ghost-angel

I have noticed that Hero is getting compared to Genre Specific games a whole lot. Which isn't particularly fair. It's easy to zone in, narrow down, and simplify choices when you're trying to create a specific feel for a specific genre & setting. Hero is not a beast of that nature, the rules inherently have no genre attached, nor should they. They shouldn't even default to the assumed Superhero Genre. Which makes "introductory/intermediate/advanced" harder to contend with. How can you tell the introductory player "You can make anything you want! As long as your idea doesn't involve these constructs which we've deemed more advanced and too complicated..." It's where Hero Basic kind of failed, it literally left some cool options out.

I like the idea of finding Combat level applications for Skills though, some may have limited use, or no use... And then there's using a Skill during Combat vs for Combat. AK: NYC used during a hi speed chase for example can help give a bonus to the next Combat Driving Roll while you shoot out the window at the other driver... Electronics maybe to help take down a Power Suit (or other Gadget type) could also be applicable in the right circumstances.

There are also some Change Environment options that can do similar things. You can also do weird things like: Damage Negation; Requires Skill Vs Skill Roll (your Oratory vs their EGO) If you win you take less damage from them during the fight.

A Variable Power Pool is the simplest method of allowing for the creation of a wide variety of weapons. But if the only things changing are the special effects, and the attack itself is remaining the same (always a 12D6 ranged attack, or always a 3D6 Killing Attack) then Variable Special Effects may be an easier model to work with, certainly less up front work as the Player just needs to describe the SFX for each attack rather than rebuild the Power all the time.

I see Breakfall more when you're not in control of the fall; Knockback, Knockdown, actually falling off of something, Thrown... Acrobatics is a controlled fall, more or less. Use Acrobatics instead of DEX as a Dive For Cover roll seems logical, and having the added benefit of using an actual skill should (or could) give you the added benefit of not ending up Prone: that moment when the hero dives out of the way of the explosion, and rolls up to a crouched position behind cover; for example. This is as much about giving Skills some use in Combat as it is preventing everything from falling down onto one skill only; Breakfall already has a myriad of defined uses, spreading the fun around a little can give characters who focus on such things a bit of a chance to shine a little more (just about everyone buys Breakfall, not so much Acrobatics). Also, even if everyone has both on their sheets, using different Skills in different situations makes everyone feel like their whole character sheet is getting used, not just a narrow focus.

Here's how I would play it: Acrobatics means you don't end up prone. DEX Roll means you end up prone. It's a small thing, but paying points for an actual Skill should get you a little something something.

I think as short, 96-page splat books groups like Eurostar could totally get their own book. Or PDFs. Frankly, I'm tired of 200+ page hero books. The entire library is entirely too thick on the bookshelf. This system is entirely too verbose at times. A Slug book would be cool to see though, that'd be interesting I think.

round and round the conversation goes... anyone else getting dizzy? Why something is done is as important as What is done. Shiva just seems to assume any level of efficiency or optimization is done to be abusive, or is inherently disruptive. That's as bad as pure, point grabbing, out-to-get-everyone, player-vs-gm, gaming out there. Some players just tweak until they get their vision just right, and sometimes that means a bit of manipulation to get the most of from their allotted point totals. They aren't out to disrupt the game, probably won't even actually disrupt the game. Unless you assume that it always will, then it probably will - because you as the GM let it disrupt the game by you yourself getting more caught up in how a player used points then why a player used points. You're as bad as any munchkin at that point. Probably worse.

I use it more like an Attack Skill 11 + OCV = Attack Roll 11 + OCV 6 = 17- Roll the number you make it by is the DCV hit. Modifiers apply like they do to Skills, either before or after the roll.

All this said; it's entirely possible to create a Game which is mostly, or all, Skill Based instead of Power based. You just have to be careful how much benefit comes from a Skill versus other, more traditional, sources. Or at least, how often the benefit comes into play, and you'll probably be rolling dice a lot more often for what be otherwise simpler tasks. If you do try this, have the group sit down and outline exactly what kinds of benefits various Skills and levels of success get you... Fighting in the rigging of a ship? Climbing can be used to reduce/remove penalties, enhance movement, used to gain surprise, or mitigate it... As an example of ways you can get creative with Skills & Combat, with or without the use of Power Based Talents...

I have the same experience with most game systems: Those who want to learn a system, any system, will sit down and read the book and learn it. Those who don't, but want to show up, play a character, roll some dice, and game, won't. Ever. Doesn't matter if it's Hero or D&D Basic. Someone will have to make the character for them, let them fill in non-mechanical details, keep their sheet updated, and get input when it's time to add things; You generally only have to show these types of players where things are on the sheet once or twice, maybe help them with the dice here and there, mostly they simply do not care about mechanics. Simple or Complex. Anecdote is not Data; but the experience tends to be pretty constant from my view: Some will learn the game engine because they want to, Some will learn only their character sheet. And the type of system is completely irrelevant.

Not buying that. They said the same thing when TV was introduced. And when Radio was introduced. And when mass printed books were introduced. Probably when paper was invented too. Every technology makes us less attentive, or less patient, or less intelligent (yeah, fun fact: people who read aren't a tiny subset of people, more books are getting sold every year, it's a multi-billion dollar industry and growing - http://publishers.org/news/us-publishing-industry%E2%80%99s-annual-survey-reveals-28-billion-revenue-2014 ). Social media has connected us more, isolated us less, allowed small groups to become medium groups. Allowed ideas to be shared more accurately and more quickly. Your market is now always global all the time. As has also been pointed out: modern RPGs really aren't all that much more simplified than previous decades. We may be getting better at presentation, but they certainly aren't "light and breezy"; I just read the new Dresden Files RPG book, lots of crunch in there. Not Hero-numbers crunch, but definitely crunch. Maybe if we stopped treating new comers to the RPG hobby like their favorite new RPG is some kind of fake, "you kids got it easy":, back-in-day uphill both ways belly aching we'd get a few more permanently in the door... (and I don't mean just here, I mean everywhere I turn in this hobby is some old dude yelling at the clouds about how games today suck.)

You could always do something like "Acrobatic: +3 DCV, Requires An Acrobatics Roll" - make your roll you get more DCV. But generally, what you're talking about is the difference between Special Effect & Mechanics. Since other systems don't have the separation, they inherent mix the two ideas into one pot. In Hero - you have to simulate what Effect you're going for, matched with the Special Effect of what you're describing. Since Acrobatics the Skill only has the Mechanic of performing Acrobatic Tricks (that is all it does Mechanically); It has no other direct applications. In Hero whatever you want to happen Mechanically you have to purchase. No, that isn't to say that they can't help with properly done Role Playing, use of Skills, and Situational Modifiers by creative GMs & Players; For example; In a fight where you have cover, an enterprising group might say at 1/2 Cover or more you can try and duck quickly, perhaps an Acrobatics Roll to gain 3/4 Cover instead...

Skills are used in Combat, or you can use them in Combat all the time. Though using Acrobatics to avoid an Attack bypasses the whole idea of DCV (it'd be much cheaper to buy Acrobatics to a very high roll than buying a high DCV). Breakfall has some very specific roles to play in combat, with regards to Knockback/Knockdown. You can use Skills as complimentary to getting Surprise while already in a fight. If the GM allows Analyze might apply in some situations (Analyze: Fighting Style for instance to gain a CSL for the fight, as a possibility). Fantasy Hero has outlined a Feint Skill for using in sword fighting if there's a focus on that in the campaign. There's lots of imaginative ways a GM and Players can come up with to incorporate skills into combat if they wanted.

The gist of the conversation seems that the way 6E split up things was hard to parse, and kind of pain & perhaps it should be split a little more like this: Players Book 1. Introduction 2. Character Creation 2a- Point Totals For Genres 2b- Characteristics 2c- Skills 2d- Perks & Talents 2e- Pre-Built Powers (a couple builds of each Power, with some variations for flavor, Choose Your Special Effect & Write It On The Sheet) 2f- Compliations 3. Playing The Game (Senses, Movement, Maneuvers, Damage, etc, blah & so on) 4. A Basic Setting for major genres GMs Guidebook 1. Introduction 2. Setting Character Point Totals & Genre Discussion 3. Some more Optional Rules (possibly?) 4. The Mechanics: The Builds from Players Handbook: This is where the meat of 6E1 sits, How to make, break, modify, spin, mutilate, drop, bend, and mishandle the Hero System 5. Changing The System So book one looks similar to 6E1, but where there's 300 pages of Powers + Modifiers there's probably a much smaller page count of Simple Power Builds in a "Pick & Go kind of way); & the first half of 6E2 should be there too - so any Player can pick up the book, sit down, rock out a Character, and get on with the game. The GMs Book has the meat of the Power Descriptions in pure raw form, basically all the tools in the box for any enterprising person at the table to go nuts in classic Hero fashion. It has more in depth look at how to put together the system, how to mix elements, and lots of Optional Rules (like all the extensive bleeding rules). You've got one book aimed at the whole group, with the rules for actually making & playing a character. as well as some basics on running the campaign. The second book is all the stuff that makes Hero tick in all it's messy aspects. The audience here is GMs looking to set up their own worlds, players who tinker, and long time Hero gamers. After that, Genre books are nice, and I like Hero's in depth look at a Genre, but we also need actual, set in stone "These are the parameters & campaign" World Books, complete with a chapter for Players with some more builds in it & and a GM Chapter with how the campaign world is laid out mechanically (this includes things like what is and isn't allowed, assumed power level, how magic works in this fantasy world, etc and so on). It keeps the main fairly generic, as is Hero's strength, and provides some ongoing splat book creation within campaign worlds...

L. Marcus beat me to it. Obviously Pursuit Predation is not the most efficient technique ever invented; but combined with some basic tool use & the way humans are built specifically for that kind of task, it is probably a major tool in our evolutionary path from then to now. One of the things pointed out is that Humans can still operate at peak efficiency during the heat of the day; most animals cannot. 3 Hours in high heat at maximum performance is merely a reason for us to drink more water, and is nearly fatal to just about everything else.

Part of the problem is we like to think of evolutionary advantages as a one-on-one kind of thing; Long Distance Endurance helps us hunt animals; so we picture a hunter running down a gazelle. It's more like long distance endurance allows large groups to hunt down even larger groups. One guy probably didn't chase down a gazelle. Ten guys probably got together and hunted down several of them using endurance & tacitcs & tools. Gazelle are great sprinters, not so great at even a 3 hour chase. Or 2 hour chase. It also allows an entire pack of humans to migrate a great distance as a group and ensure pretty much every makes it to the other end of the journey, and pretty quickly when we really don't have to stop for anything but short rests.

Yes, but I didn't say chase a single prey over a long range; I said we have the largest range of any animal. We hunt farther afield than just about anything, couple with nomadic attributes, and as Sinanju pointed out the ability to move outside disaster areas - that super long range is a massive evolutionary benefit. Sure, it's stupid to hunt one animal into exhaustion. But we can hunt entire herds into exhaustion, or simply change locals on a whim. That's huge, most animals stay within a climate zone, we don't. We can hunt from mountain to savannah to jungle, and back up the mountain in a single week. Very few other things do that. When you combine tool use and "can jog a very long time" we become a supreme predator. It's also good for getting away from predators (at least a group, we may lose one or two guys who aren't so in shape on the way out).

This works if you're Just aiming for new players. But I think the entire thing, top to bottom, needs a cleanup in display. Why would I graduate from Easy To Read to Word Salad? I wouldn't. No, we need to strip down to the start How We View Things, we do not need to remake how it's built, Hero is about seeing the engine running the car. Make it that way from top to bottom and your Introductory and Standard rules don't even need to look different, the difference will only be in Scope & Options, not Builds & Display. It's an easier transition if you don't suddenly have to relearn how to read a Power Build. So no, I don't think we should be stripping out the List (and cost) of Advantages & Limitations from a build to get new gamers in; I think we need to present them in a fashion that people can actually quickly grasp.

It gives by far the largest hunting range of any predator species. One of our actual evolutionary advantages is the ability to sweat - seems weird, but even other animals that can sweat like we do suffer massively for the effort (horses, for example, can sweat but it's very bad for them and horse trainers do everything they can to avoid prolonging the condition). When your hunting range is potentially "I wonder what the other side of the continent looks like?" you're in a whole new ball game from most any other species. New climates? Thanks to tool use we can walk through a dozen climates in a few weeks by dramatically changing our covering to whatever we want (and can catch, skin, and wear). That's an advantage for sure, too. In a Sci-Fi setting, Humans are basically the Orcs.

RE music with a different note every millisecond: It's called Extratone and starts at 1000BPM and goes up from there (no, the human ear cannot discern individual notes at that speed, yes the people who listen to this regularly are strange, but they are happy). [here - warning, it's not actually that pleasant to listen to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeQ4hKr1IZI ] And I picked an over-built power on purpose to demonstrate what happens to how we present things in an extreme situation. Under normal circumstances it doesn't nearly as bad, but cleaning up the presentation even a little bit can go a long way to making the style of Hero's crunch look easy to deal with: 3 Elements: Power + Level Advantages Limitations Long time players will naturally see it broken down that way, if you read through the book it kind of splits out that way (but not entirely as many Modifiers exist next to Power write-ups themselves if they're specific to only that Power). But when every publication writes it down, it's just a block of letters with no easily recognized organization unless you're already familiar with the system. The point is not to argue over how overly detailed are or aren't; There are quite a few Hero products that aren't over built (in fact, over building is something I see more in players than the books, to be honest); But it's equally poorly displayed. With proper display you can make even the most convoluted build digestible, and that's the point I was going for.

I'd just go with Partially Limited Powers personally.

Or just use different colored dice... 12D6 Explosion; Character A has 3DC DN; Character B has 5 DC DN; Character C has no DN: 3 Red, 2 Blue, 7 White Dice = Character A takes White + Blues Dice; Character B takes White Dice; Character C takes all Dice.

On a very basic level, the UI for the book is difficult to parse. the biggest thing about Hero is How Stuff Is Built; and to show how it's built, you need to show all the pieces in a way that can be easily read - and not just by people who have been reading Powers for a few decades, but especially new players. I grabbed the following from Lucius' list of various water power builds in the Drinking Water thread as an exmaple; Look at this mess: Just fill it with the Fire Hose: (Total: 84 Active Cost, 28 Real Cost) Dispel 4d6, Does Knockback (+1/4), Area Of Effect (4m Radius; +1/4), Double Knockback (+1/2), Fire Powers (+1/2), Double Knockback (+1/2), Double Knockback (+1/2), Cumulative (96 points; +1), Reduced Endurance (0 END; +1), Autofire (5 shots; +1/2), Non-Standard Attack Power (+1) (84 Active Points); Conditional Power Must be standing by the pool to change it (-1 1/2), Reduced By Range (-1/4), Incantations (-1/4) (Real Cost: 28) This is a Hero Designer display which is better than the books in that listed AP & RP twice it at least puts one of them at the start of the build, the books rarely (if ever) do something so helpful. Heck most of the Character builds (all? Didn't actually look at every book just now) don't even list Active Points, just Real Points/Cost; totally useless for when Adjustment Powers come into play. Now: Just fill it with the Fire Hose: Dispel 4d6 Does Knockback (+1/4), Area Of Effect (4m Radius; +1/4), Double Knockback (+1/2), Fire Powers (+1/2), Double Knockback (+1/2), Double Knockback (+1/2), Cumulative (96 points; +1), Reduced Endurance (0 END; +1), Autofire (5 shots; +1/2), Non-Standard Attack Power (+1) (84 Active Points) Conditional Power Must be standing by the pool to change it (-1 1/2), Reduced By Range (-1/4), Incantations (-1/4) (Real Cost: 28) It's still a bit of a jumble, but mostly from just sheet size. The build is easily dividable into separate pieces with meaning with just some line breaks: Name; Base Power (what you roll, what the Power is) Advantages (total Active Points after all are applied) Limitations (total Real Points after all are applied) We could probably make this is even better with things like totaling up Advantages and Limitations and possibly even adding Base Points. Yeah, it might take more space, and this may be an example with a lot more Advantages & Limitations than you normally see, but the extremes start to show us the jumble we parse constantly. I find the listing of Active Points in the middle of the build in the book especially problematic, I have to scan the entire build to find the stop of Advantages (or Base if none) to find the AP. That's annoying. It could easily be listed thusly: Just fill it with the Fire Hose: Dispel 4d6 (Total: 84 Active Cost, 28 Real Cost) Does Knockback (+1/4), Area Of Effect (4m Radius; +1/4), Double Knockback (+1/2), Fire Powers (+1/2), Double Knockback (+1/2), Double Knockback (+1/2), Cumulative (96 points; +1), Reduced Endurance (0 END; +1), Autofire (5 shots; +1/2), Non-Standard Attack Power (+1) Conditional Power Must be standing by the pool to change it (-1 1/2), Reduced By Range (-1/4), Incantations (-1/4) Name; Power & Dice You Roll (Active & Real Points) [You can even add END or Charges here if using something other than official Char Sheet 3-col breakdown] Advantages Limiatations Points are scanned faster (they're always at the front, and together); Again simple line breaks turn a jumble into a more readable aspects; Benefits / Restrictions are not all together in one massive block. (I didn't build the power, I have no idea what it has Double Knockback 3 times either... but picturing it is funny).

Here's how TNG was explained to me, and backed up superficially by a magazine article I read: TNG actually had a massive female audience by somewhere in the second season, and it grew as the writers wrote the show less like a Sci-Fi Epic and more like a Soap Opera. By the end of the shows run it was firmly a Space Opera; interestingly by most surveys ST has the highest percentage of female fans over other specific fandoms, with TNG being still the most popular of the shows overall in fandom with women liking it more than men, usually. Which goes a long way to explaining why it always took an entire episode to flip the polarity on the main dish and solve the problem in the denouement while basically having a drama unfold in the previous 42 minutes.