Surgo

Re: Why I prefer HERO System over Pathfinder/OGL/D&D for fantasy What on earth are you even ranting about? I never even talked about whether CR was useful or not (it is -- in fact, it's the only useful measure of power in D&D). None of this has anything to do with how the four-encounter workday completely breaks down anywhere outside of a dungeon, which is why everyone abandoned it in the first place. Plus, nobody was even that limited in the first place once you passed level 6. Let's face it: what you're claiming is a core paradigm is actually a joke. I'll break it down for you in steps that happened, though... 1) People realized the four encounter workday didn't make any sense at all and made worldbuilding incredibly stupid. 2) WotC gave us early "you always have your abilities" classes that weren't Fightan Mans or Rogues (which we had even in the PHB) -- the Warlock. 3) The Warlock was, straight up, weaker than the Wizard. This was done intentionally because Warlock is all at-will. 4) But...it turned out the Wizard was pretty much always at full strength or close to it. (Plus, even a not-full-strength Wizard was still insane power.) Ability depletion only even worked before level 7, because once you hit level 7 you have four levels of effective save-or-die spells. You just aren't running out of save-or-dies after four encounters. 5) So, balance shifted to assuming parties were almost always close to full power. Because they totally were.

Re: Why I prefer HERO System over Pathfinder/OGL/D&D for fantasy Considering how I'm one of these "people" -- I think the only person who needs the kick in the pants is you. The four-encounter workday pretty much only worked if your party was under a constant dungeon crawl, like World's Largest Dungeon or something. Try to do literally anything else in the campaign and it broke completely because four encounters a day just doesn't make any sense at all from a verisimilitude standpoint. Gee, it sure is funny that we're running into four exactly-challenging encounters in this forest per day, while merchant caravans are traveling through it all the time! Truth be told, it didn't make any sense in dungeon crawls either thanks to the existence of spells like Rope Trick. It only ever worked when the party was under serious time constraints, which is a story mechanic that can get tired and overused extremely quickly.

Re: Why I prefer HERO System over Pathfinder/OGL/D&D for fantasy I don't think, in the latter era of 3.5, anyone really subscribed to the "four encounter workday" style of D&D anymore. By that point just about everyone realized that 1) it didn't ever happen that way anyway and 2) it totally broke verisimilitude. Eventually, people started releasing classes that weren't balanced around the four-encounter workday. When they were at first made with weaker abilities to compensate (the first effort from WotC on this line was the Warlock), they turned out to be weaker effectively all the time. Having never played 4e, I cannot speak to that. The point I'm trying to make here, though, is that while there are major differences between the systems, this isn't really one of them.

Re: Abortable advantage, leading to a more general question of resolution mechanics I see your point, but this is GM-dependent. It says the GM may allow you to just hold your phase generically, but if not you have to specify it in response to something else -- in which case, if said "something else" never happens, you've just your phase and this is an inferior option. If you can hold your phase generically, though, it doesn't seem so bad.

Re: Abortable advantage, leading to a more general question of resolution mechanics You guys are right: I totally forgot about Reflection. Go me. That being said...there are a couple differences. I like the idea of reducing the damage if it goes over the Reflection instead of having it fail entirely (if you miss); I also don't like how you need to be in range of the attack to block it. I like the more absolute nature of Damage Negation. But I really, really don't like that clause about not being able to Reflect after an abort -- it kind of defeats the purpose of the power, because this character has far better things to do than sit around waiting for an attack to come (namely, actively attacking targets themselves). Of course, it's just a GM ruling away, but... Yeah, see, I really don't get where this is coming from. Maybe I'm still thinking from a D&D sense too much where holding an action was always a bad idea, but it doesn't necessarily seem like a much better idea here.

For those in a hurry, there's two distinct parts to this post: "is this balanced/a good idea" and "maybe there's a better resolution mechanic out there". One of my players and I came up with a neat idea for a power: taking the energy from a punch or kick or (physical) blast, and redirecting it to somebody else (preferably an enemy). Fairly straightforward to build, my interpretation was: Damage Negation (10 physical DCs), Nonpersistent, Instant, Usable On Others (Limited Range; Grantor pays END; +1/4); followed with Blast 10d6, Linked (Damage Negation), Damage Capped by Damage Negated (-1/4), Indirect. Originally, this was written up as a Blast with a linked Damage Negation. Now, Blast is (obviously) not a defensive power, so you can't abort to it. Of course, with the not-so-brilliant idea of turning it around and linking the Blast to the Damage Negation (which also lets us redirect the energy "nowhere", i.e. not using the linked Blast, so we don't have to choose to hit anybody with the power), it becomes abortable. This is just a happy accident though, and I expect to come up with more situations where you'd want to abort the powers. My campaign already has one -- a Dispel Magic in our magic system should be abort'able. Now I can just say "you can use this to abort", but that's a little...unsatisfying, because I think a general case solution is better than a single case one. So, let's say we were to make an advantage called "Abortable" which allowed you to abort to a power that had the advantage. How much should this cost? I'm tempted to say +1/4, based on the Trigger advantage. Essentially, this is designed to be used where Trigger isn't as appropriate (such as where "resetting" doesn't make any sense). There's no reset condition, so that would be more expensive if you just used trigger, but it's not a zero-phase action either (which would make it less expensive, theoretically). This brings me to my other point -- all of this making actions abortable seems like a hack. A hack that, basically, tries to turn HERO's combat resolution, where actions resolve sequentially, into something where they don't necessarily resolve sequentially anymore. So this is a more general question -- has anyone tried to change this resolution mechanic into something that happens simultaneously instead? I tried this a while back with a small space-combat minigame I made for a game (I think it was Dungeons and Dragons) -- basically, everyone rolled their initiative for the round and the person who won went last (and the second-best went second-last, and so on). That way, they could see the actions everyone else made before deciding their own, and then everything done in the round resolved simultaneously. Has anyone tried to change the HERO system in a way like this? Did it work, or is it just not appropriate?

Is there a pre-generated list somewhere, that says something like "with many active points / damage classes of damage, you'd need on average much to , but no more"? I'm starting a game and I've found the most difficult thing is figuring out exactly how many defenses everyone should have.

Re: Seed of Life spell Oh, this is interesting. I just completely read Usable On Others, and it has a mechanism at the end for separating the power activation from the power use. This makes it a (somewhat) straightforward Usable By Others: Simplified Healing 1d6, Trigger (Activating Takes No Time; Resets Automatically (immediately after activation); Can Expire (one minute time limit); Character Does Not Control Activation; +1/2), Charges (6 Recoverable; -1/4), Area of Effect. The cost for this part is then applied to Usable On Others (Limited Range; Only Grant to Others) (+0), and there it is.

Re: Seed of Life spell Thank you for the advice. Given what you said I think Trigger makes sense more than Time Limit because the goal is to have it activate whenever damage is taken, not just once per phase. The reason for the Limited Range is because I want to be able to use the spell on someone who is on the other side of the room. This brings up a general problem I've had with the spell though, which I'm still not sure what the answer is: which advantages apply to the spell effect, and which to the "casting" of the spell? By that I mean, Limited Range ought to apply to the spellcasting -- I can use it on somebody who is across the room, not have to go up next to them. On the other hand, Charges should mean "how many times the spell, once cast, can trigger" -- not how many times I can cast the spell.

Inspired by the Guild Wars spell of the same name, for my healer character. The idea is: whenever the subject of the spell is hit for damage, it heals all allies in an area. At first it seems like an application of "Time Limit" and "Trigger", but I'd like to have some amount of cap on how many times it's allowed to trigger. This is what I have so far: Simplified Healing 1d6; Limited Range* [20m] (+1/4), Time Limit [up to One Minute] (+3/4); Trigger [When hit; Non-action to activate; can expire with spell] (+1/4); Area of Effect [Radius Heal, when hit] (+1/4); Selective [Only Allies] (+1/4); Charges [4 Recoverable (by recasting the spell)] (-1/2); Costs Endurance [Only to Activate] (-1/4); Does Not Work on Drains (-1/2). This is one of the more complex things I've built, and I'm not entirely sure I'm doing it right. I'm not sure I'm applying Charges correctly -- I want the spell itself to create the Charges, which are used when the target is hit, not apply to the casting of the spell. The Costs Endurance limitation was added because of Charges; it should only cost the caster END, not the target. Similarly, I'm not sure about the Area of Effect advantage -- I want it to apply to the healing when the target is hit, not the casting that puts the spell on the target. Am I building this correctly? Is there a better or simpler way to do something like this? * The power is part of a magic system that lets the base effect be boosted, so the Limited Range instead of Ranged makes sense here.

Re: Fantasy Hero - Talents - Storm of Steel (for up to HKA 4d6) Sorry to raise an ancient thread from the dead, but I have a similar question to the OP and I'm not entirely clear on the answer -- and there's conflicting responses within this very thread (Christopher and NuSoardGraphite). Specifically, the following question from the OP: If you already have an HKA 4d6 power, and you use the naked advantage, can you then further add DCs from STR, martial arts, etc., and have them affected by the Autofire naked advantage? It says on 6E2 102 that if you have a naked advantage for an attack you'd need to buy it powerful enough to cover the whole attack, but I'm not clear if it refers to naked advantages for a specific power or -all- naked advantages. I suspect it's the latter, and NuSoardGraphite is incorrect -- but I'd just like to be clear. Similarly, the books all use the phrase "up to HKA 4d6/HA 12d6". Is this just a convenient shorthand for "up to 60 active points", or does it actually mean HKA 4d6/HA 12d6? I ask because if I have, say, an Armor Piercing power, the "up to HKA 4d6/HA 12d6" is no longer accurate if it actually means the latter instead of the former.

Re: Naked Autofire Nothing particularly interesting. I have a rogue/assassin/ninja/whatever character who wields daggers, and she can hit people really fast with them (autofire), and can also move fast enough to hit everyone in the area around her (AoE). The other use for autofire is "hit everyone in the AoE a lot more". On second thought though, I'm going to nix the idea. While it would certainly be big damage on enemies, the END cost is simply insane -- and is already extremely high with the Autofire alone.

Autofire is a bit of an exception to the rules in that it's a variable advantage based on what you're applying it to. So this has been making it a bit tricky for me to figure out how to use it as a naked advantage. I've bought a naked Autofire [5 shots] for up to 60 AP of HA/HKA, which is +1/2 (and so is itself 30 AP). I also have a separate naked advantage that 4m radius AoE to up to 60 AP of HA/HKA. If the attack itself has a low enough active points, I could apply the AoE advantage to push it up to 60 and then, presumably, an Autofire advantage. Autofire on an AoE power is an additional +1, though -- so I can't use the normal naked advantage. Would I need to buy a second, separate naked Autofire in order for this to work? Is there some way to bring the point cost down since I have to buy both? Is it reasonable to just buy the +1.5 Autofire, and be able to apply it (for a lower AP cost) when AoE is not in effect?

Re: 61 Monsters Available For Download Thank you! Always can use more monsters.

So, here's an idea for a somewhat higher-powered fantasy campaign that I was wondering if anyone tried before: Everyman Magic. The idea is simple: if it's easy/sensible to scale it, take your campaign's magic system and give it, in some small or medium scale, for free, to each PC. Not necessarily every character, just each PC. Then PCs then differentiate themselves with the rest of their character points: if they want to be very magic focused they can spend a lot improving themselves in that system, or they can buy combat abilities, or pretty much whatever in terms of independent powers. I imagine it would, obviously, work best with a magic system that was somehow limited in producible effect. Maybe it's "only known spells" (Harry Potter style, with a power framework and free known spells) or everyone has to specialize somehow (one guy's a healer, the other does fun things with necromancy, etc.) Then, if one player wanted to be a super-awesome mage, there would need to be a straightforward way to scale up their power (control cost of a VPP, for example). Has anyone tried to do something like this, and how well did it work? I could see it as a way to give everyone a very broad base of horizontal abilities, with their real vertical abilities being what they spent a lot of actual character points on. Just an idea, which will maybe make its way into my next campaign.

Re: New Hero System Players And Game Masters Perhaps we can use the advantages of the internet. Getting people together in real-life is hard -- if people were more apt to run and join, say, Skype games with potential strangers, and this was a common thing, perhaps it would be easier to migrate a number of people into the system. I'd love to get people into the system myself, but I personally dislike MCing. As far as the PDFs versus books topic goes -- millennial here, I've been using computers since I was 5 (I'm 24 now). It used to be that I preferred books as well and reading on the computer hurt my eyes, but I think with the massive increase in resolution (the first monitor I owned (as in, actually owned) was 800x600, my current is 1920x1080) combined with moving to LCD screens from the annoying CRTs, has made reading on a computer far easier. I only buy books in PDF form, for a few reasons: 1) Searchability. Someone earlier in the thread talked about how they could look through a physical book faster and easier. Maybe it's because I grew up with computers, but with the PDF bookmarks I can instantly go to anywhere I need to. With full-text searching, I can pretty quickly find any query that I don't know where to look for. What could be improved here is searching over a whole library, instead of just a single PDF. 2) Monetary. PDFs are cheaper, because you don't have to print them. 3) Space. I can't put physical books anywhere, and even if I had the room I wouldn't want to.

Re: What Can We Do To Serve HERO? I own Fantasy Hero (though not the Bestiary yet), and it is an amazing product, but I don't think it is at all true that you need the book to run such an encounter. It was a great reference for me in creating my fantasy campaign, but my players certainly have no need of it for anything in the campaign. A more convincing issue is that of the bestiary... I can pull stats for a wolf out of my nether regions, but that gets really taxing after a really small amount of time. I think that's the part where having a large wiki-resource would be excellent -- pregenerated things that everyone ends up using (like monsters), and are really time consuming to do over and over again but not a big deal to run off one or two yourself. If everyone can share their one or two, that would be just awesome. If anyone is interested in this idea please PM me -- if I get a critical mass of people I will set up a wiki just like my aforementioned Dungeons and Dragons one.

Re: What Can We Do To Serve HERO? One of the biggest problem I had starting my game was that it was just so difficult to bring all the necessary pre-game rules together, because there was a lot to think about and do. I don't just mean stuff like what I expected the OCV/DCV to look like, but I mean stuff like "what is my magic system going to look like". Having the kind of resource we're discussing now would have helped a lot (and I'd be happy to put up my own magic system interpretation and whatnot there). Again, I have no idea if any of this will bring people to HERO but even if it doesn't it's probably a worthy endeavor.

Re: What Can We Do To Serve HERO? Interesting thread. I've been working on starting a HERO game with my own group of friends (and bought the PDF core books for a buddy as a Christmas present). One common complaint I'm seeing in here is there's no good source of pregenerated stuff (powers, characters, adventures, whatever), or alterations to existing rules. There's stuff like the "how do I build X" threads stretching back to the beginning of time but it's really not easy to index or search a forum. I operate http://www.dnd-wiki.org, which is a big resource for that sort of thing for the Dungeons and Dragons world, though I'm not particularly interested in that game anymore. If there's a critical mass of people interested in contributing I could create that sort of thing for HERO. That sort of gateway resource and easy reference could interest people in the system. Or not, but I'm willing to try it.

Re: Fantasy Superheroes I always thought that superheroes was the correct way to run Fantasy Hero. I am running a rotating-DM superhero Fantasy Hero game right now (well, more accurately, starting one up). It's actually using the old D&D Planescape setting -- we're all D&D veterans, but found that 3rd edition D&D really can not do mid- to high-level Planescape (the level you care about in that setting) at all, thanks to the abundance of movement spells. Carceri just doesn't hold much interest as a prison plane when everybody 9th level and higher has Plane Shift. Thus running it in Fantasy Hero, with the Teleport power substantially limited (in my ruleset it requires OIF with at least Bulky -- giving you portals and astral dreadnoughts but not Plane Shift), and all my players are pretty excited for it. My magic system uses a cosmic VPP but you have a cap on the spells you know (minor variations within spells allowed) -- I guess it's not really how a VPP is "supposed" to work but the cost in character points seems to come out pretty much right so that's good. To get back to the thread though, I couldn't really imagine running a Fantasy Hero game without doing it as superheroes. Though to be honest I couldn't really imagine doing Hero as a whole without superheroes either so maybe I'm not the best judge. edit: I can post my campaign rules if anybody cares, but the only really interesting thing is probably the magic bits. Also looking into doing a social combat system but I haven't written that yet.

Re: House Rules As far as Transform goes, it does have that Stop sign. Which means, for us, it's a pseudo-case-by-case basis thing. For mental transforms (which are, again, the big ones for us) you still have to get past EGO -- but it's not EGOx2, just EGO, and there's no power defense or any of that. For physical transforms like a "baleful polymorph" it's just automatic; we haven't actually used any transforms that can improve a target so we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Different rules for different usage classes is okay with us; it's a stop sign power for a reason. I do not believe I said anything to contradict this...

Re: House Rules That would be why this thread is titled "House Rules"... 6th edition, volume 2, page 106, last paragraph on the leftmost column.

Re: House Rules We just moved from a D&D campaign into a Fantasy HERO campaign, and one feature (some would say a bug, but we believe feature) that D&D has that we used extensively is that unconscious creatures are automatically considered willing. We would routinely attempt, as part of an overarching plan in the plot line, to knock out certain creatures and keep them in Temporal Stasis for later use, or throw down a Programmed Amnesia on them, or really just about any of those truly nasty Enchantment spells would be done here. As far as I can find (I am still a newbie) HERO explicitly does not have a similar rule, but it does state that knocked out creatures can be killed with a full phase action. Thus, we extrapolate this with a house rule that an offensive power used on a knocked out creature is automatically successful -- mental powers and mental transforms being the default mode of operation here. edit: Registered since October, but I'm being CAPTCHA punished for posting sparingly :-(