Heroes out of Time

[Michael Hopcroft]

One of my favorite subgrenes of anime and fantasy is the stories of people from our world who are drawn into a different one for any number of reasons. They can be ordinary people, but posess abilities they do not know in the other world -- they don't think they're hero material, but somehow they are.

 

How would you work this trope in HERO? The very nature of HERO System character design prevents you from designing a character with powers he or she doesn't know about. But how would you play a character who has mystic, superhuman, or strange powers but doesn;t even know it in a system that encourages you to know what your character can do down to the last detail?

[Lord Liaden]

If your players trust you, you can have them buy Mystery Powers and/or Mystery Disadvantages. They invest the points in a Power or ask for a Disadvantage of the appropriate size, you design it and let the players discover it during play.

 

It would be appropriate to build a Power with No Conscious Control, so that you as GM control when and how it's used at first. That can be how the players first discover that they have these abilities. They can buy off the NCC Limitation with Experience over time as they gain greater control of their abilities.

[Susano]

Re: Heroes out of Time

 

Originally posted by Michael Hopcroft

How would you work this trope in HERO? The very nature of HERO System character design prevents you from designing a character with powers he or she doesn't know about. But how would you play a character who has mystic, superhuman, or strange powers but doesn;t even know it in a system that encourages you to know what your character can do down to the last detail?

 

This isn't that hard. In a case like this the GM needs to decide what super powers the characters have. In El Hazard, they all served to drive the plot, so in an RPG, the GM should decide what are useful powers (in the long run). Thus, no "random" powers tables, as that sort of goes against the whole genre.

 

Sticking with the El Hazard setting, we have one PC who can see through illusions, one who is super strong, and one who can make old machines work again. The 1st power allows the PCs to deal with the Phantom Tribe, the second allows them to deal with the Bugrom, and the third lets the hero of the story keep Ifuita from blowing up everything.

 

So... in your game you would need (as GM) to decide what powers they should have to make the plot move. In the one game where I tried to run this, I made everyone's powers an extension of them. So the new photographer didn't need his telephoto lens to see, the baseball player was super strong, and so on.

[MoonHunter]

Two ways....

 

I have had two ways of dealing with this....

 

1) As part of their conception development, I asked everyone what kind of super powers they think their character would have, if they had powers. They build "normal" people. When they crossed the Veil to MetaLand, we stopped and built them up. Using the original characters as a base, they received additional base points and could take super related disads, up to the SuperHero level. If they spent EPs on mundane parts, they could use those in the normal world. If they spent EPs on powers or buying off super disads, those, like the powers, were no longer available on Earth.

 

2) Power Envelopes: Every character had to save 75 points. I created 8 sets of 75 points of super powers and skills (two for each element). On each envelope I wrote a line or two of poetry/ image, that related to the aspect of the element I designed the 75 points with. At the first game, I handed out the various envelopes and told everyone to pick one that matched their character's true personality (not their public face). A few games later, when they passed over to The Land, they opened their envelopes (one character traded for a new envelope because they mentally reworked their character) and copied their new powers and skills on to their sheets.

[Enforcer84]

I like the power envelope idea. Along similar lines...

I played a game where we made 50 pt normals and then we ended up in the new world the characters found themselves in a temple. They were instructed by disembodied voice to choose the icon that appealed to them most. If I recall they were:

 

Honor - Ring

Justice - Scales

Freedom - Wings

Joy - Heart

Wealth - Coin

Knowledge - Eye

Health - Hourglass

 

Then depending on what they had chosen they got the power set that the GM had devised. It was pretty cool as far as Role playing he had chosen the exact wording of each symbol. There was also an empty eighth slot. It later turned out to be "Power - the Sword". That was the major villain of the campaign.

 

My character chose Honor and became a superhumanly strong combat machine. He acted as the groups Champion and occasionally conscience.

 

If I recall correctly

 

Justice became a swordsman of inexplicable ability, he could cut arrows out of the air. disarm several warriors at a time... he also could detect untruths and seemed to be cosmically aware.

 

Freedom was a speedster. Also, she could escape from almost any bonds.

 

Joy was an empath capable of divining the hearts of others, inspiring courage and basically told us who was good and who was not. He could also heal.

 

Wealth was, well rich. Not only that but had an acute understanding of any of the economies that we encountered, an ever full purse, the best equipment money could buy, and the ability to bribe darn near anyone. This guy was a player, he was in it for the big payoff and we thought he had sold us out to Power, but he could sort of read the futures, and knew we were more profitable, he basically sacrificed himself. (there by "buying" his way into paradise)

 

Knowledge was a wizard of great power and a sage on near infinate knowledge. She alone knew that Wealth was still an ally.

 

Health was practically immortal, a relentless warrior who could not be stopped. He was also a healer.

 

 

It was a cool campaign. In a fantasy like setting. I think the GM had sort of based the world on Bastard! from what I can remember.

[Dr. Anomaly]

I was in a (regrettably short-lived) game that the GM worked very much this way. It was a home-brew system so I'll not discuss "crunchiness", but the flavor was great.

 

We all started as real-world people who'd have some reason to be in, or have some connection to, Cairo. We had an archaeologist (natch), her "publicity" agent, the native "guide" (thief) she usually worked with, and a local officer of the law (VERY honorable and by-the-book).

 

The first session was very long and drawn out, but eventually ended up with us "crossing over" to "the other world." During the crossing we were confronted with a vast hall adorned with 12 great Seals, surrounding a mammoth 13 Seal. Each had a different picture, and the GM asked us to each pick a Seal (portal) based on the image that appealed most to our character, without knowing anything else about what the Seals would do. Either the GM's set-up of what the Seals represented was eerily accurate, or he did some fast behind-the-scenes juggling. In either case, what the selections did were perfect for the characters and their backgrounds.

 

I can't remember what all the Seals were, just the ones that got chosen:

 

Wolf - protection and companionship (by the cop)

 

Book - knowledge (by the archaeologist)

 

Snake - stealth and healing (by the guide -- the healing fit so well because a traumatic event in her past was the death of her grandmother, a local 'doctor'/'pharmacist', who'd been unable to cure herself -- and it had been the heartfelt desire of the child-who-would-be-guide to have saved her)

 

Dragon - personal power (the 'publicity agent')

 

This last one was a surprise to most of us...we had the impression the 13th Seal was not a choice, just sort of a decorative/symbolic center for the rest. Michael (the publicist character's name) was the last of us to choose, and he announced he was picking the Dragon. I think all of the rest of us (including the GM) were surprised, but the GM handled it smoothly. Though we never got to find out (the campaign didn't last long enough) we strongly suspect the Dragon path is one of those "you'll end up master of the world, or dead...nothing in between" sort of situations.

[Space Cadet]

I was in an Anime Hero campaign a few years ago that had the

"Earth people mystically transported to another world" theme.

The GM (who also happened to be the president of the local

Anime club) had set up a campaign based on the Aura Battler

Dunbine series (in HERO terms, this was Fantasy Hero meets

Robot Warriors). The basic plot was something like this:

certain people from Earth were being transported to the

world of Byston Well in another dimension, where they found

themselves becoming the pilots for the various feudal lords'

Aura Battlers -- organic mecha that were energized by the

aura powers of their pilots. The Aura Battlers were powerful

enough in their home reality, but once in Earth's reality their

destructive capabilities -- as well as the aura powers of the

few individuals who had crossed over from Byston Well -- were

boosted to a level comparable to tactical nuclear weapons.

Our campaign, however, only lasted for 2 or 3 sessions.

 

Space Cadet

[Black Rose]

In this vein, I would ask this question of the assembled HERO gurus (sorry, I've been reading Regency-style political intrigue). How would you, both mechanically and thematically, describe a character whose relatively normal abilities become suddenly augmented upon being in the Otherworld? Not gaining new and unusual abilities, but one's own abilities being dramatically boosted? For example, if you had a swashbuckler-type character with a DCV of, say, 8 with CSLs, how would you let the character (and the player) know he suddenly had an additional +4 DCV? Or a combat-only form of Desolid? Or their 4" of Leaping becoming 9"? With some powers it's fairly easy, you just need for the players to describe things more than use metagame language; if the player says their PC is going to swing with all their strength, and they now have a 35 STR instead of a 15 STR, well, things are going to be interesting in a second. But some abilities are pretty precise, and don't fall into place like that.