The Horror

Re: How Long to Learn Hero System? Ha ha ha. I once ran a Shadowrun game without knowing any of the mechanics other than the basic task resolution system. Luckily, one of the players knew the system inside out. I just told him he was in charge of the rules, and concentrated on telling a good story. Whenever I asked for a skill roll he took over explaining it to the other players. Whenever combat started up or magic needed to be used I asked him to help the other players figure out the modifiers involved. The game went great, and by the end of the third session we all had learned the system. The only thing you have to watch out for in Hero is the balance issue. Having experienced players should be a good thing during the game, though in character creation they may end up designing rather unbalanced characters for your game. That's all ok though, as long as you make sure to tell them all that characters will be subject to change for balance purposes later on in the campaign, or that these characters will only be used until everyone (including you) is confortable enough with the system to start up a long term game. I think you are going to have a blast of a time. The Horror

Re: How Long to Learn Hero System? I started off by plowing right into it. Read the book, get a group of friends together and design some characters. Don't worry about screwing things up and just concentrate on getting down to playing. Once the characters are made run them through a one off game. Essentially you should be aiming to teach them the basics of using skills, rolling to hit in combat, using different maneuvers, using the speed chart, and rolling for/applying damage. Everything else is not important at the outset. If you are still not too confident with the system, keep running one off sessions for a while. Slowly introduce the optional rules you want to use as you go. Probably at a rate of 2-3 rules per combat. Within 2-3 sessions you and your players will be ready to start a long term campaign, and you can all sit down and make up new characters for that one, using your new experience with the system to get you exactly what you want. And it pays off for me to reiterate the single best piece of advice I ever received before I started running HERO. "Remember that everything in the game can be boiled down to rolling 3d6 and scoring under a target number." If in doubt, tell the players to roll the dice and make up on the spot whether they succeed or fail. The game will keep moving, and everyone will have a good time. The Horror

Re: What's the most useless supplement you'd actually like to see? And it would appeal to all superhero genre players, not just HERO people.

Re: What's the most useless supplement you'd actually like to see? 10,000 Ways To Be Cool - a book with thousands upon thousands of one liners, ready to be delivered by your favourite character or villain. All perfectly indexed by situation and superpower. "Let off some steam, Bennet."

Re: What should be DROPPED from HERO? Characteristics and skills I haven't forgotten about that thread. It was a brilliant idea that deserves some hardcore implementation. When I finish my PhD I'll see about giving it a good looking over. The Horror

Re: Newbies, All Well, if you guys are keen on playing a supers game I say you just go for it. Get everyone to design 350 pt characters and learn the system. After a couple of sessions let everyone go back and completely redesign their characters. You'll probably need to do this since there will be a lot of things that you'll all have missed. If the players are interested then you've already won half the battle. And I do recommend Sidekick. Probably a better investment to start off with than Star Hero or Dark Champions. The Horror

Re: Newbies, All I found that HERO is really easy during actual play. Remember: most of the time HERO can be boiled down to rolling 3d6 and scoring an 11 or less to succeed. If you don't remember a rule just fudge it and keep going. The players won't know any better anyway, so really as long as you run an entertaining game most of them probably won't care that the system is not being run exactly as written to start off with. Leave off END for the first few games. Don't introduce knockback/knockdown until later on either. You probably just want to concentrate on skill rolls, the Speed chart, odds to hit and damage rolls to start off with. Don't bother with multipowers, ECs or VPPs. I probably complicated things a fair bit by starting off with superheroes too, so I'd suggest starting off with a Heroic level one off session. If you want to go straight for the supers though just dive right in with your players. Explain to them the basics behind the power design of HERO. Explain to them the concept of advantages and disadvantages, then get them to allocate some points on stats and skills. Follow this up by getting them to tell you what sort of powers they would like. Once they describe the effect they are trying to achieve you should be able to very easily design the power for them, making sure to explain what you are doing. And remember: fudge everything you are not sure about. Not sure what disadvantage to apply or how much it costs? Well just make it all up. As you and your group design more and more characters you'll get the hang of things, and the entire thing will go smoother and smoother. Avoid the crunchy bits during actual game play. If you hit your players with too much crunch they might get turned off from the entire thing. Instead emphasise that the power of HERO comes in being able to design anything you want and express it in game terms. Then follow it up by playing through a session that is very fast and relatively rules light. They'll hopefully love it and be hooked thereafter. The Horror

Re: Speeding things up Pretty much yes. I figured something like this could save a lot of time when rolling for damage dealt by bad guys. Just use BODY dealt = # dice rolled, and roll a d10 on the chart for the stun damage. Players could use it as well of course. There is less than 5% chance that a roll will come up beyond the maximum or under the lowest value on that table. If players feel like speeding things up, the chart could be kind of handy. The Horror

Re: Speeding things up What do you guys think of this? The Horror

Re: Speeding things up Btw guys. I've started drafting up the table of results I mentioned. I know you guys won't need it, but it may help some people here and there if they are really sick of adding up 10-20 dice every time. I'll post it up here and at RPGnet (where most of the complaints about speed of play in HEROcome up) when it's done. Should be tonight or the next night. The Horror

Re: Speeding things up The general rule we played with was that the amount of Body inflicted would always be equal to the number of dice rolled, unless the player particularly wanted to count them. It would really speed things up when 10-15 dice were being rolled each time. What do you think of distribution charts though? You could list a roll of 1-10 on the top going across, and the number of dice rolled on the left going down. Then each one of the entries on the table would have the amount of damage dealt. It means that all damage could be boiled down to one d10 roll. The numbers 5 and 6 would be average damage, with less damage (as per the correct bell curve for the number of dice) with a lower roll and higher damage for a correspondingly higher roll on the d10. If the Body counting is standardised like I mentioned above, this would probably really speed things up. The Horror

Re: Best HERO Products for Military SF Campaigns Please do! The only reason I haven't purchased Alien Wars yet is because I know it will be mainly setting specific things as opposed to general military sf info. The Horror

Re: Champions vs other systems I can comment on Godlike. It's been a while, so there may be some small errors which I'd welcome people to correct. On the surface the system seems fantastic. Roll a number of d10 equal to your stat + skill (but never more than 10). You aim to get matching numbers. So rolling up a double of any number will constitute a success. The more matches you get of a number, the faster you succeed. So someone who rolls a triple 2 will go faster than someone who rolls a double 2. The higher the actual number rolled the better you do at it. Now the entire basis behind this is that you can in theory compress every aspect of combat down to the one roll. In actual fact it is a horrible mess that leaves much to be desired. And it's time consuming. Allow me to explain. In combat, matches determine initiative. So if A gets a double 3, B gets a double 5, and C gets a triple 2, then C will act first followed by both A and B. Ok, this is good so far. The actual roll on the match will indicate hit location. So if you roll a double 10 you hit them in the head, whereas a double 2 will hit the legs. Ok so far as well. Now here is where it all screws up. Damage is determined by the weapon used and by the number of matches you get. So if you score a double 5, you will do 2+x damage to your enemy (x is the weapon modifier). If you score a triple 5 you will do 3+x damage to your enemy. The problem with this is that the number of matches also determine initiative, meaning that people acting first will always do more damage with their attacks. There is also a rule in place which states that when you hit someone, they lose a die from the matches rolled in their set. So in the example I get above, C acted first and shot A. Player A would lose one match from his action, reducing it to one die and thereby missing. Another advantage of going first. But it gets better. One of the ways to represent increased difficulty in a task is to increase the number they must roll matches in before succeeding. So for example, a guy running across an open field will be harder to hit than he was standing still. So when you try and hit him you must roll a match on your dice, but they won't count unless the match result is greater than 3. So a double 1 will miss, but a double 4 will hit. Remember how hit location is determined by that same number? Well, it means that in this example you can never hit someone in the legs if they are running! Then there are the armor complications. This is a bit complex so I'll just say that different types of armor behave very differently under this system, leading to absurdities in some specific situations of combat where it becomes better to rely on a thin wood wall for protection than a thick metal one. And I havent' even gone into wiggle and hard dice yet. Actually, hard dice is worth going over for the sheer absurdity. Essentially a hard die is a die you can buy for your super character that will always roll a 10, every single time. So if you buy two hard dice in coordination for example, and you fire a gun at someone, you will always get an automatic match of two dice to hit them in the head (remember, a 10 is a head hit location). But what if they are sticking their head into a sewer opening, and you have to shoot them elsewhere? Well, to get around simple dillemas like that the creators of the game made up a rule. They said that "you actually shoot them elsewhere, but you damage them exactly as if you'd hit them in the head". In other words, you kill them almost every time regardless of where you shoot them. All fine and all until your character dies because he got shot in the finger whilst climbing over a wall. Note that all this is not actually much faster than combat in any other game, Hero included. Everyone must roll their dice together, and check for matches. Then as people get hit they have to keep track of matches they still have left etc. The entire problem with the system is the one roll engine itself. Dennis Detwiller and Greg Stoltze did this in Unknown Armies as well, creating it's own host of problems there. Let me summarise their design philosophy for you: "Steal the best parts of the systems currently in existence that dominate this particular genre of game, then funk it up a little here and there and streamline all the rolls down to a minimum irrespective of how it may screw with common sense." Reading through Godlike I was amazed at how much like Hero it was. To design the powers you do the effect based thing and spend points to purchase up what you want. Only of course the system itself limits exactly what you can do, and a lot of fudging is required all over the place. There is in my eyes no contest between the two games. The only advantage of the Godlike/Wild Talents system is that it appeals to people who can't handle Hero's character creation. Otherwise Hero is better in every respect, including character design and actual play. The Horror

Re: Any Suggestions for a Hero Newbie?

Re: Perry Rhodan Hero That is very cool. At some stage I'll make some inquiries as to whether they hold the license for the English version as well. Regardless, I'm sure there will still be a place in plenty (or some) of people's hearts for my version as well, since it's set in the first cycle of the series. Damn. I wish I had the time to learn German. One day, when I finish studies, maybe... The Horror