5th Edition Renaissance?

[zslane]

Sounds like maybe it should be called "the Martial Arts bug" rather than "the STR bug"...

[Spence]

It's a meh issue for me. 

Hero is not an RPG. 

It is a system to build a custom RPG.

Every single incarnation from 1st through 6th has had "broken" or "incorrectly costed" something.  

Even the concept of "balanced" RPG is ludicrous. 

 

While some people looks at 6th as having "fixed" issues. 

Other people think that 6th just "broke" many of the central reasons that made Hero good in the first place.  

I'm one of the people that saw 6th as a revision that eliminated many of the core reasons that brought me to Champions (Hero) in the first place while hamfistedly "breaking" it.

 

But I am aware that 6th has it's cult following  

All hail the Great Sixth'thulhu

 

In the end Hero in all it's forms is a game that you do not let anyone "build a PC at home and show up to play".  At least if they are not someone that you have been gaming for years and understand intimately the parameters of the campaign.  

 

Hero cannot be "fixed" or "balanced" by the rules. 

That must be done by each GM as they build their world. 

I am positive that 99% of the posters on this board could build a character that will "break" any campaign if they have free access to the core rulebook and intent.  

 

IMO 6th Edition is every bit as "broken" as 5thR was.  It is just which flavor of "broken" do you prefer. 

 

 

[Opal]

5 hours ago, assault said:

4e blew up that balance by establishing fixed price Martial Arts.

4e did adopt the more granular skill system collectively by ither hero games at the time. 

 

Earlier martial arts were more like adding to your STR in 50% increments, which was not very granular, at all.

 

The 3-5 pt manuever martial arts were a little bit like having an attack multipower with you STR & DCs as the reserve.  Which is a little whack, sure.

[Opal]

On 1/18/2022 at 4:58 AM, Ninja-Bear said:

Many old timers keep referring to D&D many editions ago and things have changed since then.

It did change in the oughts, characters became more customisable, especially for the brief run of the last ed.

 

But current D&D, 5e, is consciously designed to evoke the classic versions of the TSR era.  It doesn't have THAC0, and wizards don't technically 'fire & forget' anymore, but armor, not skill, still makes you harder to hit, and fighters are still tough early on while wizards still get new spell levels every-other level and leave them in the dust.

 

Its still classes and levels and extremely limited in what you can do to create the character you want.

[Opal]

On 1/24/2022 at 8:16 AM, Grailknight said:

10 Points spent on STR(or CON) gave back 11 Points  in value spread across PD, REC and STUN(or ED, REC, END and STUN in the case of CON)

And, you could "sell back" all your figured from CON for a 1 point gain, so get all the points you wanted, limited only by shame (without breaking campaign limits like STR would). In the first ed.

 

After that, you couldn't "sell back" more than one figured stat, so the bug was fixed.

 

Figured stats became just another cost break, like Power Frameworks, and on basically the same scale.  

 

Honestly, they served a purpose. Having 60 points in several powers is just nothing like as OP as having 90 points in one.  They're discounts for being rounded out a bit rather than diving down the hyper-specialization rabbithole, a real problem in build systems that you rarely are addressed.

[assault]

10 hours ago, assault said:

STR, of course, gave figured characteristics. Also, with the right object at hand, a limited ranged attack through throwing.

 

I left out one important benefit: the base 10 points you got for free.

That meant that if you spent 40 points on Energy Blast or Martial Arts you would end up with an 8d6 Blast or Martial Kick, but if you spent the points on STR, you would end up with 50 STR, and a 10d6 punch. Or, if you preferred, 40 STR at half Endurance.

 

As for the non-granularity of Martial Arts - frankly it wasn't that big a deal for superheroes in my experience. The pesky half dice that would turn up sometimes were a bigger nuisance.

Making the system universal added needless complexity, ending up with 6e going beyond the point of diminishing returns, IMHO.

 

 

[JackValhalla]

I created over 270 homebrew character statblocks for 5th edition. I bought 5REd and 6th, but I have never used them. Converting 270+ characters is just not gonna happen. If 5th gets a renaissance, that'd be handy for me because I never switched over in the first place.

i think my campaign has more villains and npcs than have been officially published in Champions sourcebooks. Especially if you count multiforms, duplications, summons and followers.

[Christopher R Taylor]

Quote

 Also, with the right object at hand, a limited ranged attack through throwing.

 

And leaping.  STR used to determine how far you jumped, as well.  It was super super cheap and cost effective.

 

And 3rd edition/previous Martial arts were a flat multiplier to STR damage, it was broken as hell for high strength characters.

[Jhamin]

My take on the Edition wars is that they are usually fairly meaningless in most systems and *especially* so in Hero.

 

Over the last couple months when the Bundle of Holding stuff for 6e and then 5e was available several places I hang out on the internet had people popping up to ask how big a deal it was to use 5e books with the 6e stuff they had bought a few weeks earlier.  I answered at least a dozen times in several locations... it's super easy, barely an inconvenience.  As long as you don't sweat the exact point totals virtually nothing has changed since 4e.

 

The stuff we are arguing about is some real "inside baseball" stuff rules-wise.  I would argue that since 4th edition every subsequent pass at the rules has tweaked the edges but not in a way that is meaningful for anyone except we few Grognards who still hang out on this board.  We can talk about how big a deal figured characteristics or elemental controls or the Megascale advantage are but that is nothing compared to how D&D changed from 3e to 4e to 5e.

 

If people aren't flocking to Hero it isn't because figured characteristics are gone and putting out a rules revision that restores the Martial Arts rules from the 80s isn't going to make anyone re-evaluate the system.  When I talk about Hero in game design forums 90% of the people there have never heard of it.  If Hero does need a revision (and I think it does) it is to bring it into the 2020s, not to return it to 2001.

[assault]

5 minutes ago, Jhamin said:

If Hero does need a revision (and I think it does) it is to bring it into the 2020s, 

But what does this mean?

[Scott Ruggels]

4 hours ago, assault said:

But what does this mean?

 The Hero System will not survive a 2020's revision. Either that or it won't be The Hero System.

The problem of 2020s is the lack of patience to the screen addicted audience. The usual response to this is mechanical minimalism, usually accompanied with a more shared narrative control systems.  Putting these in, will break the backwards compatibility of the system, due to differences in the mechanics, and the assumptions. Focusing the next edition to the younger audience means making things more performative, due to the outsized influence of Matt Mercer.

For many of us, these high Narrative, minimal mechanical systems, aren't "games", they are "shared storytelling" which, again, for some of us are highly unattractive, and bear no relationship to classic Hero. The 6th Edition may be too far into the crunch, but it's still The Hero System, and backwards compatible mostly.  Even a modest push in the "modern" direction, like Champions Now, broke backwards compatibility, especially with it's narrative emphasis, and taking the game off the boards and moving combat into "Theater of The Mind". 

 

The Problem also with a 7th Edition, is "Who is going to write it?"  We would need someone to keep the system fun. Fun to read, and fun to play (like 4th Edition).

[Christopher R Taylor]

Yeah I think the tone is key, and I think that's why, say  Aaron Allston's Strike Force took off well (fun to read, fascinating, informative) and other more recent stuff is less popular: its too dry, too GM-centric, and too focused on data rather than play.  You can make "killing attacks do 2d6 damage" dry and mechanical or informative and fun.  I've written a bunch of stuff and lately I realized that you gotta be player-centric, because EVERYONE plays, but only a few GM.  Its not that you don't need info for the GM, but you gotta reach the players where they are.

 

Plus 7th edition is a big argument over mechanics and rules and build stuff, and that often ends up being pretty contentious.

[Jhamin]

4 hours ago, assault said:

But what does this mean?

 

I would say there are are a few things that need to happen on the presentation side of the fence.  Art, production values, ongoing support for various product lines, etc.  But we are talking bout the game system.

 

I *do* agree we need a rulebook that more actively engages readers and really shows them the possibilities of Hero.  People need to *want* to play after reading the powers system, not fall asleep.  

 

I disagree that "Theatre of the Mind" is in any way bad.  I haven't ever played Hero on a Hex mat and I've been doing this since 1992.  I think it is time for a new edition to break backward compatibility but keep a focus on what the core Hero experience is. Don't get me wrong, I have a long list of small things that bug me that I'd love to tweak, but most of it amounts to doing stupid math tricks with a character build that would have been just as well accomplished by the Big Blue Book in 1990.  If that is all a new edition is, what's the point?

 

My thoughts about what makes Hero what it is are:

- Point based character creation

- Reasoning from effects

- 3d6 "bell curve" math

- A universal system

 

My IMHO, the basic framework of (power cost*advantage)/disadvantage is super core to the game and can't be removed while still calling the game "Hero System".  The Costs of characteristics or the ins and outs of specific powers and the value of specific advantages/disadvantages can be argued, but those lead, at best, to minor "playing the margins" kind of revisions.  I'm all for that as part of a major revision to the game but changing the cost of Killing attacks or bringing back Figureds does not a seventh edition make.

 

The two things that IMHO need fundamental work:

 

Skills.  The single target number, roll under system feels antiquated.  I'd like to see a fairly heavy revision to the system.

• I'd like to see different success/failure criteria that involve task difficulty vs skill and degrees of success.  In an ideal world I'd love to see skills vs task difficulty interact the same way OCV/DCV does and fallout from just missing, just making, or making a skill roll by a lot.
• I'd like to see broad and narrow skills.  Having 6 different fields of study bought separately vs SCIENCE GUY 12- are both valid constructs for different games.  I'd like to see the system support both, probably at different point costs, especially if they exist together.
• In conjunction with the above bullet point I'd like to see broad/narrow skills brought into the campaign limits settings along with Active Point limits, does everyone have Normal Characteristics Max, does equipment have to be paid for, etc.

 

Drama Systems. Right now Hero is an elaborate character generation system and a mid-weight Combat system that turns into "roll for success and its' all gm Fiat" once you are out of combat.  Other games have been building "meta systems" into their games for decades.  Hero is all about reasoning from effect.  I want a "combat luck" style meta rule for always cutting the correct wire on the bomb because you are the hero.

• I'd love to see things like manipulating dice rolls (rerolls, "rolling with advantage", auto success, etc) built into the system, and this being Hero allowing character builds to affect it
• I would like to see campaign "ethos" stuff built into Genres and Campaigns that can be interacted with by the PCs.  Stuff like "unlikely coincidences are pretty likely", "The good guys always win", "The Cavalry always rides over the hill in the nick of time" is currently GM advice in the various Genre books.  I'd like to see a list of them per campaign  that set the tone and can in fact be invoked and rolled against when things threaten to not go that way.  Once again, I'd like to see come character stats or perks that would interact with this system.
• With the above couple bullet points, I would entirely scrap the current Luck/Unluck system and replace it with whatever mechanics allow metagame manipulation.

 

The unfortunate thing about this is that I also don't think Hero Games can do this in 2022.  A new edition needs to make Hero relevant again.  Tweaking the Math so the guys who already play Hero like it is a way to remain a livingroom game.  A modern relaunch For the game  that breaks backward compatibility needs to draw in a large new audience.  I think there is a trend toward "rules light" but I don't think there are any fewer players that like "cruncy games" than there always were.  They would need to be reached.  Unfortunately a new edition that would Hero to return to relevance would require a fairly flashy re-launch accompanied by a product with all-new, modern art and layout.  I don't think the company has the finances to support that.
I think it would be important to actually support the people playing the game with adventures and setting info instead of just having more genre books that will never be supported again.

Something like this would also require writer(s) and editor that could make the rules accessible as well as engaging.  I know *I'm* not that guy.

[Duke Bushido]

I'm on the other end of all that.

 

I'd just like to see one of the older editions re-published with a note that says "okay; our bad.  That was a bit much.  Sorry about that."   

 

Clean up a couple of inconsistencies, and some stuff for mapping and tracking large-scale combats, in case that's your thing (it's not mine, but my players are about 50/50 on it, and I admit that it lets you simulate a lot of things like naval battles, etc).

 

 

 

Now up-front, I'm going to say that I am so tired of this conversation (we're at a point where it rolls around every eight to ten weeks, it seems) that I'm not going to go into any defense or detail to the following statement:

 

 

My biggest reason for my lack of interest in the "fixes" offered by the last two editions is that I have yet to find anything that proves to me there was something that was actually broken.

 

"Points value" and "but he gets X or Y without A and I can't if I B" don't specify there is a problem with the system.  Because one thing has an advantage over another doesn't mean that the game is broken or that it is not "perfectly universal."  "Everything should cost the same when it effects the same" or whatever the arguments are that now all Characteristics cost the same--

 

it's all nonsense.  There is absolutely no amount of STR that perfectly equates to a given amount of SPD; there is no amount of DEX that can substitute for 22" of teleport; no FLT is equivalent to X Mind Control---

 

Yes; there are numbers involved, and costs involved, and that's that.  The fact that they can be made to cost the same or to cost different does not imply that any of them should, or that they are more or less "fair" or "equal" at given cost points.  It's a fantasy pipe dream that these different things have a point of equivalence somewhere, and everyone was so taken with the math itself that the actual _need_ was never considered.

 

Just like the cost of STR / cost of HTH attack debate.  There.  We have it "perfectly even" now, somehow, I guess.  Until someone buys STR with two limitations on it.  Uh-oh!  He's getting his damage cheaper!  Back to the revision board!

 

It's---

 

no.  I really have lost interest in even continuing the conversation.  It's too late to stop the ever-expending rules in their quest for a fictitious perfection, but I would really like to just scrap the whole thing and back up to when it was still fast, light, and fun.

 

Good night.

[Christopher R Taylor]

Quote

I think it would be important to actually support the people playing the game with adventures and setting info instead of just having more genre books that will never be supported again.

This is key.  I know that adventures don't sell quite as well; About 1 "Taming Tascora" module has sold for every 10 Western Hero books.  I get that.  But without the support stuff like characters and adventures and campaign settings you don't have a game.  GMs need something they can PLAY immediately, not just the setting and the rules.  There's been 2-3 Champions adventures put out on Drive Thru and they are great stuff, but only one official adventure from Hero Games.  We need more: like ten times that many more.  We need to flood the store with adventures so people have lots of options and stuff to DO with Hero games.

 

In putting out my Jolrhos Fantasy Hero setting I've been trying to space out one adventure in between each big book, to build up a body of things a GM can do.  We need more of that.  I mean... until I put out the Lost Castle there were absolute no adventures put out for Fantasy Hero since fourth edition, and even then only one book of adventures.   That's ridiculous for a game company.

[HeroGM]

I would love to see a Silver and Iron age set for Champions - on the ground of Strike Force where it shows the genre and how to adapt Hero to it (and not the other way around).

 

Several things I'd enjoy seeing even if it broke some things into multiple books.

[Opal]

21 hours ago, Jhamin said:

If Hero does need a revision (and I think it does) it is to bring it into the 2020s, not to return it to 2001.

Heh, Hero was so far ahead of its time there's no difference.

 

Not entirely joking.  Like, 4e D&D was the most flexible, most-nearly-balanced, version of D&D ever, and it did it by dipping it's toes in powers with special effects. 

 

I suppose it's also worth noting that 5e D&D achieved great success by reaching all the way back to its earlier forms and ditching all the best stuff from 3e & 4e.

[Spence]

19 minutes ago, Opal said:

Like, 4e D&D was the most flexible, most-nearly-balanced, version if D&D ever, and it did it by dipping it's toes in powers with special effects. 

 

LOL

The gaming world never ceases to amaze me.  One persons treasure is anothers garbage.  For me 4e D&D was easily the worst experience in TTRPG I was ever exposed to since I played my first game in the late 70s. 

 

And yet for some it is their favored game. 

 

And the world turns 🤔

[zslane]

15 hours ago, Duke Bushido said:

I'd just like to see one of the older editions re-published with a note that says "okay; our bad.  That was a bit much.  Sorry about that."

 

This is pretty much where I land these days.

 

And I (too) lost interest in "the conversation" long ago when it became obvious, to me at least, that all we will ever get is endless talk and debate amongst the old guard because the necessary resources are simply not available to do what needs to be done (which I still believe would primarily consist of an effort to create a setting that lots of people wants to play in, and turning it into an evergreen product line).

[Opal]

50 minutes ago, Spence said:

The gaming world never ceases to amaze me.  One persons treasure is anothers garbage

Oh, don't get me wrong, D&D was always a bad game - it's saved from being the worst TTRPG of all time by the existence of things like Spawn of Fshawn and FATAL - it's just that, out of that load of fetid dingos' kidneys, its 4th edition was the least fetid.

 

I'm never dismayed at the range of experiences people report having with RPGs, from treasured experiences playing terrible games like D&D, to hellish experiences playing good ones like Hero. 

A good enough GM can salvage anything, and a bad enough one (or a single malicious player, or even just a bad day) can ruin anything.

[DShomshak]

Eh, D&D 5th ed is quite good at being what it is. As opposed to, say, Exalted 2nd ed which was quite bad at being what it was. As in, the Rules As Written supported a style of play that was not what was advertised or intended, with rules full of land mines just waiting to blow up a campaign. The Exalted campaign my friend ran was great fun, but wrestling with the rules broke him as a GM. It took a spell of Barbarians of Lemuria to recover, then running a D&D 5 campaign. D&D5 is now our go-to-game because it's easy to make characters, it's easy enough to run that even a novice GM can handle packaged adventures, and plenty fun if you accept what it is and what it isn't.

 

I would like to get back to Hero, though.

 

As far as Hero editions go, I think the system started down a wrong path through the Dreams of Perfect System that others mentioned, and 6th plunged completely off the deep end in this respect. Champions Complete at least pruned things back to one volume of manageable size.

4th edition will always be "mine" for sentimental reasons: I ran most of my Champions campaigns with it, and wrote Creatures of the Night and Ultimate Supermage for it. My ideal edition would be more like 4th than any other, though I would like some of the specific mechanics introduced in later editions. And keep one very useful feature from 5th: Sample Powers using each mechanic. Useful not just to see how the Powers and Modifiers worked, but to show the sheer *range* of what a Power, Advantage, Disadvantage or Limitation could represent!

 

As for attracting new players, I suspect Hero will always be caviar to the general. Character creation can be a lot of work, especially for new players. But as others have said, a rulebook that didn't read like a textbook would help; and well-designed, well-supported settings would help a *lot.* Returning to Exalted, the game's many flaws did not prevent it from being popular; as was the case for Vampire: the Masquerade and White Wolf's other games, all of which had less than stellar rulesets. (And I say this as someone who liked those games quite a lot.)

 

Dean Shomshak

 

 

[Spence]

1 hour ago, DShomshak said:

D&D5 is now our go-to-game because it's easy to make characters, it's easy enough to run that even a novice GM can handle packaged adventures, and plenty fun if you accept what it is and what it isn't.

 

For me GUMSHOE Horror and/or Call of Cthulhu fill that slot.  I can run those at a drop of the hat. 

 

Right now I am working on my 5thR Super Fantasy Hero (think of fantasy sword swinging Anime) game.  I am currently organizing the chaos that are my notes before generating characters using my setting guidelines.  Hopefully I will actually be able to playtest it soonish. 

 

 

[Christopher R Taylor]

Palladium gets a ton of mileage out of a barely workable ruleset and enormous support.  I think that's really the best path for Hero, after the Complete books came out.  We have the bare bones to build around.

 

And people are building!

 

With stuff like Red Cobra, the Task Force campaign materials Forgotten Enemies, etc there's new product on the shelf regularly.  We just need to see more fans step up and add their best work, to continue the momentum.  Hero Game is putting out a few things every year, and I keep chugging along with a few things every year.  There's content, we just need more of it, to make running a Hero game easier for GMs.

[zslane]

1 hour ago, DShomshak said:

Sample Powers using each mechanic. Useful not just to see how the Powers and Modifiers worked, but to show the sheer *range* of what a Power, Advantage, Disadvantage or Limitation could represent!

 

Ever since I started playing Champions back with 2e, I and everyone I knew looked to the Enemies books to serve as creative examples of how to use the powers, modifiers, and frameworks. In my view this was far better than a reference tome full of examples (or examples crammed in the margins of the main rulebook) because villains--as well as NPC heroes/teams, organizations with super agents, etc.--provided much-needed context for the presented power builds. Too often when players and GMs see Sample Powers presented without context, they tend to treat them like pre-designed D&D spells that they use, unchanged, as though ordering from a menu.

[assault]

2 hours ago, DShomshak said:

As for attracting new players, I suspect Hero will always be caviar to the general. Character creation can be a lot of work, especially for new players. But as others have said, a rulebook that didn't read like a textbook would help; and well-designed, well-supported settings would help a *lot.*

 

The sad thing is, Dean, that you are one of our few authors who could create a "well-designed" setting. And of course you know how much work and how thankless (and non-financially lucrative!) that is.

Michael Surbrook has other things to do. Scott Bennie has his horrible health issues. And of course, Aaron Allston is no longer with us.

I'll acknowledge Christopher Taylor and others who are still in there plugging away. We need more of that. (Looks in mirror, guiltily. Where's my stuff?)

There's no special sauce that will bring HERO into the big leagues, of course, but something that really grips and inspires people would help.

The standard Hero fantasy settings are a bit too generic for my tastes. There's a contradiction between providing "what people expect" (Elves and Orcs and Dwarves, Oh My!) and providing something that isn't just yet another version of the Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk or Fill-in-the-blank.

Hmm. I wonder if there isn't something lurking in Aaron Allston's notes on his Mythic Greece game(s). Bronze weapons and chariots are probably a bit specialized - steel and horses are probably a bit more accessible - but an Age of Heroes, city-states, and buttinski deities could be interesting.

It would need adventures though, and lots of them.

That's one thing D&D has - the dungeon conceit. It makes no sense, but going down a hole in the ground, killing monsters and taking their stuff is really basic, understandable and fun. I find it a bit dull these days - I'm a bit old for it, probably - but what else is there that has the same appeal? Sitting around pretending to talk to cardboard cutouts doesn't do it either.

Simplifying character creation isn't too hard once you have a setting, and thus a finite number of options. There's a point at which something like the Champions Character Creation Cards would become possible.