What is HERO combat like?

[zslane]

I dunno. Being Mind Controlled to not move, or stuck in an illusion where I think I am trapped in a cage where all I can do is make EGO rolls to break out, or hit by a Presence Attack that robs me of my next Phase, or Entangled such that I can't do anything but make STR rolls to extricate myself, or knocked unconscious, or being Stunned are all examples in which my agency has been removed. When my only choice is to "recover" from my current condition, be it Stunned, Entangled, Mind Controlled, etc., it is equivalent to having no choice (of actions) at all. I'm still not sure why being Stunned is being treated as a special case.

 

When the refrain is, "I hate having to blow a Phase on recovering from something because then I have to wait so long for my next Phase when I can do something fun and interesting", my gut reaction is that players are having difficulty finding the game (i.e., combat) interesting during those periods, long or short, when they aren't spending a Phase taking an action. That is typically referred to as "down time", and I just don't think that a well-run battle conducted by engaged, attentive players produces enough down time to make anyone complain. If they are complaining (or the GM is unhappy), I hesitate to find fault with the system since my own experiences with this issue have varied considerably with the group.

 

Rather than eliminate things that can impose down time on a player, maybe investigate why their down-time is so long and why players are finding it worthwhile to tune out during it (or, rather, why they aren't finding it worthwhile to watch what is going on and plan their next move during their down time).

[massey]

Slow players can be a problem.  If every time it is Bob's chance to go, he takes 10 minutes to figure out what he wants to do, then the most boring thing in the world is to get stunned, or entangled, or otherwise lose my phase and give Bob two chances to sit there and scratch his head, not knowing what he wants to do.  Sometimes it's like you can hear the Final Jeopardy music playing over and over again inside of his head.

[Ndreare]

In every game I have ever played, the players are what sets the pace of a combat.

 

Some systems take a little longer than others it is true (Hero does take longer than average IMHO) however that is nothing compared to the players.

 

Normally a round of combat with for or five players versus a dozen nobodies at average speed 3 takes my group five minutes or up to ten if they are cautious.

 

However my brother when ever he plays every action or roll is preceded by a minimum of ten Mets game questions followed by him doing all the math out loud and it will store the 12 second turn down to 20 minutes. It drives me crazy, because when he GM's her hours at normal pace.

 

Even when we play Aie'r a game that resolves conflicts with a single roll he will spend forever taking everyone it off the action while he goes through his options.

 

Lucky for me he is very receptive to feedback and when reminded tries to speed it up. But after a couple sessions he will revert back to normal.

[massey]

I played in a Pathfinder game where the GM was slow as molasses.  5 or 6 characters fighting a dozen orcs would take 2 hours.  He had this stupid app on his iPad that was supposed to "speed up" combat, but he would sit there and fiddle with it, pressing buttons, and verrry slowwwly narrating what was happening.  After about 3 sessions, I left the game.  Someone who just refuses to move things along can suck the fun out of a game.

[Hugh Neilson]

Slow players can be a problem.  If every time it is Bob's chance to go, he takes 10 minutes to figure out what he wants to do, then the most boring thing in the world is to get stunned, or entangled, or otherwise lose my phase and give Bob two chances to sit there and scratch his head, not knowing what he wants to do.  Sometimes it's like you can hear the Final Jeopardy music playing over and over again inside of his head.

To me, the problem element here is not the Stun Rule. The problem would be just as present if you are waiting to recover from a presence attack, get a breakout roll against Mind Control or Mental Illusions, try to escape an Entangle, Barrier or Grab, or just take an ordinary, unconstrained action. If it is Phase 5 and you are waiting to recover from -13 STUN on Post-Segment 12, it would be even worse.

 

But the problem is not the game mechanics - it is Bob's inability or unwillingness to make a decision and take his action. So don't change the game rules, change the problem player. Either Bob learns to stay engaged and plan his move while others are making theirs, Bob is removed from the game or everyone else will be bored and frustrated watching Bob count hexes to every possible target on the board, run through every maneuver and multipower slot, ask once again for the description of each character on the map, and slow the game down. All being Stunned does is let us get to Bob's next game-momentum-crushing action a bit sooner.

[massey]

To me, the problem element here is not the Stun Rule. The problem would be just as present if you are waiting to recover from a presence attack, get a breakout roll against Mind Control or Mental Illusions, try to escape an Entangle, Barrier or Grab, or just take an ordinary, unconstrained action. If it is Phase 5 and you are waiting to recover from -13 STUN on Post-Segment 12, it would be even worse.

 

But the problem is not the game mechanics - it is Bob's inability or unwillingness to make a decision and take his action. So don't change the game rules, change the problem player. Either Bob learns to stay engaged and plan his move while others are making theirs, Bob is removed from the game or everyone else will be bored and frustrated watching Bob count hexes to every possible target on the board, run through every maneuver and multipower slot, ask once again for the description of each character on the map, and slow the game down. All being Stunned does is let us get to Bob's next game-momentum-crushing action a bit sooner.

 

Oh, definitely agree.  I think if you've got a group of players who have never really played the game, like the OP does, you're going to get a bunch of Bobs.  That's probably going to make being stunned a worse experience for them.  I've also played in games where nobody was a Bob, and everyone was chomping at the bit ready to shout out their action.

 

GM:  Phase 1, nobody

Players 1, 2, and 3:  I SHOOT HIM IN THE FACE!!!!

GM:  ...goes yet.

[Christopher R Taylor]

When the refrain is, "I hate having to blow a Phase on recovering from something because then I have to wait so long for my next Phase when I can do something fun and interesting", my gut reaction is that players are having difficulty finding the game (i.e., combat) interesting during those periods, long or short, when they aren't spending a Phase taking an action. 

 

I agree, if you're not acting, then you should be preparing what you'll do next and most importantly enjoying what else is going on around you in the game.  When its not your turn... you're the audience at a very dynamic movie or play.  Enjoy the game as others play it too, and hopefully the GM is making it fun as well.

[Joe Walsh]

I agree, if you're not acting, then you should be preparing what you'll do next and most importantly enjoying what else is going on around you in the game.  When its not your turn... you're the audience at a very dynamic movie or play.  Enjoy the game as others play it too, and hopefully the GM is making it fun as well.

 

I understand that it's sometimes hard for people to get out of board game mode, but the benefits make it really worthwhile. Your post is a great expression of that.

[Altair]

So. I had a long response written. Perhaps too long. I deleted it, because I don't think that it productively added to the conversation. I was typing angry, and that's the opposite of useful. So let me try again:

 

I appreciate the feedback. It's worth noting that my problem does not stem from "Bobs" or players who are in too much of a boardgame v. RPG mode. We're newbies to Hero, not to gaming. And it is possible that my strong negative feelings regarding action denial stem from memory of gaming with a serious Bob.

 

No joke. His Pathfinder turns would take roughly 15 minutes. I started timing them.

 

Now, there were a lot of reasons why he & I should not have been in games together. So perhaps there's something to all this, and I will mind these things less in the context of a group of like-minded players. That hasn't been the case yet, but maybe that will change with time!

 

Anyway. I think we'll mess around again tomorrow, and perhaps we'll try combining END & STUN, and see what that's like. There's no ongoing campaign (well, there's sort of a continuity coming up, everyone is too story-invested to just do straight-up wargaming), so it's a good environment to playtest things, see what shifts. 

 

Thanks again, y'all.

[Altair]

Related: in your experience, what's the optimal percentage of time spent in combat, in your Hero games? Does it vary by genre, or is it more of a group preference thing? 

 

Also, how close is the optimal to the actual?

[Ndreare]

We only play for four hours at a time, so anything over half an hour for combat is too much.

 

Ideally 10 minutes or less. We play Heroic, which is much grittier than Supers.

 

However we do occasionally have those epic boss fights that last the whole session. These are normally things we all know we are getting together for so I will have the minutes, map and stuff set up.

[Joe Walsh]

My current campaign is heroic-level. We typically play for about 2 hours per session, and combats (when they happen; that's not the focus) typically take 5-10 minutes.

 

My ideal depends on the campaign, really. If we wanted to do something more combat-focused, longer combats would be welcome. But as it is, the campaign is focused on espionage, keeping firmly in mind that for covert agents, being in combat means you've screwed up.

[Altair]

My current campaign is heroic-level. We typically play for about 2 hours per session, and combats (when they happen; that's not the focus) typically take 5-10 minutes.

 

My ideal depends on the campaign, really. If we wanted to do something more combat-focused, longer combats would be welcome. But as it is, the campaign is focused on espionage, keeping firmly in mind that for covert agents, being in combat means you've screwed up.

 

Nice! Reminds me of a quote from one of my players, explaining what we meant by a "Shadowrun" combat paradigm to a D&D group:

 

"Combat will be rare, brief, and hilariously one-sided."

[zslane]

A typical Champions (supers) game session for me over the years (stretching as far back as 1983) has been 4-6 hours total, with about half of that devoted to the fight at the end of each session. The basic structure of each session was: Hear the Call to Action. Do the Detective Work to find out who the Villain is and What They Are Up To. Formulate the plan to stop the villain. Confront and defeat the Villain. The first three steps take up roughly half of the session, and the last step takes up the other half.

[mhd]

I prefer to mix it up. I mostly play fantasy, and that means we can have sessions where combat is 90% of the experience (combat, kick in door, combat...), some where it's all building up to a big fight (~ 1 hour) and some where we don't have any fights at all.

 

The average fight takes us about, well, 30 minutes, I'd say. Less if the enemies are brutes and/or glass cannons and I can't be that devious and/or cowardly.

[NuSoardGraphite]

I also play mostly Heroic.  Usually fantasy, but I do like to stray into sience fiction from time to time.  30 minutes seems to be about average for a fight.  When you are working with Hit Locations, Impairing/Disabling, Bleeding, Critical Hits etc, only one or two well-placed strikes are needed to put the enemy down.  Thats not necessarily killing the enemy either, that means knocking them out, severely injuring them enough to take the fight out of them.

[Christopher R Taylor]

I've found that the duration of the fight is less significant than the content of it.  A short bar fight everyone has done 50 times is interminable, but a 3 hour slugfest in a sinking ship against foes that require creativity and teamwork can fly by.  That's why I try to craft fights in interesting ways that keep attention.  Its an old trick that was on the Hero Mailing List back in the 90s, and I can't remember who to credit for tipping me off.

 

Basically its not the fight that matters, but the twists and the location.  Its one thing to fight Viper Agents in a warehouse, but what if the warehouse is on fire?  Or collapsing into the bay?  Or falling from orbit?  What if the fight is on top of a speeding train?  What if an earthquake is going on?  I love to throw a wrench into the situation, having something just show up to change the patterns.  OK we're saving a ship from hostage takers, great.  But then the king of the sea shows up and demands a piece of jewelry one of the women has hidden in a cabin.  The blast by that hero opens up a sinkhole and what's beneath?  Etc.

 

By doing this kind of thing, fights can be more interesting and engaging than just a bunch of powers being used.

[Greywind]

One of the most interesting fights in my game happened in a bathroom. Think of the opening of Craig's Casino Royale with archenemies going at it.

[Altair]

For sure, things are much more interesting when combat's varied. Just trying to get a general ballpark on combat frequency*, as I wonder how big a factor that plays in the experience. 

 

Reference point: the current game I'm running, which is a session away from its 2-year anniversary spends <10% of its time on combat based on my quick back-of-the napkin math, split between dogfights, starship battles, and ground encounters. It's mostly political maneuvering and interpersonal drama, set to a backdrop of galactic apocalypse. When I was running a Pathfinder game for my university's RPG club, we had 3-4 hour timeslots, and probably averaged ~.66 combats/session. Those combats were usually about an hour.

 

It took years for me to get that my tendencies are considered combat-light by most RPG communities. So I can't help but wonder if my vitriolic dislike of action denial stems from actions being a somewhat scarce resource. Some explication:

 

An RPG group meets bi-weekly for 4-hour sessions. They're moderately experienced, and like decent-sized groups, so they tend to knock out roughly 2 combat turns per hour. The average SPD of the group is 3, so that comes down to ~6 phases per hour of combat.**

• Scenario one: the group spends ~50% of their time in combat. That's about 12 phases per biweekly session. 
• Scenario two: the group spends ~10% of their time in combat. That's about 2.4 phases per biweekly session.

In scenario one, losing a phase represents about an 8% reduction in your combat actions for the week. In scenario two, losing a phase is roughly a 42% reduction. Now, how does this effect overall experience? No idea. Still, I've had less promising hypotheses.

 

* For the sake of these numbers, dungeon exploration/trap sweeping and the like are included as "combat." A more precise term would be "procedural engagement," but whatevs. 

** I have no idea if this is representative. I'm trying to ballpark - this is all napkin statistics.

[Altair]

I've found that the duration of the fight is less significant than the content of it... Basically its not the fight that matters, but the twists and the location.  Its one thing to fight Viper Agents in a warehouse, but what if the warehouse is on fire?  Or collapsing into the bay?  Or falling from orbit?  What if the fight is on top of a speeding train?  What if an earthquake is going on? ...By doing this kind of thing, fights can be more interesting and engaging than just a bunch of powers being used.

 

For sure! I'm a big proponent of dynamic combat objectives - different combat objectives besides taking everybody out, dynamic terrain, stuff like that. Lots of fun. 

 

In messing around thus far, our Speedster's primary combat role has been civilian rescue, and it has been delightful. We've had buildings collapsing, fires and other massive environmental changes mid-fight; it's been great fun. I know you can do things like this in in many systems/settings, but in my experience, Champions has really shined in this regard.

[zslane]

I think the major reason I'm not much help to heroic-level players--in terms of offering advice on making combat quicker or more interesting--is that 99% of my HERO experience was with Champions, where combat is never boring for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that a properly structured session restricts combat to the boss fight at the end (...oy, I really hate using video game/MMO terminology...) and insures that there is a big boss fight at the end of every session. Or maybe a smaller fight against the master villain's main lieutenant in Part I and the big fight against the master villain himself in Part II, played out over two separate sessions.

 

A group can really create problems for themselves by structuring the campaign in a way that makes combats intrinsically dull, inconsequential, or unnecessary. This was never a problem in any of the Champions games I played in, but they were always structured deliberately to make combat worth all the time spent on it. Not so in many of the non-supers games I've heard people talk about over the years.

[Altair]

Word. Supers action really does lend itself to episodic play with big set piece battles, and Champions in particular does a lovely job rendering that.

[Christopher R Taylor]

I think too many GMs in fantasy campaigns are thinking in terms of computer games and D&D where you fight hordes of little stuff to get treasure, slogging through endless rooms of bad guys.  Instead, I think the GM should think similar to champions in Fantasy Hero.  Don't just have hordes of guys to kill, have a specific team with a build up to a big mean bad guy.

 

I'm all for the dungeon crawl, I've written a few adventures just so people have that as an option for their games.  But you need to keep the encounters interesting.  D&D is a matter of a few d20 rolls to take out crowds of goblins.  In Hero its more complicated and time consuming, and that has to be taken into account.

[Altair]

I think too many GMs in fantasy campaigns are thinking in terms of computer games and D&D where you fight hordes of little stuff to get treasure, slogging through endless rooms of bad guys.  Instead, I think the GM should think similar to champions in Fantasy Hero.  Don't just have hordes of guys to kill, have a specific team with a build up to a big mean bad guy.

 

I'm all for the dungeon crawl, I've written a few adventures just so people have that as an option for their games.  But you need to keep the encounters interesting.  D&D is a matter of a few d20 rolls to take out crowds of goblins.  In Hero its more complicated and time consuming, and that has to be taken into account.

 

Yep. This, this this.

 

 

In other media, the objective is very rarely "kill all their doodz" - outside of online multiplayer games of course, and even those have base capture goin' on. People have goals & motivations, and they tend to be pretty big when they're willingly risking their lives. Macguffin acquisition? Escape? Chase & capture? 

 

Supers has a lot going for it - combat is often in an urban environment, which immediately adds goals to pursue beyond "damage opponents until n < 1." Civilian rescue. Trying to move the fight out of the city. Keeping your favorite coffee shop intact. Evacuation coordination. And this is before you get to all of the cool environmental elements that a city has going for it. 

 

All this, before the GM has to get creative. 

 

Now, there's nothing that keeps us from doing this in other genres. Even in a dungeon crawl - that room with the skeletons? Sure, you can fight skeletons. You should fight skeletons at least once in a dungeon crawl, ain't nothing wrong with it! But, you could also be trying to fend off the skeletons long enough for someone to activate the five points of the star in the floor, so that the Sphinx head lights up and asks a riddle, which is how you stop the spiked ceiling from descending. 

 

Still a room where you fight skeletons

[zslane]

Agree completely.

 

Now, if by "other media" you mean fantasy literature and folk mythology, you're absolutely right. The kill-everything-and-take-their-stuff motif of the classic "dungeon crawl" derives exclusively from Gygax and Arneson's medieval miniatures wargaming sessions in which killing the enemy (army)--all of it if possible--and plundering their treasure was the natural goal of every battle/session. When the action went under the castle being attacked, and the focus shifted to individual heroes rather than nameless regiments, the same goals were carried along without much thought to do otherwise. What the "leveled heroes" were doing underground was just an extension of what the army was doing on the surface.

 

It is in this sense that D&D is effectively its own genre. Inspired by fantasy literature, folklore, and mythology to be sure, but not modelled after it. The structure of the game's narrative, such as it exists, is unique to itself and not found anywhere else except perhaps early D&D novels.