Altair

Yep. Incentivization! It's a thing.

Out of curiosity, which edition do you use?

Oh word. Variety = spice, and all that. Also, sometimes it really is quite satisfying to just stomp some opposition. Establishing the characters as BAMFs, or reinforcing such? Totally a worthwhile goal of an action sequence. My dramatic structure of combat encounters (in a game where combat is likely to be A Thing) goes roughly thus: Easy fight to learn the mechanics if players are new to the system Reference implementation fight - here's a baseline for where the PCs stand in terms of the setting. Something they can base expectations off of. Introduction of major plot element during high-spectacle combat scene Tricky combat scene with non-combat goals - chase, capture, bomb disarming, etc. Giant eff-off arc-ending spectacle combat with all bells & whistles sounding. I try to check those off the list; not necessarily in order, but frames of reference are important, and I'm a sucker for big ending numbers. Now, if I were to do all of those in a game that runs a year or two? That might be every combat that occurs. Still, I try to keep the above in mind - I'm much more improvisational in my style; when I make notes, I just wind up throwing them out and doing something else - so that when a fight scene happens, it doesn't wind up being 5 Orks in a 30 sq, meter space.

@ Glacius: Yeah, I agree. The text isn't terribly user-friendly, there's a lot of time spent on clarifying and dealing with edge cases. It can feel like every other word is "please do not try to abuse this mechanic in manners x, y or z, as they have been attempted and rectified." Hero System isn't great at teaching itself to new players. Communities are pretty great at teaching Hero System, though, and this community's pretty great. I've only been poking at Hero for a month or two, and they've been super-welcoming. Is there somebody in your group who's got experience? The GM, who's initiating the switch, perhaps? Related: have you seen any of the "Hero in Two Pages" .pdfs? They're pretty rad.

Yep! Gygaxian roots show up all over the place. Nothing wrong with them, but they should be used on purpose. I do agree that D&D is its own genre, and this can get confusing when people show up to play D&D, because they might mean different things. By "other media," i mean both those, and other things besides. Basically, there's usually an analogue in media somewhere. Supers have comics, film and television, as well as the occasional novel (I am told that I must read Steelheart), sci-fi has been expressed in a wealth of media, post-apocalyptic stories have been very successfully told in film, print and video games, so take your pick. And if I think of an example of a fight scene in a non-gaming media, there's often something besides unit attrition going on, at least, when it's interesting. There's an interesting and well-traveled blog post from the dude who made Leverage, which contains NSFW language and topics, but I found compelling. Main takeaway for our purposes: You can stop reading now, if you just take this away: Don't write action sequences. Write suspense sequences that require action to resolve. Basically, "and now they fight!" is not terribly interesting storytelling. This needle is moved a bit in games, insofar as engaging in combat can be fun in itself - but not that far, as the spectacle of an action sequence is supposed to be fun in itself for an audience. When done right, the end result can be intensely satisfying, and highly memorable. Downside: it's a lot of work!

To riff off of what Scott Baker was saying, there's very little in Hero System that can't be resisted in some way. Not that many absolutes, which I think is pretty nice, it means that there's no "Trololol, nothing you can do" attacks, or defenses. Now, really high numbers can make that difference academic, but that's true of any system. If Darksied is built on twice the points, then yeah, his defenses might be able to laugh off whatever's thrown at him. This is true in pretty much any system. I can't think of a counter-example. Point being, the "trololol/ololol" problem is just less likely to ever come up in this system, unless you're dealing with massive power discrepancies. In which case, maybe talk to the GM about it? There's not much that'll fix an arms race outside of discussion. Anyway, to get back to your question, I think there's something to be said for mental attacks? Very difficult to mitigate. Here's what I'd do, building off of Grailknight a little: Life-Binding: Mental Blast 1d6 (standard effect: 3 STUN, 1 BODY), Penetrating (+1/2), Does BODY (+1), Damage Over Time, Target's defenses only apply once (33-64 damage increments, damage occurs every Segment, can be negated by initiator losing consciousness; +7 1/2) (100 Active Points); Side Effects, Side Effect occurs automatically whenever Power is used (User takes full damage; -2), Perceivable (Giant Ethereal Snakes writhe about both users; -1/2) Which is a 100-active point power, though Hero Designer says I got it down to a real cost of 28 points. Manageable, if your GM approves. Obviously, tweak to taste - I'm not sure how rapidly the effect takes hold in your vision of the power - but I think this'll get at some of your idea. Edit: This is the "Dark Snake Syndrome" version. Sympathetic damage is probably impossible in Hero, at least to the "if I die, you die level." Nothing prevents your GM from making some plot macguffin that works that way, but as a baseline power, that's probably impossible.

Yep. This, this this. In other media, the objective is very rarely "kill all their doodz" - outside of online multiplayer games of course, and even those have base capture goin' on. People have goals & motivations, and they tend to be pretty big when they're willingly risking their lives. Macguffin acquisition? Escape? Chase & capture? Supers has a lot going for it - combat is often in an urban environment, which immediately adds goals to pursue beyond "damage opponents until n < 1." Civilian rescue. Trying to move the fight out of the city. Keeping your favorite coffee shop intact. Evacuation coordination. And this is before you get to all of the cool environmental elements that a city has going for it. All this, before the GM has to get creative. Now, there's nothing that keeps us from doing this in other genres. Even in a dungeon crawl - that room with the skeletons? Sure, you can fight skeletons. You should fight skeletons at least once in a dungeon crawl, ain't nothing wrong with it! But, you could also be trying to fend off the skeletons long enough for someone to activate the five points of the star in the floor, so that the Sphinx head lights up and asks a riddle, which is how you stop the spiked ceiling from descending. Still a room where you fight skeletons

Word. Supers action really does lend itself to episodic play with big set piece battles, and Champions in particular does a lovely job rendering that.

@ zslane: that's fascinating regarding the different point costs. I never knew that was a thing, wide-eyed youngster and all. I wonder, has there ever been a "cost-by-genre" supplement, or anything of the like? It's one of the things that I really liked about BESM - basically different skills had different costs, based on the genre of the game being played. Everyman Skills are the closest I've seen in CC/6e, and I'm not sure that I'd want anything more than that. Mostly just curious.

For sure! I'm a big proponent of dynamic combat objectives - different combat objectives besides taking everybody out, dynamic terrain, stuff like that. Lots of fun. In messing around thus far, our Speedster's primary combat role has been civilian rescue, and it has been delightful. We've had buildings collapsing, fires and other massive environmental changes mid-fight; it's been great fun. I know you can do things like this in in many systems/settings, but in my experience, Champions has really shined in this regard.

For sure, things are much more interesting when combat's varied. Just trying to get a general ballpark on combat frequency*, as I wonder how big a factor that plays in the experience. Reference point: the current game I'm running, which is a session away from its 2-year anniversary spends <10% of its time on combat based on my quick back-of-the napkin math, split between dogfights, starship battles, and ground encounters. It's mostly political maneuvering and interpersonal drama, set to a backdrop of galactic apocalypse. When I was running a Pathfinder game for my university's RPG club, we had 3-4 hour timeslots, and probably averaged ~.66 combats/session. Those combats were usually about an hour. It took years for me to get that my tendencies are considered combat-light by most RPG communities. So I can't help but wonder if my vitriolic dislike of action denial stems from actions being a somewhat scarce resource. Some explication: An RPG group meets bi-weekly for 4-hour sessions. They're moderately experienced, and like decent-sized groups, so they tend to knock out roughly 2 combat turns per hour. The average SPD of the group is 3, so that comes down to ~6 phases per hour of combat.** Scenario one: the group spends ~50% of their time in combat. That's about 12 phases per biweekly session. Scenario two: the group spends ~10% of their time in combat. That's about 2.4 phases per biweekly session. In scenario one, losing a phase represents about an 8% reduction in your combat actions for the week. In scenario two, losing a phase is roughly a 42% reduction. Now, how does this effect overall experience? No idea. Still, I've had less promising hypotheses. * For the sake of these numbers, dungeon exploration/trap sweeping and the like are included as "combat." A more precise term would be "procedural engagement," but whatevs. ** I have no idea if this is representative. I'm trying to ballpark - this is all napkin statistics.

Nice! Reminds me of a quote from one of my players, explaining what we meant by a "Shadowrun" combat paradigm to a D&D group: "Combat will be rare, brief, and hilariously one-sided."

Related: in your experience, what's the optimal percentage of time spent in combat, in your Hero games? Does it vary by genre, or is it more of a group preference thing? Also, how close is the optimal to the actual?

So. I had a long response written. Perhaps too long. I deleted it, because I don't think that it productively added to the conversation. I was typing angry, and that's the opposite of useful. So let me try again: I appreciate the feedback. It's worth noting that my problem does not stem from "Bobs" or players who are in too much of a boardgame v. RPG mode. We're newbies to Hero, not to gaming. And it is possible that my strong negative feelings regarding action denial stem from memory of gaming with a serious Bob. No joke. His Pathfinder turns would take roughly 15 minutes. I started timing them. Now, there were a lot of reasons why he & I should not have been in games together. So perhaps there's something to all this, and I will mind these things less in the context of a group of like-minded players. That hasn't been the case yet, but maybe that will change with time! Anyway. I think we'll mess around again tomorrow, and perhaps we'll try combining END & STUN, and see what that's like. There's no ongoing campaign (well, there's sort of a continuity coming up, everyone is too story-invested to just do straight-up wargaming), so it's a good environment to playtest things, see what shifts. Thanks again, y'all.

Not even kidding, I've half a mind to record a version of that.

Rock, and good catch on distinctions. There are very few ways to force much of anything in Hero, which is a big plus in my book. The rest of this, I'm going to break down - not to try and be hostile, but to show where the difference in experiences lie. I don't. In fact, I'm a tiny bit disappointed in any RPG if a fight goes by and my character's unscathed. It can depend, but in these cases, I still have something to engage with. If the character's stuck in an illusion, that's a point of interaction - the game hasn't stopped. Difference of experience. I know that this is the case for a lot of people, but it's not a universal experience. Context can matter - it's a lot more fun for my regenerating, self-resurrecting Champions character to get walloped than it is for my level 1 Pathfinder witch, no doubt - the consequences are different. One of the real benefits that I derive from Hero, is that it's just less lethal than many systems tend to be, and so the risk/reward for engaging in combat of any kind is altered in a way that I like. I 100% agree on the above. Abort actions were one of the first things that really jumped out at me about the combat system - I'd really dug them in SR5, and I frankly find Hero Systems' to be more consistent, well-thought out, and accessable to a wider selection of character types, rather than just High SPD (Or the Shadowrun Equivalent) characters - though obviously, they get the most use. The meaningful distinction, to me, is one of player agency. Being stunned is something that happens to you. Aborting to dodge is something that you make happen. One of my favorite combats of all time was a Feng Shui game where one character just used defense on my horrifically overpowered, superinitiative boss monster, sacrificing her actions to sacrifice the enemy's It was amazing. The player, me, and the other players had a blast, and it was very tactically satisfying. Conversely, if I'd had the boss monster just take away her actions, it would have been a very unpleasant experience for her. I have a horse in this race. It is not actions. It is player agency. I'm sure that you don't mean it this way, but that feels like an ad hominem attack. I can refute it - many of the players are avid Go enthusiasts, and while I haven't played Chess competitively for a while, I took 2nd place in the last tournament I was in (high school, so grains of salt abound), so I think the logical leap there is unnecessary. I rather enjoy when it's someone else's turn in Chess. But when my turn comes up, if the other player said "sorry! No turn for you, because reasons," I would not enjoy that experience. I would also wonder what the heck kind of chess match I'd gotten into, but that's neither here nor there. Anyway, sorry if it seems like I'm being contentious here. I promise, my goal is not to argue, but rather to clarify the difference in experience. People interact with our hobby in different ways, and experience it in different manners, and that's awesome! But it can be tricky, as human beings tend to assume that other human beings experience the world in the same way that they do, which just isn't the case. My S/O is an introvert. I'm the other thing. No matter how much I might think that when she's upset, what she needs is lots of cheerful people, that's not going to make it any more true. Voice of experience, yo. Anyway, sorry if I'm rambling. I just wanted to make it clear where differences exist, without accidentally starting an Internet Fight. This thread has been super useful to me, and I want to see it continue. Rock.

I just found a thing! APG II, p. 27: Extradimensional Space. BAM. (Edit.) By which I mean, if you're looking for your Bag of Holding, there you go.

Master Rouge - King of Cosmetics. I dunno man, that'd be worth shooting for.

I know it's a bit off-center from what you were asking, but if the idea is to get dynamic combat, I cannot recommend terrain representation enough. With a group that's 100% new to Hero System, the thing that stood out the most, was just how dynamic, kinetic and full of movement and environmental interaction the combat is. You can get Fat Dragon Games' Capital City set for like, 9 bucks on DrivethruRPG. Scissors, cardstock, some glue. Brick goes from hitting dudes to throwing dumpsters at them, not because it's even more effective, but because HOLY CARP YOU GUYS I THREW A DUMPSTER AT THAT DUDE. It's wicked fun. And this is coming from someone with a giant pile of unpainted minis, because I gots the shakey hands, so when I say it's easier than you think, that's the context. Basically, if the problem you're trying to solve is static combat, then there are a couple different ways to address it. Hopefully one (or more) helps out!

To take a different approach: Do some real-world research. One of the things that I love the most about Role Playing Games is that I learn things, constantly. I learned a metric buttload about the politics of Russia and the CCP running a near-future cyberpunk game. This isn't because Shadowrun 4 (the system I used, I just stripped out magic) had any details about Asian politics. Rather, I took the opportunity to do research, because I like that kind of thing. Granted, this doesn't have to be a massive endeavor. Wikipedia is actually roughly on par with other encyclopedias, so you can get a good rough overview of things. What I would do, is take this opportunity to do a little Google-fu, and dig up a range. On that note: I found a couple infographics for Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark - I agree with the author of the blog this is hosted on, some of those numbers seem to have materialized out of thin air. There's a breakdown on YouTube that handles Mr. Wayne a bit more thoughtfully. One can usually get rough estimates of the cost of various military technologies, which are by far and away the most resource-intensive things your average Champion or Spy is likely to be dealing with. For Pulp Heroes, ludicrous technology that works not because of science, but because of Science! is a genre staple. Though, if you're curious, adjusted for inflation, you're probably looking at upwards of $33 million to build the Hindenberg today. Salt to taste. Anyway, hope that's more helpful than frustrating! TL:DR? Google is your bestest buddy for this stuff.

Yep! Increasing degrees of system mastery come with time. Significant time will turn into significant mastery in many cases. However, we can't really beam 10+ years of experience into our brains.

Nifty!

Whole character doesn't, really. It's a reference sheet. Note that there's no space for complications, etc. I use it in conjunction with the full sheet, which is there if I need to look something up. (Edit: I did try, initially, to fit everything vital on said sheets. There's just too much info, so I changed what I was doing.) Question: is there any way to force a character to be stunned besides doing lots of stun damage? I've been seeing it less as an option, and more as a symptom of damage - there's not really a choice involved, like "should I try to stun them, or damage them a bunch?" You can't stun them unless you damage them a bunch; after defenses, if you take more STUN than your CON, you're stunned; nothing terribly tactical about it. Unless there's an option I'm missing! Like, those stunning shots on Hoth: are those just blast? Only Does Stun doesn't increase your likelihood of stunning someone, right? Again, I understand why people like it conceptually. I just find player action denial to be quite unpleasant, and the more time elapsing between turns, the more severe the experience. It's a total double-standard - denying one's opposition the ability to act is great fun, but it feels wrong to take it away for one side but not the other. Obviously, if I was playing a Hero game with someone outside my group, I'd just have to prepare accordingly: Keep Playing the Game: +30 CON (30 Active Points); Unified Power (My enjoyment of the experience; -1/4)

This is the zenith of human achievement.

Adjudicating such is another skill to learn, to be sure, and if you don't want to spend extra time on that, then something that doesn't require interacting with - like static modifiers - becomes much more appealing. I brought it up because hey, let's look at this from a couple angles. Metacommunication! It's good, if sometimes challenging.