Skills - not that important?

[mhd]

As a relative new-comer to HERO (at least when it comes to actually playing it), I'm still a bit confused about skills. Sometimes it looks like they're a bit of an after-thought. Which is kinda okay-ish in a superheroes game, but somewhat surprising in more Heroic variants.

 

Maybe I'm just imagining things or extrapolate too much from sample characters, but it seems that leveling beyond your base level of competency is rather rare. Granted, given the bell curve and some overall skill levels chances of success are probably high enough. And combat skills (where improvement/high competency would seem valuable in a game) are a separate entity anyway. Another exemption to this rule are Power skills, which generally are pushed about as much as possible.

 

Besides not wanting to waste an action in combat, the latter might also be exacerbated due to the fact that modifiers seem to be harsher than for other skills.

 

Now in other level-less games, skill rolls are often the primary subject for character improvement, and I wonder how people treat this in their Heroic games. How often do you put additional points in skills beyond simply acquiring them, even for characters that aren't hyper-focused (e.g. "normal" characters improving Stealth, not just your party's ninja).

 

The system is flexible enough to accommodate all kinds of playing styles, don't get me wrong. It's easy enough to just introduce enough difficult checks so that high skill levels are useful (cf. GURPS, where 20- skills aren't that rare in campaigns with a power level comparable to 175 CP characters). One might even flatten out the initial skill acquisition a bit, if variance on that scale is important enough. Easy enough to do and with few risks to impact game balance, as the skill system is rather self-contained...

 

So I'm really not complaining, just wondering about playing styles, game history etc.

[Tasha]

Depends on the GM and the Genre of the game. In the Champions (Superheroic Genre) games that I have played and run, Skills have been really important. Enough so that I have bought up Skill rolls on the non combat skills. This is even more so in Heroic Games (ie Fantasy, Sci Fi etc). Those games I have had characters and seen others with over 18- rolls and been in circumstances where it was actually possible to miss those rolls. In Hero there are sometimes modifiers to the rolls esp for situations where the task is harder than normal. Also in situations where another character  is actively opposing your roll (ie Stealth vs Perception roll, Security Systems roll to break in vs attendant's Security systems roll to detect your intrusion etc).

[Kraven Kor]

In my Fantasy HERO and Star HERO Campaigns, Skills generally account for 50% of your character points, and are far more important than in a super's game.  

 

The main issue is lack of granularity until you hit super-skills (21- and up, generally speaking, associated to Characteristic Scores in the 50 to 60 range.)

 

In a Heroic level game, you'll have typical skill rolls from 8- to 18-; with most in the 11- to 13- range.  Which is far less "granularity" than D20's +20 to +30 bonuses and DC's up to the 50's.  (Less Granularity hear means less overall range of difficulties / die roll results.  In HERO, you have about 10 "Difficulty Classes" from 8 or less on 3d6 to 18 or less on 3d6.)

 

Of particular note are things like Autofire Skills, Defense Maneuvers, Penalty Skill Levels, the "Power" skill, weapon and transport familiarities, fast draw...  Lots of fun stuff there for non-supers campaigns.

[Sean Waters]

One issue is that 3d6 averages 10.5 and so you only have a relatively small range: +/- 7.5.  Given the nature of the bell curve, a few points on a skill (or a natural boost from a heightened stat) make more difference than the next few or the next few after that.  An above average skill value means that you have a significantly better chance of success than an average character.

 

The flip side is that a few points of penalties really bites into your chance of success.  If a GM ups the basic difficulty of tasks by making more use of penalties then that practically requires either specialists in a sufficiently broad pool of skills, or everyone to up their game, which is expensive, even if you want to cover the basics.

 

The cost nature of Hero is also a feature.  Some people buy lots of skills, which is only a worthy investment if the GM requires lots of skill rolls.  I imagine that most groups self-correct the problem by (mainly) the GM requiring skill rolls that he knows relate to available skills.  That does not mean that it is not an issue from a game design POV, but it does not often seem to be too much of a problem in practice.

 

Tasha and I have recently been discussing whether skills (specifically social skills) are an afterthought in Hero and still have not been developed as much as other parts of the system.

 

My feeling is that if we had a more interesting skill system, it might encourage more of the use of skills.  The challenge when designing such a system is going to be to pitch it so that you encourage more investment in skills but are not going to fail at everything if you have not added four levels to a skill to make you good enough at it.

 

I think a task difficulty system, should be part of the mainstream rules, as a minimum.  There  is already something in APG II, but not a lot of people necessarily have that, and it feels marginalised.  A difficulty system, perhaps with more examples for reach skill, might give both players and GMs an opportunity to more easily see how useful a skill is, encouraged it for appropriate tasks and still reward the occasional really high skill by allowing its use for tasks beyond the ken of the normal (or possibly the normal for Ken).

 

In addition to that we need a better system of opposed rolls, and skill contests.  

 

Finally we probably need more buying options.  Hero gamers love to think they have a bargain.  You know, skill specialisations, that sort of thing, perhaps other ways of buying skills in packages.

[Kraven Kor]

On the "Character Development" comment:

One of the wonderful, and frustrating, things about HERO is that "advancement" so far as XP is - by default - slow, unguided, and arguably less important to the system overall.  This allows GM's and players to "decide for themselves" what "character development" means, how fast it should occur, how far it can go, etc.  A few XP points can nearly double the effectiveness of some powers in games where things are loaded down with limitations or all in multipower slots, while in a less restrictive campaign you need 10, 20, 50+ XP for a new power or to have that same "doubling" of effect.

 

In my Supers game, we started high and pretty much XP was only being used to buy new perks and such.  While in my FH and SH games, even just 2 or 3 XP was having profound effects on a character.

[bluesguy]

In my Champions game most characters have a small % of their character points in skills.  Something like 20% to 25%.  But that is because I run a very episodic Champions campaign and they don't need a bunch of skills to succeed in an adventure.

 

In my Fantasy Hero game most characters have somewhere between 40 to 60% of their points in skills.  My FH tends to have whole sessions (or a string of sessions) with no combat - lots of role playing and skills play a big part in that role playing.

[PaycheckHero]

mhd:

 

Skills were something of an afterthought in very early versions, I want to say through v2 or v3 (I wish I had a v1 to compare with).  IIRC the non-supers games for v3 of necessity really expanded it because most non-supers games tend to be rather skill-based, and 4e unified and merged those expanded skill lists and systems back into the core.  I wouldn 't say they're an afterthought now, though I think the rules contain artifacts from the fact that they were greatly elaborated after the basic system was in place, as well as artifacts reflecting the conventions of the era in which they were developed.  Combat, as you have noticed, feels(*) like a separate subsystem from the skill system rather than an application of it even though recent versions tend to take another baby step or two in the direction of unifying the presentation of combat and skills with each release.  Another relic is that hero skills are presented as rolls based on a specific characteristic rather than as bonuses to a characteristic roll that may be chosen on the fly.  It is trivial to change it to the latter, as more modern games do, but in my experience no one bothers.  (It's a bit of a shock sometimes to realize just how old Hero is and how innovative it was at the time, because nowadays we compare to systems that were explicitly built with lessons in mind that had been first learned in seminal games like Hero and Traveller.)

 

What makes you ask the question is perhaps a misunderstanding of the effects of cost structure on character building.  Whether characters tend to have skills bought above their starting values or not isn't a good measure of whether skills are an afterthought.  The underlying cost structure discourages it unless you only have one or two key skills.  Beyond that, it becomes much more cost effective to buy up multiple skill rolls at a time by buying up characteristics and buying skill levels with whole categories of skills (GURPS later modified the basic cost structure in a way that magnified this effect to a staggering degree, to the point where buying up characteristics and keeping most skills at a fractional point cost is practically a defining aspect of the system).  This incentive is increased in every version before 6e in that primary characteristics are not only skill bases but also add to figured characteristics, and this so extremely cost-effective that you already want to buy them up just for secondaries even before you start wanting to save money on your skills.

 

As an extreme example, one of my favorite characters was a 4e 225-point batman-like character, and to be true to the character I had to use every trick in the book (and talked the GM into a couple that weren't) to afford what amounted to most of the skill list and still be a useful team member in combat.  I bought characteristics as I high as I could, but chose to keep them at 20 or below to stay true to the concept (in a particular rules interpretation which champions itself doesn't share) and then had to make up for "only" human maxima with very careful building.  I *never* purchased anything above default.  All skill improvements were 10-pt overall levels with both skills and combat--he started with two, and I think he got up to four before the campaign was effectively retired (and possibly should have had more by then, but I also had damage classes and utility belt gadgets to buy).  Your argument would suggest skills must be an afterthought for that character because nothing was bought above starting level, and yet the character was almost entirely skill-based (except for DEX, can't ever have enough of that pre-6e) to the point where I had to create a custom character sheet to list all of his skills.  What matters is how many and what kind of skills a character has, what the rolls are, and so on, not the little system-based efficiency tricks that players tend to use to obtain them.  A character with a couple of signature skills may well buy them far above starting values, but one with many won't because the system rewards a different purchasing strategy.  Since you mention GURPS you must be familiar with this effect, as GURPS exhibits it more than any game I've ever seen.  I wrote up a couple of skill masters in, hmm, maybe 3e, and  quickly learned that if you wanted a lot of skills and you paid more than a quarter-point for more than a very few of them you were a chump (though maybe a better role-player, if you're doing it to be true to your concept).

 

Use of the skill system depends on the GM's style (the more you let your players do with skills, they more they'll buy) and the genre, but that's a separate issue.  Suffice it to say that many games revolve around skills, and even in supers a skill-master character such as I described above is viable.

 

PaycheckHero

 

* Though it isn't at all obvious from reading the rules, the difference is something of an illusion created by the traditional presentation of the rules rather than a mathematical reality.  You can actually re-write hero combat as an application of the skill system without changing the probabilities in any way, but it takes work and annoys experienced players because they don't want you to change the conventions they are used to.  In fact, you can actually present hero as a mostly pure one-mechanic system with a set of elaborations.  I'd like to write the system up from beginning to end this way, but there wouldn't be much point unless Hero Games wanted to publish it--which they would not.

 

Worse, presenting combat as a pure application of the skill system is actually slightly cleaner mathematically if you switch to a (statistically identical) roll-high presentation of the skill mechanic, and even suggesting such a thing can lead to threats of violence.  The fact that in one particular sense Hero is a roll-high system in (heavy) disguise (I found only one rule that is not equally natural either way, and it has a simple fix that preserves the statistics) doesn't placate the grognards at all. :-)  (Plus, the truth is that it just doesn't matter much, so there is little incentive to annoy existing players in order to please players of other games who don't play hero.)

[Sean Waters]

.....

 

* Though it isn't at all obvious from reading the rules, the difference is something of an illusion created by the traditional presentation of the rules rather than a mathematical reality.  You can actually re-write hero combat as an application of the skill system without changing the probabilities in any way, but it takes work and annoys experienced players because they don't want you to change the conventions they are used to.  In fact, you can actually present hero as a mostly pure one-mechanic system with a set of elaborations.  I'd like to write the system up from beginning to end this way, but there wouldn't be much point unless Hero Games wanted to publish it--which they would not.

 

Worse, presenting combat as a pure application of the skill system is actually slightly cleaner mathematically if you switch to a (statistically identical) roll-high presentation of the skill mechanic, and even suggesting such a thing can lead to threats of violence.  The fact that in one particular sense Hero is a roll-high system in (heavy) disguise (I found only one rule that is not equally natural either way, and it has a simple fix that preserves the statistics) doesn't placate the grognards at all. :-)  (Plus, the truth is that it just doesn't matter much, so there is little incentive to annoy existing players in order to please players of other games who don't play hero.)

 

High roll = good works well for combat in Hero (or would if it did not cause paroxysms of disgust in the faithful), not so sure it would be any clearer or more helpful for skills as they currently work.  14 or less is easy enough to understand.

 

Personally I would like to see the skill system and the combat system unified using the combat system and high rolls, so, for example roll your 3d6, add your modifiers and try to equal or beat a target number of 10 + whatever difficulty is assigned.For combat your 'skill' is OCV and the difficulty is DCV; for skills, it is the number of skill levels and the task difficulty and I was there for the first edition of Champions.  It may smell like DnD but we were there first, we just did not know it.

[Greywind]

High roll = good works well for combat in Hero (or would if it did not cause paroxysms of disgust in the faithful),

 

Heresy!

 

[Chris Goodwin]

While Skills may have been an afterthought, I don't think that means there's anything wrong with them.  The way Skills work is more or less unchanged from first edition, even though costs have changed and there are more of them.  I've played in many a game where Skills were the first thing you looked at when making your character.  

 

It also all depends on the campaign, as usual.  Champions games tend to be less Skill-heavy than the heroic level campaigns.  

[Cancer]

The cost nature of Hero is also a feature.  Some people buy lots of skills, which is only a worthy investment if the GM requires lots of skill rolls.  I imagine that most groups self-correct the problem by (mainly) the GM requiring skill rolls that he knows relate to available skills.  That does not mean that it is not an issue from a game design POV, but it does not often seem to be too much of a problem in practice.

 

Tasha and I have recently been discussing whether skills (specifically social skills) are an afterthought in Hero and still have not been developed as much as other parts of the system.

 

My feeling is that if we had a more interesting skill system, it might encourage more of the use of skills.  The challenge when designing such a system is going to be to pitch it so that you encourage more investment in skills but are not going to fail at everything if you have not added four levels to a skill to make you good enough at it.

I heartily agree with the first quoted paragraph here: skill investment depends strongly on the GM. As has been pithily said elsewhere, it is almost always true that 20 points in Energy Blast is far more useful than 20 points in skills. Depending on the GM, it may always be true that 2 points of EB is more useful than 20 points of skills, frankly. I have an irrational tendency to build "skill money" type characters, and it is always true (in my experience) that skill monkeys make good NPCs but will always make profoundly unsatisfactory PCs.

 

Social skills ... heck, anything other than direct attack powers ... certainly take a back seat in Hero. If skills were employed with the same absolute on/off treatment as powers, that would increase their importance, but most GMs aren't willing to do that. (By absolute on/off, I mean, a player who has 20 points in skills but no points spent in an Energy Blast is completely incapable of employing Energy Blast except by picking up a blaster pistol -- which may not exist. By contrast, the Energy Blaster with no points spent in skills is still all too often allowed to attempt to use many skills -- even in patently asinine cases -- and rolls of 3 or 4 on 3d6 do happen from time to time.) And social skills (other than the sledgehammer of the Presence Attack, which explicitly is not skill-based) are in practice worthless in HERO combat.

 

Sean and Tasha's idea about a more elaborate skill system possibly encouraging skill use ... I am not so sure about that. To encourage skill use you will have to provide clear benefits from use of skills that cannot easily be obtained without skill use, it seems as clear as that. If you can get the bennies without buying skills, then spending in skills is just a self-inflicted wound.

[griffinman01]

I find that the usefulness of your skills depends entirely on the GM.  If your GM never puts you in a situation where you'd need to use skills (as in some campaigns that focus on combat) then skills are essentially dead points.  However, if your GM puts out the effort and/or rewards people for coming up with alternative solutions, then they become vastly more important.

 

Likewise, the number of points you put into a skill depends on the GM and how he assesses penalties to the rolls.  As people have stated a 13- will pass about 80% of the time so anything more than that is a waste of points if your GM doesn't assign penalties such as rushing through the skill (picking a lock in 5 seconds is a lot harder than if you had 5 minutes) or use skill vs skill contests (trying to hack a hacker is a lot harder than a normal person).  So there's little need to boost skills up to 17- or so unless your GM regularly gives you steep penalties.  A -4 penalty to the roll on that 13- (80 % success) will tank it down to a 9- (39% Success) while going from a 17- (98% success) to a 13- (80% success) isn't so bad.

 

Basically it boils down to the kind of campaign your GM is running and how he's running it.

[PaycheckHero]

High roll = good works well for combat in Hero (or would if it did not cause paroxysms of disgust in the faithful), not so sure it would be any clearer or more helpful for skills as they currently work.  14 or less is easy enough to understand.

It is clearer ways that are trivial to experienced Hero players but may be important to bringing in new players and also for some people who don't like (very simple) mental arithmetic.  That is to say, while the standard system compares the quantity 11 + ocv - 3d6 to the target's dcv (this is the opposed value presentation that I think started to be made explicit in the rules in 5e), an equivalent roll-high system compares 3d6 + ocv - 10 to the target's dcv.  The latter is simpler for most people because they can do addition more comfortably than subtraction, so adding the dice roll is easier than subtracting it, and also because the subtracted quantity (the one that compensates for the mean of 3d6) is the base of the number system (10).

 

It also explicitly unifies just about all the mechanics in the game.  Damage is already a roll-high system where the value rolled is compared to the target's defense, and the amount by which the defense is exceeded is the degree of success (in this case interpreted as the amount of damage applied to the target).  A roll-high hit roll can be interpreted as the same mechanic albeit with a different random factor (3d6 always) and a different interpretation of the degree of success (often just success/failure, but for example autofire gives you an extra hit for every full two you succeed by).

 

The only mechanic I noticed that doesn't permit a good roll-high interpretation is the optional critical hit rule, because (almost uniquely among hero mechanics) it is multiplicative rather than additive.  However, it turns out there is a simple fix for this--flip the three dice over and use that value to determine whether the hit is critical.

 

Again, none of this helps the experienced player.  However, I think it would help the newcomer, and Hero isn't exactly bringing in new players at a breakneck pace.  I've actually thought about writing up a 2-page version of this for convention games precisely because there may be Hero newbies.  I haven't because there may also be grognards, and the whining and moaning would be epic. :-)

 

Personally I would like to see the skill system and the combat system unified using the combat system and high rolls, so, for example roll your 3d6, add your modifiers and try to equal or beat a target number of 10 + whatever difficulty is assigned.For combat your 'skill' is OCV and the difficulty is DCV; for skills, it is the number of skill levels and the task difficulty and I was there for the first edition of Champions.  It may smell like DnD but we were there first, we just did not know it.

Yes, they're easily unified, I've done it basically as you say.  It's actually clearer to explain that way.  You have to do more work for the whole system--for example, to unify damage you need to alter the random factor, and to unify (say) teleport-into-a-solid-object damage alter it again.  But it all works, it just doesn't have a constituency that wants it.

[PaycheckHero]

Heresy!

 

 

Yeah, that's why I haven't seriously written anything up.  However, that heresy makes it easier to introduce new people to Hero.  That seems important to me, but it isn't sufficiently important to the grognards.

[bigbywolfe]

Why do people always act like it is somehow mind-blowing-ly confusing that damage rolls high when everything else rolls low?  How many systems exist where damage is not roll high?  I don't know of any off hand.  How many systems are there where skills are roll low?  Dozens, including virtually every percentile based system I've ever seen.  

I'm not an old hand that's been playing since the 80's.  I picked up 5ER and had no problem understanding roll low.  

 

Have many of you actually had trouble teaching Hero strictly because of the roll low?  Because for as much as that gets complained about I only recall two times since I've been around the boards where someone said it was actually an issue in practice.

[Tasha]

High roll = good works well for combat in Hero (or would if it did not cause paroxysms of disgust in the faithful), not so sure it would be any clearer or more helpful for skills as they currently work.  14 or less is easy enough to understand.

 

Personally I would like to see the skill system and the combat system unified using the combat system and high rolls, so, for example roll your 3d6, add your modifiers and try to equal or beat a target number of 10 + whatever difficulty is assigned.For combat your 'skill' is OCV and the difficulty is DCV; for skills, it is the number of skill levels and the task difficulty and I was there for the first edition of Champions.  It may smell like DnD but we were there first, we just did not know it.

I love roll High, but it does mean that there will need to be adjustments for Combat systems (ie Half DCV can be weird in roll high). Also you have to get some of the Grognards to get over Fuzion (the first Hero system that used Roll High).

 

Also people will swear up and down that Roll Low is no harder to teach than Roll High. Despite most players with previous RP experience coming from systems that ARE roll high.

[PaycheckHero]

I love roll High, but it does mean that there will need to be adjustments for Combat systems (ie Half DCV can be weird in roll high).

I don't think so. You compare to half DCV just as you would compare to full DCV. What gets weird is the "beat half what you needed for max damage" critical hit rule. In fact, that rule as stated is really just for the canonical system that was the only one mentioned in the rules until 5e, meet or beat 11 + ocv - dcv on 3d6. Since that method computes the number you need to roll, it's natural to halve it. But in 5e they still list it that way even though they're now advocating comparing 11 + ocv - 3d6 to dcv, which never computes the number you're supposed to halve. The correct rule for the 11 + ocv - 3d6 computation is actually better, and I don't know why they don't present it properly (maybe they do in 6e somewhere, I didn't find it):

 

1. Compute 11 + OCV.

2. Subtract 3d6. If the result is equal to or greater than the defender's DCV, you hit.

3. If you hit, subtract your die roll again (without re-rolling). If this new number is still strictly greater

than the defender's DCV, your hit is a critical.

 

Since that simply involves repeated subtraction, it's very simple. However, it turns out there is no simple analog for roll-high (you can construct them, but they involve adding or subtracting 31 or some other similarly inconvenient number). But because of the traditional way dice are labeled, there is a solution:

 

1. compute OCV - 10.

2. Add 3d6. If the result is equal to or greater than the defender's DCV, you hit.

3. If you hit, take all three dice and flip them over so the top sides are now on the table. Subtract the number

showing on the new tops from your previous number. If it is still strictly greater than the defender's DCV, your

hit is a critical.

 

With that one change, critical hits are as usable with roll-high as roll-low.

 

Also you have to get some of the Grognards to get over Fuzion (the first Hero system that used Roll High).

Ah, you know, I never read the Fuzion rules so I didn't realize it was roll high. Yeah, that would definitely poison

the well.

 

Also people will swear up and down that Roll Low is no harder to teach than Roll High. Despite most players with previous RP experience coming from systems that ARE roll high.

It ultimately isn't a big deal, but it's clear that roll-high is more familiar. What I'd really like as a genuine improvement is to decouple skill rolls from attribute rolls. That would let us unify skills and skill levels, which is another simplification, and make it easier to do things like roll dex + football to play football but int + football to remember who won the 1987 superbowl.

[PaycheckHero]

Have many of you actually had trouble teaching Hero strictly because of the roll low?

The real issue is not the direction in which rolls go but rather that hero has accreted many slightly different ways of doing something different depending on whether A is larger or smaller than B. I'd like to not have to explain that we have skills, but we also have skill levels, and combat levels, and a combat system that doesn't appear like the skill system. That is a problem in practice--people get over it, if they stick around, but it contributes to the overall impression of complexity even if they learn it.

 

All the rolls can look the same, and interestingly if you do that you end up with a skill system that looks rather like, say, Ars Magica. But it's statistically identical--that fact shows how amazingly innovative Hero's mechanics really were. The only difference is that games of AM's vintage and newer did the cleanup we don't want to do to hero. It's OK, hero plays just fine as is, but it isn't great to leave unnecessary historical cruft laying around. It isn't about rolling high or low, it's about the cruft. It just happens to be easier to clean it up if all rolls are the same, whether they're to hit, damage, or make a skill roll.

 

Say, we could just make damage roll low instead...that should satisfy the grumblers, right? ;-)

[Tasha]

Making Hero Roll high makes the system work like a lot of 3d6 roll high based systems. Heck it works like pretty much any skill system no matter what die or dice you use for the roll. That's how the Fuzion system came to be. When the folk at Hero and R.Tal realized that the core skill system actually worked the same. The only difference was that Hero used 3d6 and Interlock used 1d10 for randomization.

 

The easy math for every part of Resolution should be Offensive Value + Die roll vs Defensive value +10 (This value can be replaced by a die roll if wanted).

 

Familiarity with a Skill (and "Everyperson Skills") are -3. This could allow someone to have a Familiarity for 1pt and a slightly better (-2) skill roll for 2 points, and 3pts give you the stat bonus base.

 

It wouldn't even require a rewrite of Hero Designer to accomodate this style of character. Just an Export Format that does some math to the skills (subtract 9 from the roll) to give the skill bonus.

[psyber624]

Back to the original topic (Why Skills arent bought up) in Superheroic games there are a number of other factors that play into this. First of all Superheroes frequently have very high stats for the skills they are going to take. If your playing a Super Science guy he probably isnt running around with an Intellect of 10. Same for an Artful Dodger build, no 10 Dex's here. So the skills relevant to that build already have a built in "up" in the higher stats that they are used for. If your running a 30 int and have a Science Skill Roll of 15- already, why bother to increase it?

 

Secondly is the issue of a points based system. This gives everything a value and for a player creating a character it is relatively easy to loose sight of the value of a skill. After all you will be able to use your Energy Blast in every battle you fight, but how often will you need your Lockpicking Skill? Or your Science: Botany Skill? It becomes easy to fall into the mindset that points spent on skills like these are wasted (indeed we have a member of the boards who loves the term "What not to spend points on" and appears to be a proponent of throwing out non-combat skills altogether). The other issue is that unlike combat skills you can't know ahead of time what skills will be needed for a campaign, and honestly only a bad GM would require you to have a skill that no one in the team has. "What, noone bothered to take demolitions? Okay the bomb blows up doing 16d6 KA to everyone in the world. Game over!" This also makes buying "improvements" to a skill less attractive at first light, as if you need the skill you can generally count on it being rather successful.

 

I believe, however, that if we can divorce ourselves from this concept of points efficiency that we can have much more enjoyable games. Buy the skills that are appropriate to your character concept and background. Buy them to a proficiency that coincides with what you envision your character having. And trust that a good GM will make those points relevant in his game (or inform you that he cant/wont and let you have them as free "fluff" on your character sheet). This makes for far more interesting, well rounded characters, at least IMHO.

[Tasha]

ever since the Skill system was added there's always been a bit of push and pull to buying skills. Early Champions characters didn't have many skills at all because they didn't really have the points to buy them and to still be able to build a character to their power concept. You see this style of Powers trumping characters in Cassandra's 250pt 5e characters. She does really wonderful things with the powers, but the characters rarely have more than a few skills.

My original Champions Group eventually started PC's with 250pts + 50ptsthat was supposed to be spent on Non Combat skills(AKA 150pts +150 disads). We tended to use the skills in play so it made sense. Also as our play matured past the weekly Beatdown of the Villain group, we started to want to do things that required more skills. This is probably due to our playing a lot of Fantasy Hero and Various Modern, Cyberpunk and Sci Fi campaigns. Where the PC's tended to be all skills.

If I were to run Champions now I would give 500pts for building the character. I would suggest.demand that Players build a Heroic PC first with skills etc for that character to be able to exist in their background job. Then add the powers to that character transforming the Heroic PC into a Superheroic PC.

so IMHO if you don't give the Players enough points to build their characters powers to fit their Power Concept, then the Player will skimp on "Luxury" items like background skills.

[mhd]

Thanks for all the replies, there were some interesting points. And I think that, yes, looking at superheroic sample characters probably is a bad idea when you're looking at how skills would be distributed in a Heroic setting.

 

And the "roll high" digression was surprisingly apropos, as my group switched over to that lately -- as nobody's really that entrenched in the system, it doesn't hurt and I'm a stickler for unified systems (which is my prime reason for using HERO in the first place). Gave us no problem that far, apart from the need to modify your HERO Designer print outs a bit for ease of reference.

 

Given a high-CP character, the purchasing structure for a skill monkey really doesn't justify putting a lot of points in single skills, true. You're better off with some generic skill levels and good attributes. And as opposed to combat, you're rarely juggling points. You're defending and attacking at the same time, but it's rare that you'll be using astronomy and biology for the same action.

 

Also, the HERO Skills book was added to the HERO Bundle today, and interestingly it does list a few options of stretching out the initial skill purchases for a while. We already did that a bit with familiarities and proficiencies, but it might be worth looking into. The current campaign started out pretty low-powered and almost every skill purchase was during play, so it wouldn't be too hard changing something.

 

Regarding background skills, well, the free PS/KS ain't that bad. And with some GM generosity you could eke some mileage out of that, especially with the complementary skill rules. But I think for future campaigns I might steal something from recent editions of Shadowrun (despite my general animosity towards that setting): A free pool of KS, but with rather specific specializations. So someone might buy KS(dwarven swords) or KS(Capitalia downtown street gangs).

[PaycheckHero]

I heartily agree with the first quoted paragraph here: skill investment depends strongly on the GM.

I agree with this. From the below, though, I'm not sure you really do.

 

it is always true (in my experience) that skill monkeys make good NPCs but will always make profoundly unsatisfactory PCs.

I completely disagree with this; apparently you've only played with a particular type of GM. My favorite hero character was the most dedicated skill-based superhero I've played with, as already described. However, it was a shared GM world, so I periodically played that character as an NPC when my turn to GM came around. That wasn't really satisfactory, because he outclassed everyone else doing investigation and deduction out of combat--that was his specialty, and there were no other investigators. But if he really used his skills as an NPC, it amounted to me giving clues to myself and then telling the PCs what they needed to do, which isn't really fun. So I kind of muffled him as an NPC so they had things to do out of combat. In short, as a PC he was my favorite, but as an NPC I did not think he worked that well.

 

Social skills ... heck, anything other than direct attack powers ... certainly take a back seat in Hero.

This contradicts your (correct, in my view) assertion that it depends on the GM. The game can't make social skills take a back seat, that's entirely up to the GM (and what the players want--Jane Austen Hero, anyone?). This is not hero's fault--it is a GM choice. The hardest hard-SF game I ever ran was in hero, and I don't even remember if there was any actual combat in the game. There may have been a couple of minor encounters, but if so they weren't important enough to remember. The entire game was based around role-playing the skills (especially technical skills--everyone involved had advanced science or engineering training and one of the ground rules was that you could argue technical facts with the GM the way some groups argue rules). Combat abilities were basically irrelevant in that game. This worked at least as well in hero as it would have in any system.

 

...By contrast, the Energy Blaster with no points spent in skills is still all too often allowed to attempt to use many skills -- even in patently asinine cases -- and rolls of 3 or 4 on 3d6 do happen from time to time.)

This is an abuse that I wish Hero discouraged more. Because skill rolls are based on attribute rolls, it screws up the system to do something very natural for some people--if you don't have a skill, make an attribute roll. You're *supposed* to apply penalties so that having the skill is better than just raw attributes, but people forget to do that. That's one reason I would prefer to make explicit (as later games do) the "attribute + skill" system that is only implicit in Hero as written; it's (slightly) easier to see that if there is no skill to add to the attribute, the roll should be lower.

 

And social skills (other than the sledgehammer of the Presence Attack, which explicitly is not skill-based) are in practice worthless in HERO combat.

Of course they are. Is combat the only thing that happens in your games? If so, of course social skills are worthless. They're also worthless in Panzerblitz. You can't take social skills and complain they're worthless in combat. They aren't for combat. A legitimate complaint would be that your GM doesn't create important non-combat situations. If that's the case, then either don't write up characters that are suited for a different style of play than your group likes, or find a different group.

 

Sean and Tasha's idea about a more elaborate skill system possibly encouraging skill use ... I am not so sure about that. To encourage skill use you will have to provide clear benefits from use of skills that cannot easily be obtained without skill use, it seems as clear as that. If you can get the bennies without buying skills, then spending in skills is just a self-inflicted wound.

Yes, but has little to do with Hero. Even in a combat-heavy game, it's pretty easy to set up situations where you need social skills, stealth, or what-have-you to avoid getting into a combat that you can't win. I've been in *many* combats where previous non-combat events were the only thing that made the encounter winnable. If fast-talking the guard makes the difference between choosing where, when, and who you fight instead of having every guard in the castle come down on your head while you're still in the outer courtyard, you start valuing fast-talking very, uh, fast.

 

One thing that I think more recent versions of hero make explicit is that a character sheet is like an agreement between the GM and the player. Giving one to the GM says "here is a character I'd like to play, and obviously I'd like him in a game where he will have spotlight moments like everyone else," and accepting the character into a game says "OK, I will make sure that this game will have situations where this character is in the spotlight." If the player doesn't play the character, or ends up wanting a different one, or if the GM doesn't make that character an important part of the party, then one or both has broken the agreement. That doesn't work well in *any* system.

[PaycheckHero]

Tasha and I have recently been discussing whether skills (specifically social skills) are an afterthought in Hero and still have not been developed as much as other parts of the system.

 

My feeling is that if we had a more interesting skill system, it might encourage more of the use of skills.  The challenge when designing such a system is going to be to pitch it so that you encourage more investment in skills but are not going to fail at everything if you have not added four levels to a skill to make you good enough at it.

 

I think a task difficulty system, should be part of the mainstream rules, as a minimum.  There  is already something in APG II, but not a lot of people necessarily have that, and it feels marginalised.

I was going to bring up things like the "social martial arts" system in APG II. But my suspicion is that it's marginalized partly because very few people would use it if it were there.

 

However, the skill system changes I prefer would also make it easier to de-marginalize it. If the combat system is an explicit application of the skill system rather than being disguised as it is now, then the martial arts rules could be applied to any skill interaction (well, they can be already, but it isn't obvious enough that very many people will get it). For example, Martial Strike can be applied to *any* skill interaction where resolution is modeled as a sequence of pairs of chained rolls--one to determine whether an effect happens and the other to determine the degree of effect. The first roll could determine whether you manage to make a chess move that improves your position and the second could determine by how much your position improves just as easily as they could determine whether a hit is achieved and how much damage was done. Thought of that way, Martial Strike can give give you +2 to keep your opponent from improving his position next round, and also +2d6 toward determining by how much your position improves if you hit.

 

Since some of us have compatible ideas (at least it's clear that Tasha and I have very similar ideas on how to re-present skill rolls), it would be fun to have a project to create and test them. The biggest problem with that is simply that a proper write-up would really be a set of altered rules, not just houserules (overriding existing rules increases complexity, you want to write it up stand-alone to make it easiest and clearest), and I doubt HG would or could allow such a thing to be produced--it amounts to publishing complete rules that would be a derivative work of theirs. I see no solution to that problem.

[Greywind]

Skills are inherently only as useful as the GM allows them to be. Otherwise, it becomes a matter of the players twisting the GM's arm in order to get some use out of their skill purchases.

 

As for the "roll high/low", I started with 2nd. Neither me, nor anyone I've played with or introduced to the system, has ever had a problem with the way the system is written.