DreadDomain

April 9, 2006

Re: The Last Dominion Campaign Setting

Bought it, didn't read it yet, at first sight looks really, really good but what about the maps? I thought the high resolution maps were included in the book. Or did I misunderstand and is there only the four small, half-page maps?

January 18, 2006

Re: Has HERO achieved maximum desirable complexity?

To me' date=' the difference is that GURPS has more exceptional conditions (powers working in different ways), nuances (such as skills relationships/influences), and different "handling rules," (differing types of damage and treatment of damage per SFX-bases) lacking as much consistency as HERO, even if in some instances it's technically more realistic.[/quote']

Well then me may just have to agree. What you describe there, I see as more detailed not more complex but otherwise, we are saying the same thing.

January 18, 2006

Re: Has HERO achieved maximum desirable complexity?

I also agree. While I'm not eager to see Hero "dumbed down," I also think it's plenty complex now. In fact, I think there are some areas of the rules where it's probably too complex already... areas where we've opted for detail over consistency, but where we perhaps should have opted for consistency.

Just for one example, I think the rules for adding damage certainly should not get any more complex, and are very likely too complex already. There are multiple, slightly different, ways of adding various kinds of damage in various ways and for various purposes. If anything, that area of the rules should be consolidated, simplified, and streamlined, IMO.

Let me echo that opinion. Adding damage is probably the current worst offender in the category of "overcomplexity which doesn't bring much". I personally feel Hero is complex enough. I don't feel it is really complex but then again I've been playing it for so long it just naturally make sense to me.

I do not agree with Zornwil that GURPSizing = more complexity. GURPS in my opinion is no more complex than Hero. More detailed in certain areas (skills, advantages, disadvantages) but not really more complex. Like Hero, it just needs a few rules simplified for the sake of gamability (like the throwing distance rule for instance). I don't feel GURPS is really complex but then again I've been playing it for so long it just naturally make sense to me.

January 18, 2006

Re: Worst comic book superfight ever

I especially liked later on when Lobo said he was paid to throw it so it could explained somehow.

Really? In what book did he say that?

January 14, 2006

Re: Worst comic book superfight ever

Coming in very late here but to answer the original question, the worst super-fight ever for me was Wolverine versus Lobo in DC versus Marvel. I blame this whole mess on DC. How they could offer Lobo in a popularity contest against Wolverine is beyond me? It wasn't bad enough that he could not win this contest, they had to pit him against a character nowhere near his power level. Obviously, there was no way to write this fight in a believable way but they even fail to make it entertaining or fun.

Bad, bad, bad...

January 10, 2006

Re: DC's Best Martial Artist

My vote :

1. Richard Dragon

2. Lady Shiva

3. Batgirl (current)

4. Deathstroke

5. Batman

6. Kobra

7. Mr. Terrific (current)

8. Bronze Tiger

9. Ra's Al Ghul

10. Bane

Again, based on skill. Bane is more of a brawler than a refined martial artist but his abilities are right up there.

January 10, 2006

Re: Marvel's Best Martial Artists

Let's see. Based on martial arts ability only (skills) :

1. Shang Chi

2. Iron Fist

3. Ronin (New Avengers)

4. Captain America

5. Daredevil

6. Black Panther

7. Elektra

8. Batroc

9. Black Widow

10. Wolverine

Like I said, I based that on skill levels. I still think Cap would win against any of the first three because of superior strength and stamina.

November 6, 2005

Re: Calling Frenchmen and Francophiles

Well the Brick is feeling French to me. I'm trying to come up with a name for him/her (I'm trying not to pre-assign gender).

The first name I came up with is Bastille, but I'm just not sure if it is something that a Frenchmen/Francophile would use as a name.

I also considered Maginot, but that really seemed to have as much or more bad baggage.

Alternatively, I'm thinking about using either LibertÃ© or FraternitÃ©.

Personally, I would avoid Maginot (the Maginot line didn't prove too useful after all) and Ã‰galitÃ©, LibertÃ© and FraternitÃ© (it just doesn't sound too Brick like).

My favorite would be Durandal but Bastille or Bastion seem very good too. Other possibilities include :

Percheron (a horse originally from Normandie specifically bred for power)
Citadelle (Citadel)
ChÃ¢teau Fort (Fort means both "keep" and "strong")
Assaut (Assault; for a more agressive character)
Mortier (which both means "mortar" and designate a type of canon)
Le Gaulois (the Gaul)
RÃ©publique (for a democracy inclined patriot)
Premier Empire (for a nationalism inclined patriot)
RÃ©volution (for a socialism inclined patriot)

More may come later.

Dread

September 25, 2005

Re: Strength Cost: 1 point or 2

Right now, I'm under the opinion that Strength should be increased to 2pts and I will be making the END cost be on a per 5pt basis. Do you think this might be a bit harsh?

Using the characteristics as is, I also think Strength should be increased at 2 points per level in a Heroic game. I might even do it in a Superheroic game but I would be much more hesitant.

September 25, 2005

Re: Strength Cost: 1 point or 2

Whenever I wonder if STR is costed to cheaply I ask myself "Would it be worth it at twice the price?" And since the answer is always "Yes" or "A bit less than this' date=' yeah" I don't really have a problem with it. Personally, I'd like to see all the stats costed to 2/+1, but I'm not sure how you'd go about it[/quote']

Oh! one of my favorite topics. You see, if there is one thing I was disappointed with Hero 5 is the lack of change to the characteristics. I would have preferred better balanced characteristics in general as well as less breakpoints in efficiency (0, 3, 5, 8). I would also have considered making CV and skills at the same scale (either both based on char/3 or char/5). Looking in my files, I found some playing around I have done with the characteristics. My goals were :

Keep pretty much the same characteristics so I could use easily the published characters (only their cost would change)

Make all the characteristics cost 2 pts per level

I ended up with something like this :

Primary Characteristics

All would start at 10 (average human at 8), have a NCM at 20 and an absolute "realistic" maxima at 30 (no more Int up to 50). The cost for all primary characteristics is 2 points per level.

Strength

Dexterity

Constitution

Presence

Intelligence (although the name could be changed to better represent what it really means)

Ego

As you can see, Body and Comliness have disappeared from the primary. These were the two odd characteristics anyway and have moved to the secondary characteristics.

Secondary (or Figured) Characteristics

Physical Defense (1 point) : Str/5

Energy Defense (1 point) : Con/5

Mental Defense (1 point) : Ego/5

Speed (10 points) : 1+ (Dex+Int)/20

Recovery (2 points) : (Con+Ego)/5

Endurance (1 point because I hate half points) : Con+Ego

Stun (1 point) : (Str+Con+Pre+Ego)/2

Body (2 points) : 8+(Str/5)

Com (1 point because I hate half points) : 8+(Pre/5)

All have average, NCM and absolute maxima as per Hero 5. I also used formulas like (Con+Ego)/5 instead of ((Con/5)+(Ego/5)) because then having Con 12 means something when you have Ego 11. I also considered merging PD and ED to create Physical Defense at Con/5.

Just to convince myself, I tried to roughly evaluate the worth of every characteristics by asking myself how many points of benefits would every +10 in the char would bring. To my surprise, it seems like the characteristics were worth closer to 3 points per level. Dex and Ego (because of the cost of CV were the less balanced). Here goes :

Strength +10

Effect (Lift, Casual STR) : 5 points (guesstimate)

Damage +2d6 : 10 points

Roll +2 : 4 points

Jump +2: 2 points

PD +2 : 2 points

Stun +5 : 5 points

Body +2 : 4 points

Total worth : 32 points

Dexterity +10

Effect (Initiative +10) : 15 points (according to Hero 5 but I find this overpriced)

DCV +3 : 15 points

OCV +3 (No Mental -1/4) : 18 points

Roll +2 : 4 points

Skills +2 : 10 points

Speed +0,5 : 5 points

Total worth : 67 points

Constitution +10

Effect (resist Stun) :5 points (guesstimate)

Roll +2 : 4 points

Recovery +2 : 4 points

Endurance +10 : 10 points

ED +2 : 2 points

Stun +5: 5 points

Total worth : 30 points

Presence +10

Effect (Resist Pre attacks) : 3 points (guesstimate)

Presence Attack +2d6 : 10 points

Roll +2 (rarely used) : 0 point

Skills+2 : 10 points

Stun +5 : 5 points

Com +2 : 2 points

Total worth : 30 points

Intelligence +10

Effect (none) : 0 point

Roll +2 : 4 points

Skills +2 :10 points

Perception +2 : 6 points

Speed +0,5 : 5 points

Total worth : 25 points

Ego +10

Effect (Resist Pre/Men att) : 5 points (guesstimate)

Roll +2 : 4 points

ECV +3 : 15 points

MD +2 : 2 points

Recovery +2 : 4 points

Endurance +10 : 10 points

Stun +5 : 5 points

Total worth : 45 points

What do you think about all this?

June 4, 2005

Re: Introducing player to the HERO System

If you don't mind doing alot of work yourself' date=' you could try this method. Have your players tell you what they want, and you do the actual stating out of the characters. That's how my first Champions character was created. This method works best if you can take time outside of the regular gaming session to do it, otherwise you'll chew up a whole evening doing characters.[/quote']

Actually, even if we are playing Hero for 15 years and are very comfortable with it, this is exactly the method we used for our ongoing Champions campaign. We all decided together what were the basic concepts for our characters (so they would fit together) and then we individualy wrote them in plain french. Some wrote them in one page, others in a dozen with a lot of details about background. The GM then created them in Hero. Finally, every player had the chance to revise them with the GM to tweak them to their liking. While the last step might not be possible with newbies, you could just keep an extra 50 points so that you can add stuff you forgot as the game progress.

March 27, 2005

Re: What we like about HERO

Not that I do it conciously but generally I judge a RPG according to three main factors :

Completedness/Adaptability
Consistency
Realism of genre

Completedness/Adaptability : Like it is discussed in another thread, completedness is in my opinion a huge asset. If the rules cover it all in one single book, that's great. In order to do that, a RPG *has* to be a toolkit otherwise it would be impossible to cram everything in a book. I couldn't imagine a book including a complete super power list, a complete spell list, complete gear lists from different epoch, etc... Good examples of the Completedness approach are Hero, Gurps and to lesser degrees Tri-Stat and Action!. Hero is in my opinion the most complete game on the market. Gurps 4 comes close but falls definitely short on the powers aspect. Hero is still the king of the hill in this aspect mainly because of its yet unmatched construction system.

A game could be incomplete (not covering everything you could come up with every genre) but be so adaptable that you can easily tweak it to make it work. While the "complete" games are generally rule heavy, the "adaptable" games are generally narrativist. The best examp,e I can think of is HeroQuest by Issaries. This game was created for Glorantha but it screams "try me with anything you want". Games like Rolemaster or d20 are just not flexible/intuitive enough to easily adapt to everything. The key word here is *easily*. Sure I can take d20 and play in a super game but I will have basically to create rules are the basics to make it work. Look at M&M. It is a good super game loosely based on d20 but you can barely recognize d20 behind it.

Consistency : There is not much I hate more in a game that inconsistency of the rules. I like it when very simple concepts are applied along the rules to keep the system solidly rooted. An example of this is the famous +5 active points doubles the effect. While quite simple, it helps making the game works at any level. In Hero, any kind of effect is handled the same way may it be Flashes, Drains, Physical Damage, Mental Attacks. You roll a number of dice according to your effect, you substract the defense if any, you tally up against a resisting stat (Body, Ego, etc...). A game like HeroQuest is very consistent in its resolution system as well. Gurps is mainly consistent but sometime the resolution works like in Hero, sometime you have to figure out the outcome using a contest of skills/stats. This kind of dual system doesn't help keeping balance along the power levels of play.

Realism of genre : What I call "Realism of genre" is the ability of a game to reproduce the specific feel of a genre. Some games are very effective in a very specific niche but are not very good at anything else. D&D and Warhammer come to mind. Obviously, the wider the range of a game, the better. While it is very difficult to cover it all, if not impossible, some games have a very wide repertoire. Some people believe Hero is very poor in the low, gritty end (to which I disagree) and excellent in the medium to high power range (to which I agree) but nevertheless, I cannot see a game with a wider range than Hero. For example, Gurps is excellent in the low to medium range of power but generally becomes much predictable in the high range. That is understandable because Gurps was built with "realism" in mind. In contrast, Hero was built with "effect" in mind.

Where am I going with that? Well, I mostly like broad concepts in games not specific little things. I love Hero because it scores very well in all three aspects described above and because I don't think another game succeeds better than Hero on all three account. In short, I love Hero because it is the most complete game around, built consistently all around and capable of reproducing the genre of a very broad category of style.

In contrast, what I do not like in games are often the little things.

I don't like that Gurps has only 4 stats. I don't like how throwing distances are calculated in Gurps, etc...

There is honestly not much I don't like about Hero. I would prefer better balanced and better defined primary chracteristics. I mean what the heck is Comeliness all about? Why noy replace it by a fourth, useful mental stats?

I don't like how the throwing distance is calculated in Hero (hmmm is there a trend there?). Or, to be more precise, I don't like that throwing distances, as claculated in the rulebooks are losing fast any sense of realism once we get in the high end of Strength. I mean, I understand why it is done like this but I just cannot bring myselk to like it. At least there is the realistic throwing rules in The Ultimate Brick.

While I like the Bleeding or the Endurance and the LTE rules, I find them a little bit to tenuous to bookeep.

I like pretty much everything else but speaking of little things, I really, really love the speed chart and the languages chart. I admire the power system (well ok, it is not such a *little* thing). I love the freedom players have to design there characters. I love the stun concept, I love that there is not automatism in Hero (you know, like in Gurps every warrior type have Combat Reflexes). On the whole though, what I really love about Hero are the broad concepts.

Make no mistake, I do love Gurps has well but Hero is still on top from my point of view.

March 18, 2005

Re: How do you track END?

I kinda like this idea. If the chips are handed into the GM' date=' he can keep a list of everyone's RECs and hand them back in Post 12 or when they make a Recovery. I'll have to ask my group about this idea.[/quote']

Right now we play in a Champions campaign and we just go the fast and lazy way : we don't keep track of End. For Body and Stun, the gm made a combat sheet for every one of us so we just tally on it with a pencil.

For a Fantasy game, I would be tempted to use the poker chips idea (maybe one colored set for each of Body, Stun and End) but I would let the player keep their chips. I think it would then be easy to use LTE.

"Here is my pile of remaining End, here is my pile of spent End this turn... Oh! crap! I spent twice my Recovery in End this turn. Here is one LTE lost."

The LTE lost could then be handed over the GM until the proper rest is taken.

March 13, 2005