Hero GUI

[Zane_Marlowe]

How would you streamline the presentation of Hero for convenience and new players just learning the game? This thread is where I want to hear ideas about how people work with the system in that way. I've been thinking about this a while, and I've seen that others have too. I'm going to collect ideas of that sort into this thread.

 

Here is a guiding principles for what I have in mind.

This is not about introducing new rules. I haven't done so, and that sort of thing typically raises more questions than it answers. This is about how the game is used and presented. Hero System is the Linux of RPGs but it needs a GUI.*

 

 

So, in no particular order, I present my own contributions and others I'm aware of, and invite you to do the same

 

• Tags to simplify the creation and presentation of powers.
  
• Hero System Power Cards to simplify the player's interaction with the character's abilities.
  
• Hero System in Two Pages to summarize Hero System concepts.
  

 

I'm sure there are more, but post your suggestions and thoughts and I'll add things.

 

* Neal Stephenson's analogy between operating systems (c. the late 90's) and cars is relevant here. (Edited for length.)

Linux, which is right next door, and which is not a business at all. It's a bunch of RVs, yurts, tepees, and geodesic domes set up in a field and organized by consensus. The people who live there are making tanks. These are not old-fashioned, cast-iron Soviet tanks; these are more like the M1 tanks of the U.S. Army, made of space-age materials and jammed with sophisticated technology from one end to the other. But they are better than Army tanks. They've been modified in such a way that they never, ever break down, are light and maneuverable enough to use on ordinary streets, and use no more fuel than a subcompact car. These tanks are being cranked out, on the spot, at a terrific pace, and a vast number of them are lined up along the edge of the road with keys in the ignition. Anyone who wants can simply climb into one and drive it away for free.

Customers come to this crossroads in throngs, day and night. Ninety percent of them go straight to the biggest dealership and buy station wagons or off-road vehicles. They do not even look at the other dealerships.

Of the remaining ten percent, most go and buy a sleek Euro-sedan, pausing only to turn up their noses at the philistines going to buy the station wagons and ORVs. If they even notice the people on the opposite side of the road, selling the cheaper, technically superior vehicles, these customers deride them as cranks and half-wits.

The Batmobile outlet sells a few vehicles to the occasional car nut who wants a second vehicle to go with his station wagon, but seems to accept, at least for now, that it's a fringe player.

The group giving away the free tanks only stays alive because it is staffed by volunteers, who are lined up at the edge of the street with bullhorns, trying to draw customers' attention to this incredible situation. A typical conversation goes something like this:

Hacker with bullhorn: "Save your money! Accept one of our free tanks! It is invulnerable, and can drive across rocks and swamps at ninety miles an hour while getting a hundred miles to the gallon!"

Prospective station wagon buyer: "I know what you say is true...but...er...I don't know how to maintain a tank!"

Bullhorn: "You don't know how to maintain a station wagon either!"

Buyer: "But this dealership has mechanics on staff. If something goes wrong with my station wagon, I can take a day off work, bring it here, and pay them to work on it while I sit in the waiting room for hours, listening to elevator music."

Bullhorn: "But if you accept one of our free tanks we will send volunteers to your house to fix it for free while you sleep!"

Buyer: "Stay away from my house, you freak!"

Bullhorn: "But..."

Buyer: "Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?"

Sound familiar?

[steriaca]

Re: Hero GUI

 

I myself am working on the "Hero System Charater Creation Cheat Sheet" project. It is proably not exactly what your looking for, thoe.

[teh bunneh]

Re: Hero GUI

 

In my convention games, I use simplified and graphically attractive character sheets that reflect what the game is all about...

[mhd]

Re: Hero GUI

 

Dear Deity, please no Power Cards or other regurgitated single-purpose rule collections. Make documentation more accessible, but keep it in one place. This way people will have to look some things up, but at least they're more likely to learn from that. So instead of putting all the required rolls, special cases etc. of a power in one block, make it reference the required rules. Next time you have to construct something of your own, you know the basics. Empower the users, don't patronize them.

 

Which was exactly the point of Stephensons essay, if I remember correctly. No GUIs, man pages.

[Zane_Marlowe]

Re: Hero GUI

 

Not following what you mean by a "single purpose rule collection." Elaborate?

[mhd]

Re: Hero GUI

 

Let's say you have an instance of Aid, with some adders and modifiers. Then you print all that in an abbreviated, collected form. That's what I would understand as a "power card".

 

In my experience, they generally only help if the rules aren't generic anyway (D&D spells) and/or are used for tracking uses of a power (e.g. D&D 4E powers).

[Zane_Marlowe]

Re: Hero GUI

 

Ah, I think I'm starting to see. Power Cards as I designed them (see the link in the first post above) are a way of organizing the particular powers a character has. It's not a gloss or redesign of the power writeups in the book. Yes, powers are generic, but each character's powers are specific to that character, and that specific build is what's on the card, along with anything you'd need to know to use the power (i.e., OCV, available uses/charges, etc.). It is in one sense just a revised presentation of what's already on the character sheet (minus skills, perks, talents).

[Manic Typist]

Re: Hero GUI

 

.....wait, I do not understand that Linux analogy. If I use Linux, people will fix it for me while I sleep?

[mhd]

Re: Hero GUI

 

The way it goes: You post your problems on some forum before you go to sleep, and when you wake up you'll a) have no answer, because the problem with all its permutations is too individual, get three messages telling you that it works on their computers or -- more likely -- c) be insulted for not looking at some obscure documentation yourself.

[Zane_Marlowe]

Re: Hero GUI

 

Right, let's not chase the analogy beyond its usefulness. The point is, there' a lot of power under Hero's hood, but the entry cost seems intimidating to those who are just starting, and there are certainly ways in which the "interface" could be improved. That's what I think is worth exploring a bit in this thread.

[Manic Typist]

Re: Hero GUI

 

I'm sorry, I was being genuinely curious. I know Linux exists, I understand it to be "useful if you're willing to do the work yourself." I don't even know how much of the work you have to do- do you have to program your own start menu? *Shrug*

 

Hence my confusion. That right there represents the entire sum of my knowledge of Linux.

[bigbywolfe]

Re: Hero GUI

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]43121[/ATTACH]

[mhd]

Re: Hero GUI

 

Those times are gone. Sure, there are some versions of Linux that are definitely barebones and meant for experts, but the most common ones you can download (e.g. Ubuntu) offer about the same basic functionality as Windows 7 or OS X. Most of the obscure errors you could run into are due to the huge variety of PC components, but that's something that breaks Windows, too, and in my recent experience it's easier to recover in Linux. The weird technical stuff isn't that much closer on your Linux desktop, but I would say that there are more Linux people into the weird stuff. It's a bit like Germany.

 

 

GUIs are actually one level to high if you're looking for a decent analogy. Every graphical application is highly specialized, the only thing that would come close to that in a system like HERO is probably a finished character, or at least an archetype with a few open options (e.g. a Brick template). If you want to present the existing rules in a new, more palatable way, don't look at the end-user side, look at the programmer side. We're basically at an 80s level there right now, with a decently indexed monolithic manual.

[Zane_Marlowe]

Re: Hero GUI

 

I'm sorry, I was being genuinely curious. I know Linux exists, I understand it to be "useful if you're willing to do the work yourself." I don't even know how much of the work you have to do- do you have to program your own start menu? *Shrug*

 

Hence my confusion. That right there represents the entire sum of my knowledge of Linux.

 

No worries, just trying to keep on point (because, y'know, the internet).

[Zane_Marlowe]

Re: Hero GUI

 

...GUIs are actually one level to high if you're looking for a decent analogy. Every graphical application is highly specialized' date=' the only thing that would come close to that in a system like HERO is probably a finished character, or at least an archetype with a few open options (e.g. a Brick template). If you want to present the existing rules in a new, more palatable way, don't look at the end-user side, look at the programmer side. We're basically at an 80s level there right now, with a decently indexed monolithic manual.[/quote']

 

The analogy can go if it doesn't help you, but as I said in the tags thread, one of the things that got me thinking about this was someone (alas, I cannot now remember who) said (words to the effect) that Hero was a toolkit system, so we should be using it to build other games. It was an intriguing idea because I've long thought that the two things Hero GMs need are 1) a lower entry cost (time mainly, complexity as well though etc.) and 2) really great setting development. I think those two things have a common solution in the sense that making setting choices automatically pares down the overall choices in the game, which means (in principle at least) that if you're making those choices carefully, you'll have both a great setting and really easy gameplay.

 

Not sure what you mean by "don't look at the end-user side, look at the programmer side." That part of the analogy escapes me. Perhaps you can say more.

[mhd]

Re: Hero GUI

 

Paring things down is probably the wrong approach. To actually reduce complexity, you'd need to eliminate a whole category of elements (otherwise you'd just be limiting variety, which is quite different). And you'd be hard-pressed to find a genre where you could totally ignore one of HERO's constituent parts. Sooner or later you'll have to get down to the bare metal for some element. Sure, one obvious solution is simplicty for the players and refering to the GM once the abstraction gets leaky. Not a big fan of that in the long run (i.e. for anything beyond a one-shot or convention game).

 

Initial complexity is a different deal, here we're mostly concerned about teaching, not building levels of abstraction for perpetuity. But there are lots of traps involved in this part, as often you're paying for the initial shallow learning curve with a big bump afterwards, as people have to forget their training wheels and sometimes even have to start from scratch to learn the "proper" rules. A good learning abstraction makes transitioning easier, not harder.

 

Let's use the UI analogy once more: Your application allows you to cut and paste. You don't know how. But hey, there's a big button with scissors in the "tool bar". Great, works, done. But I would argue that the menu is the better interface. The disadvantage is that you have to click around to find that there's a "Cut" option in the "Edit" menu, but the big benefit is that you might find out about other functions ("Select All"/"Find") and that you might learn the keyboard shortcut for cut & paste, arguably the fastest way to do things.

 

And while we're at it, let's stay in the IT world so that I can explain my "programmer POV" comment above:

Now you actually want to make a GUI. You don't know the technology involved, as up 'til now you've worked with other systems or just created straight-forward printouts. Now the actual windows on screen can be hugely complex, ranging from the "Ok/Cancel" error message to something like Microsoft Excel. You might have a menu, tool bar icons, one of those status bars at the bottom, your window might be resizable or not etc. Lots of options, very high complexity. How that programming system is designed is obviously the biggest issue, but let's assume that's set in stone already (as is its in our case, we're not talking about Hero 7E after all). So how do quickly get a new programmer to produce some applications?

The dangerous option is a simplified layer on top of it all, so you don't need to know about the complex system. Instead of calling your "Window" function with a metric ton of options, you just call a "SimpleWindow" function that has everything set up already: You've got a menu, you've got a tool bar, etc., you basically just tell it how big the window should be and its size.

Works out alright, you've got a whole bunch of other functions that operate on SimpleWindows, making the whole experience a lot easier. Until you need to create a program that looks really different (maybe a game or a drawing application like Photoshop). Then your knowledge of SimpleWindows doesn't help you at all, you're back to scratch.

 

There are other approaches, too, and we might learn from then:

One popular one is to have a very generic "skeleton" program, where you just "fill out the blanks", but you could still delete or modify parts of the generic version -- or simply learn from it, look at how its done.

Or make the documentation better. Programmers moved from shelves of pages a while ago and were quite eager to embrace the web. Hyper-linked documentation is a boon for exploring a complicated system, better than any index.

Never mind that almost any modern documentation today starts with a tutorial, giving a general overview. Nowadays that's often in the form of a screencast, where you actually see someone typing in and executing all that stuff (not in real time, more like a "I already prepared that" cooking show).

And then there's the importance of a high level structure. Keeping things in different files is one thing, but you also might have a graphical diagram showing you the constituent parts of your whole program, click on one of them and you're in the code.

 

Whew, I earned my nerd points today. But all of that can have RPG analogies, and often already does. The "skeleton" should sound familiar, as we already do that with templates. Or even sample characters, were 90% of your points are spent, but you've got a few left over for your own designs or to pick from a small set of additional abilities.

Improving the "documentation", i.e. the HERO books is a bit difficult, mostly for legal reasons. I really loved the D20 SRD site when I was still caught in GM'ing D&D. So you've got your Pixie NPC, and when you need to find out what those spells mean, you're there with one click. Haven't seen anything like that for PCs yet, but given the proliferation of tablets, maybe some day…

And while we do have sample characters in almost every RPG out there, as well as sample sessions, I still believe we could do a better presentation for newbie players, especially if it's in an external document and thus won't cause problems with costing too many pages (for non-newbies, it's about as important as the "What's a RPG?" section). Some games actually did this with a "choose your own adventure" solo mini-game, where at almost every step a new ability/attribute/mechanism was explained. This would translate nicely into a more graphics-heavy or electronic format.

As for a high-level structure, that's basically better character sheet design. Your Power Cards being one example. The important part (in my opnion) is not hiding away the abstracted parts too much. Make the first page of your sheet stack simple and include everything you need, but give the complete power construction details on subsequent sheets, preferably with the usual "6E1 42" indexing. Again, this would really benefit from an electronic presentation and easy rules reference, but, well…

 

Whew, quite a long post. I don't know if I can provide a good TL;DR version. Maybe "beware of abstractions". They tend to outlive their usefulness and often leak (i.e. you still need to know what's at a lower level).

[Sean Waters]

Re: Hero GUI

 

There are two issues here to my mind:

 

1. Making it easier to build Hero Characters

2. Making it easier to play Hero.

 

You certainly do not need all the creation information and exact builds and points on a play character sheet, and i think a lot of people would find Hero more accessible if you have play sheets such as the one teh bunneh posted above. It has everything you need to play, it looks exciting and it is theme evocative.

[mhd]

Re: Hero GUI

 

I always thought the cover of the APG would make for a nice character sheet design. Or maybe one that slightly less Vitruvian, with a sword and a shield in each hand to better indicate offense/defense.

[Ninja-Bear]

Re: Hero GUI

 

Couple of thoughts on streamlining the game. When buying combat skill levels for characters, I suggest just buying skills levels that only add to HtH or ranged attacks. It easier to know what to add then trying to figure out what level works with which power or skill. As for martial art skills, I would recommend just using the generic style. You can simulate alot of styles with those skills and it is eaiser on the gm because you only need to remember a small set of manuevers.

[Christopher]

Re: Hero GUI

 

Hero in Two pages is n4ice to understand a sheet, but I think we need something between Two pages and "read all the powers and advantages".

The one liners on 6E1 163 and 164 are too short to give you any usefull idea what a power means. We need something closer to the way a Class Libary is introduced.

 

I think I could write something up, but I am not certain if there is interest.

 

For example, for Desolidification the book says:

"Character can become intangible, walk through walls, and ignore most attacks."

Wich is nice, but does not includes the things that really matter for the game.

 

I would write something around:

The Character can walk through walls and ignore almost any attack. However he is also unable to affect the "physical" world in any way.

Aside from literal desolidifciation, the go to powers for "unbeatable" defense, total immunity to certain damage and super contortionist abilities.

Examples: Martian Manhunter. Vision. Ghosts. Smokeforms. Shadowforms.

[Orion]

Re: Hero GUI

 

The first thing I do with people new to Hero is to totally ignore points. Just get them to describe the character, and then choose the powers that fit the description. And if they choose a power that can't be modeled well with Hero, I ignore the fact, and apply liberal amounts of handwavium. I want them to see that they can build anything they can imagine. Balance isn't even a concern at this point. I'll figure out an appropriate scenario to use it in if they can come up with the character. No GUI here though - this is just getting them interested.

 

The next step, especially good for those that are used to the limited choices of class-based systems, is simple pick lists. Choose one each on the movement, defense, and offense columns, then a quirk. Next, pick a skill level (green, regular, veteran, elite) and power level (powder puff, regular, dangerous, godly). With this, I can make a character up in 5 minutes, and then take the time to show them how I made it. This is a simple wizard in that they make a couple choices, something else does all the work, and they can look at the generated code/character to see how it was done.

 

From here, you just start adding in additional layers and options. The complexity of Hero is great once you understand the whole system, but I believe it is a major problem in getting started. I'm all for having multiple genre books that contain only the stuff needed for a standard campaign in each genre. Just the basics. Any advanced stuff, optional rules, and corner cases are handled in a second book. For those that want it, you can have a single book with all the rules from everything in one place, but it is strictly a rulebook, not an example book.

 

As an aside, ensure that the new Hero GUI emphasizes creating a character to play, and not playing with the build rules. If they want to run around and disarm everyone in a second, then they must choose fast movement and reflexes, not tport, stretching, or anything else. Not getting hit is high DCV, not armor - that is something very different. Teach the foundation of the game, not how to twist it up into something barely recognizable, just because the system can do it. A complex system is good for the experts, but should stay in the background when first learning.

[Susano]

Re: Hero GUI

 

In my convention games' date=' I use simplified and graphically attractive character sheets that reflect what the game is all about...[/quote']

 

I duplicated this layout for my Hero Left 4 Dead character sheets, and also intend to use Shane Harsch's excellent simplified Hero Designer export format for any other such games. I used the latter character sheet for my Well of the Worlds game (in which 2 people had never played before) and it worked very well. teh bunneh's 1 page character sheet works very well, looks nice, and put everything into easy-to-read sections. PM or email me and I can send you some sample PDFs of what I did.

[Susano]

Re: Hero GUI

 

Dear Deity, please no Power Cards or other regurgitated single-purpose rule collections. Make documentation more accessible, but keep it in one place. This way people will have to look some things up, but at least they're more likely to learn from that. So instead of putting all the required rolls, special cases etc. of a power in one block, make it reference the required rules. Next time you have to construct something of your own, you know the basics. Empower the users, don't patronize them.

 

Which was exactly the point of Stephensons essay, if I remember correctly. No GUIs, man pages.

 

Actually, for several of my con games, in which the PCs may gain (and lose) gear, I intend to hand out 3x5 card-sized slips that show you gear and what it does in HERO terms. This is especially important in Left 4 Dead and Half Life Hero, in which PCs may swap-out weapons several times.

[Susano]

Re: Hero GUI

 

There are two issues here to my mind:

 

1. Making it easier to build Hero Characters

2. Making it easier to play Hero.

 

You certainly do not need all the creation information and exact builds and points on a play character sheet, and i think a lot of people would find Hero more accessible if you have play sheets such as the one teh bunneh posted above. It has everything you need to play, it looks exciting and it is theme evocative.

 

Hero Designer helps a lot in building PCs. If introducing people to HERO, sheets without all of the points (and the Advantage and Limitation values) helps a lot.

[Laundry Knight]

Re: Hero GUI

 

As someone who is a new player and trying to learn the system, my biggest problem is linking the right combination of characteristics and powers to the desired advantages and limitations. Consequently, a single table that indicates what advantages and limitations work with which powers would be wonderful. It would greatly reduce the amount of time I spend flipping back and forth between pages. For that matter, having all of the character creation tables relatively close together would be great.