PaycheckHero

Oddly enough, I don't regard Star Trek, Star Wars, or B5 as being good examples of Space Opera. They are too much the products of Hollywood and pop entertainment. I don't think that have all that much in common with the stories 'space opera' was coined to refer to (first as a term of abuse). I think the reason people are treating space opera as excluding hard SF is more or less because they think that those pop entertainment icons define it, and it is true that Hollywood is purely incapable of doing hard SF (and wouldn't care to if it could, as there isn't enough money in it). But actual space opera is fairly compatible with hard SF, so long as you aren't so hard as to disallow some sort of FTL drive. I've threatened many times to do a space opera game on the hard-science end of things, I just never had the right players and the right inspiration at the same time.

I'm not sure who this is aimed at, but some of the things I don't like about the system do not appear to have changed nor are they likely to ever change; for example, the paucity of characteristics. At least through 3rd edition I can say from personal experience that there was hardly a character that couldn't be optimized by selling back skills and using the points to buy dex or int, or both. This seems inherent in the core assumptions of gurps; most skills are based on one of two stats, dex or int, and the game effect of buying a skill vs. buying the underlying attribute are indistinguishable. Therefore dex and int are always better buys(*) whenever the cost of raising all the Foo skills by +1 is greater than the cost of raising the underlying characteristic Foo. And since the cost of raising the skills individually is O(N) in the number of Foo skills while the cost of raising Foo is O(1), there will always be a breakpoint. In practice, that breakpoint has always been small enough that most characters should buy Foo. Stu over at Happy Jacks is a GURPS guy and yet he makes precisely the same point, so I very much doubt this has changed in 4e even with the change in cost structure. Of course this happens whenever you base skills on characteristics, but the difference is in GURPS most skills depend on only one of two characteristics so most characters are in a sense one of only three types: high DEX, high INT, or high both. When the same thing happens in Hero <6e, the effect is there but less pronounced because there are more base skills, and because there are things in the system that aren't skills (in many genres you can build very effective characters with only powers, or by buying characteristics like strength and con that aren't usually skill bases). In 6e I think the effect will be still smaller, mainly because one of the primary skill bases (DEX) no longer adds to combat ability. I imagine we won't have people buying dex for spd and cv, then noticing they might as well pick up some good skill rolls cheap. There are things I like about gurps, but the characteristic system is absolutely not one of them. I got quite disillusioned with it early on. * Yes, it would be nice if people built their concept and didn't worry about points. Except we know they don't, and it's reasonable that they don't because otherwise the guy who optimized is going to hog the spotlight. If this were the real answer, we wouldn't have points in the first place, we'd just write down on paper what the character can do.

SF shows are variations on a theme because of a couple of the immutable laws of Hollywood: (1) script writers neither know nor care about science, and (2) actually nobody actually knows how to systematically create an original successful movie or TV show, and so anything popular gets re-made and re-made until nobody will watch anymore. Star Trek was famously sold as a Western in space, because Westerns were big and if it wasn't connected to something known it would probably not be made. It's the economically rational choice because the alternative is much riskier. The only thing that bores me about High Fantasy is D&D tropes. I'd be delighted if there were so many games that didn't follow D&D tropes that I had the opportunity to get bored. I'm always sad when I see a Hero campaign where someone painstakingly used Hero's flexibility to re-implement D&D.

It turns out to be easy to become filty rich. Step one is to start with a hundred million dollars. This is a guaranteed plan that has never failed when followed correctly. It turns out this plan is relevant to the subject of the thread, but exactly how is left as an exercise to the reader.

How about if we make this simple: how much money do you have for up-front development costs? Name a specific figure that you can spend. If it isn't enough to fund development, we don't need to have the conversation.

Consider that Hero's current software offerings, while serviceable, are neither pretty nor slick, and I don't think HG can afford the development costs it would take even for them to be pretty and slick. It certainly didn't happen when HG (any incarnation of HG) was at its peak. Character building software only needs to know the chargen rules, and a combat manager needs only know the combat portion of the rules. Also, both products are aimed at people who know the system to a degree, and thus can afford to not cover corner cases where someone who knows the system can tweak it by hand. An MMO would have to know all the rules, would have to work transparently in all cases for someone who knows nothing about Champions, and then add a lot of actual content. It would have to have great graphics (I think comic fans would reject a MMO with perfect gameplay and story if they didn't like the look) and great gameplay as well, issues that don't even arise in the kinds of tools Hero has. In short, you don't have to be a programmer to see that an MMO is a *much* larger project than anything HG ever attempted. Now, given that even in it's best days HG has never developed anything at the standard required to sell desktop software, how can you imagine that in it's current financial state it could tackle an enormous project that would have to have first-rate graphics and gameplay to even stand a chance? Now that the copyrights are split and HG doesn't even own the Champions Universe, it's even less likely that anyone could get the relevant licenses even if they thought they could do the job. I think the odds of there *ever* being a "real" Champions MMO were probably nil before the sale of CU, and now are certainly indistinguishable from zero. I'm just glad there actually is a functioning entity named Hero Games.

I guess I think this is a campaign- (and gm-)specific choice. It would be excellent to have a short list of broader skills for many games, but wouldn't work for others. I think a lot of pulp games would work well with a short list of broad skills. OTOH, in a very hard SF game, we had *much* more specific technical skills than the hero list. (After all, who *doesn't* want to quantify the difference between a character's analytic chemistry skill and their skill at synthesis? )

You must have misunderstood me. I base every skill on a stat, and never use general skills. If I did use general skills (why would I do that?) I would have to re-write the skill sheet so those designated general make sense. But usually it's trivial to determine which stat a formerly-general skill should be based on. I don't gnash my teeth at the insanity every time I look at a character sheet, which is good enough for me. My game, my rules. Your game, your rules.

I could, except I eliminated general skills as well. I couldn't admit to my friends that I had a dozen stats and yet they weren't sufficient for all my skills. :-)

Talking about GURPS vs. Hero on a board that only appeals to Hero players is bound to be unfairl to GURPS. That said, two comments on specific GURPS features, one good and one bad (just to be fair). 1. I simply don't think four characteristics works with the GURPS skill system. It's almost always best to buy up int and/or dex and buy down your skills, and this produces a very specific kind of character. It is actually much, much worse than the figured characteristics in <=5e; the distortion is all-encompassing. If I ran a GURPS game again I suspect I'd simmply rip the characteristic system out and replace it; if I found this too unwieldy or too difficult to balance, I wouldn't play GURPS. 2. I loved how the step-and-strike movement worked for hand-to-hand combat and how well it meshed with the facing rules and only having an active defense against one opponent. For a certain kind of campaign Hero felt bland and static by comparison. I've often thought of re-creating it in Hero, and I know how to do so, but the grognards would whine. I'd be especially motivated to do this in a gritty street level martial arts or swashbuckling campaign.

That's no different than saying in <6e that we can model characters with high PD, ED, REC, END, and STUN, but low STR and CON, or characters with a high SPD and CV but low DEX. We can, but the system punishes you too much to make it make sense. The point is about correlation, and the existing rules cause correlations that don't make either good game or dramatic sense just as the figureds caused correlations. By combining them, we effectively have figureds for skills that shouldn't be particularly related. The fact that it's been in there since 1e doesn't make it make sense, and I always disallowed it in my games. Now that I use HD, I don't, but only because I haven't yet dug into the manual to change the sheet.

I would say that GURPS intends that you reason about the behavior of the game mechanics by reasoning about what would happen in the real world(*), whereas in Hero intends that you reason about the game mechanics themselves. The result is that they prefer slightly different mental abilities and different attitudes(**). This is magnified by the fact that Hero's "real world" is a more cinematic world than that of GURPS, so while both are really modeling fiction and not reality they are not modeling exactly the same type of fiction. The real world is in fact very complex and game rules must be simpler approximations, so that more or less forces GURPS to have more arbitrary adjustable parameters (special-case rules, tables, magic numbers, modifiers, etc.) If your brain likes abstract reasoning such that you prefer to reason about the mechanics, Hero is much simpler. Parts of hero are like knowing physics and being able to work out what you need--GURPS never felt that way to me at any point. OTOH if your brain is such that you prefer to leverage your very large store of information and intuition about the real world and use somewhat more concrete reasoning by analogy, I imagine GURPS is simpler (my brain is of the former type, so I'm on better ground there). I also think the GM has to approach them differently because of the willingness of GURPS to have many special-case rules. When I tried to run GURPS way back in the day I discovered that you could not blindly import rules from any book/genre into another genre without catastrophe, whereas with ordinary GM care you can usually do this in Hero as long as it fits your game. When I tried the same with GURPS my players created things like pulp heroes (heroic normals) who could singlehandedly beat up a troupe of gorillas with their bare hands while up in trees. (If that happened in Hero, it wouldn't be because I used a single rule intended for a higher-power campaign in a lower-powered one, but because Hero is quite willing to let your whole campaign be high-powered if you want it. You could make a mistake with the same result, but it would have a different cause.) Because of this I would say GURPS is less unified, but this is just another aspect of the aforementioned willingness to use more special-case rules. I don't know of any other game design by the Hero authors, but I've read and played other rules by Steve Jackson and to me this difference reflects the way Steve Jackson's mind works. His designs usually irritate me because they feel like too many special-case rules that jigger the arbitrary parameters in just the right way, compared to other games that are more true to some underlying general rule or pattern. He's obviously a very successful game designer and is a professional in a way that the Hero team was not, so I think that mainly just means his mind works differently than mine. I prefer not to argue too much about which is better, but rather just that that this affects who likes his approach to rules-writing as opposed to that underlying Hero. As for why people say Hero is more complex, I suspect that has something to do with the relative percentages of the population who prefer abstract reasoning about algorithms vs. reasoning by analogy with the real world. Other than that, it's a pointless discussion because the systems are related (as Steve Jackson has said explicitly) and retain many similarities, and if you can handle the complexity of one you can handle the other. Paycheck Hero * I did not take a position on how well or how often this will work, only that this is the goal. ** That isn't to say that you can't or shouldn't reason about GURPS mechanics or use real-world knowledge to predict by analogy what Hero will do, only that it's a bit easier and a bit more likely to succeed if you reason about mechanics in Hero than in GURPS and easier to succeed by reasoning by real-world analogy in GURPS.

I don't agree with this at all. First in general the premise is deeply flawed because character points aren't a limited resource, aren't tradeable between players, and don't have an economic value, and because the purpose of the point buy system isn't to optimally allocate their use by incentivizing people to spend their CPs in a way that earns them the most return. But more specifically, how strict or lenient you are on the use of frameworks is really a choice about how flexible you want your players' characters to be. It is a campaign setting to be manipulated for dramatic purposes, and if you think one way is the only right way, then you're not using all your GMing tools. Example: you want to start a Teen Hero campaign. The essence of the campaign, you decide, is struggling with a limited control of your powers. Sounds like a low-powered campaign, but total points are less interesting than how the characters can spend them. In this case it makes sense to have a fairly low total points/active points ratio, so the players have to invest in a few key powers rather than have a variety. In that case, it also makes sense to restrict or disallow frameworks. Frameworks are inherently flexible (that's the only reason they exist), and these characters shouldn't be flexible--at least not yet. They should be struggling to get basic control of their powers, not using them with the flexibility that comes with mastery. Example: you want to start a campaign focused on Earth's premier super team, the Avenger's League Of America. OK, sounds like a high-point game, but again there are more interesting things to tweak. You basically want the reverse of the above: higher total points/active points ratio so characters can have several strong powers, and (the point of this thread) a permissive policy on frameworks. These guys should be very good with their powers and be able to use them in flexible ways, precisely what frameworks give you. It's a *dramatic* choice to be exploited for dramatic purposes.

It only makes logical sense if you've never actually known people that smart in that way. I have. Being really, really smart isn't what you think it is. Hero INT is a particular hobby horse of mine. In general, this is totally wrong, because you believe that the same kind of ability ("INT") is the ability useful for both. It simply isn't, though how crazy it is varies from skill to skill. The most insane part is basing perception on INT--some of the smartest people I've met have remarkably low perception skills. Now, Real Life isn't balanced, and some people have high skills in many things, but that isn't the point. The ridiculous part is that hero makes them correlated; someone with high abstract reasoning skills is more likely to be good at things that have nothing to do with abstract reasoning. That isn't how life works. What I've done for, well, forever is have a separate "Wits" characteristic. You use that instead of Int for perception and many practical skills that are listed as Int, while Int is used for skills involving, for example, abstract reasoning (including science skills--I *never* permit "general" skills because it compounds the error--ability with, for example, science skills *is* strongly correlated).

Fair enough. However, it seems to me that hero players develop a kind of shared local culture in gaming groups that share the same pool of players (this makes sense, because most people learn by playing with an existing group rather than buying a book and learning it ab initio). I've talked to hero players whose groups forbid things I regarded as standard or even preferred, and vice versa. I no longer worry too much about who is doing it "right," I suspect it has more to do with a preferred style of play or conventions that the local GMs are comfortable with. I guess what I mean is that you could have seen something that was common throughout a whole area. To be fair, the hard SF game was *not* normal at all, I just used it as an illustration of the fact that it isn't normal by GM and player choice, not because the system gets in the way. The game came about because I realized I'd never seen a real hard SF game, and that I had an entire group of Caltech grad students. I wanted to do it just once while I had the chance, and I had one plot idea that really required the players to use their own technical skills to stand in for the PCs' skills (I actually had one vital technical clue that required some general relativity knowledge, which I got away with because I talked another grad student in my group into playing). Oh, and I also had a GM that was stupid enough and overconfident enough to think he could pull it off. Well, I did manage it, so I guess I was right. :-) However, a somewhat less hard-core game would work pretty well for any group that likes science without requiring such specific knowledge--if you had the right players and the GM. Most people can't or just wouldn't enjoy that kind of game, I suppose. I have to say that I don't much like any of those things. If a GM accepts a skill-based character, he should either provide some places where that character shines or warn the player in advance that his character is mismatched to the campaign. If the player still wants the character, OK (and in many cases should just get the skills for free as background abilities that don't affect play), but he deserves a warning and a chance to choose a different character. Really this isn't even about skills, it's about any ability--if someone wants to play a brick and you accept without any objections, you need to deliver plot points where the brick shines. The only reason we don't think of it that way is that we all happen to choose the sorts of campaigns that let bricks shine without having to arrange it specially. I probably don't always deliver on that ideal as a GM, but I regard it as a flaw in my GMing when I don't. OK, that would be interesting, but I don't think I've ever played a system that had what you describe. OK, fair enough, those are social skills. I guess we didn't really use those skills (for better or for worse) so I forget they're there. I think I agree with all of that. The GM really has to warn a player if a proposed character is possible but won't shine in the campaign, and of course the player can offer ideas on how it might work after all, or even say he's willing to put up with being less effective because he really likes the concept. That's really just common courtesy. I've always played with a much more expansive negotiation than that. If a player comes to me with a good background I am likely to see if I can alter or extend the world so as to make it possible. It's not only good GMing to let a player have the character they want if it isn't otherwise problematic, it's also nice when your players do your worldbuilding for you. :-) I've both played in and GM'd games in which player backgrounds kind of took over and became keystone elements to the plot and setting (usually in ways that surprised the players, who didn't know that the GM would take those particular details and run with them). I *like* it when this happens, when it works well it's fun for both players and GM. I had a campaign where an entire planet's details and the scariest villain group in the game all came from a player background. Though I knew about it, I don't think I ever played with that style even with GMs who started with D&D when it required Chainmail to play. One thing I learned from them is that adversarial GMing is absurd--the GM has limitless power, so there is no point. And if the GM isn't making it fun, there is also soon no game.

Most of my hero writeups were done with pure pencil and paper, so Hero Designer is *not* a necessity. It's a convenience, and while it is a very nice convenience it is one you can do without if you are OK with basic numbers and 4th grade math. The fundamental problem here is going to be that the company isn't big enough to have much ability to customize for particular needs, and since we're talking about copyrighted material and code it isn't very amenable to a community solution. Unfortunate. However, I would think that there is a MS Word character sheet floating around somewhere on the web. If not, a character sheet should be quite easy to produce (and could be written as a community project and then put on the hero website), which would take care of one of your issues. Probably the least important one, but it's better than nothing. That said, a spreadsheet would be better because it can do at least a little of the math for you and give you a little of the convenience of Hero Designer. It could be done in whatever the Mac's native spreadsheet is, but I'd think LibreOffice would make more sense as it's available on multiple platforms and might help more people. That's what I'd recommend--a libreoffice calc spreadsheet, put on the hero website when it's debugged so it's easy for others to find.

As someone already said, for most of the history of Hero the roll was described as you described it, "roll less than or equal to 11 + OCV - DCV to hit". (I think the first edition that even mentioned any other way was either 5e or 5er.) This is conceptually clear and shows the underlying logic of the combat roll, however for some it has the problem that you have to have a number from both character sheets in order to do the roll. You can sometimes speed up the game, or just keep the players from having unrealistic knowledge, by saying "just tell me what DCV you hit." In straightforward combat players who are on their toes can already have their attack rolled and totaled by the time you get to them and all you do is tell them if they hit, and also the players have to learn the hard way what their opponents DCV is (which is realistic). But to allow this, you have to do a bit of algebra on the roll, and the result is basically that you hit anything with a DCV of 11 + OCV - 3d6 or less. So starting sometime in the fifth edition era, they began using that as the primary presentation of the roll. Now you can see why it feels a bit odd--it doesn't directly implement the logic of the system, but rather it is designed to be statistically the same as a different description that directly implements the underlying logic. 11 + ocv - dcv is the logic--that hit rolls follow a bell curve parameterized by (ocv - dcv) and centered on 11 or less for equal CVs. As someone else said, you can also roll high if you wish: the formula is that 3d6 + ocv has to equal or exceed 10 + dcv, so that 10 is functioning as the default difficulty number in the system. It's statistically equivalent to the previous two systems, it just treats higher rolls as better rather than lower. But mostly, it's conceptually as clean as 11 + ocv - dcv while also letting you not need to know your opponent's DCV, just as 11 + ocv - 3d6 does. This won't work if you have experienced Hero players in your group because they will hate it--people want to do what they've always done, and most people can't or won't change. But it's just as feasible as the other systems for a group of newcomers, and depending on what other games you are used to you may like it better. Hero is meant to be customized for you, even though the Grognards think that's only true as long as you don't customize the roll. Any of those systems will work just fine (you can even make critical hits work with roll-high if you know the trick), so do what you and your players prefer.

There might be an exception for well-written superheroes based on skillmasters. You could check over Surbrook's versions of batman, for example. The problem with that is that writeups of actual comic characters are often not written to a point total, so they don't have to be point-efficient. It's nice not to have everyone optimizing down to the last point, but it's NOT nice to be much less useful than anyone else in the party so efficiency does matter. So yeah, writeups for heroic games is probably by far the best idea. It's unfortunate that Hero basically has a unified system, but it's not written up to make it explicit. It's good that you understand the system well enough to just convert. You can put the '10' term on either side of the inequality, and if I'm playing with people who don't know the system I'm likely to use it both ways so I'm always the one adding/subtracting it for the NPC rather than making the player do it. But if your players are learning the system, do as Tasha says and treat '10' as the default difficulty for all rolls, with DCV as the additional difficulty factor for hitting *that* character. It'll feel right to you, I think, and work extremely well. Just remember if you add the optional critical hit rules you basically have to use the little trick I posted about flipping over the dice (unless you change it to have different statistics, which is fine if you like the results). If you don't use crits, everything just works. True, but if you want the whole system unified you have to retain the possibility of using one skill to decide if an effect is achieved (to hit) and another to decide how much (damage). If you're clever you can find times where this makes sense. For example, suppose Jezebel is flirting with James, intending to seduce him and steal a secret code he has sewn into the lining of his jacket. Mary knows what is going on but (for whatever reason) can't reveal her knowledge to James, thus she instead must spoil Jezebel's seduction attempt more subtly. Sounds like a complex skill contest to me, and if this is crucial to the party's success it's worth elaborating. So let Jezebel attack with seduction vs James' ego, and either use the amount made by for damage or make a separate damage roll based on persuasion (so it's working as a kind of complementary skill) + striking appearance. Mary attacks with, say, High Society (she's being catty and trying to humiliate and denigrate Jezebel in James' eyes) vs Jezebel's High Society (because this is essentially a contest of wits and manners, I'd say it's the same skill both ways). If she succeeds, she can roll for damage based on presence as well. The first one that achieves more body damage than James has ego wins. You could also let Jezebel attack Mary with High Society as well to diminish her in James' eyes and thus be less effective against Jezebel. Now here's the thing--that won't be fun unless the players enjoy actually role-playing out the seduction and cattiness. So know your group. That was also just an example off the top of my head. In practice I'd ask the players what skills they have that they think would be useful in the situation, to give them the maximum chance of using their character's strengths. (Maybe Mary doesn't have High Society--I'd let her use something else *if* she can role-play how she's using it in that situation and how it makes sense. Maybe she's going to change the subject to James' obsession, cricket, and fight with her KS: Cricket skill instead.) Or, you could just buy the APG II and use their very detailed re-write of the martial arts rules to cover social interaction of precisely this kind. That's likely to be better in practice than something I just made up, but my point isn't about social skills but rather that you can treat *any* skill contest this way if the players are interested enough to appreciate spending twenty minutes gaming it out instead of making a quick roll. You could do Chess: The Roleplaying Game and let characters have separate offense/defense chess strategy skills (Karpov clearly was a more defensive player than Kasparov, and for this game we want to model that detail), and perhaps a third "tactics" skill to determine damage (as some players are stronger on detailed combinations than they are at overall strategy). You can do it with anything--*if* it's fun for everyone. Don't inflict this on people who just want to kill orcs after a hard day at work. :-) You're getting at something here that *is* a system issue--that Hero skills are arguably too expensive and have no wholesale discount. For my batman-like character, I pointed out to the GM that to build the concept (which was a character learning to emulate batman) I'd have to buy every skill batman has (which is most of them), and it wouldn't be cost-effective because many wouldn't really come up much. So he let me create custom skill enhancers (e.g. master detective to reduce the cost of detective skills, master athlete for acrobatics and such, master engineer for all those gadgets he somehow knows how to make--I probably never rolled on those, they just justified the utility belt--and so on). I don't know that I'd let most characters do this because it's easily abused, but given how many skills I was buying and how seldom some would come into play, I think it was reasonable for that character and I'd allow it in my own games for a similar character (if only one player wanted to be the "world's greatest detective"--if several did, I'd want them to specialize and give each a different specialty in which he was supreme, so maybe each can pick *one* category for a special enhancer that can't duplicate someone else's enhancer). What I'm getting at is that I do think there is a bit of a problem with the Hero cost structure for extreme characters with a very large number of skills, but it depends somewhat on the game, the party, and the character. If you find this a problem in your games, you can alter the cost structure a bit just as that GM did. You could just announce in advance that (1) you'll be generous with the free "skills that won't come up in the game much" category, and (2) skill-based characters can pick one custom enhancer by giving a one or two word description of what they're particularly good at. (If your players try to jerk you around on this, say that you can't have a custom enhancer for any character with OCV, DCV, DEF, or maximum active point power toward the top of the campaign norm.) I think that would work pretty well, as it gives a cost break for skills but encourages characters that have as specialty and not just "everything." (I only did "everything" for my character because his dream was to someday be as good as The Batman, who is like the Patron Saint of skill-based characters, and also nobody else had a skill-based character so I didn't step on any toes. He'd have been more effective if the skills were more focused (and thus cheaper).)

I was going to bring up things like the "social martial arts" system in APG II. But my suspicion is that it's marginalized partly because very few people would use it if it were there. However, the skill system changes I prefer would also make it easier to de-marginalize it. If the combat system is an explicit application of the skill system rather than being disguised as it is now, then the martial arts rules could be applied to any skill interaction (well, they can be already, but it isn't obvious enough that very many people will get it). For example, Martial Strike can be applied to *any* skill interaction where resolution is modeled as a sequence of pairs of chained rolls--one to determine whether an effect happens and the other to determine the degree of effect. The first roll could determine whether you manage to make a chess move that improves your position and the second could determine by how much your position improves just as easily as they could determine whether a hit is achieved and how much damage was done. Thought of that way, Martial Strike can give give you +2 to keep your opponent from improving his position next round, and also +2d6 toward determining by how much your position improves if you hit. Since some of us have compatible ideas (at least it's clear that Tasha and I have very similar ideas on how to re-present skill rolls), it would be fun to have a project to create and test them. The biggest problem with that is simply that a proper write-up would really be a set of altered rules, not just houserules (overriding existing rules increases complexity, you want to write it up stand-alone to make it easiest and clearest), and I doubt HG would or could allow such a thing to be produced--it amounts to publishing complete rules that would be a derivative work of theirs. I see no solution to that problem.

I agree with this. From the below, though, I'm not sure you really do. I completely disagree with this; apparently you've only played with a particular type of GM. My favorite hero character was the most dedicated skill-based superhero I've played with, as already described. However, it was a shared GM world, so I periodically played that character as an NPC when my turn to GM came around. That wasn't really satisfactory, because he outclassed everyone else doing investigation and deduction out of combat--that was his specialty, and there were no other investigators. But if he really used his skills as an NPC, it amounted to me giving clues to myself and then telling the PCs what they needed to do, which isn't really fun. So I kind of muffled him as an NPC so they had things to do out of combat. In short, as a PC he was my favorite, but as an NPC I did not think he worked that well. This contradicts your (correct, in my view) assertion that it depends on the GM. The game can't make social skills take a back seat, that's entirely up to the GM (and what the players want--Jane Austen Hero, anyone?). This is not hero's fault--it is a GM choice. The hardest hard-SF game I ever ran was in hero, and I don't even remember if there was any actual combat in the game. There may have been a couple of minor encounters, but if so they weren't important enough to remember. The entire game was based around role-playing the skills (especially technical skills--everyone involved had advanced science or engineering training and one of the ground rules was that you could argue technical facts with the GM the way some groups argue rules). Combat abilities were basically irrelevant in that game. This worked at least as well in hero as it would have in any system. This is an abuse that I wish Hero discouraged more. Because skill rolls are based on attribute rolls, it screws up the system to do something very natural for some people--if you don't have a skill, make an attribute roll. You're *supposed* to apply penalties so that having the skill is better than just raw attributes, but people forget to do that. That's one reason I would prefer to make explicit (as later games do) the "attribute + skill" system that is only implicit in Hero as written; it's (slightly) easier to see that if there is no skill to add to the attribute, the roll should be lower. Of course they are. Is combat the only thing that happens in your games? If so, of course social skills are worthless. They're also worthless in Panzerblitz. You can't take social skills and complain they're worthless in combat. They aren't for combat. A legitimate complaint would be that your GM doesn't create important non-combat situations. If that's the case, then either don't write up characters that are suited for a different style of play than your group likes, or find a different group. Yes, but has little to do with Hero. Even in a combat-heavy game, it's pretty easy to set up situations where you need social skills, stealth, or what-have-you to avoid getting into a combat that you can't win. I've been in *many* combats where previous non-combat events were the only thing that made the encounter winnable. If fast-talking the guard makes the difference between choosing where, when, and who you fight instead of having every guard in the castle come down on your head while you're still in the outer courtyard, you start valuing fast-talking very, uh, fast. One thing that I think more recent versions of hero make explicit is that a character sheet is like an agreement between the GM and the player. Giving one to the GM says "here is a character I'd like to play, and obviously I'd like him in a game where he will have spotlight moments like everyone else," and accepting the character into a game says "OK, I will make sure that this game will have situations where this character is in the spotlight." If the player doesn't play the character, or ends up wanting a different one, or if the GM doesn't make that character an important part of the party, then one or both has broken the agreement. That doesn't work well in *any* system.

However, it's explicitly said that only a handful of werewolves in history have managed to learn to control it, so having it happen again should be a pretty major plot element just as it was with Harbinger (who basically has an ego that would earn even batman's respect) and with Heather (who has different rules because of the effects of the amulet, an effect which can't be achieved again with the amulet now gone). So everyone would expect that the odds of a teammate managing to learn enough control would be miniscule. In fact, I think that the meta- reason for the amulet giving Heather more control was to bring in a second friendly werewolf without taking away from Harbinger's unique status. Heather is very strong for a pup and is under control, but Harbinger did it the hard way and she didn't. I doubt we'll see anyone else in the series do it the hard way so as to protect Harbinger's uniqueness. Would they give them a chance anyway? Harbinger did give Heather a chance when he expected her to fail like everyone else, and while that had a lot to do with his feelings for her, it shows that MHI might do the same for a teammate if they can do so without putting everyone in danger. I think if getting a new werewolf to a holding cell endangered anyone, and especially innocents, they'd kill the were just as they would a teammate bitten by zombies or turned into a vampire. For that matter, most of the hunters apparently would probably ask to be killed so as not to turn into a monster just as Heather did (and she hadn't even killed a person). That's my impression, anyway.

The real issue is not the direction in which rolls go but rather that hero has accreted many slightly different ways of doing something different depending on whether A is larger or smaller than B. I'd like to not have to explain that we have skills, but we also have skill levels, and combat levels, and a combat system that doesn't appear like the skill system. That is a problem in practice--people get over it, if they stick around, but it contributes to the overall impression of complexity even if they learn it. All the rolls can look the same, and interestingly if you do that you end up with a skill system that looks rather like, say, Ars Magica. But it's statistically identical--that fact shows how amazingly innovative Hero's mechanics really were. The only difference is that games of AM's vintage and newer did the cleanup we don't want to do to hero. It's OK, hero plays just fine as is, but it isn't great to leave unnecessary historical cruft laying around. It isn't about rolling high or low, it's about the cruft. It just happens to be easier to clean it up if all rolls are the same, whether they're to hit, damage, or make a skill roll. Say, we could just make damage roll low instead...that should satisfy the grumblers, right? ;-)

I don't think so. You compare to half DCV just as you would compare to full DCV. What gets weird is the "beat half what you needed for max damage" critical hit rule. In fact, that rule as stated is really just for the canonical system that was the only one mentioned in the rules until 5e, meet or beat 11 + ocv - dcv on 3d6. Since that method computes the number you need to roll, it's natural to halve it. But in 5e they still list it that way even though they're now advocating comparing 11 + ocv - 3d6 to dcv, which never computes the number you're supposed to halve. The correct rule for the 11 + ocv - 3d6 computation is actually better, and I don't know why they don't present it properly (maybe they do in 6e somewhere, I didn't find it): 1. Compute 11 + OCV. 2. Subtract 3d6. If the result is equal to or greater than the defender's DCV, you hit. 3. If you hit, subtract your die roll again (without re-rolling). If this new number is still strictly greater than the defender's DCV, your hit is a critical. Since that simply involves repeated subtraction, it's very simple. However, it turns out there is no simple analog for roll-high (you can construct them, but they involve adding or subtracting 31 or some other similarly inconvenient number). But because of the traditional way dice are labeled, there is a solution: 1. compute OCV - 10. 2. Add 3d6. If the result is equal to or greater than the defender's DCV, you hit. 3. If you hit, take all three dice and flip them over so the top sides are now on the table. Subtract the number showing on the new tops from your previous number. If it is still strictly greater than the defender's DCV, your hit is a critical. With that one change, critical hits are as usable with roll-high as roll-low. Ah, you know, I never read the Fuzion rules so I didn't realize it was roll high. Yeah, that would definitely poison the well. It ultimately isn't a big deal, but it's clear that roll-high is more familiar. What I'd really like as a genuine improvement is to decouple skill rolls from attribute rolls. That would let us unify skills and skill levels, which is another simplification, and make it easier to do things like roll dex + football to play football but int + football to remember who won the 1987 superbowl.

Yeah, that's why I haven't seriously written anything up. However, that heresy makes it easier to introduce new people to Hero. That seems important to me, but it isn't sufficiently important to the grognards.

It is clearer ways that are trivial to experienced Hero players but may be important to bringing in new players and also for some people who don't like (very simple) mental arithmetic. That is to say, while the standard system compares the quantity 11 + ocv - 3d6 to the target's dcv (this is the opposed value presentation that I think started to be made explicit in the rules in 5e), an equivalent roll-high system compares 3d6 + ocv - 10 to the target's dcv. The latter is simpler for most people because they can do addition more comfortably than subtraction, so adding the dice roll is easier than subtracting it, and also because the subtracted quantity (the one that compensates for the mean of 3d6) is the base of the number system (10). It also explicitly unifies just about all the mechanics in the game. Damage is already a roll-high system where the value rolled is compared to the target's defense, and the amount by which the defense is exceeded is the degree of success (in this case interpreted as the amount of damage applied to the target). A roll-high hit roll can be interpreted as the same mechanic albeit with a different random factor (3d6 always) and a different interpretation of the degree of success (often just success/failure, but for example autofire gives you an extra hit for every full two you succeed by). The only mechanic I noticed that doesn't permit a good roll-high interpretation is the optional critical hit rule, because (almost uniquely among hero mechanics) it is multiplicative rather than additive. However, it turns out there is a simple fix for this--flip the three dice over and use that value to determine whether the hit is critical. Again, none of this helps the experienced player. However, I think it would help the newcomer, and Hero isn't exactly bringing in new players at a breakneck pace. I've actually thought about writing up a 2-page version of this for convention games precisely because there may be Hero newbies. I haven't because there may also be grognards, and the whining and moaning would be epic. :-) Yes, they're easily unified, I've done it basically as you say. It's actually clearer to explain that way. You have to do more work for the whole system--for example, to unify damage you need to alter the random factor, and to unify (say) teleport-into-a-solid-object damage alter it again. But it all works, it just doesn't have a constituency that wants it.