How is Fantasy Hero like D&D or different?

[Alcamtar]

- the closest equivalent for a D&D turn would propably be a Hero Phase.

 

I think I would say that a Hero turn is a D&D combat round. The difference is that in D&D, you have to wait until higher levels to get multiple attacks per round. In Hero, every character has a Speed (SPD) that determines how many attacks you can make per round.

 

Some other differences:

-- A starting HERO character is much more powerful, equivalent to perhaps a 5th level character in D&D.

 

-- D&D often "breaks down" in various at higher levels (10+). HERO on the other hand is designed to scale smoothly to superhuman levels of ability.

 

-- In D&D everything is already made for you. It is pick-up-and-play. In HERO you have to make it yourself. (This is both a feature and a bug)

 

-- In D&D you can easily run through three or four combats per hour (depending on what edition you play). You often have random encounters and trivial combats to fill up the adventure. HERO combat is much more detailed, and slower. I think HERO works best when there is only one significant combat at the finale of the game session; you might optionally have one or two trivial warm-up combats if they are short, but probably not more than one per hour. I sometimes joke that HERO is for the "combat connoisseur" ... instead of quick junk-food combats, it prepares a five course feast, lovingly prepared in painstaking detail.

 

-- I can roll up a D&D character in 5 minutes, whereas a HERO character is more like 5 hours. This means death is cheap in D&D and characters are often little more than cardboard silhouettes, at least until they've had time to develop in play. It's okay to kill starting characters in droves. HERO is the opposite. Each character is lovingly handcrafted over many hours and well developed even before play starts; you want to go out of your way to avoid killing PCs if possible. This has significant implications for the tone of the game, how adventures are balanced, and so forth. In D&D you can play "iron man" games in which the dice fall where they may and there is no mercy. This style of play is not well suited to HERO. On the other hand, it can be very difficult in D&D to have a story oriented quest where the same cast of characters is expected/required to survive until the end; but HERO excels at this style of play. (Related to this: it is easy to play HERO in a nonlethal mode, where characters get knocked out but take little real damage, like in an action movie. D&D doesn't do this well, and in fact usually can't do it at all.)

[Tasha]

A round in D20= 6 seconds. Therefore 2 D20 Rounds = 1 Hero 12 Second Turn. For the uninitiated folk learning about the system. A character's Spd Stat equals the number of times in a Hero 12 Second Turn that the PC can act. Each Second is called a Segment, and when a PC has an action is Called the Character's Phase.

So a Typical Fantasy Hero PC has a Speed of 3 so they act 3 times in those 12 seconds. They Can move and execute a combat action or execute multiple Combat actions if the PC is will to take a penalty to his and to be hit.

 

In Hero a PC rolls to hit. That simulates that One swing the PC gets in that Phase. If the PC hits then damage is rolled and subtracted from innate defense and armor (if any). Damage is applied. In Hero Damage is done in both lethal and Non Lethal damage. Lethal Damage called BODY damage (after the characteristic of the same name) is how much punishment the PC takes before they die. Non Lethal Damage Called Stun Damage (also named after the Stat of the same name) is applied and can knock an opponent Unconscious, An attack that gets a large amount of STUN through defenses can cause a momentary weakness (Called being stunned) which makes the stunned person lose their next Phase(Action) and makes then temporally easier to hit. All of this allows the system to model combat in a way that feels much better than D20

Another thing you will notice about Hero is that Combat Maneuvers work on the same system as normal weapon combat. If you want to run up to someone and hit them with your weapon, you just apply the penalties to hit and to your defense. Otherwise making the same roll vs the same defensive stat as if you just hit them with your fist or sword. This allows you to use cool combat maneuvers without having to open to book and look up effects, because the effects are simple and listed in the maneuver on the PC's character sheet.

[IndianaJoe3]

A round in D20= 6 seconds. Therefore 2 D20 Rounds = 1 Hero 12 Second Turn. For the uninitiated folk learning about the system. A character's Spd Stat equals the number of times in a Hero 12 Second Turn that the PC can act. Each Second is called a Segment, and when a PC has an action is Called the Character's Phase.

 

Interesting comparison. That means that a SPD of 2 corresponds exactly to 1 attack/round.

[Markdoc]

The actual mechanics (1 turn = 12 seconds, Hit points are spilt up into STUN (short term damage) and BOD (long term damage), etc) are mostly beside the point. The real difference between D&D and Hero system is that the former is "descriptive" and the latter is "prescriptive". What that means in simple terms is that game mechanics in D&D are defined by simply writing down what they do. There's no underlying mechanic for much of what's in the game: it's up to the individual designer (or GM) to decide how they want something to work and and where/how they place it in the general game framework. Nothing can be 100% defined in a face to face RPG, but Hero system is prescriptive - meaning that almost all game content is codified, making it easier to rate powers against each other.

 

As an example, the well known and well-loved D&D spell fireball is simply defined (1d6/level, up to 10d6, causes fire damage, 20' radius, reflex save for half). But what if you want to tweak it? There are some rough guidelines - based on metamagic, increasing the maximum number of d6 damage it can do should raise the level by 1 or 2, increasing the area should increase it by 2, changing it to another damage type, by 1. But these are very rough guidelines. Changing from fire to ice increases it by 1. But what if you want to change it to sound to make an explosive sound? That’s clearly more powerful (since resistance to sonic attacks is rare), but there’s no guideline … maybe two levels? What if you wanted to change the save from reflex to fortitude, to reflect the ability to shrug off the deafening boom? There’s no mechanism for that – is it an advantage, a weakness or no difference? Personally, as an experienced GM, I’d see it as an advantage (for PCs) since many critters have a better reflex than fortitude save, but I know equally experienced GMs who disagree. Even if it is an advantage, is it worth a whole level? When adjusting spells or class features the only tool you have to adjust power is level and that’s a pretty coarse scale – a spell that is awesome at 3^rd level might be meh at 4^th. A class feature that is effective at 2^nd level might be useless at 6^th, and so on. And to make it harder, many abilities don’t scale and are therefore hard to place. A class feature like “mettle” (the ability to completely avoid effects from a spell if you make your FORT or WILL save) is pretty cool – but where does it belong? The analogous ability to avoid damage on a REFLEX save is usually rated at 2^nd level … but mettle comes in as a class feature in different character classes at anywhere from 1^st to 11^th level. The designers’ views rate it as anything from “near useless” (because relatively few spells target FORT or WIS compared to REFLEX) or “Awesome” (because a few spells have severe effects even on a failed save). And how do you compare it to other powers? Is it equivalent to “magic missile” (which does the same damage as an arrow from a light bow) or “Baleful polymorph” (which lets you instantly turn even powerful enemies into small harmless animals) - to pick two spells accessible at the same levels as mettle in different classes.

 

The prescriptive nature of Hero means that the GM gets a readout of exactly how powerful an ability is. This is not perfect: a small flash attack is not by itself very powerful but it can be more potent than expected, if most foes have no flash defence, for example. But in general, the Hero system provides a good readout of power for most abilities and also lets you customize with a fair degree of certainty.

 

There’s a second aspect to this prescriptive/descriptive thing. Because all powers in Hero are built from components (defence/damage/movement, etc) on a defined scale, the game scales up relatively smoothly – you can (and we have) play Fantasy hero with 25 point characters and with 350 point characters and characters can grow from very low points totals to very high relatively smoothly. In D&D, scaling is a problem, for two reasons. First, because at the higher levels, the fact that many abilities are “descriptive” means that you get absolute outcomes (and because we’re talking high level, those outcomes are usually serious). A good example – we’re at 13^th level in our current Pathfinder game, and two sessions ago, a greenhag threw a Destruction spell at our sorceress. She burst into flames and burned away until nothing was left, not even ashes. Game over, man. High level D&D often becomes what is referred to as “rocket tag” because the first one to fail a save loses.

 

 

While you can occasionally get similar outcomes in Hero, the scaling aspect of all powers means that’s the exception, not the rule.

 

The second aspect of this is that at higher levels, D&D is all about spellcasters. When we hit 13^th level, the cleric got the ability to create alternate universes (albeit very small ones), regrow lost limbs and kill or blind masses of foes with a word, and a bunch of other stuff, plus a small bonus to saves, combat and hitpoints. The sorcerer gains the ability to blind with a word, to kill large numbers of weaker foes instantly,  teleport any distance, and take the form of almost any creature up to an including large dragons, and a bunch of other stuff, plus a small bonus to saves, combat and hitpoints. The fighter gets a small bonus with a new type of weapon and a slightly larger bonus to saves, combat and hitpoints. A lot of D&D campaigns start to fall apart at this point (and our own GM is hinting that she’d like to end our game soon, and start again at a lower level) because of this issue. Official pathfinder games (Pathfinder society) all end at level 12, because of it. A lot of GMs cannot cope with providing meaningful challenges or spotlight time to all players due to the vast power differential between PC classes, and also cope with the change to power levels which render the standard pseudo-medieval background of most D&D games irrelevant.

 

Because Hero has no inbuilt "classes" as such, it does not have to suffer from this problem and a high point "fighter" can remain as relevant as a high point "mage" - in and out of combat.

 

The flip side of this is that the exponential D&D approach means that unless the GM goes gonzo with magic items, you have a pretty good idea of what PCs can do –especially at lower levels. Not just combat-wise, but also out of combat. Lower level groups in D&D will almost never have access to flight, telepathy, teleport, weather control, etc – all those things that can really mess with a planned scenario. That cannot be assumed in Hero, which makes writing scenarios and planning a game more work. Pretty much every Hero system campaign is individual, and what works in one cannot be assume to work in others. You can reuse material more easily than in most D&D games, since the points scale is the same, but you cannot just assume that what will challenge one group will challenge another, nor can you assume “class distribution” so that the PCs will have specific powers available at a specific points total.

 

The better scaling and balance of Hero comes at the cost of more GM work

 

cheers, Mark