Brian Stanfield

At the end of the day, no matter how many times I hear things like "doing /accepting / taking / buying _this_ tells the GM _that_,"  I bow up just a little bit. 
 
I'm not hard-hearted.  I've been told that I am generally "less restrictive" than "my last GM," etc.  (as an aside, I don't take it as either an insult or a compliment but instead as a demonstration of what decades of pracrice makes possible.   ) 
 
But at that first setting, we _all_ hand our sheets to the GM.   Why do we do that? 
 
GM approval.  We all know that.  We can "tell the GM that I want this adventure to revolve around X" or "let the GM know that I expect to be able to Y," but I don't really see that as the players running roughshod over The GM simply because these characters are submitted for approval.  The GM can say yes or no or edit as he sees appropriate for the adventure he has planned just as much as he can tweak and bend and change that adventure to accommodate reasonable idea or interesting notion. 
 
 
Unless someone is running a game where characters do _not_ require GM approval, in which case there are problems on both sides of the screen. 

Looking back at the thread, I think it is more things that I strongly dislike rather than things that affect my immersion.
 
I already mentioned the pathetic way ship's are usually handled in RPGs. 
 
Another item is exploding "races", where we have multiple races of elves, dwarves, etc.  Humans are humans with cultural trappings.  Elves should be the same.
 
And the last for this post is zombies.  I am sick of them and will simply walk away from a game when they appear.  Zombies are even worse than the Vampire/Werewolf craze of the 80/90's.
 
 
 

6E does away with the concept of hexes and inches and just uses meters for movement, distances, weapon range, area of effect etc.  Feel free to use whatever scale you wish for hex maps.

Maybe I’ve missed something that everyone is seeing in 6e. Where is the 1 hex=1 meter scale coming from? On 6e2 p.15 it suggests 1:1 or 1:2, or whatever else is appropriate, but doesn’t set 1:1 as default. In fact, characters are assumed to be 2m tall, so I assumed (perhaps wrongly?) that a hex was still 2m. The rules are careful to explain that measurements are in meters, but don’t set the default scale. Is there a particular passage I’m missing?

Scale depends on which edition you are using, For 6th edition use 1M per Hex, otherwise it's 2M per hex.
 
Never plan ahead in the campaign.  But, Know the world as intimately as you can.  Three years of world Building, through three campaigns, gave me a good idea of who was where, and how they reacted. In general though, other than the first session or two where I did have to prepare some background and packages and the like for the players,
 What would happen is that during the wind down half hour after the game, while everyone is packing up their books and binder, I would take a half hour to think and elaborate on the notes I took during the game.  a half hour before the next session I would make some notes as to who would do what, make some rolls, and remember where thye players were at the end of last session. So any "planning" was just an intro into the next session and then the players would be off, like frightened cats, all over the background. 

Here are some of my note from the last time i ran that campaign, back in 1993 or so:
https://imgur.com/a/YMeqPys
 
They are in chronological order. (until the final retcon that derailed and ultimately sank the campaign.)

1)  I use the older 1"=2m scale.  It's what I've used for decades, and I'm not inclined to change.  However, if you're learning from 6e, I'd really suggest using the 1:1 scale, as anything you may want to reference or look up in the rules as you go is going to be written with the assumption that 1:1 is the scale you are using.  I also tend to change scale up and down depending on what I'm trying to map and what I expect to be going on: if there's to be a "large area" and I expect lots of movement, sometimes I will set scale as the lowest common denominator amongst the players' various movement speeds so as to make the map more useful.  In "chase" type scenes, I will often set scale as the slowest character's half-move, and when moving everyone will deduct that amount from their movement-- again, these are just things I do to keep from running out of map every couple of Phases.  My groups have been doing it for years, and we're all used to it.  (it hasn't come up yet with the new youth group, and I'm down to one rather-irregular game with my "normal" groups; I hope to get something going with the other group late in the year, but we had a couple of deaths, so we haven't really been in a hurry to pick that back up).
 
 
2)  I have never written a document, ever.  No; I take that back.  I have tried twice, years ago, and was reminded, in the words of a better person than I am, that no campaign plan survives contact with the players.      I keep notes-- it's not even organized enough to call it an outline.  I have a list of things I want to cover during this arc, and will often make some kind of notation that there are certain things I want to get done _this session_.  Then there are furious angry circles around the things I wanted to cover in the last session, and furiouser, heavy circles around things left from the session before that.
    If someone(s) are repeatedly missing an important clue, I scratch it from one location and put it in another.  Several times, if I have to.   As Chris Goodwin once said "clues want to be found."  Generally, I prefer "clues" that provide only "something extra," and not let an entire plot hinge on one or two things being discovered, but sometimes the players just won't let you do it any other way.  Since the clue _has_ to be found....    Well, be prepared to stash the same clue (or variants of it) in multiple places, because any player who isn't my wife won't stick around any location more than a few lines and maybe a skill check or two.  (My wife, on the other hand, will keep an entire party sequestered around a weird stain on the floor for the next four sessions.  ugh...)
 
I keep a running list of "atmosphere."  Seriously-- things I think of or notice as I go about not-gaming I keep a record of; I write a lot of it down if I have to.  Sort it out by location type (or sometimes actual in-game location), and randomly toss about bits of filler to remind the players that they are in a real world.  Note: if you're going to do this, start from the beginning and never stop.  Don't vary too much in how often or how deeply you do this, or your players will start keying on these things as some sort of clue.  Remind me to tell you about the janitor some day.  
 
If there is a sequence of events, I generally note it simply: sequence number, name or brief description of even (and NPCs potentially encountered, so I remember who I am at that moment), and "go to" notes depending on the outcome.  It's more straight-forward than it sounds, but it reminds you to mix things up every now and again.    I also note in these event notes if a particular event is suitable to "make up" for something lost or missed from earlier.
 
All my stuff is hand-written, sloppy, and repeatedly scratched out and re-written as the players take the game in places you never considered.  You have to think on your feet a _lot_, and be extremely flexible-- part of why a full-on document never worked for me, I suppose.
 
Monolgues, speeches, soliloquies-- yeah; those are generally written down somewhere and referenced in events.
 
one thing I can't stress enough is to leave yourself one margin down _all_ your notes.  Use it as a time-stamp for things running in the background.  The villain's doomsday clock doesn't stop running because the heroes haven't learned about it  yet.  Meetings are going to take place; deals are going to be made, etc.  You _think_ you can keep all that in your head, but trust me:  you really can't.  The players won't let you!    As an added bonus, it gives you a feel for when you need to pick up the tempo or slow it down a bit.  And it's all right there, flowing as you move through your notes, every time you glance down.   Best idea I ever had, I think.  
 
 
3)  There is no 3.
 
I got on a roll.
 
 
4) have fun with it!  Most importantly, remember that no matter how you beg or plead, if your players change, it's going to be _slowly_.  It's far easier to make adaptations to your style than it is to demand them from the players.  
 
 

I forgot about the gorilla fighting.  Although about half of those were her beating up a guy in a gorilla suit hired by Mr. Drysdale. The rest were her against a real one they liberated from the zoo.
  Even if I accept Lord Liaden’s lower estimation of Granny’s age I still stand by my opinion of the Clampett’s entire family tree being paranormal rather than just robust.

Given the GM of that game, and the game he's running, I think your character fits in quite well.
 
For those of you in the audience, we have a Jewish clay golem character, the Easter Bunny (yes, really), a reskinned Daniel Jackson using a sentient katana, a traditional superheroine (my character), and a cartoon Ostrich who sounds like Arnold Schwarzenegger (Chris G). It's a...weird game. It was pitched as 500 points with a 200-point limit on powers and otherwise anything goes. Given that, I think the character designs have been fairly reasonable.
 
My own Wild Cards-based Hudson City game is one where I do vet the characters, and I'm not shy about deciding a character won't work in it--or about making changing if a character turns out to be a problem once they're in. (I long ago instituted Rule Zero for any campaign I run: the characters must all be willing and able to work together. If your character's personality, hygiene, appearance, or some other aspect makes it unreasonably difficult for you to interact with the other PCs...do something else.)

I used a light box* to draw on paper laid over the templates.  Works well.
 
Doc
 
* A large tupperware box with an LED light underneath it!

Uh . . . I guess I should have said “one of the weirdest threads I’ve ever seen on the HERO forums.”
 
And y’all have made sure of that now!

Huh. I never thought to check if "Voldemort" actually translated as something. I just assumed it was meant to sound deathly and Dark Lord-y. Thank you.
 
Do other names in the series have meanings? Checking a French/English dictionary, the closest to "Malfoy" seems to be mal foi, "bad/evil faith," which seems appropriate for some of Lord Voldemort's dedicated disciples. Though there's also mal foie, "bad liver." And the Malfoys sure show the anger ande bitterness associated with the liver's product, bile.
 
A "baby names" book says Hermione means "Of the earth," a suitable name for the series' most prominent Mudblood. (Though Robert Graves' The Greek Myths translates it as "Pillar Queen.")
 
Dean Shomshak

Uh . . . I guess I should have said “one of the weirdest threads I’ve ever seen on the HERO forums.”
 
And y’all have made sure of that now!

Absolutely.  My question is how big the "I want to build my own world and structure my own game" to "I want to  tinker with the rules" market segment is, falling between "I want to play the game already written" and "I want to design my own game" segments.  Not big enough for 5e/6e to sell enough, if history is an indication.
 
I think a lot of people on these Boards will fall into that segment - but that's why they are playing Hero, which brings them to these Boards.  The broader market had not been as supportive of "DIY game with Hero rules".

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 . . . ?"

World builders have always been a minority. 
 
My first Champions GM was an _excellent_ GM, and alousy world builder.  Pretty much all of our D&D was module-based, and all of our supers stuff was straight from comic books (I've never seen a larger comic collection in my life) 
 
There was a plus side to it, though: 
 
My original Traveller GM was a dedicated world-builder.  We were essentially using the "a traveller system" to play in a completely unique universe doing interesting and fun things. 
 
My second Traveller GM... We were using Traveller to live out his Star Trek fan fiction....   That was mercifully brief.... 
 
If it hadn't been for Jim"s inability to put together a solid world,--  and don't get me wrong:  he had the time, as he was the only real trust-fund kid I ever knew.  I don't think he even considered a job until his mid-thirties, and even that was just to meet people.... 
 
Anyway, he had the time, and I know for a fact that he _tried_, over and over.  He was just terrible at it... 
 
But if it hadn't been for this lack of talent, I would have never known the depth and breadth of the amazing published Traveller universe, which seems to have something for everyone. 
 
To be perfectly straight, even through all the incarnations of Traveller and the dozens of different people I've played under, I've never seen any homebrewed world that rivals it.  People who think it's about space merchants and royal intrigue haven't really paid a lot of attention to the other materials, but I don't evangelize it because I'd rather you didn't sit down with a predisposition to negativity anyway.  It's not going to be fun for you or anyone else if you do, right? 
 
I started this to state quite clearly that if everyone could build a world on their own-- and they can't, and few who can are able set aside their personal wants to create the broad appeal needed to entice enough people to keep coming back, year after year--   
 
If everyone could do it, there would never have been a shortage of material for _any_ game, ever. 
 
HERO is dead, and it's dead for lots of reasons, all of which none of us are ever likely to know, but targeting the extreme minority audience of "people with time, desire, and ability to craft their own worlds" strikes me as a likely contributor.  I could be wrong, but the resulting play model of "scour the planet looking for a GM wo can also build an interesting world and is maybe willing to travel a few hundred miles a week" couldn't have been great for the success of it. 

To me, this is where one book games would have dual benefit.  If the toolkitting info was online somewhere, then not only does everyone get a game they can play straight off the shelf, world builders (and proto world builders) can see how a published game went about it.
 
If I was HERO, and publishing these games, I would have a podcast with the designer, talking about the book and how they used the toolkit to achieve their aims.  This would be decent advertising for the game but also provide oxygen for the toolkit itself.
 
Doc

Oh, I agree that characters need something to do. But any setting description worth its salt will provide plenty of ideas for that. A sample adventure in a core book should provide a good example of the kinds of things characters would do in the setting. To my mind, "what do we do?" is a question for which the answer is implied in the setting (and the core book) if it is written properly.
 
And it is my deepest belief that a setting which is "not much more than a sheet of paper with a few towns, roads, forests, rivers, mountains, etc." is simply not going to cut it in this day and age. Today's RPG marketplace is too cluttered for that old fashioned approach to work. That only creates the impression of a setting, and fails to do the very necessary work of delivering a setting that becomes the game's unique selling proposition and primary means of attracting customers. 'Cuz I guarantee you that nothing else will (attract customers), aside from really awesome artwork which, if directed properly, visualizes the setting and the kinds of things that happen in it.

Here's our point of disagreement, it looks like.  To me, there is no game without something for the characters to do.  There can be an implied setting -- every edition of D&D's mechanics go a long way towards implying a larger setting, and making a few changes can go a long way to defining the setting.  
 
A setting can be -- and in D&D, often is -- not much more than a sheet of paper with a few towns, roads, forests, rivers, mountains, etc., and a dungeon to go crawl with a flimsy rationale for crawling it.  
 
There's at least one Adventurer's Club issue from back in the day that included a Fantasy Hero adventure.  If you have pretty much any edition's core rulebook you could probably play it with nothing else.  Having that edition's Fantasy Hero book would definitely help, and if you have a setting to drop it into that's probably helpful for a campaign.  But you could run it with probably not much more than the sheet of paper with geographical features.  
 
For the most part, even without an explicit full description of a magic system, you could get away with using spells, monsters, magic items, and so forth, provided in the adventure.  The Grimoire, Bestiary, Equipment Guide, and so on would certainly be helpful in this regard.  
 

That’s not surprising. I think the universal systems are faltering in unintended ways. And yet Powered by the Apocalypse games are multiplying like rabbits. It’s not the universal system that is a problem; it’s what people are (or aren’t) doing with it that seems to sell. This came up a few pages back. Compact and focused games are popular now because there’s little investment of time or capital, and people can easily try out a lot of different games each week. Consumers in our online e-conomy these days expect to be able to pick things up quickly, follow their curiosity, and then move on to the next shiny shiny. 
 
I think DOJ should seriously consider their own “Powered by HERO System” approach, with smaller, easily learned games that can also be modified in limitless ways. One-book games don’t have to be the ultimate goal, but they can be gateways to folks who might be interested in investing in the larger system after they see it in action in a smaller scale. HERO System should be trying to spark people’s curiosity rather than presume to give them everything they ever wanted. Lost of smaller samples seem more practical. And then we show them the larger system, devised as a way to modify what caught their fancies in the first place. 

Yes, this is the approach many of us have been advocating for some time.
 
Where I differ slightly from the general take on this notion is that I emphasize the importance of the provided setting more than anyone else does. To me, there is no game without a setting, and it will be the setting (which obviously also implies a genre) that catches people's attention and makes them want to play the game. It is also the setting which makes it a concrete game, and not just another generic book full of genre advice and unconnected examples.
 
In addition, I think that for anything like this to have lasting, meaningful impact on the the brand and the marketplace, these games have to be planned out and marketed/advertised as full product lines so that potential customers feel that they will be investing in something with a future; i.e., games that will continue to be supported and expanded upon for years to come.

I think this is a great idea. Imagine the new player experience! You saw a nifty book about the size of Fate Core or something on the shelf of a game store. It's got a picture of a secret agent using X-Ray contacts lenses to see a gun through the jacket of somebody he's talking to, or of a monk meditating in his room on a spaceship (make the room look all sleek and sci fi), something along those lines. The point is, they pick up the book and take a look and it appears to be an RPG set in some kind of super intriguing genre bend. In fact, maybe the book has like 4 genres that you are expected to mix and match as you choose. Anyways, everything in these books is "Power by the Hero System." To the user, however, this is an opaque detail. All the content in the book is built in such a way that you would never need to reference 6e1/2, but at the end of the book there is a chapter briefly detailing how to use 6e1/2 to mod the game. 

Lighting Bolt would read "Attack..." (which they would know stops your turn and takes half a phase) "...Costs 4 END, Range of 45m..." (which we would know is just a consequence of the points we spent to build it, but the players may sense a pattern anyway) "... deal 3d6 Killing Damage. For 3 additional END, you may also blind and deafen your target for 6 segments." We know this is just an RKA with a Flash (built using Standard Effect, no less, for maximum simplicity to the player) linked to it. We know how it works, and they could find out how it works, but to them it's a simple spell. 

I feel like this would be the best approach. Fate kinda does this, but Fate is a weird animal, what with all the wacky "storygaming" and "narrativism" and whatnot. Hero could actually let you fight a Ninja against a Pirate against a Knight, with combat rules and stuff. It could be very popular like that.  

It’s documented in The Armoury, Vol. 1 (Second Edition), available on DrivethruRPG. It’s a third party supplement for Espionage/ Mercenaries, Spies & Private Eyes. They go into formulas on how to convert muzzle energy to HERO dice amounts. If you have those (usually easy info, but if not, you can get it from reloading manuals).  The hard part of conversions are figuring out is the weapons have bonuses to range mods When set & braced ( what kind of scope and how powerful), if the bullet does extra stun (determined by bullet weight) ,  any bonuses to offset autofire minuses, due to design or compensators. And the like. 

I think its worth mentioning that GURPS has lost a dramatic amount of market share, at least according to Steve Jackson's qurterly reports. It seems systems to build games are suffering all over. 

That’s not surprising. I think the universal systems are faltering in unintended ways. And yet Powered by the Apocalypse games are multiplying like rabbits. It’s not the universal system that is a problem; it’s what people are (or aren’t) doing with it that seems to sell. This came up a few pages back. Compact and focused games are popular now because there’s little investment of time or capital, and people can easily try out a lot of different games each week. Consumers in our online e-conomy these days expect to be able to pick things up quickly, follow their curiosity, and then move on to the next shiny shiny. 
 
I think DOJ should seriously consider their own “Powered by HERO System” approach, with smaller, easily learned games that can also be modified in limitless ways. One-book games don’t have to be the ultimate goal, but they can be gateways to folks who might be interested in investing in the larger system after they see it in action in a smaller scale. HERO System should be trying to spark people’s curiosity rather than presume to give them everything they ever wanted. Lost of smaller samples seem more practical. And then we show them the larger system, devised as a way to modify what caught their fancies in the first place. 

Well, to me that stuff is cruft, even in a survival horror setting. Because players aren't going to build a base with points but with stuff they find in the wilderness, the construct would exist narratively instead of mechanically...like they do in almost every other rpg. Sure, you could add that in via the full rules, but this is about making a stripped down version for quick play.
 
Ditto with removing the powers. Zombie stat blocks would contain all the mechanics for any power they possessed, listed in normal language. How it interacts with the power system would be unneeded and somewhat detremental to this exercise. 
 
That said, I would love to see a simplified and streamlined version of Hero, but that is a different project I think.