Brian Stanfield

Hopefully you didn’t get permission because they’re already preparing their own digital versions of Adventurers Club?

I’d love to hear more about this, since I’m relatively new to the forums. What was the old approach that didn’t work? I totally grok the disappointment that DOJ doesn’t seem interested in supporting their own game. Jason Walters is going crazy about supporting Champions Now, which is a re-design of 3e. I wish he/they would put as much energy into publishing adventures & campaigns, as you say. And full color art?! Don’t even get me started. And I totally wish they’d offer some sort of third party license like the other games. This seems like the easiest way to do things. But since that’s not happening, I simply offer an addition to the downloads page as a solution. Heck, I guess I could start a forum topic where people can upload their adventures. Folks are doing this in individual threads all the time. Why not centralize it? Just a dream, but one that we, as a community, can do something about. But the rest I just don’t understand. I’m not trying to be obtuse or argumentative. Why can’t we post everything? Are you referring to the “official” material, like villains and things like that, and locations like Vibora Bay or whatever? That I can see as a problem, but DOJ has shown a readiness to offer licensing for such a thing. I’m not even sure the license costs anything if you aren’t making any money off of it. But not all adventures need to be “official” in this way. In fact, I suspect most HERO players now are using their own creations to a large extent. That’s just a baseless guess on my part, and pure conjecture. But really, if we’re all already spending time making adventures anyway, why is it a bad thing to save all the info into a file, add a cover page explaining what characters, villains, or other books are needed, and add it to a repository? If people are playing, but are desperate for new adventures, it seems to say to me that they’ve created their own stuff but ran out of time or ideas. An adventure swap where you add what you’ve got and grab what you want doesn’t seem all that crazy to me, and doesn’t have to violate any intellectual property laws. I’m assuming “Crime Spree” uses the villain books of some sort? (Sorry, I don’t know the “official” material all that much, and never have cared either). For players who care about the official material, I guess they’d be buying the books already. If I want to make stuff in D&D, it sure helps to have the Monster Manual, for example. There are a lot of third party products, but they’re getting pretty sophisticated, large, and pricey. And many of them assume you have some of the books already as well. In all honesty, that’s how things have always been. I haven’t looked at the M&M and Call of Cthulhu sites, so I don’t know how they do things. Maybe you have some insight there you can tell me? I’m always curious about these things. Anyway, I’m sure DOJ would be a lot more cooperative about using their intellectual property in adventures if the potential sale of other books was part of the transaction. Just conjecture on my part again. But it in all seriousness, there’s got to be tons of “unofficial” material clogging up people’s hard drives that could easily be shared with almost no hassle. I wonder why everyone seems to complain that there are no adventures, but then don’t even think of offering what they’ve done in exchange for what others have done? I went to Origins two weeks ago and collected seven new adventures from GMs in the HERO System alone! They’re always (in my experience) willing to share their ideas, and I didn’t have to do anything for them except ask. Which brings me back to the first point: what was done before and why didn’t it work? Anyway, @Spence, this isn’t a diatribe aimed at you. I hope you don’t take it that way.

Well, if we're escalating:

If you're responding to my idea above, @mallet, it really isn't a "buy and play" concept. I'd expect a great deal of open-endedness in that sort of adventure to help alleviate some of the problems you (rightly) point out. Let the professionals figure that out. What I'm envisioning is simply a free pool of stuff other people have successfully played and are willing to make available to other people on the forums. Each contribution could have a cover page explaining some of the constraints, assumptions, and expectations in that particular adventure so people could make an informed choice. And, as always, they could be customized. It's usually easier to tweak something already made than make something from scratch. A pipe dream, indeed, but not all that far-fetched if people agreed to do it. Many people are already posting their campaigns in the forums already. It would be nice to centralize it all so we can find pre-made and pre-played adventures if we find ourselves in a pinch.

11 isn’t awkward, it’s a prime number! C’mon, man!

When I learned to play GURPS, I thought this was a cool idea. It’s reasonable to make every attack contend with an active defense. What I realized, though, after playing a while was that a defender could successfully defend against an indefinite number of attacks before he ever has an actual chance to act. The thought of blocking punches from 5 opponents pretty much all at once, and then have a counterattack (which that target gets to oppose) could make combat interminably long! After thinking about this a while back, I’m satisfied that OCV vs. DCV with modifiers for defensive maneuvers is a good enough model for a game. It may not be as “realistic” as the opposed rolls, but the infinite parry machine is just as “unreal” in the other extreme.

I appreciate your point, and agree with it, but that ain’t going to happen any time soon. My point is that if we start with baby steps and a steady stream of “fan produced” adventures, available in a central location, perhaps enough of a demand could kickstart some “official” material. Not likely, but better than rubbing two wet sticks together and hoping.

How do you determine how many dice are in the pool at the start? I like Neil’s idea of everyone making rolls to contribute to the Plan. In this case, maybe they’d add more dice to the pool with successful rolls.

I think, just conceptually, trying to explain why they subtract their die roll is the catching point. That seems like a negative modifier or something at the gut level. When I explained that the roll was their base chance to hit, with OCV and DCV as modifiers, they got it right away. The math is exactly the same! Who knows why these things click or don’t click with people?!

The problem I ran into at Origins was that people didn’t really understand what they were rolling for. It’s hard to explain, but if you say “Roll under 15 and you hit,” they get it. If you say “Roll the dice and you may or may not hit this or that character depending on his DCV,” confusion sets in. The roll appears to be an arbitrary modifier to your Offensive value rather than a probability randomizer. This was the hardest part to explain, at least in the game I was playing.

My experience so far has been good. It doesn’t show them how to build characters, but it does show them the character sheet and gives them a tour through the various parts of it. It’s really ten pages of teaching gold as far as I’m concerned. It makes the character sheet less of an intimidating monolith of numbers! (Huh, autocorrect just changed “numbers” to “my nerds!” Nice!” If they are familiar with the basic 2 page rules summary, and where to find all the stuff on a character sheet, then they can look at pre-gen characters make a slightly informed decision about what they do. My suggestion is to look at the Introduction the 6e Basic Rulebook and see what you think.

Good points, butte 50/50 split is at 10-, so trying to explain this to people who have never RPGed before may not catch on as easily as saying “11- is a competent skill level, and is modified by your OCV,” or whatever. This is all great stuff though!

It looks like I missed an entire page of responses. Sorry it took me so long to get back to you. I have ave the speed chart laminated, a couple of pages from the books like the skills list and combat maneuvers and modifiers, and a lot of stuff from the downloads page, such as combat summaries, the quick roll reference chart that shows all the rolls needed for a range of OCV vs. DCV, stuff like that.

Nice catch on that! Again, it’s another one of those things that I didn’t see before, but will never unsee again. Thanks!

If the goal was to provide professionally finished adventures and campaigns, then I absolutely agree with you. However, what I’m envisioning here is something to go on the downloads page, which is all unprofessional (for the most part), and offered up by players for use by other players. One of the most frequent complaints about 6e and HERO in general is that there aren’t any adventures available which are ready to run. Everyone on the forums has probably created adventures and larger campaigns, so if we all simply offered up our notes and character write-ups we’d have a huge pool of ready-to-go adventures. No art would be needed, nor any finished editing, just the plot points, conflicts, villains, etc. it would be an almost instant archive of adventures that people have run (and presumably enjoyed). This is is obviously a makeshift idea at first, and completely an amateur effort, but it could become a very real and valuable resource to keep the community going. It’s just a thought. . . .

Thank you so much for this. Until you presented it so clearly, I just wasn’t seeing it. Now that I see it, it’s so obvious that I can’t unsee it! This is exactly how I’m going to describe it again for our second game session. I’m sure they don't recall too much at this point, so I’ll basically be reteaching them the basics again. This should help tremendously!

Just find out what method works best for teaching the combat rolls. Pay special attention to which method end out “clicking” with your player, and then post it here. I’m curious to find out what works for you. Steve is always active on the forums, usually at least once a week (at least it seems so). I contacted him directly about his Hudson City book and he had all kinds of feedback for me. This is one of the things I love about the HERO forums! People are usually really helpful.

I wish that the web site would facilitate this kind of exchange more easily. A separate tab on the downloads page would be awesome!

This is pretty much what I’m talking about. Me too. I’m not trying to change the rules. I’m just looking for a streamlined way to present them for the first time. All the complex aspects of HERO System (normal/killing damage, etc.) are what make it distinctive in the first place. They need to be included, so no, I’m not trying to only please the casual gamers as was suggested above. I’ll keep the complexity because it’s more fun that way. BUT, I’ll also try to find the easiest, simplest way to teach those rules so that the complexity isn’t overwhelming for a newbie.

Does anyone know how to make my billeted lists post correctly the first time? I have to edit them every time to get them to post correctly.

It’s different in this way: Skill roll = Roll under your skill. Attack roll - add your OCV to 11 (why 11, a newbie might ask) and roll the dice and subtract it from the previous number, and then maybe you can hit your opponent with this amount of DCV or less. I have ave no problem teaching the Skill Roll in 30 seconds. I’m still trying to get my newbies to understand the Attack Roll after two game sessions.

It seems like you don’t even need #3 as long as people are willing to share their adventures at no cost. I’m not sure how the licensing works, but maybe it would be possible to have an adventures section in the downloads page of herogames.com where people could share their adventures with the rest of the community. No one profits from it, and it wouldn’t be compromising any IP . . . The adventures really wouldn’t even have to be all that complex or complete. They’d need just enough to give people the tools to run an adventure right away. Characters & villains, the main point of conflict, and a series of interactions, and you have something playable. I wonder if anybody would be willing to try something like this?

Aaron Allston’s Strikeforce is the closest thing to a GM’s guide you’ll get for HERO, and it’s still probably the best book out there even today. I wish there was a way to include those observations into a more thorough GM section of the rules, as you rightly suggest.

Welcome to the forums, Greysword! Out of curiosity, how long have you been playing in the HERO System? This isn't a challenge to your authority or anything like that, I'm simply curious. Many of us have been playing the games since the rules were only 70 pages and really easy to learn. I think @Duke Bushido is on to something when he doesn't play past 3rd edition. Trust me, you'll learn this if you spend enough time on the forums. . . . (Love you Duke!) So, perhaps you're misunderstanding my question. I'm not interested in dumbing down the rules permanently for casual gamers. I agree that gamers are smart and can figure this stuff out on their own simply because they want to. But what I am interested in is how much can you boil the game down for teaching purposes so that casual gamers can get into gaming. I've got a new group of 6 and only one of them is an experienced RPGer, so my challenge is to not only teach them what role playing games are all about in the first place, but also how to explain rules mechanics to people who've never experienced the concept before. It's not insulting to try to come up with better ways to teach the rules. I'll let the full ruleset come into play after they get used to the basics. Ok, so this is more what I was asking for. I think experienced gamers who are used to rolling dice for various reasons have forgotten what it's like to be a beginner who has never rolled dice for anything other than Monopoly. Subtracting a dice roll from 11 + your Offense (I like your simplification there) just doesn't make sense to someone who doesn't understand the concept of how the roll functions. The first formula is much more intuitive, and that's all I teach. Maybe later I'll switch it up on them when I don't want them to know the DCV of their opponents, but for now, it's so much simpler to jut give them a target roll. As you say, dropping the acronyms helps too! There have been lots of various suggestions for this over the years, and I'm always curious about different ways to present the information so it doesn't confuse a new player. Thanks for the input! Enjoy the forums!

I have a buddy who is a great Warhammer 40k modeler in the Seattle area. He was offered a dream job to go build models for a Hollywood studio, but turned it down for some inane reason like he doesn’t like the sun that much or some such. Joe’s cut from a different cloth, but I still can’t believe he turned it down.