Rhodri

My gut feeling has always been that Hero doesn't handle quasi-realistic low end campaigns well because weapons are insufficiently lethal.  If you waive the realism in favour of character survival, it does just fine.

1 hour ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

For example, I've long used armor piercing on bodkin arrow heads to represent all that force on a small point.  But watching real life archery and testing archery against various armors, either the bows aren't doing nearly the damage listed in games, or they aren't actually armor piercing.

Mm, well, ish.  Bodkins are definitely the only type of arrow that will actually go through decent plate armour far enough to be potentially fatal, but if they hit at the wrong angle they aren't going to do much.  Also don't forget that the quality of real armour is incredibly variable.  Poor quality metal is going to stop a lot less than you would hope, and badly fitting armour is an active hindrance to the wearer.

There's an interesting summary with link online here from Benjamin Rose.

To me the point of Multiform is that both (all) forms have distinct advantages and disadvantages with respect to each other, such as different power or skill sets.  You seem to be thinking of the more Shazam! type Multiform, which I think of as a Shape Shift plus a bunch of Only In Heroic ID limitations.

People assume that dice are random number generators.  Any roleplayer knows better than that.

A friend of mine's teenage son was set some maths homework to roll a d6 a hundred times and plot the results as a bar chart, hopefully demonstrating a fairly even distribution.  He didn't roll a single 6.

I actually think that one sourcebook would cover everything really needed.   When I think of a War Hero book, I am not really thinking about equipment and historical information.  But rather a guide on how to run or play a PC in a Cinematic War setting.   Everything from John Wayne in "She Wore A Yellow Ribbon" to Humphrey Bogart in "Sahara".   Those movies were not rooted in realism, but in cinematic adventure with the hero/good guys versus the bad guys regardless of real world definitions.    Equipment and real world history is easy and can just be pulled from the internet.  How to plan and run and fun war story with just enough fact sprinkled in to feel right is hard.  Roleplaying a patrol of riflemen during the Napoleonic Wars (like Sharpe's Rifles) would be more about larger than life heroes, than what was historically happening.

I'm still not seeing how this is different from the SpecOps elements of Dark Champions, and indeed all the discussions of "how to run romance/action-adventure/tragedy/whatever" in that book.  If you aren't looking for equipment and history (and by the way, don't believe for a moment that you will get the interesting history off the Intarweb), then you really aren't talking about anything that hasn't already been published.

Following on from Mike, I'm not sure that PCs and mass combat mix well.  The nearest I've seen to it working is the Pendragon battle rules (which needed serious reworking, since Greg Stafford and statistics have an uneasy relationship) which essentially do brief flashes of skirmishing in the chaos of the overall battle.

Late 20th century warfare might live unhappily on the fringes of Dark Champions, and early 20th century warfare is more in the realm of Pulp Hero. Once you start going back to Napoleonics and earlier you are in a no-man's land that's probably nearest Fantasy Hero.

Maybe what we really need is a Historical Hero sourcebook?

I wonder if a more minimalist approach to netrunning might be appropriate? I know that detailed hacking scenes (and rules) are a staple of the genre, but they run the risk of most of the group sitting around bored while the decker does his thing, and the decker being bored while the rest of the action occurs. Maybe it's best to have the hacking resolved with a few minutes of die-rolling, and let the hacker save enough points to be useful off-line as well.

My group found this playing Shadowrun.  We started off playing the netrunning rules as written, but quickly gave up and abstracted it down to a few skill rolls when it became clear it was very boring for everyone but the hacker.