gojira

Re: Newbie to HERO needing advice about world building For books, you'll need the core rule books (volumes 1 & 2). For fantasy, you don't strictly need anything besides the core books, but to make your life easier (and saner) you'll want Fantasy Hero, the Grimoire (first one especially), and the Bestiary. It also wouldn't hurt to have one example of a worked out game world. I'd recommend Tuala Morn, which is low fantasy mostly but has an option to crank-up the power level. Right now, things are a little in flux. The company hit a rough patch financially, and not every item is currently in stock, or translated to the newest edition (6e). However, 6e is very similar to the previous edition, and you can use the previous 5e books just fine. You don't even have to translate, the 5e books work fine as-is. Just the point totals are different, and there's been some adjustments which only apply to character creation. Now here's a question for you: what sort of "high fantasy" are you envisioning? Because there might be some adjustments to the recommended book list depending on exactly which route you want to go.

Re: Grimm / Shadowrun / Urban Arcana Worlds - Hero Supplements or How To Or add Hudson City: The Urban Abyss, which makes a nice city setting for urban games. One of Urban Fantay's mini-settings even has ideas for how how to "magic up" the HC source book.

Re: Damage Negation! See? See?! Smart people think alike! I hadn't even read Vondy's reply yet, but I had the same house rule in mind. It's common sense. Don't worry about the friggin' minutiae of calculating out every last +1/4 on a 2D6 roll, it doesn't amount to much. Just roll some dice and have fun.

Re: Damage Negation!

Re: Damage Negation! Based on that observation above I'd be tempted to say DCs = dice and forgo any complicated calculations for DCs. 4 levels of damage negation means you roll 4 less dice. Done.

Re: BOOK OF THE EMPRESS Kickstarter

Re: BOOK OF THE EMPRESS Kickstarter Commencing imagining.... world imploding into singularity... commencing migraine... head hurting bad...

Re: Hero System Sixth Edition Concise Right, and I also think most folks here are talking about one medium sized rule book, not one single "large/big" tome. Maybe that's just different choices of words, rather than true semantic differences, but I thought I'd point out the dichotomy. Totally agree that pleasing *everyone* is hard. Picking the compromises is hard too.

Re: Hero System Sixth Edition Concise

Re: BOOK OF THE EMPRESS Kickstarter Half that now, this morning, at $221 left.

Re: BOOK OF THE EMPRESS Kickstarter In other words, since the book is dedicated to whomever made the $2,000 donation, you'll have to wait for the book to read the dedication. And if you really want to know, you might donate a few extra bucks to the project to make sure it happens because otherwise you'll never find out.

Re: BOOK OF THE EMPRESS Kickstarter Wow, 80% of the way there already... and someone made the $2,000 pledge. Go go gadget BotE!

Re: Hero System Sixth Edition Concise I haven't read all the responses yet, but I generally do agree that Hero System seems hampered by the verbosity of its core rule books. At least in my mind. I don't have 6e (other than Basic) to reference, but I think a list of Do's would be handy as well. Some thoughts: Do ask for advice and vetting. -- I think if it's not clear to DOJ what rules need to be cut down, asking the fans would be the next logical step. I see about 4 to 6 folks on these forums that would likely make good consultants for any such effort. People who are playing games and GMing, and have some insight into what needs to be retained and what can be edited out. Do plan for just one rule book. -- I also think that the multiple rule books thing is not working out. I'm talking about Basic vs. Core here. Once Consice comes out, the Basic book should be dropped. All future material should reference the new book. The current full rules can hang around for those who want them, probably as PDFs, but shouldn't be considered "core" any more. The new book will be the core book. In short, if DOJ does decide on a concise edition, they should go for it 100%, not hedge their bets. Do some tactical planning first. -- Someone here mentioned that Savage Worlds sold 400,000 copies of their basic rule book at $10 a pop. I have no idea if that's really true, but if it is it indicates that the RPG market is HUGELY elastic right now. People will spend more money at smaller increments than they will in one large one. I know I dropped a bit of coin over the holidays on Steam sales, all at $1.25 to $5.00 a pop. It's a very interesting marketing scheme at least. Do use the "Limited Power" disadvantage A LOT -- Many of the special cases that are detailed in the core books could be covered by the GM looking at about how limited that power would be in his or her campaign, and just assigning a value. I recall older editions of Hero had a largish chart wilt quite a lot of limitations. They weren't explained or detailed, just listed, a long with a value for the limitation. That could save a lot of space, and give Hero more of a "light-weight" feel. More ideas if I can think of them....

Re: New Here Welcome Valkyrie... err, Laundry Knight! Yeah, just post up any questions you have, folks around here are pretty easy going.

Re: BOOK OF THE EMPRESS Kickstarter It appears that the amount you pledge and the reward you select are two different things. So I think they'd pledge 80$ and select the $50 reward. In the future, it might help to make the rewards with shipping a separate item. I don't know if you can have multiple rewards at the same amount but that's how I'd do it; there'd be an $80 reward that said "basic book plus shipping to Canada" and a $100 reward that said "basic book plus shipping to Europe". Anyhoo, BotE not my thing, although I might kick in a few bucks, especially if it gets close to the end and there's only a bit more to go for the project to meet its minimum. Good luck folks!

Re: Ctrl+V New Caledonian crows

Re: Inexperienced GM introducing group to Hero and having writer’s block… Inner Earth is a short PDF adventure for Pulp Hero, it does the "center of the Earth" thing, although it's a single adventure and not a full treatment. https://www.herogames.com/viewItem.htm?itemID=201053

Re: Interesting discussio on the future of Hero System on rpg.net

Re: Vampire An even easier write up would just use a multipower. For example, Multipower Reserve 40 points 4 u 40 meters Flight (SFX: you turn into a bat) 2 u 24 meters Running (SFX: you turn into a wolf) 4 u Intangible (SFX: you turn into a cloud of mist) It's all really up to how detailed you want to be. Some of us don't think it's necessary to be super detailed. Important sub topic: be careful that you don't do anything you don't want players doing. If the above is too light and breezy (for example, putting movement powers in a Multipower) then don't do it, just take as many points as you need to build it the more complicated way. This prevents arguments, because some players will resent the fact that the GM is allowed to use constructs the players cannot.

Re: Vampire Well, you'll need a sheet for those animals with the VPP too, right? If you want to play them that is. There's standard write-ups for vampire in the Bestiary, iirc, and also Urban Fantasy (both a higher-powered Hollywood vampire as well as a low powered "urban hunter" vampyre). For an aura blocking Telepathy, that's mental defense or EGO, only for defense against telepathy. Maybe power defense too, I'd have to look the telepathy rules up.

Re: Interesting discussio on the future of Hero System on rpg.net My goal here is "can we figure anything out that would improve Hero enough to make it commercially viable?" I don't know of we can, being just fans and working out side the game industry and all, but it might be useful to try. What I was trying to converge on would be some combination of rules + supplements that would accomplish that. I assume you need supplements of some sort to be an on-going concern. No one could just sell one rule book and leave it as that. So what would sell, and in connection with what else? My thought: rules medium -- cut down the current two books to what would be essentially an expanded basic rules book, with all the rules, but not the options or expanded discussion. Hopefully that works out to around 200 pages or so. Then what? People like the idea of "all the rules in one spot" but I was not pleased, ultimately, with Hero's attempts at those products. I supported them when they were announced and I bought them, but after getting them in my hands and reading through them, I think a rules-light re-print isn't the way to go. The rules-light approach is ultimately unfulfilling, and the re-print is ultimately a poor use of paper and an extra expense for both publisher and consumer. So, my idea was simply to take 3 or 4 of the best settings, and make them a mini-setting in the main, slimmed down rule book. Get all the rules -- the real rules that every product would use and reference -- and get a setting and a game (or three) with the rule book so you can play your first game right away. That's what came with the 3rd edition rules, it's how I got started, and I think some "back to your roots" examination of the game system might be in order. Of course, the full settings should be available also, separately, for those who want them. I'm concerned that some folks are saying "I like the genre books, not settings" because it kind of flies in the face of what I think would be best. I assume folks could kit bash and make up their own stuff with just the basic rule book, but I know that can be hard. I prefer to take a setting and kit bash it, but that's just me. Other game systems seem to do OK with a rule book + settings combination, so I do wonder if the roll-your-own folks would be able to get by with out the generic genre treatments. So that's it, my big idea. A rules medium book with three or four mini-settings. Let's say the mini settings are Champions, Tuala Morn, STORMlords, and a pulp setting of some sort. I think a lot of folks would shell out for a 350 page book with all of that in it. And by "a lot" I mean to include many folks who aren't currently buying Hero products. This would work out like 5er, but in reverse. Rather than going bigger and adding explanations like 5er did, the 6er book would go slimmer. The original two books could be kept as PDFs, which would allow folks to purchase them if wanted, if they feel they need the full explanations. Well there it is. All of you can kick it around now.

Re: Interesting discussio on the future of Hero System on rpg.net Well, I guess I should preface this by saying I'm not running or playing any HS games right now. But of the books I buy, I like the settings best, followed by "utility" books (grimoire, equipment, etc.), and then the genre books last. The main reason being, if I'm going to make up stuff, I can do it with the core books. But if I'm going to be lazy (which would be far more likely for me), I'd like to just whip out a setting or mini-settings, make a few changes here and there, and then just roll with it. I really doubt I'd have time to make up a full setting from scratch. I certainly would have the confidence to do so right now (inexperienced at GMing). But the time thing seems more critical; who has that nowadays? Saving time is generally why I pay for books. Stuff that I'd be kinda interested playing are Tuala Morn, Valdorian Age, Hudson City Shadows, After the Bomb (Gamma World from Post Apoc), and Moonshattered Earth. Mostly because I thought the settings (or mini-settings) were darn cool. It's nice if you can roll your own stuff, and have the time, but I'd guess that the setting books would have a lot of potential if Hero could expand beyond what seems to be a small core base.

Re: HERO System Tips, Tricks, and Advice These two are the same. OC + 11 --->> OCV 6 + 11 = 17- I hadn't thought about that being "like a skill roll," but it's an excellent point.

Re: Interesting discussio on the future of Hero System on rpg.net

Re: HERO System Tips, Tricks, and Advice I liked the slight variation on this, OCV + 3d6 = 10 + DCV hit. I haven't tried it in play, but it sounds like it might be easiest on players.