Brian Stanfield

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

You are hitting on all the big time issue of game design and actual play. Your admission of "... end up with a world in which there's no place for player charaters..." is so very true and probably a very hard lesson to learn. I know I have a strong, similar streak, and often struggle to go along with events in play that seemingly don't make a lot of sense to my very analystical brain, in the context of the SIS as defined. 
 
Your last point is where I tend to enjoy a lot of the indie games and let myself explore the experience, realizing that some/many of them may not be for me, but that's ok. The trend of more specific game designed with clear, focused intent of a certain kind of play experience... not that others are bad, but this game in particular is what the designer wants it to be... if you don't like it, cool... many other games to choose from you don't have to play. Gone are the days where being a "gamer" means you play everything and everything is for you. Many experiences are simply not what certain players want... and that's ok. Those games aren't for them, and no reason they should be. 
 
To me it is about maturing as a "gamer" and being willing to being open to different experiences, get out of our ruts. Some will be better than others from our very personal preferences, but hey... the idea that every game must be exactly what you expect and the best experience ever is a horrible level of expectation to try and live with. I mean, I gave a D&D 5th Edition game six or seven sessions, and ultimately chose to step out. I wasn't angry or calling it stupid... but the play experience that others seemed to be really into, I simply found tedious and pointless. Not for me. Cool... I'll find something else.
 
It is the odd (well I find it odd) expectation where people seem personally angry and affronted because a particular game or session or system didn't work for them... as if it was wrong or bad... not just "not their thing." 

And as I've stated in other threads, I personally know that my role playing preferences can be at odds with each other. I prefer more and more Nar style, system light experiences... while at the same time, desiring the intricate, simulationist crunch of a HERO martial arts fight or gun battle. These two things do not line up very well, but I want them both. I've just learned not to get frustrated (usually) if it doesn't work out all the time.

Yeah, that last points to an unacknowledged issue in tabletop RPG design and industry: individuals have different experiences that are most rewarding to them, but usually the system creator overlooks this and assumes that his/her/their goals as a player are universal.  This leads off to Gamist-Simulationist-Narrativist considerations, and Robin Laws's taxonomy of Butt-Kicker/Power Gamer/Tactician/Storyteller/etc. for RPG players and their proclivities.
 
As a GM, I am an appalling Simulationist... my game-worlds have to hang together logically and flow clearly from first principles and cause-effect relations.  (The players in general never see those; it's that I have an overwhelming preference for top-down universe creation.)  As I learned twenty years ago, you can easily end up with a world in which there's no place for player characters that way.
 
As a player, I'm a Tactician; I try to exploit the opposition's weaknesses, and arrive as quickly as possible at the situation where I and my cohort not only can't lose, we can't even take losses.  I need a rigorous rule system, I want to master it and exploit the pinch points, and use them to manipulate the enemy into a position where they are quite vigorously doing ineffective things and my side's victory is entirely inevitable. As it turns out, this can frustrate the crap out of my fellow players; the Butt-kicker absolutely must get out in front and kick butts, and the Power Gamer absolutely must get out there and do his White Lotus Secret Decapitation Strike With +3 Vorpal No-dachi to whichever bad guys he chooses, and my suggestion that now that we have the enemy boxed in we just wait here and lob fire blasts and thunderbolts into them for an hour until they're all dead makes my buddies go into open revolt.
 
But ... I also have a strong latent Narrativist streak, in that as a player I really want to feel like there's an overarching plot and that we can, ultimately, end the evil we have to contend against.  Unlike my Butt-Kicker and Power Gamer buddies, to me a game world which is just a cornucopia of beatable bad guys with loot ... looks a lot like a humdrum miserable Hell whose underlying nature is in the global sense, nothing you do actually matters.
 
Creating a game and game system that scratches everyone's itches is really hard.  Especially if you don't know those often unarticulated basal desires your players/market have.

Ok... so we used "The Plan" mechanic (process?) in actual play again tonight. It was mostly successful, but still a bit awkward in implementation.
 
The good:
1) It felt really correct and natural to begin when the game naturally entered a stage of "Ok, so we want to do a, b & c and find out..." from the players (the determined they wanted to implement a physical hack of a cartel's server farm to determine routing and transactions of finances and who they were working with)... and I was able to say, "Ok, this is clearly time for "the Plan" so let's structure this discussion.
2) The structure of determining "What are you trying to achieve" and "what is your general strategy" worked out, though, as noted below, the goal they were trying to achieve kept shifting throughout the plan. The general strategy, "We want to find their information infrastructure and get a hard line hack into it without them noticing" was enough to get to "Ok, so what kind of prep do you need, and what actions do characters take to make this possible?" and this didn't take long at all.
3) The actual prep dice rolls and then "The Plan" roll worked well, and enable me as the GM to provide key information that they learn along the way, so the players and PCs are clear about what they are up against.
4) The "We planned for this" chits were used in a different way that was just as effective. The Plan roll earned them two such chits. They chose to spend one to say, "We create a distraction that pulls the majority of the guards away from the server farm so there is a window to infiltrate." By spending a chit, this was a given, the distraction works, and we could start the moment by moment actual play with the professional thief at the door and picking the lock.
5) the player with the thief character who was primary driver of this plan, really felt it was a chance to "show his stuff" and have the professional thief in his environment and really shine. (The op went nearly flawlessly, with the one major monkey wrench overcome with a 3 on a perception check and a 4 on the stealth roll to avoid discovery by a seriously bad guy.)
6) It was a good combination of "prep rolls" and "plan rolls" that are more meta... and traditional task resolution skill rolls like "Lockpicking" and "Stealth" etc. and they felt different enough, even though both used skill rolls to resolve. 
 
THe not so good:
1) Again, it was difficult for the players at first, to get to the idea of "What are you trying to achieve." They tend to think in term of tasks, "Pick this lock" or "Sneak by X guys" or whatever... the specific actions, and they needed to be prompted to really focus on "Why? What are you hoping to achieve with these actions? What is your desired outcome"  It was up to me as the GM to say "Hey, back to what we are trying to achieve. No need to get bogged down with all the actions you could take, until we understand what all these actions are supposed to accomplish. 
2) Once established, the goal kept changing. This isn't inherently bad... the planning is fluid and the goal can change as the talk about it, but I needed to explicitly call out "Hey, it sounds like originally you wanted to shut down this server farm and really hurt the cartel, but now you want to install a hack and leave it running so you can siphon information over time? Am I understanding this? And we have to start over on the tactics, because you now have a different strategy."
3) The players can struggle a bit with prep rolls and ideas, as they aren't used to simply getting to state director stance "X is true and that means Y" as traditional games the players state a task resolution and look to the GM to tell them anything meaningful. Here the players say, "If I succeed, a, b and c are true and I know about thej, etc." The philosophy of "Yes... and ..." isn't intuitive at first.
4) Not all the PCs had a clear way to contribute to the plan, or the players felt that way, but that was ok as it just limited which PCs could contribute a possible plus to "The Plan" roll.
5) The more strategically minded/also GM type of players dominated the conversation, as other players can really prefer to react to specific threats a GM throws at them. This process asks for pro-active imaginations by the players.
6) GM needs to be able to give clear guidance on the minuses and such that indicate the difficulty of the task in general. It was a struggle at times to provide clear guidance on "Ok, this is what you'll get with a successful "The Plan" roll vs. what will happen if you fail it. 
7) It generally had some awkward moments as it can feel odd for some to "go meta" with the discussion which this demands.
 
Ultimately it worked really well, and a potentially quite complex and time consuming planning session fit right into our regular four hour play session, and the scenario was resolved by evenings end. It definitely helps structure and speed up "op planning."
 
All in all in worked

It's an old thought and has been proposed before.  It didn't work then, won't now.   More below.
 
 
It does work when officially sanctioned and contained within official guidelines.
 
Examples:  DM's Guild (WotC) and Miskatonic Repository (Chaosium)
 
Unofficial fan builds posted on a forum simply doesn't work for what this game needs. 
 
The game needs adventures readily available at a "official location" (such as DriveThruRPG) using actual Champions source material.  For instance I ran a mini-campaign (5th Ed) that had an unnamed mastermind hiring Grab and Merc-Force 1 to acquire needed items for his master plan. Of course neither villain team knew about the other one.  The players were faced with solving a crime spree with the different robberies being carried out with completely different methods, one seeming to avoid casualties and one that seeming indifferent to the body count.  
 
If this was Call of Cthulhu I could grab the template and writers guide.  Type it up including the full write ups of Cheshire Cat and the rest of Grab and Merc-Force 1.  I could use specific locations in Hudson City or Vibora Bay.  And then drop it in the Miskatonic Repository on DriveThruRPG for $ and Hero Games would get a few $ for each sale. 
 
WotC's DM's Guild guidelines has a few more specifics on which setting material you can use, but then it is WotC.
 
Green Ronin had M&M Superlink for Mutants and Masterminds. 
 
All of them had "official" sanction provided a LOT of ready made adventures and campaigns for novice players.  All of them required little to no time or money from the parent company and yet was very flexible method to create a pool of resources for players and GM's while generating a small trickle of income for them. 
 
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).
 
In the end unless they take a new course the game will disappear.   Remember the old quote "Insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results".  Well Hero has been stuck here for literally a decade.  Sticking to the "gamers will not play pre-built adventure" fantasy while not taking advantage of the avenues made available by new technology will just accelerate the slide into obscurity.
 
Tap into the the fan base for adventures?  Absolutely. 
 
But that spring has been thoroughly tapped for ten years or more.  
 
A new approach needs to appear. In this case the bandwagon of "official" e-adventures via an online store is a very feasible low cost/time alternative that is working for other lines.
 
In the end it is no skin off my nose.  I've managed to land myself 4 copies of Fred and 3 copies of the Character Creation Handbook.   One copy of Fred was POD.  I have to revise my opinion of POD as this is a decent book and nothing like the mess of POD I experienced years ago.  I wish DriveThru had Hero System Sidekick Revised so I could get a few POD copies. 

O.K.
 
I misunderstood.  But the things you describe are what has been keeping Hero's life support going for the last 5 10 years.  It is common knowledge around my area that Hero went out of business years ago.  And for proof they point out that none of the big distributors carry it.  Perception outweighs reality every time. 
 
Hero needs to get actual NEW product with the Hero logo out there.  I fully understand that it isn't viable for Hero or high end gaming writers to commit to traditional products using traditional methods.  But if they fast forward to 2019, there is a built in zero risk method to get new product flowing. 
 
Unfortunately, I doubt we will see it here.

Well, if we're escalating: 
 
 

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. 

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. 

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.

It is explicit... a goal/intended outcome and a basic strategy and ex-fil idea... but it doesn't dwell on the details. No spending hours sweating exact timings, load outs, etc. It is more focused on "in what general way does each PC contribute via their abilities/skills"  i.e. We infiltrate the club and apartment building, using the club/party to cover our infiltration and if possible, find the hostage, hit quick and quiet and get out without sounding the alarm... vs. "We want to use a helicopter to repel down on the penthouse and go in guns blazing" or whatever. Say, fifteen minutes of discussion, not four hours.

Once the basic plan is agreed upon, then each player says, "Ok, to reach that goal, my character would prep/contribute by..." and that is the individual character rolling a key skill roll.
 
Then once each PC has rolled... the final "The Plan" roll to say "Ok, you did all your prep... overall, how well did it work out"
 
One way to think about it... the first Mission: Impossible movie starts with all the characters in place. Estevez is hacked in and sitting on the elevator, the others are either 'in the van' or infiltrated the crowd... they have their gear and positions and actions... and the dramatic action just starts. You didn't have a tedious six hour movie of them all arguing about how they were going to do the op... you get right to the op. That is the point. Show the prep in a montage, and get to the point of 'contact with the enemy' or whatever and do the actual play.

This... a hundred times this. I love that fluidity in HERO combat, but it is complex and difficult at the beginning.

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. 

I'd quibble with this a bit.  Danger International doesn't touch on the powers at all; it explains what Killing and Normal damage are, and gives lists of weapons, just not in terms of the "Killing Attack (Ranged)" or "Energy Blast" Powers.  You don't need any kind of Enhanced Senses to explain how a radio or night-vision goggles work; drugs and poisons are explained in terms of damaging Characteristics other than Body and Stun.  And so on.  
 
DI, along with Justice Inc. and Robot Warriors, includes two pages or so of "gadget rules" which talk about using the Champions Power build rules to build gadgetry, but those are by no means mandatory.  And I was never in any group that used them.  

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. . . .

I don't think I can beat ten pages.      But I will ask you this:
 
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!
 
Though I suspect I could safely bet against eating my graham cracker hat (really the best kind to wager with, just in case  ) that it doesn't really teach them the game much more than HERO in Two Pages does.  In which case, I stand by my decision to use the older edition as the best primer.
 
As for Martial Arts-- like Scott, I tend to consider that almost as a different game: something you include to create a specific mood for a specific campaign or something.  I don't knock it-- seriously; I don't-- I just don't _use_ it because we realized years ago that it was literally little pre-builds for shuffling Skill Levels and extra damage dice around, but for points on each pre-made combination.  We simulate it quite fine with "regular" combat maneuvers, shifted skill levels, a couple added damage dice, and an occasional 'power requires skill roll' or Floating  sorry-- "Naked" advantage.
Sometimes we yell "HAI---YAAH" loudly in a shrill voice, just to make sure our opponents know it's martial arts and not pre-build skill level allocations.  The best part is that each of our (rare) martial artist has _dozens_ and _dozens_ of maneuvers at his disposal, since they are....   well, there's no way around it:  the mechanic is shuffling skill levels and and extra damage.  The _maneuver_ part?  It's just special effects.  Sometimes our "martial artist" will have lots of fun with it, yelling out a hundred different "maneuver" names in a night.   As you say: it makes him feel like he's doing something special, and I endorse that.  My recommendation to gut it from "introductory rules" is based on the idea that it's one less thing to have to try to grasp right away, particularly as it's pretty easy to get the same effect using the rules you're interested in them picking up on quickly.  Rework the character later, if you want to.
 
 
 
I wanted to split that a bit more, but my return button's acting up again...   So here goes:  I suspect those playing aids (which I endorse, whole-heartedly) might have a lot to do with how much of the game a player can pick up "with just ten pages."       As for the laminator:  Yes; you are absolutely right.  At my last job, they stopped letting me anywhere _near_ it.   Though I still have a passion for the old-school mostly-transparent ConTac paper from days of yore....

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.)

Guys, this isn't a discussion about which edition is best. That's a different thread. Please go argue on that one.
 
My question is edition-neutral. It doesn't matter which edition you're using, my question is still the same: how much can you simplify the rules (primarily for teaching purposes) without losing the game itself? This is also not a discussion about what can be borrowed and inserted into HERO games from other systems. If you go back an look at the original post, I'm only using a rules-lite game as an instructive tool, not as the end goal of this discussion.
 
So let me restate: if I can learn another roleplaying game in one evening, or learn and play it in one 4 hour game session at a convention, what can I take from that experience in order to simplify HERO enough to teach to beginners?

This used to come up a lot when this board was busier-- at least as far back as BBB discussions on the old Red October board, and if often got heated as to which was the "best" way, and how one of them ensured that "you always roll high, and pattern recognition is a really important thing in teaching new players and young puppies and on and on.
 
Personally?
 
Well there's a quote in my tag line space at the the bottom.  It's been there for years, and is the only thing I have _ever_ quoted from the internet, and I think it sums it up with a simplicity that is almost elegant.  
 
 

Tying these two thoughts together, what about a laminated card divided into halves by a line down the middle, with one half labeled "OCV" and the other half "DCV", and then each player could write down their current modifiers in the appropriate section?  When they reach their next phase and their modifiers change, they can erase and rewrite.  Eventually the players would (hopefully) get better at keeping this information in their heads and no longer need the card, but it might help out in the beginning.
 
That said, I have to ask: what sort of laminated playing aids have you put into use? (Inquiring minds want to know )

This seems like the biggest dichotomy between "new" and "old" gamers. We like crunch and wanted to learn it. System mastery and rules exploits were more like points of pride. And the sheer joy of not being tied to a class\level or a clan or an OCC or whatever the heck else they liked to call them was huge.
New folks seem to be more of a, "rules get in the way", sort of bent, in addition to the narrative focus.
I feel more like Scott Ruggels, I think, the rules exist to give the various tactical (and other) scenarios structure and you're engaging (as players and as characters) with the scenario.
It's not that fighting\combat was the point of the game but more so that it wasn't looked at as a distraction from the "real" game (ie, the story).
 
That's my probably my bias talking though.
 
Back on topic: Pregens are the main thing for teaching. I think. Just a nice clean and balanced example for folks to look at and start to decipher.
 
With the hope being that once they realize you can adjust, like, ALLLLLL of those bits on your sheet they'll get the Hero bug and want to dive right in.
 
 
 
It certainly seems fine to me. Every game needs a core mechanic (probably) and 3d roll low is one, so...good enough.
 
 
 
Yes, mostly I feel the unlimited flexibility\build your own stuff gets presented up front as being good and valuable. And...it is.
But I think it's a distraction from learning the game part of the game and until you learn the game part of the game the character building stuff kinda exists in a vacuum.
What's Power Defense? Do I want it? Do I need it? Should I have it for this game?
Is this attack "good"? Is it "too powerful"?
All of that stuff is, I think, hard to grok for new folks because it's...well, Hero.
Good\bad\powerful are all relative.
But you can't really teach folks by saying, "it could be" and "it depends on the game\setting\scenario" over and over.
 
Pregens that are working balanced examples get around most of that. Which is why I suspect essentially every single thread I've seen about introducing folks to Hero suggests that, eh?
 
Mostly I just mean I think players have a certain limited amount of attention span to give stuff and if most of that attention span is taken up by looking at an insanely overwhelming character creation\powers section until they give up then it'll be hard to get them to reenage on the system aspects.
 
Of course this is all generally speaking and IMO and all of that. Gamers are still gamers and do still like learning games and rules and playing them.
 
It's just funny to me that chargen (the point-build system mechanics) is the heart of Hero but when teaching folks the system I think it should be strongly deemphasized to prevent brainlock.
 
Pregens.
3d roll under.
Many default tactical options that aren't just the player trying to connive the GM in to giving them a situational bonus
Probably Stun\Bod and Normal\Killing.
I'd say I'm in the Speed Chart = Hero camp as well.
 
Those all seem core Hero to me and are the elements that can be well separated from the chargen stuff.
 
And I think ghost-angel's point about Special Effects and Mechanics being separate is also true but I don't think it's....particularly playable as an aspect of the system. Like it's very central to Hero but also not really something you can teach as part of the system without getting a bit lost.
Maybe he's got examples and I'm missing something there tho.
 
 
 
 
 
 

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:
 
Champions Complete pg. 23

 
Thus, I think the 11 assumes the hero is already "competent" at using their powers, as they've likely spent time practicing (hopefully, at least 🙂).  OCV is then used to increase the attack skill above competent at a cost of 3CP per +1 Attack, much like any other skill (which usually cost 2CP per +1 skill increase).  This seems like an easy way to explain why the 11 is in the equation.
 

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.

Since it seems the sticking point is explaining how Attack Rolls (which fundamentally work exactly like Skill Rolls) work; let's try.
 
Attack Skill = 11+OCV.
Literally forget everything else about OCV, DCV, and Combat. Just have them write down Attack Skill, 15-
Edit: forgot, you only ever need to do this once, at character creation. Like you only ever really calculate you skill rolls once, at character creation.
 
Skill Rolls: How much you roll under your Skill is how much you succeed by. If you have a Lockpick Skill of 14- and you roll a 10, you succeeded by 4. What does that mean? Well, the GM assigned a difficulty of 2 to the Lock. So, any roll that succeeds by 2 or more unlocks. (in Hero Combat Terms, the Lock has a DCV of 2, and your Lockpick Roll hit a DCV of 4 or lower, the explanations go both ways, because it's literally the same math.)
 
Moving back to Combat; You make an Attack Roll, you roll a 9, you have succeeded by 6 on your Attack Roll. What does that mean? Well, DCV is just a target difficulty, like with Skills. Your target has a Difficulty of 5, you hit if you succeed by 5 or more.
 
Modifiers:
Attack Modifiers adjust the success level of the Attack Roll, just like Skill Modifiers adjust the success level of the Skill Roll. You can either add this onto the Skill Roll directly, or you can add it to the Success Level after the roll - the math is the same. If you have +1 to OCV you can either say your Attack Skill goes up to 16- or just add 1 to your Success Roll.
 
Defense Modifiers adjust the target number, normally Skill Challenges have static target numbers (the Lock does not become more difficult or less difficult, typically, one attempt to the next), but Combat is fluid and sometimes positions change and the Target Number moves. Still - you're just adjsuting the target number, either yours or the GM adjusting the NPCs. And while this is typically yet another number to keep track of in combat, it's not especially unique to Hero - D&D has plenty of spells that adjust the AC modifier on the fly (heck, even as a reaction in the same Action sequence).
 
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.

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.