Fantasy Hero combat slower?

[Herolover]

Here's another one.

 

One of my players that plays Supers alot using HERO thinks Fantasy HERO combat is a lot slower because you don't get as many actions. I, on the other hand, as GM don't think it is any slower, just that turns go by faster.

 

Is Fantasy combat slower than Supers combat? If he is right is there anything I can do to speed things up?

[AmadanNaBriona]

Re: Fantasy Hero combat slower?

 

I suspect his reasoning is flawed. You have it right...turns go by faster. What makes any HERO system combat faster or slower is the number of optional rules you use, as well as the complexity of powers and abilities brought to bear.

Fantsy Powers tend to be more limited, so they take longer than most supers powers. 4 color combat is a lot quicker than fights using hit locations, bleeding, impairing and disabling, pain, hindering circumstances etc. Heroic level characters, in general, also have a higher damage to defence ratio, and thus spend more time getting tricky in combat. IME, this does make heroic level combat slower, but in many cases more fun.

Just my $.02

[John Desmarais]

Re: Fantasy Hero combat slower?

 

Here's another one.

 

One of my players that plays Supers alot using HERO thinks Fantasy HERO combat is a lot slower because you don't get as many actions. I, on the other hand, as GM don't think it is any slower, just that turns go by faster.

 

Is Fantasy combat slower than Supers combat? If he is right is there anything I can do to speed things up?

 

I generally find that heroic-level combat goes faster than superheroic - mostly due to fewer combat options being used.

[Labrat]

Re: Fantasy Hero combat slower?

 

I generally find that heroic-level combat goes faster than superheroic - mostly due to fewer combat options being used.

 

Not only that, but basically you're working mostly with SPD 4 or less (which can be regulated to the 'average' SPD 3 for faster group combats). Case in point:

 

SPD 1 is hardly used

SPD 2 is for mostly 'non-combatants' and is not used often

SPD 3 is most commonly used, so most of the action tends to be in this phase in my experience, this is where DEX's really come into play for initiative purposes and it's why a lot of combat-based characters opt for Fast Draw

SPD 4 is the next commonly used

 

If anything can take a hit in Heroic Level games, it's the REC Phase. If characters aren't allowed to recover, then combat tends to go even faster -- that can be good and bad. YMMV.

 

There's not as many one-on-one battles as in supers, so usually there's more movement tracking but that is also a generality inherent in the HERO way of things.

 

That's my experience anyway.

[JohnTaber]

Re: Fantasy Hero combat slower?

 

I dunno if I agree with John...at least not in my games...

 

I think FH combat is slower because of hit locations and damage figuring. Sometimes players are not as fast as I am with the details. Also defense can vary with locations so it can be more confusing for some folks.

 

In terms of in game time FH combat is definitely slower as Heroic level PC have much lower speeds.

[MitchellS]

Re: Fantasy Hero combat slower?

 

I dunno if I agree with John...at least not in my games...

 

I think FH combat is slower because of hit locations and damage figuring. Sometimes players are not as fast as I am with the details. Also defense can vary with locations so it can be more confusing for some folks.

 

In terms of in game time FH combat is definitely slower as Heroic level PC have much lower speeds.

I have to agree. In Champions you decide on your maneuver, roll to hit, and roll damage [counting body and stun], and subtract end. In Fantasy Hero you decide on your maneuver, roll to hit, roll damage, roll hit location, subtract end, possibly subtract encumbrance end, think about things for possible long-term end, check for possible bleeding or wounding, and if you're a mage you must throw in a magic roll too. Fantasy Hero has a lot of extra steps if you're using all the options.

[Starwolf]

Re: Fantasy Hero combat slower?

 

It is for just this reason that I use GMAid an old DOS app that tracks Phases, Damage (including hit locations, bleeding, impairment stunned, unconcious, and dead), End, Stun, Body, and effects. The only problem I have with GMAid is that it does wonky things if you replicate bad guys, then delete them and try to replicate another batch. There are also a couple of Windows apps that I am experimenting with Such as the Phaser2D Beta program. These apps allow you to use the speed of your computer to overcome the game lag created by adding in the optional rules like hit locations, bleeding etc.

[NuSoardGraphite]

Re: Fantasy Hero combat slower?

 

In my experience, Heroic level combat goes way faster than Superheroic combats. Characters in Superhero level combats have high defenses and monstrous levels of Stun and body. They can usually last for at least a few turns of combat, even at the Super level. Heroic level characters have much less stun, body and most especially defenses. Add in the fact that fantasy combat is usually resolved with killing damage and the bodies start to pile up fairly quickly. Especially if one uses Hit Locations and Impairing/Disabling rules.

[John Desmarais]

Re: Fantasy Hero combat slower?

 

I have to agree. In Champions you decide on your maneuver' date=' roll to hit, and roll damage [counting body and stun'], and subtract end. In Fantasy Hero you decide on your maneuver, roll to hit, roll damage, roll hit location, subtract end, possibly subtract encumbrance end, think about things for possible long-term end, check for possible bleeding or wounding, and if you're a mage you must throw in a magic roll too. Fantasy Hero has a lot of extra steps if you're using all the options.

 

I have found, im my games, that powers introduce enough time draining options to more than offset the fact that I use hit locations and a few other "gritty" options at Heroic levels.

[MitchellS]

Re: Fantasy Hero combat slower?

 

In my experience' date=' Heroic level combat goes [b']way[/b] faster than Superheroic combats. Characters in Superhero level combats have high defenses and monstrous levels of Stun and body. They can usually last for at least a few turns of combat, even at the Super level. Heroic level characters have much less stun, body and most especially defenses. Add in the fact that fantasy combat is usually resolved with killing damage and the bodies start to pile up fairly quickly. Especially if one uses Hit Locations and Impairing/Disabling rules.

While super-characters do have higher stuns and defenses they still end up being 3-4 hit victims, meaning, on average, it only takes 3-4 hits to knock out a superhero [45 Stun, 25 defense, 42 points of damage per attack is 17 point through. 3 hits and out].

 

A standard heroic-level game with 11/2d6 sword attack gives about 5 body rolled per attack. The most common hit location is chest for x3 stun [arms and legs hits balance out vitals and head]. So you are looking at most attacks doing 15 stun with a character having 5-8 pd [we'll say 6] and 3-8 defense armor [we'll say 5]. Give that character 25 stun and you can see that it takes 11 hits [with phase 12 recoveries] to knock out the target. That's nearly 3 times more hits than a superhero character.

 

Both combats are slow but I've found Fantasy Hero combat [with the optional rules] to be slower for me. Of course everyone's mileage will very.

[Labrat]

Re: Fantasy Hero combat slower?

 

There's got to be a way to link hit success and hit location into one roll... it's an idea that I've had floating around my already-too-crowded cranium for many years but I've never really sat down to figure out what that solution may be. Any suggestions?

 

-Maybe a house rule that suggests all shots to be 'called shots' and the ones that can't be called are 'automatically' chest shots or something like that. I'm not sure...

[MitchellS]

Re: Fantasy Hero combat slower?

 

There's got to be a way to link hit success and hit location into one roll... it's an idea that I've had floating around my already-too-crowded cranium for many years but I've never really sat down to figure out what that solution may be. Any suggestions?

 

-Maybe a house rule that suggests all shots to be 'called shots' and the ones that can't be called are 'automatically' chest shots or something like that. I'm not sure...

We tried a system like that for a while. Basically an exact hit was x1 stun, 2-3 was x2, 4-5 was x3, more than 5 was x4, and a roll of 3 was x5. it worked ok for us and seemed to speed things up a little.

 

The problem we had with the system was sectional armor: people like to wear it and without hit location it becomes complicated. And sometimes people like to make called shots to the head. The more you must think about and tweak it, the more you might as well just use hit location. The system really only worked when using average defenses.

[Markdoc]

Re: Fantasy Hero combat slower?

 

A standard heroic-level game with 11/2d6 sword attack gives about 5 body rolled per attack. The most common hit location is chest for x3 stun [arms and legs hits balance out vitals and head]. So you are looking at most attacks doing 15 stun with a character having 5-8 pd [we'll say 6] and 3-8 defense armor [we'll say 5]. Give that character 25 stun and you can see that it takes 11 hits [with phase 12 recoveries] to knock out the target. That's nearly 3 times more hits than a superhero character.

 

Maybe, except that the maths are are bit off (at least based on my experience). The DEF is OK, but attacks in all the FH games I have run tend to average about 2d6 - using the same rubric, that means 21 STUN or 10 going through a time - meaning KO in 3 hits, same as Supers. I don't think that's out of line - in the current FH game I am playing only the wussy healer/magic user type can't generate a 2d6 HKA (and these are all starting characters). None of our fights so far have gone much beyound 4-5 phases.

 

Add that to the fact that FH characters tend to be OCV biased - often heavily (whereas supers are often a bit more balanced) and that explains my experience that FH fights go faster. Certainly in the last game I routinely would get through several combats in an evening, sometimes with as many as 6 players and 20-30 NPCs. Just one fight with numbers like that at the Superhero level (even given that most of the NPCs are agent level, relatively speaking) and I'd plan on it taking the whole evening.

 

I guess it depends on your GM and gaming style - I don't think it's a generic observation that can be applied to FH.

 

cheers, Mark

[MitchellS]

Re: Fantasy Hero combat slower?

 

Maybe' date=' except that the maths are are bit off (at least based on my experience). The DEF is OK, but attacks in all the FH games I have run tend to average about 2d6 - using the same rubric, that means 21 STUN or 10 going through a time - meaning KO in 3 hits, same as Supers. I don't think that's out of line - in the current FH game I am playing only the wussy healer/magic user type can't generate a 2d6 HKA (and these are all starting characters). None of our fights so far have gone much beyound 4-5 phases.[/quote']

I was basing the 11/2d6 off of what the PCs would be fighting most of the time: Goblins, Hobgoblins, Drakine, Dark Elves & Dwarves, and other humanoids who use normal weapons from MMM and the Bestiary. Most of those foes fall in the 1d6 - 11/2d6 range. I expect the PCs to be a little higher because they are usually fighting more foes at one time.

[Markdoc]

Re: Fantasy Hero combat slower?

 

I was basing the 11/2d6 off of what the PCs would be fighting most of the time: Goblins' date=' Hobgoblins, Drakine, Dark Elves & Dwarves, and other humanoids who use normal weapons from MMM and the Bestiary. Most of those foes fall in the 1d6 - 11/2d6 range. I expect the PCs to be a little higher because they are usually fighting more foes at one time.[/quote']

 

OK - gotcha - but in that case you'd WANT them to last longer.

 

When comparing weaker and more numerous foes in FH, the analogy is agents in Champions - where the "3 hits" situation doesn't and shouldn't apply. When looking at equivalents fighting - FH characters against boss types or supers vs villains then in both case you are at "3 hits".

 

OTOH, I can kind of see your point in that "PCs vs more numerous but weaker foes" is a much more common event in FH than Champions, so this is perhaps the standard.

 

cheers, Mark

[arcady]

Re: Fantasy Hero combat slower?

 

Speed score has -nothing- to do with speed of play in Hero.

 

Speed diversity however does. If every character had speed 12 game play would only differ from every character having speed 1 in terms of the post-12 recoveries.

 

However if you put 12 characters in a room with speed stats from 1 to 12 it will take you all night to get through the combat.

 

Fantasy Hero can be slower because post 12 comes around more often, but it can be faster because defense is lower compared to damage.

 

That can play out either way, though I've always seen it as faster due to the second factor being much more severe than the first.

[Skalizar]

Re: Fantasy Hero combat slower?

 

I think one of the reasons heroic level games (hit locations, sectional armor, etc) seem slower is due to the number of additional options that each player has. With supers (at least in our experience), once you decide to blast 'em, you just blast 'em. You don't have to decide on where you might want to aim, whether you need to adjust your levels for offense/defense, etc, etc. This leads to players trying to figure this stuff out when its their turn, instead of planning in advance. We used some computer programs (Hero Dice, I wrote it ) to speed things up and that seemed to make up the difference and made it managable again.

[mangahunterd]

Re: Fantasy Hero combat slower?

 

I think the only time the game drags on is when VPP's are in play. It just gives you too many choices to make. We kept our games simple by using MPP's (Except one character..) and it speeded up the combat quite a bit. The problem that almost always seemed to slow the game I was in was tactics. People try to overanalyze things many times and then a combat that is supposed to take place in less than one minute takes an hour to resolve.

Luckily I had a great group to game with but even then we got bogged down at times worrying about tactics...

In actual playing though it always seemed that fantasy combat flowed better. Maybe it was just the GM's style or that your powers are so limited (swords, bow's etc) that it took less time to resolve.

[Eosin]

Re: Fantasy Hero combat slower?

 

Seems much faster to me but having players who take their sweet time coming up with a plan of action seems much worse in FH than in traditional supers.

 

I aslo disagree with the damage premise by Mitchell. Sure, goblins and such dish out 1 to 1.5d6 but non grunt characters are handing out tons more damage. To illustrate, out of the Taurakian Age:

 

NPC 1 does 3d6+1, OCV 9

NPC 2 does 3d6+1, OCV 9

NPC 3 does 3d6 RKA vs ED

NPC 4 does 4d6, OCV 12

NPC 5 is a Lich

NPC 6 does 2d6, OCV 9

NPC 7 does 2.5d6, OCV 11

NPC 8 (non-combatant) does 1/2d6, OCV 3

NPC 9 does 1.5d6, OCV 5

NPC 10 does 3.5d6, OCV 11

 

To me that looks like a 2.5 to 3d6 attack being the norm from non-grunts.

 

Roughly 10.5 BODY (meaning 4-5 BODY through the armor) and 19-20 STUN per hit on average. Players in my game average around 25-31 STUN total with a 17-ish CON being average. In otherwords, say night-night.

 

Combat can drag on but this is most often because players realize that one hit could be lethal (Average hit to location 5 puts average PCs at negative BODY and very close to dead) and so they tend to act in a much more cautious manner than they might do in a supers level game. Either that or I blink and combat is over cause the players synched into some uber force and went on a devastating offensive.

[Zed-F]

Re: Fantasy Hero combat slower?

 

Combat speed tends to have more to do with the size of the average attack relative to the average defense and to what combat options are in use than it has to do with SPD scores.

 

IME, in heroic games offense tends to overpower the available defense by a significant margin, to a greater extent than is usually the case in superheroic games. That's of course not true in every campaign, but in the heroic games I've been in attacks tend to come in at 40-45 AP while defenses are stuck in the 10-20 AP range.

[Ner0Sputnik]

Re: Fantasy Hero combat slower?

 

It's your job as a GM to streamline combat as much as possible. Let your players know that sitting around waiting for 5 minutes while they figure out what to do is NOT cool. They should be thinking about their action before their turn comes up. Granted, what happens during the turn can change that but they should be spending their time figuring out what they're doing next.

 

Also, combining die rolls is helpful. For instance. Roll damage and hit location at the same time. Use different colored dice to differentiate. This seems like a small thing but believe me, it does speed things up.

 

If your players are having problems determining their actions, you need to up the ante for them. Take one of those small kitchen timers, set it for one minute, as you go from player to player say, "Go!" and start the countdown. If they haven't at least decided what they're going to do by the time the 1 minute counts down, move to the next player. They're confused for their turn and lose it. This seems harsh but is really designed to combat those people who like to spend tons of time figuring out every possibility. They shouldn't have that much time to think in combat anyhow. Split second decisions. That's it.