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The HERO system syndrome


jdounis

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I will only run Hero games.  I have taught many people how to play.

 

Right now my gaming group is playing 5e D&D because the GM didn't feel comfortable running a Fantasy game using Hero.  He did run a Hero Fantasy game with us and it was fun but he struggled with getting opposition vs. players right.  He loves playing Hero.

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I will only run Hero games.  I have taught many people how to play.

 

Right now my gaming group is playing 5e D&D because the GM didn't feel comfortable running a Fantasy game using Hero.  He did run a Hero Fantasy game with us and it was fun but he struggled with getting opposition vs. players right.  He loves playing Hero.

 

It can be tricky to balance those stats. I just use the party average for CV, DC, DEF, and Body to build my enemies. A couple of points higher than the average means that the party will be challenged (and some individuals outclassed) and a couple of points lower makes for a weaker enemy (though maybe still challenging to some individuals in the party). Not that my advice is going to make your friend suddenly grab up the nearest Hero rulebook and convert his campaign over or anything. :)

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As many times as I look for the greener side of gaming I too come back to Hero. Except two games.

 

1) Star Wars - specically WEG. Its so quirky that I keep giving up trying to convert. (Maybe this will be the year!). In fact I've ported over Hero parts to make WEG run smoother.

 

2) Battletech. Again the game has elements that you cannot reproduce in Hero but want for flavor of game. And Yes I do own Robot warriors.

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LOL, when I first heard HERO syndrome I thought about after learning HERO I started to stat everything out in HERO.

 

"That car probably has a 4 spd and dex 18 with 21" ground movement"

"The terminator has does not take stun, probably a 35 strength ..."
"I make my EGO roll and did not eat that chocolate cake and ruin my diet ..."

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Call of Cthulhu seems to work best with Chaosium's creaky old system rather than any other.  Its so simple and minimal its almost a background effect for the game and lets you focus on just the story more.

 

I suspect that one of the main reasons for this is that in games like CoC, all the supernatural stuff just does what it does without much regard to play balance or how many "points" it would cost a character (or NPC/monster). You can do the same thing with the Hero System but you ignore/discard the point system and just write down the powers that are in play. In effect, you use the Hero System primarily for its game mechanics rather than for its point-build architecture. And even that may or may not be what you want if you don't want an intrinsic cinematicism to a Cthulhu campaign.

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It does unless your GM is not very observant or experienced.  This is by definition exactly a limitation that is not worth as much because of circumstances.  Its like having a power that only works in darkness and a perpetual darkness field.  Ordinarily, maybe a ½ limitation, but now?  It may not be worth anything.

 

The problem was that it was a multi-GM game. A couple of them loved the character and the rest had to kind of lump it coming into their games every so often. The player was cool enough that when he saw it was starting real world problems he retired the Char.

It was kind of like the situation with Squirrel Girl in Marvel. Some Writers/Editors love that she can go toe to toe with Dr. Doom and some want her to get run over with a truck and die.

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  • 3 weeks later...

I've been playing Hero system (Yes, Champions) since pacificon 1981, and i still will graph out a character in other media in Hero system. what io have seen in the past, was when Magic The Gathering came out,  within a year, much of the gamer's disposable income got sucked into CCG's and acquiring cards. I think that lead to a sip on Table top gaming, and when the CCG interest settled, computer games  became capable enough to ensnare people's interest. I continued to play tabletop games, mostly Hero System, until the late 90's when my friends acquired too many family and professional responsibilities to continue gaming. So for a while i stopped.

 

Recently, an associate who lives in Hannover, Germany, convinced me to start gaming again, using Roll20.net. First we tried FATE, and, well, I hated it. As attractive as low mechanic, dramatist systems are for younger players, they held no attraction for me, due to the fact that my background was wargaming, and I "put my trust in the dice" rather than my acting ability or ability to BS the GM. I am not a writer or storyteller( I am a CG artist, currently).  After some discussion with the players, we switched systems to Pathfinder.  My impression of pathfinder is that it's a D&D variant, however it's a bit more "Monty Haul-ish' in comparison to D&D and int only works well in Roll20,net due to the extensive support that website gives to Pathfinder, with the MULTI -PAGE character sheets, operating like a spreadsheets, displaying real time change due to current Buffs and problems.  Now, I am enjoying the game, but if I were to run again, I would rather run Hero, but there is currently no Roll.20 support for it.

Roll20 is expanding. Looking for group requests are increasing each month, and it allows for the table top experience over one's desktop ( or better than average laptop). It has several tools for GMs, to manage maps, handouts, music, and "premium" tools for lighting effects and managing Line of sight. The audience is world wide, and there are games in most time zones.

I would think that it would expand the player base if there was an effort to have the Hero System supported on Roll20.net. The hard part would be "coding" the character sheets on the back end (coding is something i cannot do), so that for the players, building a character would be similar to how the various 5th ed, and 6th ed Excel spreadsheets work. I think that the best advertising for Hero is other players, and word of mouth.

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After playing Hero any other system feels either like a straitjacket or like make-believe with no rules.  I've played the occasional Shadowrun or Pathfinder game; Shadowrun is such a messed up game system that you just have to roll with it for comedic value, and I really have to work hard to ignore the annoyances of Pathfinder.

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I guess there are just some things you don't mess with. There is so much tradition tied up with the D&D brand that they don't dare re-design too much lest they lose what is perceived as the system's core identity. That means, hit points, armor class, levels, and saving throws. c'est la vie.

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I'm told the new edition of Shadowrun is much improved. (This from a guy who hates the old system with a fiery passion.)

 

Geez, which one?  Most of my experience is SR2 with some SR1; I understand the system was radically revised a couple times since but I don't know what the differences are.

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It is interesting seeing what the D&D guys are doing, trying to squeeze new life out of an old creaky system.  3rd was the best improvement overall but they still retained a lot of really poor mechanics like hit points and armor class.

 

 

For me 3rd was the beginning of the end and 4th put the nail in the coffin.  D&D had successfully sucked all hint of fun right out of the game.

 

It took a while for me to try it, but 5th is a solid try at returning to D&D as fun game.  If I still liked class/level games it would be my choice over the rest of the splat-book by the pound games.  ;)

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The d20 combat system felt in many ways like the designers were trying to borrow ideas from systems like the Hero System and shoehorn them into D&D. In some cases it helped formalize combat, in some cases it created nothing but endless confusion (AoO), and in any case it helped sell miniatures, which was WotC's true goal.

 

Having said that, I liked how the OGL gave the hobby the closest thing to a standard it ever had, and it really ushered in a rennaissance in gaming in the late-90s when RPGs were getting lost amidst the CCG and Eurogame craze. I didn't particularly love the implementation, mind you, but I liked the concept. Pathfinder was obviously the evolutionary climax of the d20 system, but by now I sense it is every bit as complex as the Hero System (though in a different way), which sort of undermines any reputation d20 may have once had as being a good "quick and dirty" RPG system.

 

I have the same view of 4th edition D&D as Spence does; it was a travesty that ought never have seen the light of day IMO. I tried playing it with a regular D&D group upon its release, and it was a profound disappointment. If the game was ever going to have a future, it needed a 5th edition like the one it got. But WotC's publication schedule for this new edition is so glacially slow, I'm having trouble getting a feel for how bright a future it actually has.

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After playing Hero any other system feels either like a straitjacket or like make-believe with no rules.  I've played the occasional Shadowrun or Pathfinder game; Shadowrun is such a messed up game system that you just have to roll with it for comedic value, and I really have to work hard to ignore the annoyances of Pathfinder.

I am in two Pathfinder games, right now, and the only way the system works is that I am doing it online and the buffs and slights are handled by check boxes on Real Time update Spreadsheets. In that situation, the games works fairly smoothly, but stalls when there needs to be a rules clarification then we have to stop and wait for someon to find the specific rule (usually online) and then inform the group of the rule, then a slight discussion with the GM, and then the game starts up again after the issue is resolved.  It generally works, it's just got bumps in it.

Shadowrun i never liked, as I was a Genre purist, and worked for R. Talsorian Games (Cyberpunk 2020).

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But WotC's publication schedule for this new edition is so glacially slow, I'm having trouble getting a feel for how bright a future it actually has.

 

We actually think the new more deliberate release rate is far better.  For supplements. 

One of the things I hated (and still do) about Pathfinder and the various D&D versions, was the uncontrolled splat rule releases.  Nothing was ever actually tested before it was vomited into publication.  And no, a few weeks of playtest is not testing. 

 

I could see more smaller official adventures but the 3rd party market is filling that nicely. 

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I've never been a hungry consumer of follow-on rulebooks. Give me the core rules and then just give me campaign setting material. That's what I would really want from WotC; lots and lots of campaign material. Not more rules. The only reason to continually pump out rulebooks is to have something to sell each and every month. But that's a publishing mandate, not a system mandate. The game itself doesn't really need them, and neither do 99% of players. But adventures have a tendency to take characters all over the place, and having lots of adventuring/gazetteer material is always a good thing.

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We actually think the new more deliberate release rate is far better.  For supplements. 

 

 

I agree.  For one thing, it strings out the line longer.  Something to understand with gaming is that its a pretty limited customer pool, once everyone that wants your product has bought all your books... there's no more revenue stream.  Spacing them out more makes the revenue last longer, and keeps the game alive until the next edition, hopefully a long ways down the road.  It makes sense from a business perspective.

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A stretched-out release schedule didn't seem to make sense in the 80s and 90s. And there are some here who believe that the player base is as large and robust today as it was back then. Surely WotC can make a 1-campaign-book-per-month (rather than 1-campaign-book-per-quarter-if-they're-lucky) business model work for their flagship product.

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I don't know if today's RPG audience is as big as it was at its peak, but I do believe that it's bigger than people realize because the market is spread over so many RPGs. It used to be that maybe 2-3 dozen current games were available at any given time. But now, almost every RPG ever made is available one way or another, and anyone can produce new ones. We're swimming in a sea of product.  And then, of course, there's the issue that a lot of that product is available for free or at very low cost, thanks to PDFs. And then, as always, the space in the market for all games that aren't D&D (including Pathfinder) is a minority share. And the sub-slice that's for anything that's not based on an existing and popular IP is even smaller. And then you have Fate and Savage Worlds, both popular designs that are available for free or very low cost, sopping up the lion's share of that slice. So you're left with this teeny, tiny bit of the market where all other RPGs compete. Which makes it seem like there's almost no market for RPGs at all. But the truth is, the overall market may be plenty big enough. It's just divided among way too many products now.

 

That's my theory, anyway.

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For me 3rd was the beginning of the end and 4th put the nail in the coffin.  D&D had successfully sucked all hint of fun right out of the game.

I recall my first read of 3e and thinking it was a completely different game, so no thanks. Actually playing it, though, it added a lot to the game, mainly in character customization and options. Pathfinder built on that pretty well. I was turned off by 4e and have not really looked at 5e.

 

Even in 1e D&D, I think one of the most common phrases in mid-level play was "Did you remember the Prayer bonus?", so the need to track buffs and debuffs isn't really new.

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