ArcaneArchitect

To add to this discussion, I will talk about the areas that I personally struggled with (and in some cases am still a little hazy).To be clear I own Fantasy Hero Complete, I purchased the PDF from here.

* Damage Class. I read about Killing Damage and Normal Damage and resistances to that damage (physical defenses against Normal Damage, resistant defenses against Killing Damage). That wasn't too hard to grasp. But as some point in the book it started talking about DCs and seemed to skip the process of converting from DC -> Killing or Normal Damage (1DC = 1D6 Normal Damage, 1DC ~= 1/3 D6 but not really...; or 3DC = 1D6 Killing Damage if I remember correctly). I actually didn't figure that out, assuming I have it right, until searching the forums and reading about other people asking about it.

* Calculating the cost of powers. This was a big one, the rules in FHC do not seem very clear in many cases. Active Points = ( Base + Adders ) x (1 + total of add advantages ); Real Points = Active Points / (1 + total of all limitations). Now figuring out exactly what the Adders, Advantages and Limitations are turned out to be more tricky than I would have expected. To compound the problem the formula isn't super easy to find, even when I knew where to look.

Honestly that's it for me. Combat seems clear, its a bit different from Gurps - mainly in the way turn order occurs and how speed is handled - but its not bad. It seems to me that Damage types and Powers are so critical to the system that the book needs a lot more examples and it really needs to make the wording itself much clearer.

That said I am going to use the system for my next campaign because I wind up building the world, culture and customizing the system for my games anyway - with Hero that customization is really emphasized. So my criticisms are not towards the system itself but rather the documentation.

I cannot speak more highly of Hit Locations. I've always used Hit Locations in the games I run, but I have also played in games that didn't. Speaking from personal experience, it is a completely worthwhile Optional Rule. If you are worried about the time taken by adding an extra step: you can simply have your players roll for Hit Location alongside their Attack Roll (typically using two different sets of dice, with an understanding beforehand which are the Attack Dice, and which are the Location Dice). I'm not sure which source books you are using for 6th edition, but If you are worried about having to reference an obscure table in combat, you can have players use the standard 6th edition character sheet (as opposed to the version presented in Champions Complete and Fantasy Hero Complete). The standard sheet includes the Hit Location Chart (with spaces to fill in section defenses, if any), as well as common called shot penalties, the Range Modifiers, and the shorthand versions of the Standard Maneuvers. The Standard Sheet should still be available in the Downloads section of this page, and is also the sheet out-putted to when you export a character from Hero Designer to PDF.

 

I feel like using Hit Locations gives my games an added level of dramatic realism you rarely see in other RPGs. I use the location rolled by an attack to inform the way I describe combat. Mechanically, using Hit Locations has several advantages: It serves as a kind of critical hit system, which meshes naturally with the existing mechanics for called shots. It negates the need to roll a separate "STUN Lottery" for Killing Attacks, which makes the whole process of rolling attacks more consistent. It also removes the necessity of having players make an Activation Roll on sectional armor (since you use the actual coverage instead).

I am planning on using Fantasy Hero for my next campaign (and thus I am new as well), I have run games in different systems. For my current campaign I have been using GURPS. Anyway I originally decided against using Hit Locations and for a long time the players were fine with that. At some point though, they wanted to be able to disable a person's arm or shoot them in the head with a bow. So this created a situation where sometimes we use Hit Locations and sometimes not. I've come to realize that it is better to just use the feature consistently and seamlessly give the players the option of using it when they want to deal with the penalties.