7th Edition thoughts

[Greywind]

Hero has books to simplify. USPD, USPD2, and the 6th edition counterpart. Plug and play.

 

Fantasy has the Grimoire for spells.

 

There's the bestiary.

 

How much more simple would you like?

[NuSoardGraphite]

I do think the character, power and equipment writeups can be simplified quite a bit. they were much simpler in the 4th ed but still very playable. the 5th edition began the trend toward more complex characters (stat wise) and the 6th ed characters look like an indecipherable block of heiroglyphics.

 

I'm okay with simplifying that aspect of the books, but the system itself? no way. outside of making a "basic hero" introductory book that has just the base character creation system and combat and adventuring rules (minus all the optional rules) without the massive powers section.

 

I wouldnt mind it if they put a version of "hero basic" rules in with every core campaign setting book to make each setting a stand alone game of its own, with the ability to xpand your game using the advanced hero rules if you wish. as long as in the long run it remains the same game we all know and love.

[zslane]

Yes, absolutely. The game system itself doesn't need to change just because the presentation style does.

 

The more I think about it though, the less I find myself invested in discussing the idea any further. Only because I know there will never be a re-envisioning of the brand like I would want, and even if there was a serious effort to try, I'm not even sure what version of the system I'd want to see become the foundation of the new standard. It most certainly would not be 6e. But that's just my personal preference, which I'm sure isn't shared by many today.

[mhd]

These days gamers can set the difficulty level, use cheat codes, download maps and tips, look up solutions online, and expect things to be easier.

Sorry, but that sounds awfully curmudgeonly. Cheat codes have been around for almost as long as video gaming existed. Heck, back in the days we spent quite a wad of cash on things like "game genies" and other hardware workarounds, never mind software patches and savegame editors.

And nowadays people pay friggin' money to watch people play games with the hardest settings and/or self-imposed restrictions ("permadeath" etc.).

 

We have more (legal/first-party) options when it comes to video gaming, but that's it. Everything else is mostly a numbers game, as both the total playing time/game and the sheer amount of gamers have increased by orders of magnitude. (And arcade games have always been almost separate entities, for obvious reasons.)

 

Extrapolating from that for tabletop games seems a bit odd. Never mind that we had board and wargames way before someone put two transistors together. And if we're mixing up game types, usually that's were we're looking for our historical foundations. Gygax and his ilk weren't exactly basing D&D on Galaga and Centipede. Deadliness was mostly due to the fact that you don't really spend time to create your French Napoleonic war unit nor are you emotionally invested in it. Quite different in role-playing games, especially the post-Gygaxian ones (seriously, never read anything exciting about Gary's games from my POV).

 

Also, even if I'd rate games that much more deadly back then, I wouldn't equate that with an exaggerated need for simplicity at all. I've played Wizardry/Ultima, I've played Mass Effect/Oblivion and I really wouldn't rate the latter that much more simple. Sure, when it comes to the total amount of people playing games out there, we've got more people playing Tetris' descendants than those of the gold box games, but, again, we've got way more people playing games in toto. Waaaaay...

 

So let's not get too bothered about those analogies. Never mind that the generational gap isn't as big as we'd like to think, it's not gangs of youths playing new-fangled simplistic story RPGs, a huge part of it still consists of the same (slightly more paunchy) dudes who spent their school days mapping out dungeons and devising silly traps.

 

I'm hailing from the trackless wastes of the software industry, where terms like "dumbing down" are often used as well -- and better be avoided. Never mind what Heinlein said, specialization is pretty natural. The gamer who knows a bit of everything has as much a hard time as the craftsman, engineer, programmer or writer with similar delusions of grandeur. When things get more complex, it's time to introduce multiple levels of concern and abstraction. (No, modern cars aren't purposely made more complex so that you can't service them yourself like your dad claimed to do.)

 

 

Sure, we can argue whether games actually have gotten more complex. I think they did, on average. Yes, it's still a lot of the same structure, but that can be said about TV shows, too. And there we did progress a bit from the days of Rocket Command Cody to contemporary HBO shows, I would dare to say. Sometimes you don't need a lot to cross a threshold.

 

 

One game I'd always recommend to look at when it comes to changes isn't an obscure story game that's all about your vampire catgirl's inner feelings and her struggle with Jungian archetypes. It's Savage Worlds: A pretty derivative "generic" & pulpy role-playing game. And actually still not without its complexities (it's no Star Wars D6 1E). But it has a more rigid structure and rather narrow way of presentation: No single pool of points and a pretty straight-foroward orientation towards a cinematic playing style.

 

I do wonder how much of that you could build on top of a more generic game like HERO. Sure, you've got youre LEGO building blocks, but they're packaged to re-create the current Star Wars spaceship. Compare FH1 with FH6...

[ghost-angel]

Crap, back-in-the-day-ism.

 

Please, what a bunch of BS. Competely.

 

We're not talking about dumbing down.

 

Pick up CyberPunk2020 - one book, straight out, you can play - game world provided, adventures your idea.

D&D box sets - game world provided, create a character, adventures your idea, lots of modules provided even (Lots... lots and lots and lots and lots of adventure modules).

Shadowrun - game world provided, create a character, start playing.

Traveller - game world provided, create a character (then create a new character when yours died half way through creation), start playing.

Star Frontiers - game world provided, create a character, start playing.

 

I bet we could rattle off dozens upon dozens of games from the 80s where you picked up a rule book, it provided enough of a game world where you could create a character and start playing. This is not some new fangled notion of gaming. It's pretty much the Actual Standard Of How Most Games Are Made.

 

So stop with this whole "back in my day..." and "kids just want things spoon fed to them..." just stop it. It sounds petulant and tired and sad.

 

Hero has, over the last 25 years, created a great, moderately, complex, toolkit you can use to make any game style and world you can think of. And I would never want to lose that - you can pry my toolkit from my cold, dead, caffeinated hands - but it has done precious little to provide an experience where a group can pick up a book and start gaming right away with.

 

The genre books tell you how to start tailoring a Genre to your needs, using the main toolkit. The Setting Books tell you how to narrow down the toolkit to work with a specific world, but never quite reach the point where you can pick it up and start playing.

 

Only two products have done that since 5E was release: PS-238 & Lucha Libre. Game world, rules, character creation, adventure ideas all in one spot. You can literally pick up PS-238 and start gaming in a few hour. That is what Hero needs more of. (And Lucha Libre isn't quite as well defined as PS-238 - That's the example product I think Hero Games should have created more of in the past.)

 

Not even the new Champions Complete fully provides a game world to the extent those two do, it provides a kind of pseudo-framework for a setting, but still has all kinds of open ended options with it.

 

And no one - NO ONE - has suggested getting rid of the main toolkit aspect, the main rule book(s) are great, and welcome. But the books after that, many of us think that creating very Setting Specific ideas of the rule book with a Game World attached would be a much better barrier to entry than 1000 pages of rules plus 500 pages of game setting.

[Christopher R Taylor]

Its funny how people read preconceived grievances into whatever they read sometimes.

[schir1964]

... I don't mean you would lose them as players and gms, but rather would probably not make many sells from them on basic stuff geared to the newbies...

I would suggest that perhaps this might not be true. At least not based on the various posts I've read here over the years. I've read threads where the discussion was about what sources GMs use to pull ideas from for campaigns they build. Many reponses stated they have bookshelves full of source/settings books they purchased that they just use to get inspiration from for new campaigns. And many of the books they had weren't even for the Hero System. So I'm not sure that existing GMs who like creating their worlds from scratch are going to just not purchase source/settings books for the Hero System. As long as the settings are rich in detail and storyline that will inspire one's imagination, then they will sell.

 

Now the economy being bad and it getting worse in the future, that is what will kill off many small companies in the entertainment industry.

 

- Christopher Mullins

[schir1964]

I'll add again that the idea put forth is to not create a new system, but use the existing core rules to build a Setting just as a GM would with all the rules and groundwork a GM would have to make decisions on to create a rich Universe for the players to interact with.

 

An example of one such setting I would consider rich in "flavor" and detail would be from Spacemaster 2nd Edition. There were source books and settings that gave such detail about the universe that I've even thought about trying to purchasing those old books off of Ebay in order to recreate it in Hero System terms. This is where sales come from I think. There's been some GMs here who've said they've purchased source books from systems they've never played or plan on playing but just wanted to read those books because they were so interesting.

 

- Christopher Mullins

[schir1964]

Traveller - game world provided, create a character (then create a new character when yours died half way through creation), start playing.

I just had to say ghost-angel that I got a good chuckle from this. I remember the times I would be generating a character and roll the dice and go, "AHH MAN!!! Now I have to start over!". It's the one game system where I was sorely tempted to fudge the procedure and say, "I get a re-roll on that one..."

 

- Christopher Mullins

[Lucius]

Only two products have done that since 5E was release: PS-238 & Lucha Libre.

Out of curiosity, why do you exclude Monster Hunter International?

 

Lucius Alexander

 

House of the Palindromedary

[NuSoardGraphite]

Crap, back-in-the-day-ism.

 

Please, what a bunch of BS. Competely.

 

We're not talking about dumbing down.

 

Pick up CyberPunk2020 - one book, straight out, you can play - game world provided, adventures your idea.

D&D box sets - game world provided, create a character, adventures your idea, lots of modules provided even (Lots... lots and lots and lots and lots of adventure modules).

Shadowrun - game world provided, create a character, start playing.

Traveller - game world provided, create a character (then create a new character when yours died half way through creation), start playing.

Star Frontiers - game world provided, create a character, start playing.

 

I bet we could rattle off dozens upon dozens of games from the 80s where you picked up a rule book, it provided enough of a game world where you could create a character and start playing. This is not some new fangled notion of gaming. It's pretty much the Actual Standard Of How Most Games Are Made.

 

So stop with this whole "back in my day..." and "kids just want things spoon fed to them..." just stop it. It sounds petulant and tired and sad.

 

Hero has, over the last 25 years, created a great, moderately, complex, toolkit you can use to make any game style and world you can think of. And I would never want to lose that - you can pry my toolkit from my cold, dead, caffeinated hands - but it has done precious little to provide an experience where a group can pick up a book and start gaming right away with.

 

The genre books tell you how to start tailoring a Genre to your needs, using the main toolkit. The Setting Books tell you how to narrow down the toolkit to work with a specific world, but never quite reach the point where you can pick it up and start playing.

 

Only two products have done that since 5E was release: PS-238 & Lucha Libre. Game world, rules, character creation, adventure ideas all in one spot. You can literally pick up PS-238 and start gaming in a few hour. That is what Hero needs more of. (And Lucha Libre isn't quite as well defined as PS-238 - That's the example product I think Hero Games should have created more of in the past.)

 

Not even the new Champions Complete fully provides a game world to the extent those two do, it provides a kind of pseudo-framework for a setting, but still has all kinds of open ended options with it.

 

And no one - NO ONE - has suggested getting rid of the main toolkit aspect, the main rule book(s) are great, and welcome. But the books after that, many of us think that creating very Setting Specific ideas of the rule book with a Game World attached would be a much better barrier to entry than 1000 pages of rules plus 500 pages of game setting.

No. i dont want to stop it, because what i said is true.

 

Hero is the way it is because it is designed to simulate an incredibly wide variety of settings. few rpgs can match its versatility. go down the road you suggest and you will sacrifice that versatility for popularity. if that's what you want, fine. but dont expect myself or the other grognards to take it lying down. i assume you were present during the fuzion debacle. We like our hero how we like our hero. a bit of change here and there throughout various editions is expected, but too much change and ceases to be the hero we love. and honestly can you really expect us to be okay with that?

[NuSoardGraphite]

Perhaps a bit more explanation for my position is in order for people to understand why i am resistant to the idea of marrying Hero to a default setting.

 

I chose Hero as my primary system precisely because it had no default setting. I went looking for such a system in the early 90's and eventually settled on Hero. i was tired of changing game systems every time i wanted to change settings or genres and went looking for a game that could handle anything. i want the basic game system to be completely divorced from any setting so that i may introduce it to my players in that manner. that is simply what *I* want from Hero. any attempts to marry hero to specific default settings will undermine my desire for this, thus my resistance to the idea.

 

I have no problem with Hero based settings being produced. i applaud it. the main problem i have had with hero based settings is that outside of champions, those settings arent particularly well supported, nor do they have the detail of other comparable settings (The detail in Turakian Age pales in comparison to the detail of Exalted's Creation, to Harn World or Terry K Amthor's Shadow World). and i dont have a problem with Hero printing settings books with a basic version of the game system in them for pick-up-and-playability, just so long as a core system book is released and the generic/universal nature of the system is maintained.

[schir1964]

...and i dont have a problem with Hero printing settings books with a basic version of the game system in them for pick-up-and-playability, just so long as a core system book is released and the generic/universal nature of the system is maintained.

As far as I've seen in these posts this is exactly what everyone has been suggesting, even ghost-angel.

 

No one has suggested that the core system books and the generic/universal nature of the system be dropped, replaced, changed, or no longer maintained.

 

Unless you are responding to a specific post that suggested otherwise, I don't think you are really disagreeing with those of us who proposed a set of setting books created from the core rules to make it easier for new players to try out the Hero System for a 'test run' so to speak. These books would be in addition to the core books, not a replacement for them.

 

As for any particular setting being supported, I think that is the other side of the coin that many of us are addressing. Hero needs to fully support any setting it decides to put forth. If they produce a Super Heroes setting book then they better have it fully fleshed out with everything you need to pick it up and play. The same for a Fantasy or a Science Fiction setting.

 

- Christopher Mullins

[ghost-angel]

Out of curiosity, why do you exclude Monster Hunter International?

 

Lucius Alexander

 

House of the Palindromedary

.. because I forgot about it.

 

My bad.

 

 3 products.

[ghost-angel]

Perhaps a bit more explanation for my position is in order for people to understand why i am resistant to the idea of marrying Hero to a default setting.

 

Exactly zero people have suggested that.

 

Core Rules + Setting Books w/ Basic Rules Attached.

 

That's the suggestion. That's the idea people are kicking around.

[Tasha]

One thing that would make Hero and the various supplements FAR easier to understand would be for each of the published game worlds to CHOOSE a starting POWERLEVEL (points, DC, CV, defense etc). Then support that powerlevel in the books. There would be a section talking abouit how to increase the campaign's powerlevel as PCs gain Exp. Defining that set of variables would make creating a character MUCH easier. Seeing as many many Hero campaigns don't seem to increase their powerlevels much, you can then rely on that powerlevel when buying/writing supplements.

One problem that the system has had though the years are supplements that are all over the place for powerlevels. So a Dark Champions Supplement could be street level supers with a power or two, or a full power superhero adventure that has a more street focus. Things like Champions powers become less understandable because it tries to be any powerlevel. Champions Villains have many many villains who are way too powerful for a 'Standard' campaign.

[NuSoardGraphite]

Exactly zero people have suggested that.

 

Core Rules + Setting Books w/ Basic Rules Attached.

 

That's the suggestion. That's the idea people are kicking around.

Yeah dont mind me. i'm just an old grognard who fears the slippery slope.

[steriaca]

How would you feal about a "Champions Basic Box" set, contaning 9 six-sided dice, crayon to fill in the dice, 13 pre-generated hero pages (5 for the Champions, at a beginers lable, and 8 for the Millimum City Eight at a beginings lable), Basic Rules Book, Charater Creation Book (create charaters by putting together templates, and explanes roughtly what certen powers mean and are, which is also explaned on the pre-generated sheets), Adventure Book (a series of simple adventures to get people started, including simple stats on VIPER agents, some 'easy' villians like Oger, Pulsar, ect...), a copy of Hero In Two Pages, and where to go from here leaflet?

 

Is this enougth to draw in new players? And, once introduced, will it give new players enougth leaway to graduate them into Champions Complete when they are ready?

 

Oh, and who feals that fractions are one of the factors which gives the Hero System a "Math Hard" reputation?

[Old Man]

Yeah dont mind me. i'm just an old grognard who fears the slippery slope.

I actually completely understand where you're coming from. But it's been thirty years and I'm tired of seeing Hero lose market share to inferior games. The generic build-your-own approach isn't working as well as it ought to. You and I are advanced gamers who would be mostly unaffected by a default setting. I don't know any D&Ders who didn't start branching out with house rules in their own campaigns, so I see the default setting as a way to lure players in close where they can be hit with the full weight of the Hero system in all its glory.

 

@steriaca: I've noticed before that nearly all the "math" in Hero occurs in character creation, so one way to short-circuit that is to get players started with pregen or modular characters. After that it's just counting lots of pips which isn't that hard. (Not that fractions are actually hard in the first place, but whatever.)

[zslane]

I don't think the math used by the Hero System--which is just elementary arithmetic--is "hard". But it can certainly be annoying at times.

[Old Man]

I don't even find it annoying to be perfectly honest.  But I never developed the raw hatred and distrust for math that seems to be the norm for the popular kids.

 

Anyway it'd be easy enough to insulate newbs from fractional math during the character creation process, and I think some effort should be made in that direction in future versions aimed at new players.  I'm repeating myself again, but I've often thought that Hero books are laid out backwards--the order should be 1. Pick a pregen character; 2. Here is an orc, this is how combat works; 3. Here is a trapped secret door, this is how skills work; 4. Here is a magic item, this is how powers work; 5. Here are the character creation rules if you're ready to spend XP or replace your pregen.  Something like that anyway.  (I have a preference for FH but it wouldn't be hard to come up with a supers version.)  This way it's a bit more of a walkthrough and less of a phone book that must be grasped in one sitting.

[mhd]

I don't think the math used by the Hero System--which is just elementary arithmetic--is "hard". But it can certainly be annoying at times.

The mathphobia of gamers sometimes is astounding, considering that we're generally regarded as a rather geeky hobby. Somehow I think this is getting worse, considering that we get more and more games that are trying to avoid even (mental) addition -- success counting dice pools or dice escalation are quite en vogue. Heck, there are quite a few games out there who just use a single d6. Which completely baffles my risk-averse German mind -- you might as well be playing Russian Roulette!

 

Although, to be fair, while I have no problems with fractions during character creation and other easily automated mathematics, some of the mechanics strike me a bit as needlessly baroque. Combat rolls vs. skill rolls and normal damage vs. killing damage rolls, for example.

[zslane]

I'm sort of the opposite, I guess.

 

My brain internalized the "fast counting" of STUN and BODY long ago. The basic action resolution mechanic I find to be quite straightforward, and calculating "how much you need to make the roll by" was also internalized a couple of decades ago. However, trying to figure out the cost of some of my power concepts makes my head swim with the interaction of advantages, limitations, adders, framework mods, etc. Even with Hero Designer (which I don't own, to my discredit I suppose), you trade scratching one's head figuring out the math yourself with scratching one's head figuring out how to structure a complex power so that HD accepts it and calculates the cost properly.

 

None of which is insurmountable, just occasionally annoying.

[mhd]

Sure, there's complexity in both, but quite often there's a trade-off between simplification and ease of use. Unless there's a redundancy, of course. And two damage systems look a bit like that, whereas it's harder to pick something that doesn't mess things up in the power creation stack. Unless you were restricting yourself to pure superheroics, of course. Serving two masters ain't easy.

[steriaca]

Well, we can't get away from math. Math is one of the two major essesences to a role playing game. The other? Imagination.