Joe Walsh

Rules for escaping from a building fire, if they were written by some of the AD&D parties I ran campaigns for back in the early 80s.
https://universeodon.com/@UncleDuke1969/109847699322241496

What a great game!
 
And what an awful, anti-climactic ending. 

I'm reminded of the 1st ed discussion of Special Effects and the example of the shapeshifting character with the ultra multipower.  One slot was Flight,,special effect: turns into an Eagle; another, Growth: turns into a giant ape; HKA: tiger; etc.
 
(It thought: Make it multi slots and turn onto a wider variety of things.)
 
It may seem primitive or lacking granularity or something, but, really, it was fine. 
 
(I suppose you could have added a physical limitation just as a catchall, "can't do things the form he assumes couldn't.")
 
So yeah, no need for Multiform (though I suppose you could think of Multiform as whole characters stuffed into slots of a huge multipower)

Coming back to this, I did some research into what public domain characters are out there that Hero could take advantage of.
 
Mythology: Greco-Roman, Norse, and to a lesser extent Egyptian.  Other mythologies remain an untapped resource but you start to run into a familiarity problem if you're targeting an American audience.
Folklore: Fairy tales, Robin Hood, King Arthur, Beowulf, Sigurd, St. George, Sinbad, Ivanhoe, Paul Bunyan, Aladdin
Victorian/Pulp: Frankenstein, Dracula, the Headless Horseman, Cthulhu, Zorro, King Kong, Captain Nemo, Long John Silver, Dr. Jekyll, Sweeney Todd, Alice in Wonderland, Allan Quatermain, Scrooge, Gulliver, Three Musketeers, Airboy, Tom Sawyer
Pulp (and later) Supers: Daredevil (red and blue version), The Phantom, Atoman, Moon Girl, Miss Fury, Black Terror, Phantom Lady
 
So the biggest problem for Hero is the lack of recognizable public domain supers.  The ones I list are pretty awesome, actually, but the only reason I know of any of them is because I've gone down some serious rabbit holes during superdrafts.
 
Otherwise, fantasy has the biggest public domain footprint, since it's a broad genre that can include myth, folklore, fairy tales, and horror.  Pulp has a surprisingly large public domain body of work to draw on as well, especially if you include horror again.
 
The strength of Hero is that the system could easily support a sword-and-planet pulp pirate horror fairy tale mythology setting...
 
 

I started collecting comics seriously during the Bronze Age, 1970s-80s, and I still maintain that's when the medium really came into its own. Characters with heroic ideals, but also personal issues and conflicts. Stories that were overall positive and hopeful in tone, but with some failures and tragedies mixed in. Also a willingness to experiment and try out new things. Something for the adult to appreciate while appealing to the kid inside.
 
For inspirational reading material, from Marvel I'd choose the Claremont/Cockrum/Byrne run on X-Men and Byrne's Fantastic Four. Jim Shooter's and George Perez's stories from Avengers in the 1970s were very good, but Perez and Kurt Busiek's Avengers from this millennium was also excellent, absorbing elements of Nineties deconstruction of the genre while maintaining the classic superhero feel. I'm not as familiar with DC, but Marv Wolfman's and Perez's long run on Teen Titans/New Titans, and the Great Darkness Saga in Legion of Superheroes by Paul Levitz and Keith Giffen, stand out for me.

I think the Byrne run on Fantastic Four is a great example.  Its pretty obvious that the game was mostly based on X-Men and Avengers comics from the 70s and 80s though.  Justice League and Legion of Superheroes were another good source for ideas, in the 80s and onward.  Most of the team comics by the 80s had a good Champions feel: good guys working together to face dangerous and difficult challenges.
 
As the movies and TV shows go?  Almost none of them really show the team hero effort.  Way too much splitting up, infighting, and solo focus.  I mean its easier to make a movie that way, but it doesn't reflect a game very well.

For me, a big influence was crossovers. Not the giant events that ended up being annual sales pushes and were therefore driven into the ground by the demands of publishing rather than those of the story. I'm talking more about where you might have, say, Cloak & Dagger run across various supers while going about their own adventures: Spider-Man, Daredevil, Punisher, etc. And maybe end up having to deal with a villain or two borrowed from those comics such as Kingpin in addition to their own unique villains. And then C&D show up as guest stars in a few of the bigger comic books. Stuff like that.
 
In my days of heavily running Champions campaigns for years, it was nice when I could replicate that feel of a real comic book universe with stuff going on all the time just outside the heroes' range of vision, occasionally impinging on their stories and giving them a chance to help out a more well-known and/or more-powerful hero, or help a hero who's just starting out, or maybe even set some misguided fool on the right path after the fool nearly causes a disaster while trying to play hero. That's how I ended up with binders and expanding files filled with character sheets, campaign write-ups, notes, maps, and so on.
 
I haven't read many post-90s mainstream comics, but if there's something out there like those 80s Cloak & Dagger series and even their back-of-someone-else's-book pages and their occasional guest appearances (the poor sods always seemed to be an afterthought for Marvel), I'd say take a look at that stuff. On the one hand, you have intensely personal and unique stories for Our Heroes, but on the other they are definitely part of an established universe and are therefore both constrained by it and given opportunities they wouldn't otherwise have.
 
Other than that, it was the indie stuff that had the most influence on me. Mostly stuff with a tinge of humor. I've been wracking my brain for years trying to remember a B&W indie supers comic that had a superman type who just wanted to be left in peace to read Anne of Green Gables, but the villains just wouldn't leave him alone. His best friend was named Apache Joe as I recall. I'd love to pick up a copy of those someday, but I can't for the life of me remember the title of the comic. I wish I hadn't gotten rid of 90% of my comics 20+ years ago.

I put some of the blame on the decline in comic-book reading. That's where all the conventions of the genre were laid down. Movies, and even TV shows, can't provide the depth and breadth of understanding that comes from growing up reading a range of superhero comics, living with the characters and their adventures.
 
Mind you, I don't think would-be supers players would benefit if they actually read the majority of dreck being published today.  😖

Yup. Forty years ago, I didn't know about game design issues. We just played games and if they were fun we kept playing them.
 
Thirty years ago, I'd fiddle with any issues I found and try to fix everything. I considered it part of the hobby. But only rarely was a game design and its flaws amenable to fixing one thing without breaking one or more others or doing a total redesign...that would have its own issues.
 
These days, I try to run as close to RAW as practical, only applying fixes to issues that have a negative effect on our actual gameplay, and even then only when there's a simple fix that doesn't break anything else.
 
I can applaud the folks still trying to comprehensively fix RPGs that were designed in the paleolithic era, and I can even empathize with them and cheer their successes, but in the end I want a fun game at the table, and all my favorites provided that back before I knew how to recognize game design issues.
 

Some of it's from the continuing drift away from forums, but I agree about seasonality as well. Certainly I've been occupied with other things lately. Bu I'll be cranking up another Hero campaign for the fall and winter. There's nothing better to bring warmth and light to a long, cold, dark winter.

Could turning Champions Complete into less of a toolkit and more of a game achieve the goal without alienating the current 6e/CC/FHC player base? Or is the player base so small that releasing a "recapture the glory days, only better" type product that starts with an earlier edition and grows from there be a better move?
 
Well, modifying CC seems like it would be a smaller lift, and therefore could be something more achievable by DOJ. But what would need to be done? I'm glad you asked.
 
Quick thoughts on Improving Champions Complete
Introduction: Make it clear this is a game, not a toolkit. Talk about the game world and its assumptions. Include an in-game-world short story?
Core Concepts and Game Basics: Talk about Session Zero, how to run one, and how important doing so is to having a successful campaign. Also include a discussion of Heroic Action Points as a core concept if they're to be used at all.
Characteristics: State the range for each characteristic at each level of play in this game world. What are the standards for a street-level campaign? A standard campaign? A galactic campaign? And so on. Something like what's in the Beyond Points article in HERO System Almanac 1.
Presence Attack: Revise to emphasize this flexible short-term influence system. Go into more detail about how it can be used to rally allies, fast-talk a mark, or manipulate a crowd in a crisis situation. Adventurer's Club issue 7, page 7 "Presence of Mind" is a good place to start.
Skills: Make it clear this is the main mechanic through which players interact with the game world. Spend time on how to run a game so that characters don't get to the equivalent of a door they must open but which they cannot unlock or break down. No dead ends, just costs that must be paid to get to the next step, with the opportunity of avoiding those costs through clever role-play and/or straightforward application of game mechanics.
Powers & Power Modifiers & Power Frameworks: Simplify. Cut this all down as much as possible to be more along the lines of what was included with the base Champions 1e-3e game. Also include plenty of pre-built powers based on those commonly seen in superhero comics and adaptations.
Complications: Include a discussion that this is one of the ways in which players participate in creating the campaign world and determining how it interacts with their characters and their allies. Complications are a player responsibility that limits the actions of the GM and fellow players while lending flavor and verisimilitude to the players' characters.
Champions - Superheroic Roleplaying: Have a full discussion of the game world. Not to minute detail, but enough to give GMs and players a good idea of what the game world is like. And, given that this is a game with a specific game-world, include lots more advice on how to run campaigns of various types in it, from start to finish.
Examples: Include more example characters and teams, but especially include more Templates. At each level of campaign (street, standard, etc.), it should be possible to use the appropriate Template to come up with a whole supers team based on any one common archetype and still end up with highly individual characters who compliment each other.
Presentation: Improve the layout, organization, art, etc. to the limits of the budget.
Adventures: Add a section with a solo adventure so the GM can learn and practice the basic game mechanics and see how it's run. Add a beginner GM'd adventure, and ideally a larger adventure along the lines of the Viper adventure in 3e.
 
Hmm. I don't know. It'd sure be nice in many ways to go back to 1e, 2e, 3e, or even 4e and build from there. Taking another crack at the skills system may be worthwhile. Come up with a skill system that naturally scales from the simplicity of Champions 1e-3e all the way up to the sort of highly detailed system one may want for other genres, for example.
 
But that's a lot of work and at some point you're selling a new game so why weigh it down with the HERO System name?
 
What (if anything) would you do to modify CC to make it sell better?
 
What (if anything) would you do to make a new, more appealing product line for HERO System?
 

Looks like we're turning to our favorite subject, "What's wrong with HERO and how I'd fix it."
 
This morning on the long drive to the office I was thinking about HERO (as one does) and the RPG industry in general (again, totally normal thing to do -- I don't know why you're looking at me funny) and I started to draw a hasty conclusion (something no one online ever does) and wondered if it was worth anything.
 
Hypothesis: Tabletop RPGs with enduring popularity tend to be beautiful messes.
 
White box D&D, Champions, Shadowrun, D6 System...all were games that did something new and neat with easily digestible basics -- but there were major flaws in design and/or presentation. All became popular enough to get several attempts by different designers and publishers at fixing their flaws, but those attempts don't seem to have boosted their popularity (aside from D&D, which is in many ways its own thing due not least to making it into the mainstream, with a mainstream budget for much of its life).
 
Maybe, from a hobby perspective, what works are games a hobbyist can learn in an afternoon but which cry out for tinkering. As long as there's something neat about them that provides a compelling enough reason to tinker with them and want to share their tinkering with friends and family.
 
Maybe that's why beautiful, orderly designs with great execution like EABA get lost in the waves.
 
And maybe that's one reason why making HERO System more orderly and logical didn't yield more customers.
 
Sure, there are many reasons for HERO's current situation; we're all familiar with them. But maybe this is part of it too?

Melee/Wizard used the 3d6 mechanic before Champions. In addition TFT, the broader RPG based off of Melee Wizard introduced an escalating die mechanic where really difficult tasks were rolling 4 or even 5d6 vs your stat. (low rolls being better)
 
I often wondered why it wasn't an option in HERO to roll more dice in order to achieve greater results in skill rolls.

I remember Duke saying he uses a skill system that's more in line with HERO combat.
 
Edited to add: I found the link I'd saved to Duke's brief description of his skills system --
 
 
So true! And as we saw in the GDW figures I posted earlier, well-done RPG boardgames can actually sell reasonably well (in terms of RPG sales numbers anyway).
 

I prefer different systems for different tasks, personally, as long as you don't have too many.  Using the same model for everything usually doesn't work well for most of the things, its like using a hammer to dial your phone and cut tomatoes as well as hammer in nails.  Use it for what its good for.
 
As for choose your adventure, they are actually not as tough to work out as you'd think but the main problem is that its a lot of reading and flipping pages, so if you didn't make it an app (something that does actually take a lot of trouble to do) its just not going to be very popular these days.  If someone came up with a generic "make choose your own adventures" app and then people could just input info, it would be a much easier task.
 
Other than the graphics, which you have to have or people will just give it 1 star in a review and dump it.

Consider this a note to adress that comment when I have time, Sir. 
 
That is the tree I have been barking up for years, but there is a lot to both sides of it.
 
 

I've always wondered why Hero used 3d6 for skill checks instead of the 5/1d6 STUN/BODY model.  The latter would enable finer granularity, and counting 'stun' vs. 'body' on the dice would let you simulate degrees of success, like how long it takes to pick the lock or how big of a discount you get from the merchant.  More importantly, it gives another reason to throw fistfuls of d6es.  But I confess I haven't really thought this through.
 
 
Boardgames.  Although those are expensive, so maybe a line of Choose Your Own Adventure books, with Hero mechanics thrown in.  The latter would be hard to write, but could be a free PDF that leads players through the basics of the rules one piece at a time.

As someone who's been playing since 2e, I have to admit I never thought about that. Like you, I've taken bits from each edition...but not that one. Sometimes I wonder if those of us who grab bits from here and there got together, could we come up with a superior HERO System by bringing back elements that are part of the history of HERO System (whether from a HERO System game, supplement, article, or whatever)? Or at least the start of one?
 

$15 in 1980 is equivalent to just over $50 today, so three books comes to $150 in today's money.
I reckon the wrong turn HERO took was pulling its focus out instead of simply providing a supplementary core HERO book.
 
Champions could have progressively become more focused on a core HERO System supers campaign, with more defined game standards.  Similar for Fantasy HERO, Justice Inc and Danger International.
Supplements could have been produced to play games in each genre at different power levels with different skills, starting points etc.
 
Imagine a 450 page Fantasy HERO that had a defined magic system, skillset, Bestiary and some adventures.  it is easy to do.
 
You would only need the core book to do your own tinkering and world building. Splat books would gavenew magic systems, new beasts, ideas for building fighter types etc etc.
 
Doc

D&D has proved that people are more than willing to buy multiple books, so having more than one isn't a problem but yeah you don't need to have a book big enough to break your foot by dropping it.

I seem to recall those hardbacks being around $12-15 each!
 
For comparison:
AD&D 1e is 350 pages (PHB 125 pages, MM 100 pages, DMG 225 pages).
Fantasy Hero 4E is 650 pages (Core 200 pages, FH 250 pages, Bestiary 200 pages).
Fantasy Hero 6E is 2100+ pages (Core 800 pages, FH 450 pages, Grimoire 400 pages, Bestiary 500 pages).

I agree.  Before that it wasn't a unified universal system, just another 80s "core system" a given company would build a variation on with each new game.
And after that, way too much bloat in skills, perks, skills, proficiencies, skills, familiarities, skills, contacts, skills, skills, and more skills, not to mention open-ended knowledges, sciences, proffessions, area knowledges, and, oh, yeah languages. 
 
Like, 1st:
"Ima detective in m'secret ID"
Detective Work, INT roll, 5 pts
 
Then 2nd & 3rd, stuff bled in from Espionage, Justice Inc, Danger International ...
Criminology is only 3 pts.... better pick up profession Private Investigator and Perk PI liscence, as well. 2pts ea.    
 
4th ... I think there's a 20 point package for that some where... 😐
 
5th. Did I say 20? I meant 50.  😞
 
6th:  I see your 50 and raise you...
=:-O
 
 

If I were to "fix" Hero somehow, I'd lower the entry barrier, or "energy of activation" as we call it in the chemistry world.  Get me a starter set, something like Call of Cthulhu's "Alone Against [X]" series.  Present me with a character and guide me through a short story.  Help me learn the rules by fleshing them out bit by bit, pointing out what skill to roll to resolve the encounter, etc.  Maybe have a few of these as ways to introduce Hero games in different genres.  Have a list of skills, powers, and equipment with their point costs, and dive into the underlying math later.  Maybe it's an age thing these days, but asking me to digest a massive chunk of game mechanics just to start play will result in a hard pass.  D&D is a mechanical mess, but I can throw together a character in less than an hour with minimal guidance, and be slaying orcs soon thereafter.  Hero is an excellent multi-drawer tool chest I can use to build anything, but to do that before I even start play is a turn-off.
 
It's a shame, really.  Had I devoted more time to finding and maintaining a Hero group, I would not need to learn a whole new system to play a whole new game; I'd just have to tweak the system I already know to fit that game.  I do still enjoy these forums because of the...interesting individuals here, plus the generally respectful tone of discussions we tend to have.
 
And dammit Old Man, now I can't get the image of that flying paladin out of my head.