Hugh Neilson

TECHNICALLY, it's also not Persistent. PRACTICALLY it is not "Always On" - it is "limited power", which is TECHNICALLY within RAW. Duke covers my issue with the concept perfectly. You can nudge the egg around with a sledgehammer, even if you are a brawny bodybuilding. Put the hammer on top of the egg, and the weight alone will crush it - so your character should refrain from walking on eggs, or less sturdy floors (which is already covered in that Extra Mass).

I think RAW is that it must be possible to remove the inaccessible focus in no more than a turn if the wearer is helpless. A ring which can be removed in one action from a helpless target is removable in less than one turn, but can''t be grabbed off in combat. Inaccessible. You don't have to be at the absolute maximum. You can have 30 charges, rather than 32. Design the character first, then apply the mechanics.

Emphasis added. Hero fans tend to "it all has to be there". The key to a Game Powered by Hero" is not that things like the builds and every option do not have to be there. It is that the have to not be there. This is a game, not a system with which you can design a game. We, the game designer, decide not to include animal handling skills, animal stats, etc. and a player wants an attack falcon? Just like every other game, you either suck it up (not in the rules), whine to the designers that we need an "animals" sourcebook to cover this stuff, or make your own. Unlike other games, you have the option to buy the game designer's toolkit and build it in accordance with the game system's rules and assumptions. Could we make a Fantasy or Supers game? Sure. But it has to be a game. It would not have a box of mechanics - go build your own magic system/spells/superpowers. It would have one or more pre-designed magic systems. That's how magic works in this game. Maybe EVERYONE who casts spells needs a wand, or a familiar, or cannot be in contact with metal - because that is how magic works in this game. Superpowers might be fixed, or variable in power. Maybe we use the USPD model and they come in different power levels, but not "buy 1d6 for x points", or maybe they are fully scalable. Maybe some superpowers don't exist in our game - say, no mental powers. Perhaps the only source of powers is an x-gene. Nope, no aliens or "bitten by a radioactive kangarooo" or empowered by ancient mythological deities. That is not part of this game. But Action Hero is as good a choice as any, and doesn't need as much "pregenerated X list".

I'd say the key here is that he has to use it every time he touches someone - not the best guy to carry a civilian or a downed teammate off to safety. Not sold on the logic - I'd bet a major league home run hitter can poke someone with a bat and not do near the impact he would on a fastball streaking over home plate. For the OP, 4d6 with 0 END should be 30 AP, so 15 with -1 or 17 with -3/4. An extra -1/4 for, basically, "always on unless he shuts off the DI" does not seem unreasonable, but as a GM, you would definitely run across some fragile civilians and maguffins you will have to either avoid touching or shut the DI off in combat.

@ScottishFox Exactly. Hero is a system for designing a game. What we need to bring in gamers are some games designed with Hero.

Isn't it a premise of capitalism, and the free market economy, the belief that competition between the hospitals should drive prices down? When they are negotiating with the individual whose quality of life (or even continued life) depends on their services, it seems like the hospital has a lot more bargaining power than when they are negotiating with a single large organization charged with providing the best possible care to as many patients as possible.

A lot of game design is based on how one balances the "G" and the "RP". A randomly rolled character gives you the chance to be great, the chance to be average and the chance to be a substandard loser. That's a lot more "G" then "Build the character you want to play".

It may be an interesting exercise to see just what can be cropped down. Action Hero probably has armor piercing bullets or knives. Does it have adjustment powers? An adrenaline injection, venoms designed as drains (we'll have spiders, snakes and scorpions in our purview, won't we?). Darkness (smoke grenades), Entangle (handcuffs), Flash (flash bangs; tear gas), NND/AVLD (gas again; taser), area effect (gas yet again, flamethrower). We're not into any weird talents yet. Do we have a "truth serum"? Brainwashing? Mental powers (or transform). Flight (no one can have a falcon?), leaping, running, swimming. The list of powers and modifiers can be a lot shorter. We can even avoid a lot of costing if we just present gear as given. But I'm not sure that list is as short as we initially envision, and even if we take away the costs, we need the mechanics. I don't see it so much as a "starter set" as a game Powered by Hero System - set the dials, determine which elements are, and are not, available and build the game. A lot of the design mechanics can remain behind the scenes. That's more work for the game designed, but less for the GM and players.

Doc, to me, this is a great example of how a Game Powered by Hero System could look. You don't need the build, just the results.

OK, the above will be tl;dr Some key points: Why do we assume any Hero Point system is so generous that the PCs can never miss a roll again. Most provide a pretty scarce resource. Why do we assume they will be used to succeed when you should suck, rather than to shave the edge off really bad rolls? How do great tactics and stellar planning by the players equate into an 18 at a crucial stage, or a super-lucky roll by an opponent, becoming impossible?

Emphasis added. "Occasionally...to perform a heroic action" is not "Routinely...to gain a combat advantage". Most characters had enough END and REC to last a few turns, so once we had "combat starts on Ph 12", you had only one segment of action followed by a full recovery. An extra 10 END? No big deal. There seems to be this undercurrent of "if I use Heroic Action Points, they will be used for every action, especially the ones the heroes sucked at to begin with". The player wanted to play The Man of Steel, but every KA fired on him seems to roll a 6 Stun Multiple. So, in our 12DC game, do we tell him "just buy defenses of 100 and enough STUN to weather a couple of 20 point hits past defenses"? KA makes for a poor example since 6e sought to fix that issue, but then several of those most opposed to HAP on this thread also dislike 6e. We have a lot of comments on this thread about the players designing and executing a brilliant plan. But we don't have the "and then someone who should easily succeed with his element of that plan rolls an 18. Too bad, game over, you lose, world destroyed". That's the kind of result that I think some would suggest should be "fudged", or for which Hero Points are a valid fix. But I agree I don't want them to become the equivalent of "I always open combat with a Pushed attack. Why not? I get all the END back immediately." hmmm...maybe one use of Hero Points is to even be ALLOWED to push. And bring fixed dice so you don't roll an 18 trying to find a simple clue, only to watch the dullard with an Everyman roll score a 3. See Superman example above. Would we allow him his 100 defenses, so he can reduce the odds of getting instant KOd by one lucky killing attack roll? Random chance has random results, and you can only "stack the odds" so much. When my character concept IS to be good at detective work, but the dice never come up lower than 15 when I attempt it, should I buy 23- so I can offset some penalties and still succeed, as I would expect from The World's Greatest Detective? If my character concept is not to be good at detective work, why would I not stand back and let the detective do his thing? Waste a precious Hero Point on that? WHY? I will use a Hero Point most of the time, and he will only need one on a roll of 15+. Hawkeye, who has lurked in the background waiting for that moment when the team's plan momentarily drops the Force Shield, fires that crucial shot for the team's plan, with his 21 OCV, against the DCV 6 Bullseye and ...18...misses. The Shield goes back up, and Galactus eats the earth. Wow, what a great game that was, huh? Let's assume, for the moment, that this concept is "dumb as a post but very perceptive". Poor INT skills, but a 17- PER roll. Yet he keeps rolling a 15 when there is a -3 penalty, and Olaf the Average keeps rolling 8's. You keep tossing out examples of players trying to do things their characters are ill-suited to do. In my view, a decent Hero Point system will not give the characters enough Hero Points to make that work consistently, and may even penalize non-dramatically appropriate uses (like going right against the grain of the character concept). The reality is that, sometimes, players ARE treated unfairly by the dice. The Hero Point need not be Autosuccess either. Make it "you get a reroll", or perhaps "you can spend 1 point per point you modify the roll by". Now we have Batman or Hawkeye spending 1 point to change that "one chance in 216" roll from an 18 to a 17 in a critical/dramatically appropriate situation. But Koloth needs to spend 5 to turn his decent roll of 8 roll into the 3 he needs to beat the Master Strategist at chess. Maybe he has 5 - will he blow them all on that trivial task, or save them for when he needs them for that poor attack roll against the Dragon later? So if we called them Luck Points and made them a different mechanic for luck, instead of Hero Points for Heroic Action, all would be well? In the comment about xp for Hero Points, my initial thought was an old Adventurers Club "Extra Life" power. It was a fixed cost, use as desired, one shot ability that gave you 3d6 of Luck, all 6's. Basically the same thing. Even when the heroes have taken every step to maximize their odds, when the writers would not have Green Arrow roll an 18 for his role, the dice will. I recall a comment in the original DC Heroes about lethal vs non-lethal combat and how it seemed odd to have guns default to non-lethal. It was not the original plan. But watching three lucky shots turn Batman into Batstain changed their minds. The mechanics have to support the desired game. Hero Points, at their best, are a mechanic designed to blunt the worst results of in-game random chance. They can have other uses as well, of course. I think there is some question whether it was ever legal. Grab always required an attack roll, so it ends your phase. It allowed you to "throw the target", but at no point did the rules say "at someone else with full OCV". Whether "you can toss them away or slam them to the ground as part of the Grab, but accurately targeting someone else requires a second attack" was a rule change or a rule clarification is certainly debatable. OK, 6 points for the desired size to Englobe (you left out the three base points), 28 for BOD, and let's make it 6 for Defenses is 40 x 1.5 = 60 points. That +1/2 is a Yield Sign, so the GM should be paying careful attention. I note you cannot move, nor can attacks of your SFX (or is it just YOUR attacks) cannot harm the barrier. How do you get out later? Maybe I'll just move away. Or I'll put up a Darkness field. An Indirect attack, Mental Attack, Telekinesis, Flash, gas attack and some area effects find it pretty easy to target you (and it's not like you can dive for cover!). What a great place to lob a Tear Gas grenade! The Hamster Ball of Doom is hardly unbeatable. If the fate of the world is at stake (Supers), or you are fighting a dragon (Fantasy), losing pretty clearly means dead. Or maybe you live and the world dies. Or **snap** half the life in the Universe is snuffed out (even AFTER Thor used that Hero Point to lodge his axe in the Bad Guy's chest!). And they can start by not rolling any more "18s" or getting hit by lucky attacks that roll 40+ on 8d6 (I rolled that the other day - as it was a Channel Energy to heal the group in Pathfinder, the group was pretty pleased; average of over 5 on 8d6 is pretty unusual).

They can be alternate form, weaker duplicates with the desired powers and stats, 0 Defenses, 1 BOD and a 3d6 BOD susceptibility to being touched. Pretty much anything making contact with them should do double their BOD and **poof**. You will need something to allow them to heal from death, though. An Amicable Summon could also do the trick, without the "dead duplicate" problem.

Not a fan of the system myself, but it's the only one I recall where the xp system was baked into a dice modification system, with the result that you effectively had to spend xp to offset unlucky rolls. Really, though, it was there to offset unlucky rolls, or allow for very unlikely rolls to be made when the chips were down. I always thought they needed another stat - Fantastic -- at the 60 point level. No argument there. Where I find the disconnect is this assumption that Hero Points or similar mechanics cannot be implemented, in any way shape or form, in a manner which is not autosuccess for every action resolution. So, only build characters who will exploit every possible tactical advantage, and forget making Characters with character? Impetuous, Impulsive and Impatient was a lot of fun to play, and no one at the table was complaining when he made tactical decisions that were not 100% optimal. Role playing that switches off in combat, or whenever playing the role becomes inconvenient, is not role playing at all. Duke, I would not have thought you would not be the one suggesting "so build your character as a ruthless warrior against crime, and now it is OK to murder defeated villains", but that is one avenue for "build to suit the tactics you want to use, not the character that will fit the genre and make the game more fun for everyone" easily leads. I do see Everyman skills, and a lot of combat maneuvers that anyone can use. Adding Hero Points or a similar mechanic would be one more such everyman ability. And I will ask again: if everyone got X heroic action points at the start of each scenario (use 'em or lose 'em) by default, and could buy more starting points with CP, would that make it all OK?

A series of bad die rolls resulting in a TPK despite good play, bringing a campaign to a premature end, is not considered the peak of gaming enjoyment by all gamers. "And the dragon fed well that day" is not the closer to a great game session, much less a great campaign.

That was Marvel Super Heroes, albeit in reverse. MSH had Karma, which was primarily used to alter die rolls. But you could save it up and use it for character improvement. Otherwise, characters did not improve. Just like we don't see Superman get tougher and stronger every few issues, your characters have the powers and abilities they started with, and they keep those, but they don't grow over time. Absent, no doubt, in-game "Radiation accidents". As I recall, many gamers were unhappy with stagnant characters they could not "win the game" by improving over time. Having a system geared around playing the characters you were handed by the module, rather than the ones you designed (or rolled) yourself wasn't too popular either, and the character creation system never did really gel. Let's take a step back. We are discussing Role Playing Games. The dice are part of the "game" aspect. We could play with characters who are all identical and have the exact same success and failure chances as everyone else at doing everything. The dice (or the card, or whatever element of random chance resolves the in-game issues) fall where they may. Lots of games do that. Board games, for example. But we wanted variation - we want to play different roles. So some characters are better at some things than other characters are, and our chances of success vary. We want to play Heroes, and not be eliminated by a bad die roll, or drawing the wrong card from the Adventure Deck. So we design games where "killed dead instantly", for example, is not the result of a typical attack in an average combat. Let's see an example of that random failure not being to one player's liking: So, if we all agree that sucks, and we put those cards to one side when we play, is that "cheating"? I can tell you that the many Monopoly players who tuck $500 under the free parking space don't seem to think they are cheating. I also find the Auction rules are often ignored. Are those guys cheating? Back in Hero, I see a lot of posts by players who figure you can just Push whenever you want to, say opening combat since you'll just get a PS12 right after and get that END back. But the rules say Pushing is rare, and only allowed in extraordinarily heroic situations. What if we said the same for Heroic Action Points? The action you want to use them on must be extraordinary, extra-important and extra-heroic (or "extra-in-character"). We could certainly let the dice rule combat - roll 1d6 (or 3d6). On a 6 (or 11-), you kill/defeat your enemy. On a 1 (or 12+), your enemy kills/defeats you. But we want more modifiers. We want to influence the results in our games. Hero Points are just one more means of allowing the players to influence the results of their actions. Does everyone love the mechanic? No. Not everyone prefers a bell curve to a straight d20 roll, or characters built by design rather than rolled with random chance, or rolling low for success instead of rolling high. But all of these are just game mechanics designed to provide a greater or lesser measure of player control over success and failure in the game.

Tactical play is not role playing. Would an Overconfident and Flamboyent character hide in the shadows to creep closer to the enemy, increasing his odds through a surprise attack? Does a Paranoid Loner rely on his teammates, filling them in on all of his abilities and weaknesses, to enhance his chances of success? Does an Impatient, Impulsive character delay his action for a better shot after his teammates set him up? It is very easy for tactical play to trade role playing for roll playing. "So, he won't talk, huh? Torch to the Groin!" "Your Lawful Good, Honorable Paladin is going to torture the prisoners?" "Well, it's important to get this info, and Torch to the Groin is the best modifier in the game for interrogation rolls." Sure. But having the player frustrated because their character consistently fails to achieve anything heroic is not "fun role playing". The role he set out to play has been frustrated by the dice. First off, Wheel of Fortune is competitive, not cooperative, so it makes for a poor analogy. The objective is not for all of the players to have fun, but for one to win a bunch 0of money and two to go home losers. Second, in WoF, buying all the vowels is permitted by the rules. My recollection is that it was Hero System, some years later, that brought in "create the character you want to play". Why not roll all Hero successes and failures on pure percentile, rather than 3d6? The bell curve markedly reduces randomness (notable even compared to d20 systems, much less d%). Heroic Action Points allow a modifier to the randomness, the same as 3d6 reduces randomness from 1d20. If the rules include hero points, then using them is no more "cheating" than Dodging, aborting to Dodge (after you see who he is going to attack? Cheater!) or applying skill levels. Exactly. There is a big difference between "on a limited basis, you can smooth out the excesses of pure random chance" and "just pick the results of every roll you make". In games with HAPs, I do not find them thrown around at random, for trivial tasks. I have certainly seen posters over the years suggest that any "normal human" Super with a DEX of 23+ or a SPD over 4 is a "cheater build". How do you get those characters into play if they have not been created first? Would HAP be OK if they were a base stat (1 HAP per scenario) and you could purchase more? Now it is part of character creation, so all is right with the world? Who has suggested a model where anyone has nearly enough resources to dictate the results of every die roll? You know, there are some gamers who think removing the random chance element of rolling your character is also a "screw the dice" system, and part of the game is "role playing" the character the dice hand you. And if that means (old Chaosium Stormbringer) your character is a beggar from Nadsakor in a party that otherwise consists of Melniboneans and Pan Tangians, so be it. Role play what the dice handed you. If your rolls get you Sweet Sue the Beautiful but Combat Ineffective Romantic Interest to the other players' Superman and Captain America, then you get to role play screaming, being useless in combat and being captured and used as a hostage. What do you mean, let's try a point buy system? That would be screwing the dice! note: Stormbringer actually allowed you to re-roll the Nadsakor result - if you did not want "the challenge of role playing" such a disadvantaged character. I do recall an old article on Top Secret on a James Bond style system to merge the character types that game allowed. One of that "class"'es abilities included, once per level in the scenario, to say "that did not happen". That trap was not sprung, or did not kill the character, for example. Why? Because highly skilled and competent characters should not be slaughtered by the random whims of the dice. Wow, we're going to let players have characters who are competent, even if we violate the dice. HAP do not have to allow a "whoever has the most points gets their way" result. Options exist. Just like we have the option to allow that Tarzan character to leap out of the window, scramble up a phone pole and swing across the street without a roll ("because he's effing Tarzan"), or to force that roll (because the dice fall where they may, and if Tarzan rolls an 18, his hands just slide off the vine). At its core, Hero says you succeed on an 11- and fail on a 12+. We use OCV, DCV, skill levels, characteristics, and on ad infinitum to change those odds, and no one suggests it is "screwing the dice", "poor role playing" or "cheating". HAP is one more possible modifier to the dice.

Roll playing Hero promises you get to play the character you imagine, not the one the dice impose upon you.

Seconded. A separate forum so I don't have to scroll past that and so that reading the Champions forum means that forum is marked as read, would be greatly appreciated.

I'm still back in "what does the game need"? I think it needs that "what is the game" discussion right up front, and that this is where the back cover blurb is drawn from, as well as setting the context for the rest of the game. But we can't draft the larger discussion, or the blurb, without some knowledge of the game itself. Is it Supers? Fantasy? Pulp? Modern Action Hero? It's a genre people are familiar with that does not have dozens of immediate competitors, so this seems as good a genre as any to place our game in. OK, so we open with "what is this game all about?". That's the introduction. Then we are in to character creation. Here, I disagree. The goal is a GAME, not a bunch of dials you can set and knobs you can twist to design your own game. It needs some setting/background, and an adventure, right out of the box. Is that a spies, cops, detectives or mercenaries adventure? Will it be designed around quasi-realistic cops/soldiers or Bruce Lee and John Wick? It does not matter which one you pick, but it definitely matters that we pick one. That sets the parameters of our game. Crop the setting down to what we need for the adventures. Link the adventures. They need to be usable for our one game, not mutually exclusive examples where one sends cops out to investigate a crime in a modern city, a second features mercenaries infiltrating an enemy base to capture a bioweapon, and a third sends out FBI agents to investigate reports of disappearances in a town called Innsmouth. Could we later write these other games? Sure. They don't even have to be separate games - they can provide more source material for their specific game, expanding on what we had in Action Hero. Now, that may mean this is the Action Hero line, and we need to name our individual games in a manner more indicative of their nature. In 1981, the norm for most games was a boxed set, and hope for the best. D&D was the exception, not the norm. TSR liked to release a few more adventures. Villains and Vigilantes released numerous modules and enemies books. Call of Cthulhu had ongoing adventure support. But ongoing support was most definitely the exception, not the norm. Champions was one of the best-supported games by far. That has evolved. We no longer accept "here's a bunch of rules and some sample characters now go forth and create your own adventures". You state the reason perfectly above. Today, we need to present a game Powered by Hero System, supported for ongoing play, not a system you can use to build your own game.

Agreed - that aspect would be part of the broader "about the game" discussion in the book, not the back cover. Specifically, "here is a pool of points and there is a vast array of things they can buy"? No, that's a limited group of games. But, at least in the "modern" games, we have moved from "toss some dice - you may roll a useless peasant, or you may roll Bruce Lee, Albert Einstein and Hercules all rolled into one, topped off with massive superpowers" to "players should get playable characters with an equitable distribution of utility in-game". That means we have some form of "game currency" with which to construct those characters. Pathfinder 1e and D&D 3e adopted a point-buy system for characteristics ("roll the dice" remains an option, race modifies them and you get to add points at later levels). Then you pick a race, a class, skills, feats, maybe traits, spells, a subset of class abilities (e.g the cleric picks a deity), and specific individual class abilities (pathfinder has more of this than D&D). I understand that, in 5e and Pathfinder, your stats are determined by your race, class, background, etc. Oh, and you get gear, which should be consistent with your Wealth by Level (that's right, in-game currency becomes character build game currency). "That's not worth one of your precious feats"; "don't waste a level dip on this class"; "that spell is weak"; "grab this class ability at the first level it is available". These are all game currencies. We could simulate it in Hero - just set a game parameter that you get X points for characteristics, Y for Skills, Z for whatever, whether across all characters or varying across choices of archetypes, but the Hero default is that character points are a "universal game currency". That, of course, leads to "character tax" - if you want to compete, you need to invest in CON, defenses, attacks, SPD, OCV, DCV, etc. etc etc. A lot of that is built in to the D&D model - you don't "buy" STUN and BOD or saving throw bonuses - every level brings more hit points, and your level of investment is determined by archetype - but it is still there. And you can choose to spend other game currency (better CON; certain feats) to enhance those too.

True. So what lead the person who knows absolutely nothing about RPGs to buy a Hero System game? They aren't sitting at the grocery store checkout or the bookstore waiting for an impulse buyer to grab one on a whim. I think a broader "about the game" discussion (probably an expansion of the back cover text (or, viewed another way, the back cover text is the elevator pitch of the detailed "value proposition" in the book itself) would be a better focus for this brief section of the game. You can sneak some "what is an RPG" in there, but we also get "you get what you pay for and pay for what you get", "simulate cinematic fiction" and, for this complete game, the type of game it is designed to deliver. For the system as a whole, it's "the toolkit to customize your Hero System game, or even build your own game from the ground u".

As I recall, levels are not "assigned by default". At the start of combat, they are not assigned. On recovery from being KOd, they are not assigned.

All that bolded stuff is "setting". It's not a huge setting, much less a full-blown detailed world filled with nations the PCs will probably never visit and NPCs they will likely never meet. It's enough setting to play the game. Of course, if the players want their own backstories, that also carries some setting. My character can't come from a desert tribe without a desert, occupied by some tribes. What we don't need is a huge, fully realized world. We need just enough setting to play. More can follow, whether published or home-grown.

Absolutely - you don't have to wait for a splatbook to publish a feat - you can get the design system and build the abiity YOU want right now, or tweak an existing build just so (a cone of ice splinters, for example, or I want a Cold Sphere to emanate in all directions). You decide how much, or how little, of the game design you want to take on.

Of course, as he has 0 DCV, he is pretty vulnerable when he has not assigned his levels. He can't shove someone, or trip them. Tough luck if he wants to Block. I wonder why that is. Should he want to Grab one target and punch another, he splits that OCV between both actions. No smacking a target with a girder, or a live wire, for you. And no tossing a car at the bad guy either. Gosh, if only you could aim the Freeze Gun Maguffin at the HydroBeast, huh?