The myth of Hero

[Chris Goodwin]

That's not actually true.  Being an elf gives you waht the Gm designs his world to have elves give you.  Fantasy Hero an Fantasy Hero Complete both give elf racial package suggestions with various built-in abilities.

 

Don't think of Hero as Linux. Think of it as the programming behind Windows.  The GM builds your OS and you play the game in that setting.

 

 

Most of the time, the GM doesn't do that work though.  Other game systems have that stuff pre-built.  That's what part of this thread has been about.  One of the big failures of Hero marketing is not having that stuff ready to go.

 

Having taken Fantasy Hero to task for years over this, I'm going to sort of point out that we actually do have quite a bit pre-built.  In the Fantasy Hero big books there are packages deals/templates that represent playable "classes".  They're pretty generic, but they're there and usable.  (That's been the case since Fantasy Hero 1e.)  There are a few sample monsters (plus the Bestiary), a few sample magic items (plus the Equipment Guide), a few sample spells and magic systems (plus the Grimoire).  

 

It's just that... who uses them?  I mean, I couldn't use them to get my D&D group into Hero, but they are perfectly usable as written.  Do any of the Hero Games-created FH gameworlds refer back to any of that?  

 

...Hmmm.  This bears thinking on.  

[Christopher R Taylor]

Again, that's part of why I'm working on a fantasy campaign setting, so there's all that stuff available in one place.  But there are already a couple of FH campaign settings out there to play with all the front end stuff created.

[Chris Goodwin]

Fantasy is a broad genre, perhaps you can persuade them to try a fantasy genre in HERO that DnD 5th cannot replicate. For example:

Cross-worlds Fantasy: They play a SWAT team summoned to a high fantasy world (with all of their high tech gear).

Urban Fantasy: Aka Dresden File, or Harry Potter.

Low-Fantasy/Historical Fantasy: Aka Fantasy with little or no Magic.

Science Fantasy: aka Spelljammer! Play the crew of a dimension hopping vessel going on wacky adventures in the Elemental Plane of Wine & Cheese.

Steampunk Fantasy: technically a part of Star HERO... but mislabled in my opinion.

 

As an alternative genre, you could run straight up Champions.

Superheroes is more or less what HERO was intended to let you play. There is a simple purity in playing a comic-book costumed crime-fighter. It becomes appealing when the players realize they don't have to jump through hoops to play a character like their favorite superheroes... that the system just lets them do that (fairly) easily. Plus it is such a deviation from Fantasy tropes that it really lets the players feel like they are trying something new... as opposed to just killing orcs with a different set of dice.

 

Oh, I have plenty of options... my question above was more rhetorical.   Someone else will take over running the D&D game (from the starter set) and then we're going to vote on what to do next.  So far the options are superheroes or science fiction (which might end up being a small-group-with-ship kind of game; Firefly or Traveller etc.).  I'm planning to offer urban fantasy (a sort of generic Buffy meets Grimm meets etc.) as well and maybe one or two other options as well.