First off, let me give a little background. In my teenage years (12 years ago), I played Hero games voraciously. Yes - I'm one of these people who "drifted off" the RPG circuit because of college and a lack of people with whom to play these games. Of all the games I played, Champions, and Hero in general, was my favorite.
Now - really I've been reading these forums from time to time, and thought I'd drop a line to ask a few questions about niggles that bothered me from the game that continue to keep me up at night. Mostly, I wonder if things have been fixed, so most of my points will basically be criticisms of the game structure as it existed 12 years ago.
Another preface: yes - all game flaws can be obviated by good roleplaying and a good GM. All a decent RPG really needs to be is a good story with an occasional coin flip. But Hero Games attempt to build a structure in which characters build on X points are roughly equivalent in effectiveness; therefore, it should be judged upon its ability to do this.
So - on to the questions and points:
1) Biggest problem: no diminishing returns on spent points. A character who unloaded all of his points into a single attack basically was too effective. Why? because every point spent above the "campaign standard" defense went directly to damage. The GM had to either come up with RP contexts in which the character couldn't use his massive attack, or else tailor-build enemies to suck up this attack.
The proposed solution at the time was to limit attacks to a certain number of effective points (say 60). This seemed to fail, because it then constrained pretty much all players to make sure they had at least one attack of this nature. It then made it possible to ensure that the character's defense was effective against this level of attack. Which then forced rules to constrain the defense of the character to be such that the attack was somewhat (but not too) effective against the character.
In the end, it essentially started forcing characters to fit a mold in order to be effective. This seemed to go against the spirit of the system.
I think the house rule we decided upon was to choose a basic level of effectiveness (say 30 points), and charge double for points over this level. We might have extended this to triple or quadruple - I don't quite remember.
Anyhow, I seem to remember this helping our games. Has anything like this been done?
2. Killing Attacks were Broken: Point for point, killing attacks did more body damage and a similar amount of stun as regular attacks. But they bypassed non-specific defenses! I never understood the rationale for that one. The GM I ran with at first tried to make RP repercussions for using Killing Attacks (people think you're evil since you use claws), but, I believe, eventually folded and upped the cost of KAs. Has the structure or cost of KAs changed?
3. Strength was broken: Strength was worth buying for the figured characteristics alone. Plus it did damage at the same level as a separate power. In addition, one could add strength damage to the damage of Killing Attacks and Hand Attacks. Finally, it allowed a lot more RP flexibility - being able to lift, break, and throw things around was super-useful. This kind of fine control wasn't generally afforded other powers.
It was even worse in Heroic campaigns, where, because most attacks were STR-driven, and STR was so cheap, every character who wanted combat effectiveness would peg STR at the limit. Yeah - even mages. I know it went against their archetype, but you'd be amazed at what kind of mutilation character concepts would be subjected to when the game mechanics encouraged it.
Or maybe you wouldn't. You've been playing this thing for a while.
I think we eventually doubled the cost of strength, and modified its interpretation a bit so that a "SuperStrong" character would be something like he is in the comic books.
4. The system only translated marginally well to "Heroic" campaigns Mostly this was because there were caps on characteristics, plenty of points to hit those caps, and real incentive to hit the caps. In addition, there wasn't a lot of wiggle-room for characters to distinguish themselves with respect to their stats. I seem to remember that, because of caps, breakpoints, divisions, and rounding, there were about two desirable values for each stat, and everyone's characters had one of these values for each stat.
I think, in addressing this, we created some system in which stats added to figured characteristics and damage in a graduated fashion, so that there was some reason, say, to have a 19 str instead of an 18. It wasn't as elegant as the original system, but it seemed to help. I think we also used the softcapping rule on stats, where stats over some limit (20?) cost double.
finally,
5. Power Frameworks were Broken: Yep - sorry. They were. Awarding an "Elemental Control" point bonus to a character whose powers stayed in-concept was just silly. A character was supposed to be "in-concept" anyhow.
Multipower pools were bad also, since characters would just make sure that the only powers placed in the multipower would never be desirable at the same time anyhow - you couldn't shoot two guns off in the same turn. The especially cheesy trick I remember was to make sure each of the multipower slots had charges, so one character could have a huge number of powerful attacks, each with four charges.
Finally, I seem to remember "Power Pools" just being too flexible for their cost. I remember a shouting match breaking out at one point with a player who had sunk about all of his points into a "Power Pool", then came up with a catalog of different possible builds for his single character to fill all situations. Facing down robots succeptible to electricity? No problem! ShockMan is alt number 12!
I dunno - I'm sure people much smarter than me design these games - have these things been changed, now that there's so much more player-manufacturer communication via internet, or have the same debates continued raging?
