How far have you gone?

[bigdamnhero]

Re: How far have you gone?

 

It does not become that question. The question woule be: How far can you change/modify the rules and still say you are using the toolkit? It know you asked rhetorically' date=' but the idea of whether or not the game is still the "Hero System" is completley subject to opinion and nothing but opinion. The toolkitting aspects of the system are more defined.[/quote']

OK, so now we're arguing semantics over what is the "system" and what is the "toolkit"?

[Dust Raven]

Re: How far have you gone?

 

OK' date=' so now we're arguing semantics over what is the "system" and what is the "toolkit"? [/quote']

 

Um... sure!

 

But since you asked... Really, the "system" is a set of rules used to play the game. Whether nor not the system used to play is similar enough to any officially published system to effectively to called that is a matter of pure opinion. The "toolkit" is what you do with the rules when creating the game you play. I suppose you can say the toolkit is the system and vice versa, but I tend to, at least in this case, think of the term "toolkit" as a verb rather than a noun.

[bigdamnhero]

Re: How far have you gone?

 

I suppose you can say the toolkit is the system and vice versa' date=' but I tend to, at least in this case, think of the term "toolkit" as a verb rather than a noun.[/quote']

...Okay, but how does that make it any less subjective and subject to opinion than "system" the noun? Not trying to be argumentative, just don't quite understand your point.

[Dust Raven]

Re: How far have you gone?

 

...Okay' date=' but how does that make it any less subjective and subject to opinion than "system" the noun? Not trying to be argumentative, just don't quite understand your point.[/quote']

 

It's the difference between using the rules, and changing the rules.

[bigdamnhero]

Re: How far have you gone?

 

It's the difference between using the rules' date=' and [i']changing[/i] the rules.

OK, I guess that’s a decent working definition. I could counter that “tweaking†the rules is an explicit part of the toolkit. But then we’d have to go five rounds over what constitutes a tweak versus a change. Think I'll pass.

[prestidigitator]

Re: How far have you gone?

 

It's the difference between using the rules' date=' and [i']changing[/i] the rules.

So do you have to use the actual rules, or can you use the metarules and general guidelines (5 points = 1 DC, cost of defenses to cost of damage is such-and-such, +1/4 generally doubles range/area/steps down the timechart one increment, etc.)?

[Dust Raven]

Re: How far have you gone?

 

OK' date=' I guess that’s a decent working definition. I could counter that “tweaking†the rules is an explicit part of the toolkit. But then we’d have to go five rounds over what constitutes a [i']tweak[/i] versus a change. Think I'll pass.

I'll pass on that as well.

 

 

So do you have to use the actual rules, or can you use the metarules and general guidelines (5 points = 1 DC, cost of defenses to cost of damage is such-and-such, +1/4 generally doubles range/area/steps down the timechart one increment, etc.)?

I don't see much of a difference there. In Phil's case, he changed the cost of something from 10 to 15 points, which goes beyond toolkitting.

[Rapier]

Re: How far have you gone?

 

Thinking on, I think the problem is our various definitions of "the Toolkit."

 

For me, the toolkit means that I can take any genre and adapt it readily to Hero. I mean, jeez, there are like 24 genre books out there (ok, so I exaggerate).

 

For others, I can see where they would like to adapt certain Hero concepts to other game systems. The first thing that comes to mind if using Disads in other gaming systems (which I've done).

 

The first part is pretty easy. Do I REALLY NEED to buy Fantasy Hero to play Hero in fantasy? No. It would be a bit of work to draw of Brigandine and Plate and Bastard Sword in Hero, but it's certainly not an insurmountable problem. It just takes more effort. That's a toolkit. I need a phillips screwdriver but I've got a standard that fits pretty good and will loosen this screw. It's all good.

 

On the second part, I've got a nail to pound and I've only got a crescent wrench. Can I pound that nail in with the crescent wrench? Well, sure. Is it the best use of my force and is it impossible? Heck, no!

 

Any time you try and adapt one system for use in another you are looking at a lot of work. It's just the name of the game. I even understand my the "Toolkit" portion has been advertised as the solution to other games's short-comings. Disads made out D&D character much better. At the same time it pointed out that there were SERIOUS disadvantages in the D&D system.

 

At the end of the day, promoting Hero (in any form...be it the partial toolkit (eg disads) or the total toolkit (fantasy vs DC vs supers vs cyber) it still sells product and give us more to work with.

[Doc Democracy]

Re: How far have you gone?

 

I don't see much of a difference there. In Phil's case' date=' he changed the cost of something from 10 to 15 points, which goes beyond toolkitting.[/quote']

 

Fantasy Hero suggested reducing the price of magic by a factor of three. That go beyond toolkitting too?

[Sean Waters]

Re: How far have you gone?

 

Thinking on, I think the problem is our various definitions of "the Toolkit."

 

For me, the toolkit means that I can take any genre and adapt it readily to Hero. I mean, jeez, there are like 24 genre books out there (ok, so I exaggerate).

 

For others, I can see where they would like to adapt certain Hero concepts to other game systems. The first thing that comes to mind if using Disads in other gaming systems (which I've done).

 

The first part is pretty easy. Do I REALLY NEED to buy Fantasy Hero to play Hero in fantasy? No. It would be a bit of work to draw of Brigandine and Plate and Bastard Sword in Hero, but it's certainly not an insurmountable problem. It just takes more effort. That's a toolkit. I need a phillips screwdriver but I've got a standard that fits pretty good and will loosen this screw. It's all good.

 

On the second part, I've got a nail to pound and I've only got a crescent wrench. Can I pound that nail in with the crescent wrench? Well, sure. Is it the best use of my force and is it impossible? Heck, no!

 

Any time you try and adapt one system for use in another you are looking at a lot of work. It's just the name of the game. I even understand my the "Toolkit" portion has been advertised as the solution to other games's short-comings. Disads made out D&D character much better. At the same time it pointed out that there were SERIOUS disadvantages in the D&D system.

 

At the end of the day, promoting Hero (in any form...be it the partial toolkit (eg disads) or the total toolkit (fantasy vs DC vs supers vs cyber) it still sells product and give us more to work with.

 

I've got a Jesus clip and a crowbar: what can you do for me, buddy?

[Phil]

Re: How far have you gone?

 

Hehe, glad I've sparked such discussion. I would say that what I have done is rather than using the HERO toolkit to build a character, I've used it to build a new game "powered by" the HERO system. Essentially, my design process went as follows:

 

- began with the HERO system

- decided what elements I wanted (those that supported my genre) and which needed to be tweaked.

- used hero's meta-rules to evaluate the approximate change in utility of characteristics based on these tweaks.

 

I think it's a shame that details like Speed costing 15 rather than 10 points have been singled out as significant. In fact, this is purely superificial and has come about because of rounding. The most significant difference in my new system is probably that 1 CP doesnt NOT equal 1 HERO CP... because if it did, I would have had skills with fractional cost and some other odd numbers floating around courtesy of rounding. Indeed, I make no qualms that characters created for my game are no longer compatible with Vanilla HERO, but they COULD easily be made compatible with just a few tweaks.

 

Perhaps one day I will put some design notes together, but considering how long it took me to create the char-gen rules, I doubt it! However, I would state quite firmly that I have used the HERO toolkit, but I've used it to build a game rather than a character.

Well, he's basically turned what is Hero into something that resembles most d20 systems and systems based on or inspired by it. Using the toolkit is making use of the rules to create what you need to play.

Dust raven makes the distinction between using the rules and changing the rules. I dont think this binary distinction exists, because I have used the rules to change the rules. That's the joy of the whole advantage / limitation system that underpins HERO - you can apply it to HERO itself! If using the toolkit is making use of the rules to create what you need to play, that is *exactly* what I have done!

 

And as for the first line in the quote, I'm not sure whether or not that's meant to be an insult! I was umming and erring over what game system to use in the genre I wanted to run, and came to HERO in a moment of inspiration when I realised there was no system which modelled it effectively but there was a system which would allow me to build my game around it. If by this you mean I have disempowered players by removing from their hands the true flexibility of creation in the HERO system then, yes, I have. But I dont regret that. My game has strict genre rules, and my game enforces those. In any case, my players generally dont have time to get to grips with the HERO toolkit, so my game means they dont have to. And my game doesnt have any PC magic - at least not that I would be comfortable with HERO (or any other rpg system I've yet seen) modelling - so it doesnt have a flexible range of powers for characters to choose from. If making these design decisions means I have made HERO resemble "d20 and systems inspired by it" (and that's a heck of a large category) then I dont hide from it. Because this allows players to focus on the game and the genre, and let the system take care of the numbers. Which is how I suspect most players like it, and one of the reasons people avoid HERO in its purest form.

 

My players dont need to know that the cost of a magic sword is based around +5 Killing Attack strength * 2.25 (1+1 Usable by others, +0.25 ignores damage maxima) / 2.25 (1+0.75 OAF, 0.5 No range) = 5 points for the equivalent of 1 DC. They're happy enough with 5 points for +5 Strength. And yes, this does involve changing some numbers to fit what I want, but that's always been the case with HERO - just go back to the old "Wont work in vacuum" beauty!

 

At the end of the day, I'm not precious about what labels you put on my game. But I know that without the HERO toolkit I would never have been able to design the game I want, and that without the HERO rulebook to hand for reference, I cant run my game. I think if anything, this thread highlights that the toolkit has much wider applicability than many people realise - I encourage you to go out, play with it, and see what can be done!!

 

p.s. my character gen spreadsheet is referenced on this thread if you want to take a look.

http://www.herogames.com/forums/showthread.php?p=969712#post969712

[prestidigitator]

Re: How far have you gone?

 

Fantasy Hero suggested reducing the price of magic by a factor of three. That go beyond toolkitting too?

YES! I hate that approach. It just shows a flaw in the particular magic system (not the Hero System itself; just the way it has been applied in some settings).

 

EDIT: All right, it may not, "go beyond toolkitting;" I just had to plug that little issue.

[bigdamnhero]

Re: How far have you gone?

 

Personally, I think changing the costs of certain powers/skills/etc to better suit your genre/campaign is part of what "toolkitting" is all about.

[mallet]

Re: How far have you gone?

 

Personally' date=' I think changing the costs of certain powers/skills/etc to better suit your genre/campaign is part of what "toolkitting" is all about.[/quote']

 

I totally agree. It even recomends doing this in the main book. If you want to encourage players to take certain powers/stats/abilities then you drop the price. If you want to make those same powers/stats/abilities rarer you raise the price (If I remember correctly the example they give is making STR cost 2 rather then 1 cp.).

 

This is exactly what the "toolkit" is for and it is how you can use it to create your own campaign/genre, etc...

 

The basics that make Hero Hero are still there (11+OCV-DCV+/-mods or less on 3d6), but just what (and how high and low) OCV, DCV and the mods are is what can be "toolkited" to make your own game unique.

 

The very fact that you can create custom limitations and advantages makes sure that each game can have it's own unique feel. If you want a manditory "Magical" limitation (-2) applied to every power in the game then you can. It makes powers very cheap but I assume that the GM would have his reasons for this, such as trying to capture a very powerful and mystical world where everyone has amazing magical powers.

 

This is pretty much the same as "reducing the cost of magic by a factor of three" and I do not know how anyone could say that is was not part of the "toolkit".

 

I feel that as long as the game still uses the basic 3d6, requires rolling under a certain number to succeed and the 11+OCV-DCV combat rules then it is the Hero System. How you get to those numbers (what stats you use, how much they cost, etc...) is all just window dressing.

[Zeropoint]

Re: How far have you gone?

 

To me, the "toolkit" aspect of Hero is to other game systems as Legos are to, say Megablocks.

 

You can build anything out of Legos, absolutely anything. Sometimes it takes a little work to figure out what pieces you need and how they go together, and you'll have studs sticking out in places, but you CAN build it. With Megablocks, if you want to build a castle wall, you get the castle wall pieces and put them together. Honestly, they make a better-looking castle wall than Legos do, and with less work. However, you can't use those pieces for anything else, just castle walls.

 

Hero lets you model a fireball spell. You'll have to decide exactly how you want a fireball to work, and how you want magic to work in general, but once you know what you want, you can build it. Later, you can use those same "pieces" to build something else, like a superhero's optic blast. D&D gives you a fireball spell, already complete and ready to use, but you're stuck with it. It's a D&D fireball, and if you cast it you'll have to re-memorize it, and the system doesn't provide any way to change that.

 

I'm willing to put up with a little bit of work and some visible studs to know that the same bin of pieces can be a dragon one day, a Veritech fighter the next, and a gas station the day after, if that's what I want.

 

Zeropoint

[Zeropoint]

Re: How far have you gone?

 

It seems that I forgot to actually answer the thread's question.

 

The answer is "not very far."

 

In my supers games, (when I run them) I use a house rule which states that if a Real Weapon can't get Body through "unreal" armor on a max roll, then Stun is ignored. This makes it much easier for a super to be immune to small arms fire--having a mid-weight brick get Stunned by a lucky shot from a 9mm doesn't seem right to me.

 

For my fantasy game, I created a magic system which breaks magic down into about half a dozen schools, each of which has its own associated skill. Spells are bought through a multipower, with mandatory Incantations, Gestures, and Requires a Skill Roll. All spells must cost Endurance, as well. These are really "meta-rules", since characters created with them are still 100% by-the-book. The intent (and result, I'd like to think) of this system is that there is a substantial "buy-in" cost to be a magic user (the skill and the multipower reserve), but increasing power isn't too terribly expensive and increasing flexibility is actually quite cheap. With the mandatory limitations, a thirty Active Point spell only costs the character one point.

 

Zeropoint

[prestidigitator]

Re: How far have you gone?

 

Personally' date=' I think changing the costs of certain powers/skills/etc to better suit your genre/campaign is part of what "toolkitting" is all about.[/quote']

I'd have to agree with that in general, I think. Hero, to me, is more about the logical consistency and approach to system rules than about specific point costs. Even if we were to come up with a completely different set of Characteristics, Skills, Powers, etc. to cover what can be done it could be Hero: that we do things like consider general velocities, areas, volumes, time intervals; that we consider them largely in terms of order of magnitude; that we weigh heavily principles such as the costs of attacks vs. defenses, mechanics vs. special effects. Those are the kind of things that I feel truly keep us within the, "toolkit."

[Dust Raven]

Re: How far have you gone?

 

Fantasy Hero suggested reducing the price of magic by a factor of three. That go beyond toolkitting too?

 

It's a "house rule" that affects the final result of the toolkit/rules, not the rules themselves, so I'd say it counts as toolkitting. The cost of the Powers don't change at all, just that everything with a Magic SFX has it's final cost reduced to 1/3.

[Dust Raven]

Re: How far have you gone?

 

Dust raven makes the distinction between using the rules and changing the rules. I dont think this binary distinction exists, because I have used the rules to change the rules. That's the joy of the whole advantage / limitation system that underpins HERO - you can apply it to HERO itself! If using the toolkit is making use of the rules to create what you need to play, that is *exactly* what I have done!

If I've missunderstood how you arrived at the changes you've made, my appologies. I've seen so many people on these boards go and change the fundimental cost of things because they don't think it's balanced or whatever (while I disagree with this practice, I don't feel it is wrong), and assumed you were doing the same. If you arrived at those final costs in some way similar to how Talents are made, then absolutely you are using the toolkit!

 

And as for the first line in the quote, I'm not sure whether or not that's meant to be an insult!

 

Nope, not an insult. I play d20 occasionally and find it to be a wonderful system, just restrictive. For games where much less freedom than Hero provides is desired, and all of the background mechanics are already fleshed out (such as magic, etc.) I'll definately play D&D or some other d20 game. Hero System is superior though, but sometimes I'm lazy.

[Doc Democracy]

Re: How far have you gone?

 

It's a "house rule" that affects the final result of the toolkit/rules' date=' not the rules themselves, so I'd say it counts as toolkitting. The cost of the Powers don't change at all, just that everything with a Magic SFX has it's final cost reduced to 1/3.[/quote']

 

To me that is less toolkitting than changing a cost to enforce a game genre. It doesn't fit the genre to have many people with hugely divergent speeds, the easiest way to do that in HERO is to change the cost of SPD - cost benefit changes away from SPD to other things.

 

The best thing about HERO is that the points allow the GM to incentivise or disincentivise the use of various parts of the system purely by changing the 'fundamental' cost of any one aspect of it.

 

People argue about the cost of STR and there are good arguments on both sides (there wouldn't still be the disagreement if the arguments didn't have merit). HERO allows those people to make that small adjustment in a fundamental building block, knowing that this will propagate wherever else it is needed.

 

That is not true of other systems, like D20.

 

The cost of reduced END changed between editions - that is a fundamental cost as well - didn't mean that the game was any less HERO, just that the point balance shifted somewhere.

 

In the end, any toolkitting is Houseruling by a different name, it's just easier to do and, in 5th edition, encouraged. I think it is all on the same spectrum.

 

I think that the whole point of the toolkitting is that in HERO anyone familiar with the rulebook should be able to look and understand how you got to 'here' from the vanilla rulebook and either reverse engineer the toolkitting or manipulate it more to you another particular taste.

 

As Phil said, he's toolkitted a new game from the HERO rules. People can come and play that game on its own merits. HERO gamers can discuss how well the toolkitting achieves particular ends whether or not characters from that game could play in another HERO game.

 

If portability is ultimately important (and no-one I can remember has yet claimed that) important then every HERO genre and game ends up feeling like Champions with less points and lower AP caps.

 

Phil's game doesn't feel that way. I'd love to see his (as yet unwritten)designer notes and argue different ways to achieve the same but I don't need that to play the game. My familiarity with HERO allows me to use the game better than a whole new system as it still works like HERO - the mechanics are essentially unchanged - surely the point of a generic system has been achieved - I am still playing HERO.

 

Doc

 

PS: gosh, wrote a lot there....

[Vondy]

Re: How far have you gone?

 

Personally, 'toolkit' is marketing jargon intended to increase the perceived value of the product and has very little real meaning in terms of mechanics or the system.

[Doc Democracy]

Re: How far have you gone?

 

Personally' date=' 'toolkit' is marketing jargon intended to increase the perceived value of the product and has very little real meaning in terms of mechanics or the system.[/quote']

 

Absolutely. I agree. However, I think that the marketing highlights one of the major advantages that HERO has over other systems in its ability to be manipulated at a fundamental level to achieve what the GM wants in his game.

 

Doc

[Vondy]

Re: How far have you gone?

 

Absolutely. I agree. However, I think that the marketing highlights one of the major advantages that HERO has over other systems in its ability to be manipulated at a fundamental level to achieve what the GM wants in his game.

 

Doc

 

Perhaps the question we should be asking is: how modular is hero? And how many core components do you have to have to still call it hero?

[Doc Democracy]

Re: How far have you gone?

 

There's a whole other can of worms!

 

I think there was a thread on something like that in the past six months or so. Possibly not surprisingly there was no such thing as a consensus on that!

 

What is sacrosanct to some (like the speed chart) is valueless to others.

 

GIR was supposed to address some of that issue.

 

Doc

[Dust Raven]

Re: How far have you gone?

 

Personally' date=' 'toolkit' is marketing jargon intended to increase the perceived value of the product and has very little real meaning in terms of mechanics or the system.[/quote']

 

Okay, I'll buy that.