7th Edition thoughts

[Stacie.Winters]

Someone asked me why change some of the nomenclature/wordage used in the game... Perfect example...

 

What's easier to say to somebody...

 

A) If you want to attack you need to roll 3d6 and add your Offensive Combat Value and then subtract your target's Defensive Combat Value and then if you roll under 11 you hit...

 

or

 

If you want to attack roll 3d6 and add Fighting and then subtract Evasion and if you roll under 11 you hit.

 

The wordage of the second hypothetical is way easier to both speak, and help people envision in their minds. If you say Offensive Combat Value, you are putting more focus on the mechanistic elements of the character in an offensive way but to me the word Fighting represents my capability to Fight and the word Evasion represents my ability to get out of the way.

[Stacie.Winters]

Because a "few" people compared HERO to doing taxes, does that mean that the system should be dumbed down?

 

I don't see it as dumbing down... I see it as broadening it's appeal and making it easier to grasp, understand and play.

 

The fact that anybody would look at a role playing game and come to equate making characters as doing taxes is pretty bad. I love the game and I can see where they are coming from. The books do read and appear like an encyclopedia or technical manual with a game inside it and the fact that anybody new has to really study the game to just make a character... for the rare few of us who actually like that that's great, but for the many many others who might otherwise play this game who choose not to because of that... well, that's not a good thing.

 

Champions Complete was a step in the right direction, and I think Fantasy Complete will also help... but the overabundance of 5th and 6th edition's mega volumes didn't help the game much.

[Lucius]

Someone asked me why change some of the nomenclature/wordage used in the game... Perfect example...

 

What's easier to say to somebody...

 

A) If you want to attack you need to roll 3d6 and add your Offensive Combat Value and then subtract your target's Defensive Combat Value and then if you roll under 11 you hit...

 

or

 

If you want to attack roll 3d6 and add Fighting and then subtract Evasion and if you roll under 11 you hit.

 

The wordage of the second hypothetical is way easier to both speak, and help people envision in their minds. If you say Offensive Combat Value, you are putting more focus on the mechanistic elements of the character in an offensive way but to me the word Fighting represents my capability to Fight and the word Evasion represents my ability to get out of the way.

I think you have a point. Changing some terminology would be a "cosmetic" change but a cosmetic change can have real value in terms of how something is perceived.

 

On the other hand, a change is not necessarily an improvement. Consider what you just said, "Evasion represents my ability to get out of the way." But using a shield gets you a DCV bonus but has nothing to do with "getting out of the way." Similarly, I'm not happy with the name "Resistant Protection" but I'm wary of the idea of changing the name to "Armor" because that might, for example, confuse a player who wants to make a force field or create some other form of defense that they wouldn't necessarily associate with the word "Armor."

 

 

I don't think it's a prereq for popularizing the system, but it would certainly improve the granularity of the stat mechanics. One thing I've contemplated is just multiplying the basic heroic stat range by 5, so you get a 0-100 range instead of 0 to 20. Couple it with a switch to a d100 roll rather than 3d6, and add the STR stat to damage(which you'd also have to tweak to fit), and then every single point would actually matter mechanically. You'd also have nicely gaudy stats for superheroes, like a 150 DEX or 300 STR.

 

But then you're not playing Hero anymore.

 

I remember an infamous line from the Vietnam conflict: "We had to destroy the village to save it."

 

Another idea is to take what 6E did with derived characteristics and do that with skills and just make all Skills separate so instead of it being 9 + (Characteristic/5) it's just that all skills could be based on 7 + (Skill Rank) and the Skill Rank can be just whatever points the character spends into the skill like how Acrobatics costs 3/2 where 3 is the Base and +1 for two points. Just keep the points cost as is and sever the link to Characteristics.

 

This idea might do away with the inherent break points of the Characteristics completely (hypothetically).

This idea could lead to doing away with some CHARACTERISTICS completely (I'm thinking INT especially.) I think I already touched on this in this thread, in fact. One could then buy customized Skill Levels that relate in a far more flexible way to exactly what a given person means by "studious" or "agile" or "athletic" or "good memory."

 

What about the idea of putting back some derives stats... and one idea is taking the average of Dexterity and Intelligence and that average being the basic Combat Value the characters start with.

Or the averages of Dexterity + Intelligence for OCV and Dexterity + Constitution for DCV. ??? I don't know if this would be a good idea or not to be honest.

 

And how about a rename of Combat Value to Fighting and Evading (for OCV and DCV)?

 

Personally, I'm in favor of consistency. So I think we should either have Figured Characteristics - but NOT the way they used to be, that was obviously broken - or do as I suggested above, break the link between Characteristics and Skills and replace them with some form of the Skill Levels mechanic (possibly with a variation that allows a Level to apply to more than one Skill at a time.)

 

But I'm wandering into a topic that deserves its own post, so...

 

Lucius Alexander

 

The palindromedary says it's like the metric system 

[Ragitsu]

I don't see it as dumbing down... I see it as broadening it's appeal and making it easier to grasp, understand and play.

 

By catering to the lowest common denominator? That's called "dumbing it down".

 

Also, given how much we as a nation have slipped when it comes to mathematics comprehension, I am not especially concerned that someone, somewhere, would liken an RPG to an arduous string of equations.

 

This is coming from a gamer that definitely prefers writing to math!

[Lucius]

 

The Two Paradigms of Hero System Characters

 

 

There are two models, two visions if you will, of what a character should be like. I call them the "Organic" approach and the "Inert" approach.

 

Hero started with the organic model. The character is a dynamic, interacting system, like a living thing. Changing a number here, would change the numbers over there, because the parts of the character, like organs in a body, are part of an integrated system, not things that function in isolation.

 

With 6th Edition, Steve Long took Hero in the direction of the inert model. The character is a collection of building blocks that don't have anything to do with each other and moving one block or set of blocks around doesn't change any other blocks.

 

I can see the appeal of either, and I think Hero can use either and still be Hero. But I'd prefer the system to be more committed to one paradigm or the other.

 

 

Lucius Alexander

 

So if I cut off one head, should the other just keep calm and carry on as if the lost head weren't part of the same palindromedary?

[shuddemell]

Maybe we need another Fuzion then.

 

I have nothing against it because it was before my time so I don't have that mental block of antagonism towards the game. Now I'm more interested in it.

 

It's possible that Fuzion was a game that came out way before its time and what it was trying to do when it came out the people weren't ready for but now they probably are.

 

Oh Tasha, I never got offended.   I don't get offended by what other people say. I liked that you basically asked me why I like this game without really asking the question.

I find this attitude a bit arrogant, that it is a mental block (I read stubborness or psychosis) rather than a well considered attitude, and that us old folks were unable to deal with this supposed innovation, as if everything improves with time. By and large, I don't see people getting anymore savvy than they were then, and honestly I see the level of education and mathematical skills in the general population going down, not up.

[Greywind]

Funny because that it's IMHO the biggest weakness in Hero System.

Characters in fiction are never so well designed or have the kind of iterative detail making a Hero Charter requires. It frustrates players to no end when they find out their Fire Lord Prince off flames cannot do the cool stuff they envision when they took the basics. But how were they to know there is 600 pages of hidden junk for them to sift through.

Mean while game masters play the, oh well you should have taken that card.

 

If I wanted that, I'd still play V&V or get involved with M&M.

[Tasha]

Funny because that it's IMHO the biggest weakness in Hero System.

Characters in fiction are never so well designed or have the kind of iterative detail making a Hero Charter requires. It frustrates players to no end when they find out their Fire Lord Prince off flames cannot do the cool stuff they envision when they took the basics. But how were they to know there is 600 pages of hidden junk for them to sift through.

Mean while game masters play the, oh well you should have taken that card.

GM's in very RP system need to be flexable. To allow players to rebuild characters that aren't working correctly and to work with new players to help them build the character that they want to play.

[Stacie.Winters]

I find this attitude a bit arrogant, that it is a mental block (I read stubborness or psychosis) rather than a well considered attitude, and that us old folks were unable to deal with this supposed innovation, as if everything improves with time. By and large, I don't see people getting anymore savvy than they were then, and honestly I see the level of education and mathematical skills in the general population going down, not up.

 

I intended no arrogance at all... I am just not a person who compares Hero System to Fuzion like others do as I have never really seen anything Fuzion related so I don't have a bias against it where for a lot of long time fans just the mention of the word Fuzion seems to bring a lot of vitriol to any discussion relating to it. That's all.

 

The company that did Fuzion I guess released it for a reason that I know not and they thought it would be good and a lot of fans obviously ended up hating the game, or rather disliking it a lot, to the point that any consideration of anything about the game that could have been a possible positive to Hero as a whole is always disregarded by a lot of fans of Hero System. It's also possible that at the time that Fuzion came out players of the game just wasn't ready for such major changes... the paradigm of the game was built on a different premise so to speak... and that was a long time ago. Go forward a decade plus and the role playing hobby has seriously changed, it has expanded way beyond what it was before, and how people have changed to what they like and not like, and all that...

 

It is possible that a game like Fuzion could do better now than it did back when it first came out. I am not saying it's a guarantee but it's possible. That's what I mean by the game being ahead of its time. It's like the power glove with Nintendo, which if you think about it is the same basic premise of the Wii controller... great idea that bombed back in the late 80s but jump ahead two plus decades and suddenly that same premise of using a remote motion controller to control the game on the tv screen clicked with people.

 

You are right about the general education and mathematical skills going down though... our education system is rather not so good and it does nothing to really prepare anybody for life beyond high school but that's a discussion that's probably best on a different forum.

[Greywind]

 

Consider a ship made of wooden planks. As they naturally decay, old planks are replaced with new, stronger planks. This process continues until each plank has been replaced. Now that each plank has been replaced, is it still the same ship?

[Ndreare]

GM's in very RP system need to be flexable. To allow players to rebuild characters that aren't working correctly and to work with new players to help them build the character that they want to play.

 

I agree with that method and often allow players to remodel their character to clean them up after both the first and second session. But again I see that  as a weakness IMHO, the fact that the GM needs to help or that the character will need tweaking can frustrate some. I see it a a problem of presentation, as the rules go into more and more details listing everything you can build or possibly do followed immediately by Stops and Cautions telling the GM not to allow it. It is effectively implying through twice as many pages of Stop/Cautions GM do not let your players do this thing. The end result is a feeling that if the character sheet does not implicitly say you can do it, then you cannot.

 

Personally I have always loved Hero, but the presentation is IMHO adversarial and that is something as a Game Master I have to help players with. Often times this can be fixed by being a little loose with the rules or letting the players know ahead of time for your super game 'hey take a 40 point V.P.P. associated with a use power skill to cover the extras you may have missed'.

[Ndreare]

PS: As a note Fuzion is alive and twitching (definitely not kicking). They have a Facebook and a Yahoo group and many people still play it from time to time. 

So if people want Fuzion styled hero they can get used copies of Champions New Millennium or Fuzion Core 5.02 and Power Core.

[shuddemell]

snip

Yeah, I get where you are coming from with this. The reason a lot of people (especially us grognards ) compare it to Hero is because Hero was a subset of it at one time. It left a bad taste in many people's mouths at the time. Being the early 90's (if memory serves) it was quite a while ago, but the real complaint I (and many others had) was that it didn't really feel like Hero at all to me, character creation was a nightmare (this coming from a dedicated Hero-phile...) and when played it didn't feel like Hero at all. My personal opinion is that Steve Long saved Hero from the ignominious death the Fuzion suffered. So yeah, a lot of us remember it less fondly to be sure. As far as doing better today, I doubt it. Not because of the system per se, but because of the niche market that is being served. There is only so much market share to go around, and even ones that seem relatively successful (say Savage Worlds) are never going to approach the popularity or ubiquity of the big two. Honestly, around here, I know of no one that plays SW, or many of the other excellent but "tiny" systems there are. I would jump at a chance to play Runequest again, or even Gurps if there was enough to play with. Almost everyone plays PF or D&D. Now yes, I kind of live in the boonies by many people's standards, but if I am going to play in the weeds, I am going to play what I love. Certainly, there are probably some good ideas in Fuzion, as there are in most games (I will even say I got some good ideas from Aftermath, and most people considered it unplayable due to weird complexity. That is part of my issue with education and math, everyone calls something complex when they haven't tried it, and that is ignorant in the extreme, and again we are back to excuses...

All that notwithstanding though leads me to believe that you cannot change enough players or recruit enough new players with Hero or with any of a dozen other systems to make them successful. If by successful, we are talking about the brand/game surviving, if we change it too much, it hasn't really survived at all, it fell to the LCD.

Thanks though for challenging my assumptions about game mechanics and allowing me to look at them from a fresh perspective. I won't say my position has changed much, but at least it got me thinking, and that more than anything is what we all need.

[shuddemell]

 

 

Consider a ship made of wooden planks. As they naturally decay, old planks are replaced with new, stronger planks. This process continues until each plank has been replaced. Now that each plank has been replaced, is it still the same ship?

 

One issue with this is that, when they replace the planks, they put in ones the same size that fit, not attempt to fit a sheet of plywood into the spot for a 2x4... So to answer ambiguously, yes it is the same and yet it is not....

[Tasha]

Savage Worlds sells to someone. PEG has like 8 Full color hard cover game worlds supporting it (with one in or just finishing a VERY successful KS, which was unlike the FHC KS which just kind of barely got to one of the modest stretch goals). Not to mention the other 10 companies making Print supplements supporting it. So there ARE companies making decent money with Savage Worlds. Enough money to sponsor FULL color books on glossy paper (both Full sized hard bound and digest sized perfect bound). There's enough money there that Blackwyrm is having it's best Hero books converted to Savage Worlds. When people ask for a generic system online for beginners, Savage Worlds is what is universally recommended.

[Tasha]

Fuzion was and is dead easy to make characters for. You just have to understand the numbers you are buying. CNM by itself did not have the complete Power/Advantage/Limitation list from Champions 4th (In fact they recommended people use Champs 4th to build powers that were not yet supported in the system, which suggests the hysteria about Fuzion replacing Hero was just hysteria).

 

The game played exactly like hero. Roll 3d6 add OCV compare to DCV +10. the OCV +dice is equal to or exceeds the DCV+10 then you hit. You do your dice of damage just like in hero, subtract your defenses then apply to Stun. I forget how being stunned for a phase is calculated, but it wasn't that different.

 

The Fuzion haters are a lot like the 6e haters. They have this set idea of the system and any little change turns the game into "not Hero". Of course they used the same power system in Robot Warriors and Not a single person complained.

[Greywind]

Are you referring to Robot Warriors being Fuzion-like?

[shuddemell]

Didn't say it didn't sell at all, but I did say it doesn't approach the coffers of PF and D&D and it does not..I even call it relatively successful. Your response is somewhat hyperbolic. My impression of SW is that some of it was too abstract or glossed for my taste, but it really wasn't the point I was making at all. Fuzion didn't feel like Hero to me at the time, your perception of it notwithstanding. Just because you feel it played exactly like Hero doesn't mean I or anyone else shares that opinion, then again they may, I just don't. A single roll mechanism does not a system make. I am hardly a Fuzion hater, but I didn't like it and probably still wouldn't, though if a new version were released I might look at it. Wouldn't buy it sight unseen, but would give it a shot provided someone was running it around here, otherwise there is hardly any point in it at all. And that is my real point, most people won't switch, unless someone else runs it, they like it and can get some use out of the game.

[Ragitsu]

If anything, one can make an argument that the math in certain RPGs is too present, rather than being overly difficult. Quantity over "quality".

 

Also, I think GURPS has received a bit of an unfair reputation for complexity thanks to the Third Edition Vehicles supplement: in that book, the calculations you have to run are arguably more difficult than baseline GURPS character creation/play, but that is a necessity born out of creating vehicle statistics from real-world sources or even from scratch.

[shuddemell]

Actually, my thinking on the complexity of Gurps has to do with the way they handle things, too many exception rules and corner cases spread among way too many books. Otherwise, the system overall is very good. Yeah the vehicle book required a cube or cube root if memory serves, not that it poses a problem to me, but it does put some people off.

[Hyper-Man]

I don't see it as dumbing down... I see it as broadening it's appeal and making it easier to grasp, understand and play.

 

The fact that anybody would look at a role playing game and come to equate making characters as doing taxes is pretty bad. I love the game and I can see where they are coming from. The books do read and appear like an encyclopedia or technical manual with a game inside it and the fact that anybody new has to really study the game to just make a character... for the rare few of us who actually like that that's great, but for the many many others who might otherwise play this game who choose not to because of that... well, that's not a good thing.

 

Champions Complete was a step in the right direction, and I think Fantasy Complete will also help... but the overabundance of 5th and 6th edition's mega volumes didn't help the game much.

 

This is a product of the toolkit approach of HERO.  As is, the system gives a GM the tools to make the finished game they want. 

 

It's that finished game that most folks want. 

 

The IT professionals on the board should understand the next analogy.

HERO is basically stuck at layer 6 of the OSI model.  What folks want is a program running at layer 7.

 

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentation_layer

 

 

Description

 

The presentation layer is responsible for the delivery and formatting of information to the application layer for further processing or display.[4] It relieves the application layer of concern regarding syntactical differences in data representation within the end-user systems. An example of a presentation service would be the conversion of an EBCDIC-coded text computer file to an ASCII-coded file.

 

The presentation layer is the lowest layer at which application programmers consider data structure and presentation, instead of simply sending data in the form of datagrams or packets between hosts. This layer deals with issues of string representation - whether they use the Pascal method (an integer length field followed by the specified amount of bytes) or the C/C++ method (null-terminated strings, e.g. "thisisastring\0"). The idea is that the application layer should be able to point at the data to be moved, and the presentation layer will deal with the rest.

 

 

[Scott Baker]

Same as their borrowing Action points from Savage Worlds (or whatever next gen RPG they borrowed it from).

 

I'm not sure where, or if they borrowed action points, but didn't Fuzion come out in the late 90s and SW in early 00s.

 

I just answered my own question by checking Wikipedia -- Fuzion 1998, SW 2003.

[Hyper-Man]

Someone asked me why change some of the nomenclature/wordage used in the game... Perfect example...

 

What's easier to say to somebody...

 

A) If you want to attack you need to roll 3d6 and add your Offensive Combat Value and then subtract your target's Defensive Combat Value and then if you roll under 11 you hit...

 

or

 

If you want to attack roll 3d6 and add Fighting and then subtract Evasion and if you roll under 11 you hit.

 

The wordage of the second hypothetical is way easier to both speak, and help people envision in their minds. If you say Offensive Combat Value, you are putting more focus on the mechanistic elements of the character in an offensive way but to me the word Fighting represents my capability to Fight and the word Evasion represents my ability to get out of the way.

 

I don't see an issue with this.  It's basically a re-skinning similar to what I suggested in this 8 year old thread:

Alternate defensive maneuver names free of implied sfx

 

I have seen a lot of threads on Block, Dive For Cover, Dodge and Missle Deflection lately.

 

A lot of them seem to be about applying rules based on one particular sfx interpretation.

 

I think this has a lot to do with the names of the manuevers themselves.

 

Here are my suggestions for alternatives that might mitigate some of the confusion:

 

Free maneuvers:

• Passive Evade - replaces Dodge. I use 'passive' to highlight that it affects all attacks equally well.
• Active Evade - replaces Block. I use 'active' to highlight that it targets a specific attack with the intent of getting ahead of an attackers higher DEX (initiative).
• 1-Shot Evade - replaces Dive-For-Cover. I use '1-Shot' to hightlight how it only affects 1 particular attack* in a phase and actually lowers overall DCV vs all other attacks whether it succeeds or not. Attacks occuring after the Evading character's acting DEX (aborted action or not) will not be negatively affected.

Martial maneuvers:

• Martial Passive Evade - replaces Martial Dodge.
• Martial Active Evade - replaces Martial Block.
• Martial Moving Evade - replaces Flying Dodge which is already an Improved Dive-For-Cover/Martial Dodge combination.

Powered manuervers:

• Active Evade/Ranged - replaces Missle Deflection.
• Active Evade/Ranged/Reflection - replaces Missle Deflection plus Reflection.

I'll be the first to admit that the martial and powered versions do not roll off the tongue as easy as the originals but they ALL use a consistent language to describe variations on a consistent idea: actions designed to avoid taking damage.

 

Comments welcome.

 

[Ragitsu]

d20 Modern had Action Points before the Revised Core Rules of the d20 Star Wars RPG.

[Scott Baker]

Because a "few" people compared HERO to doing taxes, does that mean that the system should be dumbed down?

The tax system should absolutely be dumbed-down! Who can understand that thing?!