Brian Stanfield

12 hours ago, Duke Bushido said:

Based on the e-mail I received this morning, Western HERO is now in Jason's hands. 

 

I confirmed that Jason and his group are in fact the current copyright holders for the Adventurers Club, but I am afraid that I was _not_ given permission to continue on with that project. :(. I will likely do it for myself, just to have, but I am afraid I will not be able to make it available for distribution in the foreseeable future. 

 

Sorry, Toxxus. 

 

 

Duke 

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

14 hours ago, Spence said:

It's an old thought and has been proposed before.  It didn't work then, won't now.   More below.

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?

14 hours ago, Spence said:

The idea of just having people donate adventures and posting on a forum never works because they cannot actually post everything.  My crime spree is a perfect example of why it fails. 

 

For example:  Bob the gamer actually found out that Champions exists and actually discovered the one place on the planet is may be purchased.   wants to try to play Champions.   He then shells out $40 for a B&W 1980's style 240 page book Champions Complete despite seeing the full color glossy 319 page Mutants and Masterminds Deluxe Heroes Handbook for $39.95.    So Bob now armed with a rulebook wants to try out the game.  Since Champions Complete completely lacks anything to actually play, he does what every new gamer does.  He jumps on his computer and looks for an adventure for the game he just bought.  After being puzzled about the Hero not supporting their game at all, he discovers the Hero Website and locates the "free adventure download section" and is happy to find an adventure and downloads "Crime Spree".   Then discovers that in order to actually use it he needs to buy two more books.  Two more 1980's B&W textbooks style books (one book if talking 6th Edition).

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. 

9 hours ago, assault said:

11 is greater than 10

Well, if we're escalating: 

6 hours ago, mallet said:

The problem I think with comparing say a Champions buy and play adventure and a D&D one, is that characters in D&D are pretty much “set”. This is because of classes and levels. A level 5 fighter in any D&D campaign is going to be close to in powers and abilities to any other 5th level fighter in hundreds of other D&D campaigns. Because the character creation rules are set in stone. 

<snip>

It it is very hard to make a buy and play champions adventure when the writer has no idea which of hundreds if not thousands of different abilities any particular group of heroes might have. 

3 hours ago, assault said:

The point is that there is a massive pool of examples of how to write and publish adventures for Champions and other superhero RPGs.

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.

9 hours ago, Doc Democracy said:

Noone ever asked me why we used 10, people like 10 more than they like 11.  11 is an awkward number...  😄

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

7 hours ago, RDU Neil said:

Make combat an opposed roll. Player just takes 11+OCV +/- any modifiers... roll and figure out "How much you made the roll by?"  Example: 7 OCV + 11 = 18 or less (just like a skill roll)... roll 3d6... get a 12... made it by 6. If they are doing an Offensive Strike it is 11+7-2 for 16 or less... roll a 12, made it by 4. Basically, all they have to do is "I made it by X"

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.  

2 hours ago, Spence said:

 

This misses the point.  People buy games they can play.  In today's gaming world that means adventures and campaigns that can be played as is, or can be easily adapted.  And the adventures and campaigns they look for are "official" ones.

 

Besides, people sharing adventures is the model Hero has been following since the later half of 4th Ed. 

 

Hero needs a commercial presence.  And that requires something different.

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. 

41 minutes ago, Doc Democracy said:

 

Try it once as a pilot.  It worked really well at my table, the discussions were not as simple as "Is it worth spending a chit", it was what are the chances of us losing our pool, is this the thing we need??  It is interesting to watch them be very casual when they have a large pool (though this is when they have the real chance of losing lots of dice) and then become incredibly stingy as you get down below 6 dice.  In the last session, the last two dice went on the first roll - 2 sixes.  In the first session the last dice was used four or five times before they rolled a 6.

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. 

5 minutes ago, RDU Neil said:

 

Interesting... usually I just point to their DCV stat... a six or eight or whatever... and say "So they have a stat like that... and if you hit that stat or higher, you hit them"... and it seems to work. I get it, though. It can be confusing.

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?!

4 minutes ago, RDU Neil said:

 

Funny... this is how I explain it and it seems eminently grokkable. Roll... subtract that from your offense... that is the defense you hit. Done. Very quickly they realize why rolling low is good. The important thing is to have your Offensive Number (OCV + 11) clearly written down. If I had my druthers, that would be part of the Stat... your OCV is 11+X and you pay five for 1 for x. That would simplify things a lot, IMO.

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. 

On 6/21/2019 at 5:39 PM, Duke Bushido said:

Given nothing but those ten pages, can you learn to build a character and play the game?

 

If we take the suggestion of pre-gen characters (which I'm a big fan of, and keep a few handy in case of new players.  My entire youth group started with pre-gens:  a dice-off to see who picks from the stack of (at that time) about eighteen characters, and eventually we had a team), will that ten pages teach them what they need to know to play the game?

 

If the answer to either of these (especially that first one!    ) is "Yes," then I need to print out two or three copies myself!

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. 

5 minutes ago, ghost-angel said:

11- is also near the middle of the 3D6 bell curve so two combatants who are otherwise equal in skill (OCV and DCV match) will have a roughly 50/50 shot of hitting (or being missed), with a slight favor advantage towards the attacker rolling 11- on it. So yeah, if you want people to hit more often than they miss, you would want a base roll to start at 11- and go up from there.

 

Edit:

(This is also found in D&D5E, where the philosophy is "hitting more often is more fun than missing a lot and then doing all the damage if you manage to hit"; unlike 3rd and 4th Ed. where very High ACs and very high Damage were more common; D&D5E damage trends on the low end, but you almost always do damage.  You feel like you're getting somewhere even if it's a long road. Similar with Hero, slanted towards hitting things more often.)

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!

On 6/21/2019 at 4:15 PM, rravenwood said:

That said, I have to ask: what sort of laminated playing aids have you put into use? (Inquiring minds want to know )

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. 

9 minutes ago, greysword said:

One other thing about the question, "why do we add an 11 to OCV", It appears that in skill tests an 11- is considered Competent:

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

14 hours ago, Scott Ruggels said:

 

Here’s part of the problem. If you want sparkling artwork, very few people do that for free. Artists these days take a dim view of being paid in exposure, and those that do, either you are married to, best friends with, or , more commonly, aren’t of sufficient professional quality to attract sales. Canned art won’t make it any more,’either. This is just the art side. What about the writers? The various species of editors?  Sure I can see someone reworking their personal campaign into an adventure book, simply for the love of the game, but art, and editorial, even for an unprinted PDF will still need to be paid for. I would love to illustrate stuff again, but other than one or two pieces to personal friends,’not without pay, and a contract. I suggest the writers take that into consideration too. 

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. . . .

10 hours ago, ghost-angel said:

Once you strip out the, poorly presented IMO, formula in Hero and literally treat Attacking like any other Skill Challenge you only need to teach one mathematical idea. In or out of combat, Attack Rolls are just Combat Skill Challenges and Skills are just Non-Combat Attack Challenges.

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!

4 hours ago, greysword said:

I don't think the to hit rolls have been that much of a problem.  Myself and all of the other gamers new to Hero that we've collected (about 6, I think) all caught onto the system pretty fast.  However, none are casual gamers.  The good news is we have a "new to gaming" player that is about to start in a few weeks (not you, Chris).  If there is anything you'd like us to do or record, I'm happy to run the experiment. 😁  Just let me know.

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. 

4 hours ago, greysword said:

Thanks and I appreciate the welcome!  A long-time Hero system user, friend, and gamer in our group was surprised when Steve Long answered a rules question for me, himself   This is an awesome group of gamers on the Hero boards!

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. 

5 hours ago, Doc Democracy said:

 

I fully intend to put all of the characters, villains and scenarios of my Golden Age game in the thread I made.  Will not be professionally put together but I intend to have my GM notes there.

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

42 minutes ago, Chris Goodwin said:

I can't speak for Brian, but in my experience with new players it's that Skills have their target number written down, and bonuses or penalties are unlikely to change by more than one or two points, while the target number for combat is a lot more fluid.  OCV, DCV, range, combat maneuvers on the part of both the attacker and defender, et cetera, and all of those can change from phase to phase even against the same opponent.  

This is pretty much what I’m talking about. 

43 minutes ago, Chris Goodwin said:

Having said that, I haven't the slightest desire to change how either combat or Skill values are changed, though I do recognize that combat is more complicated.  To me, it's up there with Normal vs. Killing, PD vs. ED, Stun vs. Body, and so on.  Fundamental to the system.  But making it easier to do without fundamentally changing it is, to me, a worthy goal.

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. 

3 hours ago, ghost-angel said:

 

Let me ask you this; do these players understand the Skill System rolls in Hero?

If so, why is the Attack Roll so different?

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. 

On 6/2/2019 at 10:25 PM, Spence said:

...there are three very real things being done by literally all of the current successful games.

1) Playable settings.

2) actual adventures and campaigns that only require the GM to read them to run.  In other words playable "out of the box".   One or two 6-10 episode campaigns a year are more than enough, especially when you have #3.

3) Some form of open license that allows people to create adventures without needing a specific license.  That allows anywhere from dozens to hundreds, depending on the game, of low cost or free adventures to be available for people who do not have time to spend building games but want to play.  They may not be top shelf master works, but they are more than sufficient to play.

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?

On 6/6/2019 at 3:55 PM, Grailknight said:

Another point that isn't being addressed is this: Hero has no book that you can call a GM's guide. Yes the main books are long but Champions Complete and Fantasy Hero Complete prove that much of that word count is examples and side notes. The actual rules on character creation and combat aren't much longer than the Player's Handbook. Advice and Guidelines for GM's are given their own section but are nowhere near the depth and detail needed to run the game without experience. Separate that out and expand upon it in a GM only book(maybe with all the almanac optional rules) and you'd take a big step toward getting Hero out again.

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!)

7 hours ago, greysword said:

First, I think it is a fool's errand to reduce Hero to a shell of what it is just to please the casual gamer crowd.  RPG gamers are usually among the more intelligent and imaginative of the human race.  To dumb down the rules for them is almost an insult. 

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.

7 hours ago, greysword said:

In reality, Hero is very easy to play for a novice.  All they need to know is what the powers do, how many dice they need to role (to hit and damage), and the basic to hit formula (as mentioned):  11+ Offense - Defense = roll needed.  Or to describe the other way to do this: 11- to hit roll + Your Offense =or < Bad Guy's Defense.  Usually it takes 2-3 rolls for new people to get this and enjoy it themselves.  We just stop with the acronyms (OCV/DCV) and call it by the first letter.  That is all they need to get it and have fun.  The GM can work with the rest to make the game fun and if this is a longer running game, they will pick it up.

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!

9 hours ago, Scott Ruggels said:

"You didn't ask?"  XD>

Oh I have had friends that ended up in Hollywood,, one of which won an Oscar for best special effects, but stuff like that doesn't come up all that often, it's Which cool Movie did you see last week? How are your kids? Did your wife ever decipher that particular in joke between us?" That sort of thing.

 

I am still open for illustration gigs, and now, currently am working hard to get up to that TSR level of art, so I can do Digital paintings at a pace I could make money at. (even though I get more 3D model commissions these days).

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.