PaycheckHero

As a playtest for a Con, it wouldn't be a campaign (unless I created further connected scenarios). It would have to be a self-contained adventure with pregenerated characters that is playable FTF in four hours. That's different than what you were looking for and might or might not scratch your itch. It is indeed complex, and you definitely should play before trying to GM if at all possible. It's so much easier, especially since it has become more difficult to learn from the book since 4th ed and it wasn't easy then (though I'm hoping that CC has changed that, finally).

I keep telling myself I'm going to try running an MHI game at a con, and if I did it would be a good idea to do an on-line playtest.

Probably, assuming H-B wrote the contract for the original RPG so that the rights reverted to them rather than selling the rights permanently. I suspect they would have done so, but I don't know what the actual industry practice is.

Box O' Truth is awesome, and anyone who doesn't like it has to turn in their gunnie card. If male, their man card too (my wife, however, informs me that you can not like the Box O' Truth without losing your femininity). Another thing I like about that episode is it shows how easily you can screw around with shotgun loads compared to metallic. I know that in principle, but haven't ever tried it. I guess I should get into shotgun reloading someday.

That's an awesome article, BTW--I haven't finished it yet, but it's great. Better than me guessing based on basic reloading knowledge--the Gun World article included starts with everything I know (and I hope more, since they get paid to write about this stuff) and goes from there. BTW, this is a good call, and in one post I agreed that shotgun reloading is a better way to go in a hurry than the metallic cartridge reloading I actually do, but I didn't really credit you with pointing it out first. It's technically much easier to safely reload and shoot wacky projectiles with a shotgun, and wacky projectiles is what the doctor ordered for this thread. I also agree about the coins. The only advantage I can think of is possibly patterning at point-blank range. One of the great myths about shotguns is that they pattern wide enough to matter that much at distances of several yards--they have to be handled like a rifle at those ranges because the pattern probably won't be bigger than maybe a silver dollar. The coins ought to scale around something fierce, and so might actually spread at self-defense ranges enough to matter. The penetration is still going to suck, though. I wonder if an unchoked barrel and a poor or absent wad would open up a buckshot pattern at the 0-10 yard range enough to help without making it useless? (It'll certainly be useless much beyond that.) Because of the multiple projectiles and the lower pressures they operate at shotguns are inherently more forgiving. One neat trick that someone might like to use in a game is that you can actually duck-bill a barrel, i.e. flatten it into a horizontal oval. The resulting pattern will be something like the barrel shape, and since people (and maybe humanoid werewolves?) are vertical a horizontal pattern is a very handy thing to have. I wouldn't be surprised if that's illegal in quite a few states (don't know the ATF rules either), but I suppose if you're looking at being werewolf chow you'd be delighted to live to defend your choices in court.

Perhaps I misunderstand GURPS: Dungeon Fantasy, as I've not seen it, but to me "Dungeon Hero" would specifically not be tied to the Turakian age or any other overarching pattern. I was thinking of it as being similar to old D&D, and probably to what the retro-revival D&D-ish things are doing. You don't have to talk much about above ground, and certainly not Kal-Turak and all that jazz, as underground is where the action is. The setting above ground is a place to stock-up for the next crawl, so the books just tell you what items are available and how much they cost, and otherwise leave it to be whatever the GM says it is. I imagine Dungeon Hero would have monsters, items, treasure, and perhaps make explicit how to do zero-to-hero in Hero rather than the normal experience progression. Probably even (sigh--it hurts me inexpressibly to say this) templates for optional classes and levels. Obviously a simple magic system with (more pain) enumerated, explicit spells, maybe even wizards with vancian magic and sorcerers with something else. IOW, retro-gaming Hero-style. Perhaps that's now how GURPS: Dungeon Fantasy really works, I'm just going off of snippets I've heard and my memories of early D&D gaming.

OK, since it's kind of on-topic I'll mention something that isn't really at a stage where I'd normally bring it up. I'm rather tempted to do a Hero write-up for Pirates Of Dark Water ("Hero Of Mer"?), which I think is the best boutique setting ever created for an animated cartoon (caveat lector: I'm not into anime, so I'm not aware of what is probably the most extensive pool of contenders for the title--but since I'm not into anime, I don't actually care about being unfair like that). to quote the series bible: Amazingly enough, I think they actually achieved that, and it is exactly the sort of thing I think shows off Hero's strengths in customization to a specific world rather than force-fitting all worlds to it. Further, Hero's preference for the epic over the realistic would, I think, make it fit the setting better than something like GURPS. So there is a specific boutique setting that is an excellent example of what I'm talking about. Imagine for the sake of argument trying to make "Hero of Mer" as a HG commercial product. For starters, though it's not that relevant to this thread, what is the business side? I don't know who owns the RPG rights now (there was an RPG worldbook published, part of which is on that site), but someone does. Are they even available? Would the cost be even vaguely reachable? And for that matter, now that the cartoon hasn't been on the air for 20 years, would there even be a market? Would I get sued even for just doing a fan conversion (probably not, given that no one has sued the site linked above for putting out part of the RPG, the series bible, and so on. More relevant to the thread, consider the boutique aspects. I think the very things that make it spectacular as a boutique setting would make it a terrible default setting; someone whose ideas about fantasy are shaped by D&D are hardly even going to be able to come up with a character concept. It has no elves, no orcs--none of the expected (i.e. D&D) fantasy races and monsters. It has no wizards per se, only IIRC ecomancers (think: druids) and people using a kind of black magic based on the Dark Water referenced in the title. For that matter, no priests, again the ecomancers are the closest thing (being, again, basically druids); if you want to be a spellcaster, you can be an ecomancer or you can be a horrible minion of the Dark Dweller. On the other hand, there is absolutely no discrimination against spellcasters who can fight (c.f. Tula, who is an excellent martial artist as well as the party's ecomancer). (Really this just means that like almost everything ever except D&D and its derivatives there are no classes.) It has fighters, but armor is little used in the warm, marine climate--the same logic that makes chainmail bikinis practical in D&D seems to apply to all characters male or female, who tend to fight in light warm-weather clothing. There are certainly major artifacts (the story revolves around them), but there don't seem to be the endless supply of +1/+2/+... "ordinary" magic weapons expected in D&D. For that matter, the cartoon doesn't portray anything like the zero-to-hero assumption that partly drives the proliferation of magic items; Ren and Tula are both supposedly 17 years old and both are excellent fighters at no disadvantage in the first episode. And finally there is a whole weird kind of biological technology that would leave room for a peculiar kind of mechanical/biological gadgeteer (we don't see an example in the series, but *someone* invents the gadgets they use). My point: it's a world aimed like a laser at telling one particular kind of story, and it's absolutely perfect for it. The perfection comes at the price of not being a good setting for telling other kinds of stories (it would suck for anything Tolkienesque, for example). That is both it's biggest strength (as a boutique system) and it's biggest weakness (if you wanted to use it as a default setting). Now, the claim I made is that hero shows its strengths in letting you customize to a boutique setting like Mer (the world in PoDW) without leaving you to do it all ad-hoc. So I'd rather see really well done conversions to settings like this one than hang the whole thing on a single generic setting (though perhaps that's necessary). So how would this get marketed? It would be illogical and prohibitively expensive to put the rules in each worldbook, but perhaps as a core book plus worldbooks, with more than one good adventure per worldbook so you really do only need the core plus one other book to get started. If we had GURPS' level of funding and market savvy you could try to make the worldbooks useful for non-hero people, but we probably don't have the vaguest possibility of achieving that. OK, I'm done rambling stream-of-consciousness now.

Steve "King of Ad-Hoc" Jackson *believes* in special-case rules, something that bothers me about his designs in general (c.f. Car Wars). I doubt it would even *occur* to him to create an underlying toolkit to build stuff instead of just scratch-building them with ad-hoc rules. I have Thaumatology (the only gurps book I've bought in 20 years), and a chapter I haven't read talks about this. As it's the last one about building magic and the chapters go from less to more experimental, I guess it's the most sketchy and out-there and far from pregen. And probably that building magic with powers isn't in any other 4e book. Am I right? I don't know about others, but I'll gladly criticize the default magic system. Even my wife, who is not a system wonk at all, still remember she thought it was flat and flavorless when I was messing with GURPS (ca. 25 years ago), and dissatisfaction with the magic was a contributing factor for our final abandonment of GURPS for Hero. GURPS magic doesn't have much of an arcane feel (SJ put way too much scientific reasoning into the structure, the prerequisites for example, it reflects a scientific worldview which is a very poor fit with most of the literature). Beyond the underlying assumptions, it forces *mechanical* assumptions on you that don't much match the literature (powerstones, I'm looking straight at you). It also is just another fixed spell list system, which bores me. If I were to run a fantasy game of GURPS now, I'd end up spending a lot of quality time with Thaumatology (which didn't exist when I was playing with it). At the very least, I'd use some of the optional rules there to modify the standard system, but honestly that wouldn't excite me very much. I'd rather scrap it for something that allows improvised magic, and that's precisely where the underlying design weakness shows: you don't have a toolkit underneath it, so determining costs for improvised spells is more or less based on ad hoc comparisons with existing spells. Or so I remember it from 20+ years ago, plus reading part of Thaumatology recently. There were things I miss about GURPS, but magic certainly is not one of them.

A general note for this thread--I just looked, and the density of silver is close to but slightly less than the density of lead. They're the same to less than 8%, and the mass is going the right way for safety (down). So substituting similar volumes of silver for lead by various means--drilling out bullets, magically transmuting the bullet tips, whatever--is likely to work pretty well.

I would personally make it a range penalty since it won't matter if, for example, you make a fast shot to center-of-mass at close range with a pistol. A total gun nut might increase the penalty if someone fails their reloading skill roll--which is of course a skill that only a gun nut would think of adding to the system in the first place. :-) If you're only adding silver inside a hollowpoint or a small hole drilled into the bullet you don't need to penalize them--the cartridge will feed identically. If stuff is sticking out where it will hit the feed ramp, maybe you should penalize them (gun nuts only: the chance of jamming could be based on how well they can make a reloading roll). If they extract the bullet or otherwise mess with the crimp, then yeah it could jam. For a semi-auto in a low-volume cartridge like 9mm or .40, if the bullet gets set back during the feed it could create serious overpressure (though again I'd guess a decent modern gun will take it for a few rounds, but maybe not for a bad setback in .40). Casting. :-) This would be *very* dependent on reloading knowledge. If you tasked me to do it, I'd start by trying to figure out how to cast a lead bullet with a silver core--that would work beautifully *if* you can get the core aligned to the axis and concentric enough. I'd do everything possible to keep silver from contacting the rifling, as that's the main thing that invalidates most of of the standard reloading knowledge and puts you into experimental territory. Very possibly the best way would be to just take cast bullets and then have a machinist teach me to drill out the centers and add a lead slug with enough precision to not utterly screw up the ballistics. If you just buy cast bullets that means you don't have to do any casting at all, which is probably a win. The down side is you probably need a good drill press and machining knowledge I don't have to get the tolerances good. Fair enough, but I omitted to say that everything I said was about metallic cartridge reloading (i.e. pistols and rifles), partly because that's the kind of reloading I do. That was a mistake, because it would be much easier and much safer to load silver buckshot into shotgun shells safely. If I already had a shotgun press, I could probably do it safely and reliably the first time using standard reloading data. In fact, I suspect it would be fairly safe to open up the crimp and just swap out the projectiles, though I don't know enough about shotgun reloading to know if it's feasible to restore the crimp without a press. Slugs would get us back to the same problems as with bullets, except they might be a bit more tolerant of screwing around since shotguns work at lower pressures and I have a larger projectile to mess with (probably less required precision). But if you have the equipment but don't have much time, buckshot seems like the way to go. If it fits the world, that could be a kind of interesting train of thought. It's kind of a magical-enhanced technology, which in some worlds is fun and interesting and in other worlds might always fail because they're incompatible. In MHI, yes it does. In some settings "kill it with fire" is a good rule to follow when in doubt.

I suppose that's harmless, but in that case does it even need to be stated? Extradimensional Travel already exists, and can be used to travel to other campaigns if the GM agrees to allow it to be used that way. You can have your superheroes fight Morgoth if you insist, traveling between fantasy worlds is that much more natural.

You know, I think the logical first setting is simple: Dungeon Hero. That's arguably a subset of the world of D&D, but a beloved one judging by the sales of GURPS: Dungeon Fantasy. And since everyone knows what it is, you don't have to teach the setting, only how to do it in hero. Support is more monsters and modules, though if you do it right you can make it easy to run modules written for other systems anyway (Hero just isn't going to be able to crank out modules the way some companies can).

I would recommend against that. This is the thinking that gave us every official setting in the same timeline, and frankly it turns me off completely. I can't say if it has that effect on others, but it isn't for me.

Since werewolves don't exist to test, there is no "right" answer except the dramatic needs of your campaign. Do you want it to work? If yes, it does, if no it doesn't. Interesting. According to Wikipedia, any common fuel will achieve this temperature, which makes sense since it's possible to forge iron with primitive tools. However, since that assumes complete combustion, you might need forced induction or at a minimum a well-designed draft to achieve that temperature. First time I've ever heard reloading equipment called armory tools. Armories are where you store weapons, not load ammunition. It'll be tough to make bullets with any kind of accuracy that way, though. The problem isn't making a mold, it's getting the dimensions right. The diameter of a lead bullet needs to be accurate to a couple of thousandths of an inch for decent performance, even using lead instead of silver. Much smaller and the bullet will not engrave on the rifling (meaning it will tumble instead of spin), much larger and it will cause dangerous pressures in the throat. Your guys are going to achieve this with holes drilled with hand tools? I guess it could be made to work with soft cast lead and some good load choices, but I wouldn't. Trying to make bullets from scratch with inadequate equipment is going to cause a lot of serious reloading problems here if you want to be realistic--I wouldn't attempt it myself even with lead, I'm a conservative reloader and I like my fingers and eyes just the way they are. Beyond the dimensions, you cannot simply replace one bullet material with another without severe consequences. A bullet is intentionally slightly larger than the distance between the lands (the diameter inside the rifling). This is so that the pressure will engrave the rifling into the bullet, giving it enough grip to spin the bullet so it will go straight. That means that the bullet is likely to actually stop momentarily in the throat until the pressure has risen high enough to force it to squeeze slightly between the rifling (we're only talking a few thousandths of an inch here). Further, the bullet *has* to get moving again quickly, because the powder charge will usually be such that the bullet needs to be a ways down the barrel by the time combustion is complete. But silver is harder than lead, so the pressure would have to rise *much* higher before this happens, and that means the bullet won't be far enough down the barrel (if it goes at all) before the full charge has burned. That's a serious overpressure event, and would quite possibly be enough to blow the gun apart (this will depend on many things--it would be worse for bottleneck rifle cartridges for example). What actually happens would depend on the amount and burn rate of the powder, the quality of the firearm, and dumb luck. Sort of. For most cartridges, you can safely go to a lighter weight bullet (it's moved farther at peak pressure, so the pressure will be lower), but not heavier without possibly exceeding the pressure rating of the cartridge. *However*, if it's a modern firearm in decent condition and you don't change the weight by too much, probably the overpressure will simply shorten the life of the gun without immediate catastrophe, and nobody will care about that if there is a werewolf around. In game terms, I'd say yes. However, there will be some difficulties. You'll have to deal with getting the bullet out against the crimp without spilling the charge (if they don't have reloading equipment I assume they also don't have powder and are limited to whatever their factory ammo is charged with), and probably have to chamfer the lip in order to get the bullet back in. That will remove the crimp, and with heavy magnum loads the bullets could start backing out under recoil (so maybe the cylinder on that .44 mag will jam after a few shots). For typical personal defense calibers like 9x19, I doubt they'll back out. However, in a semiauto you could have problems with uncrimped bullets getting pushed in further while feeding. That's why we crimp them in the first place. I suspect that without the correct tools trying to put in a crimp might just make the cartridge unusable though, and if you totally screw it up the cartridges might not headspace (which could fire unsafely or just jam in the barrel). What I would suggest is simply adding a piece of silver to the existing bullet. This will make it heavier and thus increase pressure, but that's not a bad bet if the alternative is being werewolf chow. Plus it's probably a better risk than any kind of reloading without the appropriate tools. (This is probably safer with a low-pressure cartridge like .45 ACP than a high pressure one like .40 S&W, BTW.) Much faster and less work, too. Hollowpoints come with a convenient place to put the silver slug--if it were me I'd try to wedge it in (very gently and carefully!) with a punch and very light hammer (if I didn't have a press) and still maybe glue it in with crazy glue (or something better if I had it). I'd also prefer to shoot a few to make sure the slugs aren't coming loose in the magazine under recoil, but I'm a cautious guy. If you're really obsessive, the resulting bullets are going to be unbalanced and thus far less accurate. This wouldn't matter in a pistol unless someone takes a long range shot--at self-defense ranges, who cares? As long as the silver slug stays in place, having the bullets keyhole isn't necessarily bad. I'd try hard to figure out how to minimize the imbalance, though, since I don't think the slug would stay in place. I don't know that much about knife making, but it's not going to hold an edge. I'd use a knife to stab instead of slash, and then hope it didn't bend on me. A sword has the leverage to be an extremely dangerous weapon even when blunt, but they also depend much more on being both strong and resilient. Doesn't sound like a good application for silver. My biggest worry would be weapons that end up bending and folding up after a couple of strong hits.

Whenever anyone (including me) says "XXX drives away new players," I always wish I could actually test the assertion. I rather suspect that we know a lot less than we think about that, since it usually comes down to extrapolations based on very different systems. I doubt the audience for hero is the same as it is for Fate Accelerated, and I doubt that extrapolations based on the latter audience are very reliable for the former. Be that as it may, it's worth asking which kind of settings we are talking about here. There are (at least) two basic kinds of worlds out there; let's call them generic and boutique. A generic world is designed to allow as many stories as possible to fit somewhere, while a boutique world is not. Metaphorically, a generic world is like rice, while a boutique world is like curry sauce. The archetypical generic world is that of D&D. As annoying as it is that Arneson and Gygax threw in something from just about every fantasy story they'd ever read, it did make a world where you can put most stories somewhere without that much trouble. It's malleable, thanks particularly to being very overcomplete with enough stuff for several different complete settings, and you can customize a long way simply by leaving out whichever parts you want to deemphasize. (It also eventually became it's own genre, but let's leave that for another time.) Like rice, it fits in with a lot of stuff. Not everything, though; if it does what you want, a boutique setting is almost always more interesting and memorable than a generic fantasy setting. An early example of what I'd call a boutique setting is Glorantha. Is Glorantha a better world than D&D? Absolutely! It has coherence, it was designed rather than conglomerated, it has a distinctive flavor, etc. However, it was a burden as well as a blessing to Runequest. Suppose I *don't* want to tell a bronze-age story where magic is accessible to everyone, the Gods are very involved with the world, and iron weapons are magical? I *could* rip stuff out of Glorantha, but in doing so I'd probably kill it. I'd still like to get a chance to play Runequest someday, but to be honest I probably wouldn't consider doing so unless the story is in Glorantha, and not every story fits in Glorantha. People do come to RQ specifically because of Glorantha, but I would bet that the number of people who avoid it because of Glorantha is larger. Not even because they don't like it, but simply because their latest campaign concept doesn't fit. It's a good bet that it would fit easier in the generic D&D world, even though that world is far less flavorful. Actually, *because* that world is less flavorful; Glorantha is more like curry sauce, and once you put enough curry sauce in a dish it tastes like curry no matter what else you do. I trust my point is clear: there is a difference between a great setting and a great default setting. If you give Hero a great boutique setting, no matter how great it is I doubt you'll get enough people to look at it to discover that Hero isn't tied to any setting at all (unlike either D&D or Runequest). But a great generic setting doesn't really grab ahold of you like a great boutique setting does--that's the curse of being a great generic setting. Doing it right means it isn't as flashy. Now this leads up to an interesting point: the strength of generic *rules* like Hero isn't generic settings; D&D, after all, is quite tied to the dominant generic setting. The strength of rules like here is that because the rules are generic, the settings don't have to be. Hero doesn't shine by doing what D&D does but better, it shines by doing what D&D does abysmally. It shines by supporting a wide variety of boutique settings, not a generic setting. Here is an example of what happens when you take a great boutique setting that doesn't resemble D&D and force the D&D rules on it: Pirates Of Dark Water, D&D Style. I feel bad about using that as a negative example, because he's worked very hard to do justice to the setting. But the rules are simply fighting him--he has to force the characters into classes, he has to interpret the many original humanoid aliens (that's the show bible's terminology, in spite of the fact that it's fantasy) in terms of D&D races (Bloth is a half-ogre), and so on. I'm thinking of doing that in hero, and if I did I'd be able to make notes on the cartoons and build directly from the source material rather than having to figure out what the closest D&D approximation is. (Viva Hero.) And I guess I've argued myself to my main point: I suspect a good generic setting is more friendly to the beginners everyone thinks are out there waiting to play hero (I'm not so sure, but let it be so for the sake of argument), but it also doesn't make hero shine; it doesn't give them the best *reason* to switch to hero. It does no good to make it easier if easier isn't compelling. CU is generic--it works, but I don't think I've ever heard anyone say that they started playing Champions because of CU. On the other hand, what I've heard of Gestalt (I don't own it yet) was awesome, the kind of world that makes you want to play in it. I'd say the world of Gestalt is a better setting--but as the Hero default setting, it would be problematic. It's a boutique setting. If there were no practical obstacles, I'd say that FH would be better served by multiple great boutique settings than one generic ones. Make them stand-alone books if you will, but however you choose to present them it at least sells Hero for what it is best at. But that has the problem that multiple books are expensive. They're even more expensive if you realize that a lot of the better boutique settings are licensed adaptations, and I'm not sure how many of those are within Hero's reach right now. They also, by being great boutique settings, don't get out of your way. CU is probably better as the default hero setting, even though Gestalt is a better world. I'm not offering a simple take-home answer, only pointing out some issues that aren't yet being discussed when we're talking about a standard setting. Draw your own conclusions as you will.

Discussions of giving Hero a standard world always remind me of one of the more insightful articles I've ever read. It was a long-time Hero contributor discussing the differences between Hero and Exalted on the white wolf boards, and when I went to look for it just now I find it's gone. I fear I didn't save it, and I don't even have the name of the author. Stupid of me. In discussing rules problems in Exalted, one of his points was that ultimately White Wolf doesn't do mechanics well and Hero doesn't do settings well. I suspect that's true if your standards are high enough, and for a standard setting to be a vehicle for attracting people it would have to be rather good. And it makes me think that there are a lot of pitfalls in giving FH a default setting. The obvious one is that the only reference standard setting is the D&D one, and that's trademarked and copyrighted to the limits of what the law allows. Any other setting is going to have to be original, but I admit I've never seen an original setting from Hero that I wanted to run. Can Hero create one that won't alienate as many people as it attracts? I don't know, but my experience with certain aspects of how Hero Games handles setting-specific things like magic make me very dubious. I hate the "buy every magic spell as a superpower" system and think it throws away the reasons I like FH, but it shows up over and over again in official material. It was the standard magic system in 4e (and I think it was also in 3e, but I don't have a copy of 3e FH ATM), and has show up as recently as the MHI worldbook. It's OK if you like it, but I would be no happier to have it be built into some standard setting than I am with the standard D&D system. Harry Truman, that famous role-player, once said that "if you give 'em a choice between Republicans and Republicans they'll take Republicans every time." I worry that the sentiment here is similar--an official setting will end up giving 'em D&D, and they'll choose the real thing instead. Or it will be something not D&D but not original enough to really attract people to itself, and at the same time will not attract people to the ability to do what Hero does well.

Sorry, no, to start with FUDGE encrypts its numbers so FUDGE is certainly not that system. I've had a printed copy of FUDGE on my shelf for years, and it never has persuaded me to run it. I loathe certain people's habit of obfusticating numbers by giving them names (to make them "friendly" I guess, or whatever in the world they think they're doing) with the result that you have to memorize a table whose only purpose is to encrypt and decrypt the actual, useful, friendly information, the number. Beyond that I wanted to like FUDGE enough to make it worth eliminating the encryption and putting the numbers in plaintext, but it didn't make me want to do it. The little weirdnesses like the skill tree mostly convinced me that there was some underlying imbalance in the system that needed protecting with such mechanics. More recently I've played FATE, and while the fate point economy is interesting (though I wouldn't personally prefer it as is), the underlying FUDGE mechanics didn't make me more excited than the first time I saw them. Nothing wrong with them, it just confirmed to me that they just don't appeal all that much.

Then your category is so extremely broad that I imagine virtually no one falls into the category. I've never heard of anyone who disliked every one of those. A set Of measure zero is pointless to worry about.

CC *is* the whole 6e. What is missing is interpretation, explicit discussion of special cases, and a more elaborated style (It is the Mishnah without the Gemara, if you will, or (better) the Torah without the masorah), and IIRC two specific rules (Absolute Effect and Classes of Minds). Leaving out CoM may be a deliberate deletion from the the system rather than something left out, and AE may have been regarded as a campaign-specific GMing technique rather than part of the core system. In any event, it seems to me that HG cannot afford to have people calling CC a subset of the rules when it is now their stated canonical text. There's enough confusion as it is.

That has nothing to do with hero. I have seen that opinion (replacing your value-laden language with something descriptive) most places I've gamed. The few times I did play with people who ran premade adventures, it was pretty lackluster, and I came to dread it. The exceptions were Paranoia modules, which were generally exceptional and better than anything I saw done from scratch for Paranoia (perhaps partly because Paranoia depends more on a particular style of wit and comedy, and comedy is a difficult skill). It would have been interesting to see, say, fantasy modules done that beautifully. That probably means that I didn't play with people who did it right and doesn't prove it can't be done right, but (1) the opinion has nothing to do with hero and everything to do with out hobby, and (2) correct or not, depending on their background people may have good reasons for that opinion. I would imagine there are people who played good modules and bad scratch-built adventures who have reason for holding the opposite opinion. It can be discussed rationally, however. The major advantage of a module is that hopefully the designer is an exceptional GM (which brings up the problem that no one wants to admit he might be a better GM than they are), and he has time to test and re-write. On the other hand, the inherent disadvantage of modules is that role-playing is more about character than plot, and if the players built their own characters then a module can't be tailored to give them their spots in the sun as one built for them can. (This wouldn't apply to games with premade characters, obviously, and it may be that a good module has an advantage over a scratchbuilt adventure in that case because of the ability to test, and rewrite.) What is interesting about that is that D&D is in a sense designed to minimize the effect, and in that sense D&D is well suited to being a commercial product. The limited class-based system and the custom of creating balanced parties means that the module designer knows more about the PCs than he would in a free-form game and can more easily give them their spots in the sun. The level progression system makes it easier to pin down not just the overall power level of the party but a good idea of what their specific abilities are. If you run FH that way, perhaps it makes modules easier. The way we ran FH was that people built their concept the way it would be done in a book, and if they were one leprechaun, one centaur, an out-of-work actor, and a half-triton, well, that's a good story too as long as the GM is willing and able to write stories *for those characters*. IOW, custom and playstyle has a lot to do with how well a module can work. In D&D, the rules enforce customs that help the module designer. In Hero, it is custom only, and modules will inherently work less well for groups with a play style that more resembles literature and less the customs of D&D. Which comes down to taste. I try to avoid using D&D tropes. Others intentionally use them, and still others use them without being aware of it. I suspect you'd find that attitudes toward modules are pretty well correlated with the degree to which GMs playstyles match or do not match the tropes of D&D.

Which genres do you play most often? I ask because this touches on a property of the Hero system that is seldom exploited or even recognized: that the system tolerates a great deal of messing around with the variances on the rolls (if it didn't, the standard effect rule wouldn't be feasible). The system doesn't break, it just does subtle things to what actions make the most sense in a given situation and to some extent the precise worth of the powers you buy. If you increase the variance, then there will be times where as the inferior contestant it is worth risking an action that didn't make sense before and as the superior contestant it isn't worth risking rolls you would have before. This would allow customization of the rolls for a particular genre so as to make outcomes more or less chancy. I've never seen it done, and the rules are written for a specific set of choices and don't make it clear how easy this is to do, but it certainly works. The biggest obstacle, I suppose, is the fairly enormous inertia of hero players against fiddling with certain basic things they're used to.

Huh. I must have been awfully lucky in where I played FH, then. I've never played a module in FH.

Maybe my problem is I don't have any D&D-only friends, and I personally have hated the ground assumptions since the day I started gaming so I have a strong aversion to simulating D&D without good reason. I've actually run it more than I played, but that's only because I ran an AD&D campaign where the world-saving quest was to change the rules of the universe to a decent system.

I'm too old and busy to run transition games. :-) It isn't really all that true that D&D is based on LotR, at least if that implies that LotR was the dominant influence. If it were, it would be a better game. D&D is designed for and provides a kitchen-sink world that started with everything that Arneson and Gygax had ever read and then accreted from there; LotR was the largest single influence, but it's too diluted with everything else under the sun to identify them like that. For example, I'd happily run a Middle Earth campaign, but it would certainly not resemble D&D specifically because that would make it resemble Middle Earth much less. Classes, levels, zero-to-hero and all that goes with that, Vancian magic, most of the monsters--all that would have to get dumped to make it satisfying as a Middle Earth setting. I'm not even sure I'd permit PC wizards. Notice that many of the things that immediately come to mind that you'd have to dump are core system assumptions, while all the things that come to mind that D&D took from LotR are surface things--specific races, for example.

I've noticed people using it that way about playing Fantasy Hero. I find it odd enough that anyone would want to use hero to re-implement D&D, and even odder that if I say "high fantasy" it means a D&D like game. Not having a D&D-like magic system is one of attractions of FH, so as a special case of the above I'm puzzled why people would use hero to throw away its better features so as to ape D&D magic. I guess I was lucky in that (1) my ideas about fantasy were not shaped by D&D, and (2) I started playing FH with people who didn't try to make it play like D&D.