Pointless Hero

[Peregrine]

Re: Pointless Hero

 

I have (and do) run my heroic games without set points for character generation. I do track points and costs on builds and various character abilities - but that's just out of habit. Its not for strict accounting reasons. Over time I and my players became more concerned with character' date=' narrative, and the stories we were telling and constant character growth (in terms of mechanical aspects of the character) became less an issue. I stopped giving experience. Things that flowed from the narrative (usu. perks) got tacked on formally, but most stuff was done by feel. I took character revisions with new abilities for review on a sporadic, unplanned basis. There's a Digital Hero article on this. It has some good advice. I don't follow it to the letter.[/quote']

 

"Pointless Champions", DH #3.

 

And I look at it this way: "Start small and grow" (from a game mechanical standpoint) is what I call the D&D paradigm of play, because D&D introduced that style of play when it introduced RPGs to begin with, back in the 1970s. If you play that way, you are effectively "playing D&D" with a different ruleset, genre, setting, etc; i.e., the rest is just details.

 

What the "Pointless Champions" article describes is an independent invention of what I call the Traveller paradigm, from Classic Traveller ca. 1977. In Classic Traveller, characters entered the game "fully formed" rather than "small and growing". As a mater of fact, Classic Traveller did not have any mechanics for character progression during play. Any changes to the characters were purely story/plot driven, as described in the DH article.

 

And I echo the advice - get DH #3 and read the article. One addition to the article's content - for the first couple of adventures (not sessions, adventures, assuming multi-sesson adventures) allow "editorial rewrites" for characters in case there is some critical flaw in the build - too weak, too strong, too redundant with other characters, missing role(s) in the group of characters, etc.

[The Main Man]

Re: Pointless Hero

 

There's nothing wrong with running Hero without character points. That being said' date=' if I wasn't using character points, I'd probably just roughly model the characters with Hero and use Theatrix or some other abstract system to run the game.[/quote']

 

Good call on using Theatrix.

 

That reminds me of how I've sometimes pondered a Universalis/HERO Hybrid.

[Tasha]

Re: Pointless Hero

 

Not exactly "pointless" but my campaign reached a point where there were both veteran characters and rookies and had been running for nearly (now over) two decades that I had to develop a policy of multiple "tiers" of starting points and multiple "tiers" of ability. We still keep track of points but there's no attempt to balance things. There are characters who do 10-12d6 attacks and characters who can do 18-20d6 attacks. And a lot of characters in between. We've made playing to concept more important than point balance.

 

This is how I usually run Champions. Though I try to keep the players in the dc 12-14 range. Some players like unlimited points, and some like the security of having a point limit. So I make sure that there are good guidelines for purchasing everything, and I have a round Point limit in my head for those who need one.

 

As a GM it is up to me to make sure that the 500pt character is as balanced to my scenarios as the 300point character. I like to emphasize non-combat skills so the PCs have stuff that doesn't focus on combat.

 

Tasha

[SCUBA Hero]

Re: Pointless Hero

 

The more experienced I get with Hero System, the less I worry about point totals.

 

It's not that points are irrelevant, but that I get *how effective the abilities are* that the points are based on.

 

The main problem I have with disregarding points are things like Dispell...

[Peregrine]

Re: Pointless Hero

 

The more experienced I get with Hero System, the less I worry about point totals.

 

It's not that points are irrelevant, but that I get *how effective the abilities are* that the points are based on.

 

The main problem I have with disregarding points are things like Dispell...

 

So use points to define the characters' abilities, but don't worry about character totals.