mhd

I've checked my Sovereign Stone stuff, apparently it's a "Bahk". Which sounds like something a Bostonite would say.

The magic system of my current campaign is a conversion, The original, being a very skill-heavy game in general, treated every spell as its own skill. Low skill levels were pretty cheap, so wizards had lots of spells. But most of them were still pretty specialized, with each academy devoted to one branch of wizardry (divination, combat magic, summoning etc.). Most spells aren't that powerful (a fireball is very rare), and regeneration of mana points is closer to LTE than normal END. Yet to emulate some of the spells, I've hit close to 60 active points (telepathy and barriers are expensive in HERO). As this isn't really the most superpowered game, starting points where 125. Which is perfectly fine for all the fighting types, and the more rogue-ish party members even had trouble spending their points without introducing elements that didn't fit with the background. But, of course, a caster having about 20 spells he's reasonably proficient with would be quite expensive. So my starting situation was closer to some of the systems found in Fantasy Hero: There's a 10 point perk that allows you to cast (and serves as your basic endurance reserve), and everything else was just a 2+1 skill, like PS/SS. That produced a pretty long skill list and high costs, so after some deliberation we switched to something a little simpler: One regular 3+2 skill per magical area (divination, healing, elemental fire etc.), plus a "spell familiarity" cost of one point. That made things a bit neater, your academy's specialty spells are now mostly one skill, so you can have that at a higher level than the universal spells or those you just learnt for adventuring. Sure, when you add a new spell related to something you know really well it starts out at nigh perfection, instead of you having to raise it over time, but that isn't necessarily bad. But I'm worried that this doesn't scale that well, either, once the character visited enough academies and bought enough spells books to potentially learn a lot more than 20 spells... So I'm looking for some ideas. Again, the system should at least try to fit the follow items: - lots of spells known (elves: 10-20, wizards: 20-50+) - specialization, i.e. your ability to cast a spell shouldn't just be determined by its difficulty/roll penalty. - low point total Some things I considered: - lowering costs for the outliers regarding AP, so that a power framework might be viable (makes the spells rather useless, though) - One power skill, but limit its value, then use skill bonuses to model specialization - dropping the spell familiarities, so what you know is just handled in-game - straight skill roll or skill penalties independent from the HERO rules (that would get rid of HERO's balancing, not good) - One skill, mastery is defined by the power itself (i.e. there's not just one spell, but you increase the AP's over time -- that would require the players getting more involved, as I'm not going to do 5 versions of each spell in HD) - Back to skill/spell, but make it 1+1

If I remember correctly it's some kind of not-quite ogre from Elmore's own not-quite-D&D world of "Loerem" (*groan*). Where dwarves are Hungols and elves Wapanese. The cover itself is better than a lot of his usual fare, as there are no women in it...

Definitely no actual boxes. I don't think they're a very good idea if you want to evoke interest -- they're a good entry point if there's already interest, but you don't want to invest too much money and time to get a first few games started. Sorry, but HERO isn't at that level. I think Champions Complete has shown that HERO can be surprisingly slim (in a non cut-down version). My ideal (yet very unlikely) core book would actually be generic (no generic fantasy, no four color supers, no gun nuttery) and digest-sized. And OGL

Sure, there's complexity in both, but quite often there's a trade-off between simplification and ease of use. Unless there's a redundancy, of course. And two damage systems look a bit like that, whereas it's harder to pick something that doesn't mess things up in the power creation stack. Unless you were restricting yourself to pure superheroics, of course. Serving two masters ain't easy.

The mathphobia of gamers sometimes is astounding, considering that we're generally regarded as a rather geeky hobby. Somehow I think this is getting worse, considering that we get more and more games that are trying to avoid even (mental) addition -- success counting dice pools or dice escalation are quite en vogue. Heck, there are quite a few games out there who just use a single d6. Which completely baffles my risk-averse German mind -- you might as well be playing Russian Roulette! Although, to be fair, while I have no problems with fractions during character creation and other easily automated mathematics, some of the mechanics strike me a bit as needlessly baroque. Combat rolls vs. skill rolls and normal damage vs. killing damage rolls, for example.

Well, it worked in GURPS, which pretty much uses the same base mechanic. Bell curves are great for that, don't get me wrong, nothing wrong with that as the core. Then it's all just a matter of difficulty and skill levels. I generally prefer a wider spread for that, as it gives the characters more room to grow. So something from 11- to 21- would be great. (Rather rare in HERO, more common in GURPS 3E, a victim of "normalization" in GURPS 4E) Skill use is quite specific to campaign styles, so it's easy enough to just use a wider variety for e.g. heroic games, whereas in superheroic ones it's mostly a binary thing, where difficulty levels come in rarely. It was quite popular the first years I spent on the interwebs, so mea culpa… That was actually one thing I didn't quite like about Cyberpunk 2020, the attributes were just too cheap, especially once augmentation came into play, made skills and thus specialization less important. Most later Fuzion variants toned this down a bit. Never mind that some of them had an insane amount of core characteristics, with more of them used as skill bases. HERO and GURPS are a bit minimalistic in that regard.

Right of the bat I can think of two games that solved that problem nicely. One being "Big Eyes Small Mouth", the anime RPG, where your skill cost structure depended on the genre -- so a science skill cost you a lot in a sci-fi setting, but considerably less so in a high school hijinx game. The other game is Shadowrun, where in the later editions you got a pool of points to spend for background skills only, often leading to some semi-useless knowledges ("Kung Fu Movies", "Video Star Hangouts" etc.). The latter could easily be done in HERO, especially if you're already partitioning points (e.g. characteristics/skills/powers). Different cost levels -- apart from being a hassle without electronic help -- have some issues in HERO as it is, one being just a few cost levels to work with until characteristics are the cheaper buy, another being skill levels that cover skills with different costs. Probably not worth it. I'm generally not the biggest fan of HERO's skill system. It feels slightly tacked on, a distant second fiddle to powers. Looking at some characters, it seems like the usual spread of skill levels is 0-3, unless it's a power skill, where it's usually as high as you can afford. Mostly because power skills have a much higher variety of modifiers that apply, so just having them doesn't guarantee you a success as much as normal skills do. Never mind the high base that superheroic characteristics grant you. Which is also why the initial buy in for a skill is that high, as it's often expected that that's all there's ever gonna be about it (Clark Kent doesn't noticeably improve his PS:Reporter over the course of the game, I guess) I think this was solved well enough in Fuzion. For heroic characters, your attribute bonus usually doesn't exceed +5 often, and then your skill goes from +1 to +10. Seems like a good balance. One of the APGs has an alternate skill system surprisingly similar to this.

Sorry, but that sounds awfully curmudgeonly. Cheat codes have been around for almost as long as video gaming existed. Heck, back in the days we spent quite a wad of cash on things like "game genies" and other hardware workarounds, never mind software patches and savegame editors. And nowadays people pay friggin' money to watch people play games with the hardest settings and/or self-imposed restrictions ("permadeath" etc.). We have more (legal/first-party) options when it comes to video gaming, but that's it. Everything else is mostly a numbers game, as both the total playing time/game and the sheer amount of gamers have increased by orders of magnitude. (And arcade games have always been almost separate entities, for obvious reasons.) Extrapolating from that for tabletop games seems a bit odd. Never mind that we had board and wargames way before someone put two transistors together. And if we're mixing up game types, usually that's were we're looking for our historical foundations. Gygax and his ilk weren't exactly basing D&D on Galaga and Centipede. Deadliness was mostly due to the fact that you don't really spend time to create your French Napoleonic war unit nor are you emotionally invested in it. Quite different in role-playing games, especially the post-Gygaxian ones (seriously, never read anything exciting about Gary's games from my POV). Also, even if I'd rate games that much more deadly back then, I wouldn't equate that with an exaggerated need for simplicity at all. I've played Wizardry/Ultima, I've played Mass Effect/Oblivion and I really wouldn't rate the latter that much more simple. Sure, when it comes to the total amount of people playing games out there, we've got more people playing Tetris' descendants than those of the gold box games, but, again, we've got way more people playing games in toto. Waaaaay... So let's not get too bothered about those analogies. Never mind that the generational gap isn't as big as we'd like to think, it's not gangs of youths playing new-fangled simplistic story RPGs, a huge part of it still consists of the same (slightly more paunchy) dudes who spent their school days mapping out dungeons and devising silly traps. I'm hailing from the trackless wastes of the software industry, where terms like "dumbing down" are often used as well -- and better be avoided. Never mind what Heinlein said, specialization is pretty natural. The gamer who knows a bit of everything has as much a hard time as the craftsman, engineer, programmer or writer with similar delusions of grandeur. When things get more complex, it's time to introduce multiple levels of concern and abstraction. (No, modern cars aren't purposely made more complex so that you can't service them yourself like your dad claimed to do.) Sure, we can argue whether games actually have gotten more complex. I think they did, on average. Yes, it's still a lot of the same structure, but that can be said about TV shows, too. And there we did progress a bit from the days of Rocket Command Cody to contemporary HBO shows, I would dare to say. Sometimes you don't need a lot to cross a threshold. One game I'd always recommend to look at when it comes to changes isn't an obscure story game that's all about your vampire catgirl's inner feelings and her struggle with Jungian archetypes. It's Savage Worlds: A pretty derivative "generic" & pulpy role-playing game. And actually still not without its complexities (it's no Star Wars D6 1E). But it has a more rigid structure and rather narrow way of presentation: No single pool of points and a pretty straight-foroward orientation towards a cinematic playing style. I do wonder how much of that you could build on top of a more generic game like HERO. Sure, you've got youre LEGO building blocks, but they're packaged to re-create the current Star Wars spaceship. Compare FH1 with FH6...

What I also liked a lot from a publishing perspective are all-in-one books, where you've got a basic or lite version of the rules system in the core book. Like GURPS did with Discworld or HERO with Lucha Libre Hero. I mean, I personally don't get a lot out of it as I do have the core books, but it's a good introduction to the system for other people. Not that I'm saying that a lot of stand-alone and/or franchised games are that great. It would be great as a licensing option, though. Let's say I want to publish a few versions of my "Leather Pants of the Ancients" sword & sorcery setting. The Savage Worlds and Pathfinder versions don't need auxiliary materials, because everyone either already has the system (PF) or can buy it for a buck (SW), but I'd be allowed to reprint "HERO Basic" as an appendix for the HERO version, so no one has to think twice about buying a superhero system or two massive ablative armor sets.

I like it, but I could see using some rules options instead of it. The Wounding option (6E2 108) would come to mind, where instead of being in Mortal Kombat "Finish Him" mode, you're just psychologically reluctant for a moment -- also triggered by BODY instead of STUN. You can also ditch the free recovery. This means that temporary vulnerable states are the player's choice, especially if there's no STUN inflation. So to cut a long story short, I could picture alternate scenarios but I do like the "temporary setback" mechanism instead of the "shop til you drop" approach of D&D-esque hitpoints, or most death spirals. Combined with aborting actions and different speeds ('though I'm not as sure about the latter), this brings a unique rhythm to combat scenes.

Urging the tactics dude towards the long-range spectrum? Dear Hastur, no. Ranged character builds tend to be easy enough to abuse, especially on the heroic level. Never mind that in a modern campaign you don't want to give Mr. Tacticool more opportunities than usual to bring out his gun nuttery. Not that this is a big problem. Tactics monsters tend to read even new games in one slew and start the session by asking the GM about his interpretation of all the patchy parts.

Newbies or chronically indecisive players tend to do well in ranged combat support roles, so I tend to steer them in that direction. Fewer advantages and abilities to keep track off, no "this build isn't optimal!" episodes and usually just a choice between "I shoot the dude/monster/blob!" and "I hunker down, trying not to salty tears into my wound". (I'd still like someone to make a dice calculator that works with actual physical objects. Either by having very funky, non-Zocchi-approved dice or some kind of visual pattern recognition)

Anyone ever done a calculation comparing the relative costs and benefits of location PSLs, Deadly Blow dice and straight OCV levels?

I've seen it happen with dedicated combat archers. Ranged combat just doesn't have as much fun stuff to spend their points on than melee dudes, especially if you're not playing some "ranger" type...

I don't even want to know about the rugose post-modern philosophical and/or mathematical twists that would manifest themselves if professionals would try to properly define "balance" here -- I would assume the best result would be a theorem disproving the mere possibility (plus some French guys sneering at that) In games this generally means that we're operating on a spectrum, i.e. it's usually about being "balanced enough", for certain purposes. And I'd say that within HERO, we've got a big sub-spectrum within that range. On one side, you've probably got silver age superheroes. No optional rules that complicate things, maybe not even killing damage. Most powers constructed without pedantic bit-twiddling. Combats that happen rather spontaneously and are big slug-fests, without too much tactical prep work (esp. regarding gadgeteers, summoners and other spoilsports). On the other end, I guess we'd be talking about fantasy (or very wibbly-wobbly space opera). Equipment but also special powers, and the latter possibly within a framework as presented by the various magical systems in FH and other supplements, where it's not a totally tractable point built but a guesstimating "sorcery level 12", "advanced necromancy" deal. I'm running something like this at the moment, and yet I'm still thankful for the fiddly details: Even if it's not a big part about balancing the character's point values, it's still a help in balancing the game itself. I still get an estimate of the rough power level by looking at the active points, and the higher those are, the harder it is for the wizards (skill modifier). Which is probably all you can want in a game this generic. Actually, in future products I wouldn't mind seeing more of this laissez-faire approach to character point values, although maybe not in the core book itself. Alternate character creation methods would seem neat, like a lifepath system.

Heroic games still do.

Still not as scary as Thorian botany class.

Like I said on rpg.net, if we're talking about TV and especially movie transformers, the "alternate form" is a pretty minor special effect, especially if transformation is either instant (movies) or not part of the normal time frame (like the TV cut scenes). Simulating all the minor peculiarities of the vehicle form is rarely worth it, we're not talking about really dualistic creatures like werewolves here. Heck, not even power suit heroes, who tend to be slightly more squishy out of armor. Most of the time it's a disguise, possibly with a bit of extra movement. Do we really have to simulate the fact that you can't hold on to some McGuffin in vehicle form, that you might get a speeding ticket or have some kind of malfunction chance if your alternate shape is a GM car?

I'm European, we throw like girls.

Those youths might not understand that, but everyone understands the universal language of nerf darts to the skull.

There might be some generational disconnect there, too. Checking your facesnapterest seems second nature to some and often is more interrupting to the GM than to the person actually doing that.

Not edgy enough. Can you make this pop, more web 2.0?

Instead of totally rebranding, one could look for a similar systems and try to get a "child" system that can focus on new things, wherease both HERO and the new partner system could remain the same. Y'know, some kind of "Union" system.

I got that a lot in the D20 times. Although it came a bit with the territory, if your whole business model is about crunchy splatbooks, you're going to find that people will download stuff if they just need it for that one feat or class to finish their "build". Some HERO books have a similar issue, if I mostly use it for reference when creating stuff a PDF serves fine, too. Especially considering that reference hardcopys are usually quite expensive and heavy to lug around. In my experience this was less the case with the books you're more likely to read from cover to cover (or at least large bits). So setting information or background splats fared better. Heck, everyone probably knows a White Wolf completist, whether it's about Vampire clanbooks or Exalted don't-even-wanna-know supplements. This has two sides: If you're already in a bad position to publish (good) printed works, you're more likely to focus on reference stuff instead of expositionary material. Which is one reason why there are no more interesting GURPS products. I'm not really an industry insider, but what seems to work is either stuff you need at the table (core rules, adventures), the aforementioned reading material (background exposition, setting guides, kickstarted coffee table books) or stuff that's more convenient to buy than wait for a download to appear (often rather tiny stuff, e.g. a few pages of M&M powers, a Dungeon World playbook, a class). I still wonder whether we can't improve the presentation of reference material. Things like powers & monsters might benefit from a more database-y display than just PDFs or ePub, even if those are decently indexed and linked. Basically the electronic equivalent of ring binders, like AD&D 2E and HarnMaster tried to use them.