Brian Stanfield

Names like this (taken from Turakian Age, though not a critique of that setting by any means): Shularahaleen Thugoradanirion, god of strength Sikirarthasanaila, goddess of stealth and guile Whandurashaneshir, god of dark magic UGH!!!!! Why are fantasy names virtually unpronounceable, and so polysyllabic that I have to stop and sound them out phonetically before I can continue on?! Is this inherited from Tolkein? Is it supposed to be proof of the sophistication of a culture? Hey, it takes us five minutes to say hello! It takes even longer to read an account of it in a fantasy novel! It rips me out of immersion instantly. This reminds me of the story my Mom used to tell me about the King's son named Stickystickystombonosirombohoddyboddyboscoickenonnuenoncomberombetombo. Not surprisingly, when he was in danger and everyone had to relay the message that he was drowning, they couldn't get to him in time to save him because his name was absurdly long. The King's next son was named Zip.

Unfortunately, HERO System doesn't have the FLGS presence that the games you mention have. D&D used to be under one cover, but they soon learned, with AD&D, that people will buy every book TSR created, and beg for more! One of the reasons I switched to Champions, and ultimately Fantasy HERO, was because D&D was coming out with a 2nd edition, and I refused to give them all of my allowance all over again just to get the same game I already had. The appeal of Fantasy HERO was that it was a one-book game! They released a Bestiary, which was actually pretty helpful but not necessary for playing. The ideal of the one-book game made HERO System appealing. Justice, Inc. is probably the best thing HERO System ever released, in my opinion, as a one-box game. It's brilliant, includes just enough to keep it open to many variations, and also includes a campaign book with lots (and lots) of adventures and plot seeds. Box games are out of vogue now, except for D&D's basic set. But I've given up that idea, which has been covered in great depth here. DOJ would not be well-served with yet another multi-book set. The 6e rules are out of print anyway, and Champions/Fantasy HERO Complete are barely present in physical form. My idea in this thread is to try to create a one-book game that can be taken to conventions, game shops, or whatever, and sold as-is as a complete game that new players can pick up and quickly play. As the system is now, this is impossible, even with Champions Complete, since there is no setting and no pre-built anything provided for new players.

So this is the other model I suggested earlier, but nobody has really bitten. It seems like, instead of a bunch of different independent games, we could instead keep the same independent settings, and in those books tweak all the dials and levers to offer the templates, gear, powers/spells, power levels, etc., so it's basically a ready-to-play game supplement to the core rules. This may make more sense in the big picture. No matter the approach, however, there's always going to be a problem of narrowing down some items while still needing to remain vague and open about others: Want all the rules included in one book, and abilities and gear pre-generated? No problem, but what if you want to play a variation of that game and don't have the appropriate gear? Let's say you are playing Action HERO but you'd rather include mad scientists with super psychic powers or something. Well, you're going to have to buy the core rules to modify the game yourself. Want to write a game book that takes all of the variations into account? Well then you're going to have to sacrifice brevity for the sake of being more inclusive. Action HERO may include a section on all the different genre variations, and perhaps even include a resource guide for each variant. The game will be more complete, with no need for any other books, but the game itself will necessarily be a longer book. You may even have to create several different settings for the different versions of the game. If you do more of a setting/campaign book, then you don't need to present the rules since you'll be depending on the core rules to take care of that. Now you have more space to play with, either in terms of different variations on the genre. But you're asking people to buy more than one book, with the possibility that they'll be overwhelmed by the relentlessly wordy core rules presentation. And you still may have to include more than one setting, which makes things more complicated. You could do a different setting/campaign book for each possible variation of the genre, offering each as a supplement to the core rules. Each book would be a complete game based on the core rules, but by itself would be unplayable. It would be like all the GURPS genre books: great resources, but not actually rules in and of themselves. Many problems are solve by this approach, but it still requires the core rules, with can be daunting. I'm trying to find a happy medium, which may not actually exist. But it's fun (for me at least) to consider the approaches in light of what's been done before, and perhaps even more importantly, what hasn't been done before.

Consider a good portion of these stolen! I actually had some ideas along these same lines, but hearing them presented back to me reassures me that I was on the right track. Thanks for the plot seeds!

I sorta am overthinking this, but I'm doing it in the interest of teaching good roleplaying habits. For example, when the driver in our last scene is waiting in the car, but then suddenly wants to participate in the conversation in the restaurant, we had to remind her that she wasn't actually there in the game. The balance between in character and out of character discussion is new to them, and I don't want to complicate it even more by making them have to bracket out what they know as players, but couldn't possibly know as characters. We all just roll with it as we go, but I was curious if anyone had any methods to minimize the "multitasking," as Gnome put it. Thanks for the feedback.

But there are no elves . . .

Wow, can you imagine the modifiers to the Tracking Skill? +3 to your roll if the creature is "extra poopy" . . . . Build an entire modifiers table of gastrointestinal circumstances!

I'm running a Pulp HERO campaign, and some of my characters have really (I mean really) interesting backgrounds mired in secrecy. These are all new players, and some of them really dug deep for their character conceptions. I'm proud of them just for that. However, now I have some characters with secrets, which are included as Complications. It makes for some good possible drama within the group of PCs as well as the players themselves. So what I'm wondering is, have you ever had a situation like this in your campaign? How do you go about protecting the PC's secrets from the actual players while playing the game? Or do you? I like the idea of some secrecy among the PCs, obviously, because they don't know each other yet. I also like the idea of the players themselves discovering new things about each others' PCs as the game progresses (just as their characters would). But this makes for some dicey moments when the players are trying to play to their backgrounds without revealing all of their backgrounds. For example, I have a player whose PC was part of a pre-Soviet "Red Sparrow" program, so she has all kinds of training as an assassin. But none of the characters know this because she left Russia and became a translator at the League of Nations, and is so cosmopolitan that she no longer appears to be Russian. Her skills come up in the game, and I try to encourage her to remember what she can do, but she tends to say things like "Oh yeah, because I know how to kill people," or something like that, which immediately attracts the other players' attention. She's still learning how to play, after all. I have another player who is a former Romani circus performer turned silent film actress with a heavy accent that didn't translate into the "talkies" very well, so she had to retire. The players know her as an actress, but nobody knows her background. I keep trying to remind her of things she can do in certain situations, but she too, as a new player, is not completely cognizant of hat she's revealing in her comments about her character. Given these two examples, what would you do in situations like this? In reality, the players don't seem to remember the little slips, so it's probably not going to spoil the surprises later as their backgrounds get revealed. But it's a bit nerve-racking for me to try to keep track of what's been revealed and what hasn't. What I don't want to do is have the players soliloquy their backgrounds to each other as PCs, as so often happens with new players (I actually had one player's PC say to another PC "I'm surly and I don't like people" ). But does it make a difference if the players actually know the information about each other's PCs? They could all be invested in developing the story if they have all the information, but it loses some of the fun of genuine revelation later in the campaign. What do you think? Keep in mind, I'm trying to teach role-playing best practices to my new players in the process of playing.

I got the HTML copied. You can go ahead and delete it again so it doesn't take up so much space. Thanks again.

No worries. I've fiddled with a couple of the RTF exports, but I think I'm going to have to bite the bullet and brush up on my HTML skills.

I've heard of it, but it happened during my hiatus between 3rd and 6th editions. Has someone done a HERO Designer export that resembles it?

I like that character sheet. Where did it come from?

Without knowing the particulars about your campaign guidelines, it’s hard to know why fantasy characters seem tougher than supers. It could be because there is too much power variance between character types. A 12d6 fireball with AOE vs. a 2d6 sword with a couple of CSLs is not balanced. One character will seem so much tougher than others around him. In a supers game, however, everyone will have similarly powerful attacks, and so it won’t seem so out of control or imbalanced. The relative toughness of characters won’t seem out of whack. Its also possible that magic has some sort of cost divisor making it more affordable and therefore more out of balance with other characters.

Wow! I love this idea. Next time I run a fantasy campaign, I very well might steal this idea! (Nothing publishable, though, so your IP for your novel is still safe! )

Thanks again. Do you make announcements when updates are made?

Hi Simon, I'm curious: what updates have been made to the new update of HERO Designer? I've been happy with the previous version, and like to use the print to PDF option in it. I'm trying to decide if I should update to the new version, knowing that I'll lose that feature. Thanks!

You'll be the first cover, Scott.

I totally forgot about that one. Of course, it's not a complete game, as it requires Danger International and Champions to use it fully. But it's a great example of how a campaign book can crossover and become a game book with a few tweaks.

Maybe you're onto something here: photorealistic covers of the artists who do the internal art! I'm sure it'll sell!

Same with my store. And probably every other FLGS around. They did get copies of Champions Complete, but it's lost in the sea of other HERO System books that don't sell, and so will never sell either. Seriously, selling a game that's not a game (Champions, Dark Champions, Fantasy HERO, etc.) is a horrible model for a store trying to attract people to games they may never have seen before. "Hey, I hope you enjoyed this book about a game genre. Now go get two (out of print) volumes of rules about a game so that you can eventually create your own game. Don't forget the setting book about the world for your game. Isn't this fun?! Hey, where's everybody going . . . ?"

That would be Dark Champions, wouldn't it? The "super" part of it entails all the powers and such, which is what I'm trying to get away from for a rebooted "complete game" idea. However, I think it should be a sidebar or an appendix item pointing to other books in the toolbox that can be used to modify the game for use as super agents or whatever.

Sorry, I missed the "photorealistic" part . . . . I bit on the group shot on a cover.

I think that was the idea for most of the Champions covers, pretty much ever. But to tell you the truth, I don't think that draws the consumer. Champions 6e is absolutely beautiful, but it didn't really save the franchise. When I first learned Champions, I was always a bit put off that there weren't all the characters that I was reading in the comics. This was long before I understood copyright and stuff like that. But I think people look at "generic" supers on a cover and think (like I used to), "Hmm, another Avengers ripoff. Where's the actual Avengers game?" I wish DOJ had the clout (or the sheer nerve to try) to license Marvel characters. They would be swimming in cash by now. As it stands, I don't think there's any way they can benefit from all the supers movies, which seems absolutely crazy! But it requires marketing, which just isn't happening.

Of course, (at the peril of bringing up edition wars) the characteristics are going to be the primary problem here. Perhaps dual-listing characteristics, or perhaps an appendix in the back for whichever edition you aren't covering in the primary text. Actually, I think that may be the best approach: a sidebar pointing the reader to the pre-6e characteristics. In the actual game itself you're going to be breaking down the skills and powers to what fit in the game anyway, so you don't have to worry about what translates perfectly between editions. Just pick what you want, leave the rest out, and then point to the appendix for alternatives.

I love your list of countermeasures! You should run with this as a game! Maybe if you write it up as a "setting," you could put it up in the Hall of Champions.