Shoug

At its very root, Hero is a much easier game to tweak than any other, I'd say. But that doesn't mean the book, and I'm refering to the 6e books because those are the only ones I have, aren't lethally confusing. I don't mean that the layout is especially bad or anything like that, there's just way too much fancy bologna going on in Hero system to wrap your brain around as a new player. Things like the Follower perk and multipowers are extremely unintuitive, seemingly creating character points out of thin air; Talents that simply do things outside the otherwise intuitive powers and characteristics systems; Trying to figure out exactly what should be paid for with character points, where does one draw the line between mere possessions and fundamental aspects of one's character, how are we meant to make those distinctions on the fly. ETC. I have been in love with Hero for a few years now, but only distantly. I've never actually played because of running into confusions like this, despite buying several books. Hero demands an enormous amount of gaming wisdom be afforded up front, and if you don't have much experience with actual play, like myself and my brother, it's prohibitively difficult to understand.

The biggest advantage of the subscription model is convenience and comprehensivity. Nobody who values those things (read: the people who are going to be subscribing to these services) is going to copy out materials. These are literally the opposite types of players. It's probably a super great deal for nerds patient enough to hand copy their own materials. Hero's fatal flaw isn't the perceived learning curve, it's the frontloading of all of the creative work on top of the learning curve. It's not even really a game, it's a game system. A system that lets you (read: requires that you) define all the basic assumptions and parameters of your game before you can even start character creation. You've got to learn the game so you can make the game so you can finally play the game.

This isn't only the job of the GM. Fate Core said it best, "Both players and gamemasters have a secondary job: Make everyone around you look awesome!" It's everybody's responsibility to be looking out for ways to make every player at the table feel like their character has a place in the story.

I completely agree with this, and it extends all the way to my fantasy worldbuilding. Magic is in the world, the reality is a magical one. Players who want to seem like "Wizards" or "Magicians" will have to interact with a multitude of unique elements deliberately.

As somebody who works physical labor early in the morning in Colorado, I really love the daylight getting saved for me.

20 STR is stronger than almost everybody who's ever lived. It's extremely close to the absolute upper limit of human strength. I don't think any ancient person lacking hormone therapy and a modern understanding of nutrition can achieve 20 STR without being an extreme anomaly, standing so far outside the bell curve that they could never get armor without it being specially made for them. The drawbacks of armor need to be in END and social implication. In reality, armor is extremely effective. The END cost is significant, especially in hot weather, but it was not easy to penetrate plate armor. It couldn't be done with normal weapons. At all. There's no amount of striking with an edge that's gonna hurt somebody with armor on. You need more weight, you need hammers, picks, or to grapple them and slip a dagger in between the armor. Even then, it would have to be a sharp dagger pressed hard to penetrate the gambeson, and that's only if there's no chainmail. The beautiful thing about Hero is that you get to choose how armor works in your campaign. If you want it to be a matter of aesthetics with some mechanical consequences, do that.

I would be interested in something like this. Do you do discord?

I know people here might be desensitized to this specific recommendation, but My Hero Academia is, IMHO, the finest superhero genre fiction in all the Lords' Realms. All Might is the best, most regal, most literally awesome "Superman" archetype ever manifested.

This is a fair assessment. I mean, I kinda like the way 6e supplemental material is structured from a spiritual standpoint, with categorized resources that remain relatively genre neutral. I think they fit the paradigm of the game well, "Here's a book that covers *all kinds of creatures* that your GM may want to use, here's one that covers all martial arts." But I think you're completely right. I think Hero is a game that depends on it's players to be confident gamers with solid experience and deep gaming wisdom. The GM has to hold all these complications that can have variable "frequencies" in his mind, and there's all kinds of Pandora's Box mechanics in the game that need to be used with caution and wisdom or they can get incredibly weird. Even Speed, one of the fundamental cool parts of the game, can't be used correctly without having a strong understanding of how disparities therein actually *feel.* I absolutely agree that, *if* relevance with a newer audience is a concern, simplification and content supplements are not the answer. *Stand alone games Powered by The Hero System* are the answer. If you already Grokk Hero System, these games will be transparent, narrowly focused genre supplements. But to the larval acolyte, these games must be opaque, shielding them from the vertigo of peering into the abyssal well of dark power that is the whole, unbridled Hero System. The core 6e volumes should be referenced only within the introductory or conclusory texts of the game book as "The toolkit that will unlock omnipotent homebrewing capabilities," never as a required or even an optional reference manual for actually playing the game. It should stand on it's own two legs, and prove the fun that is possible with the Hero System as a "Game" and not a "System."

"Homebrew everything" is just the impression I got by reading the rulebook of the game. Like, the nature of Advantages and Limitations reinforces the concept that players and the GM are really designing the mechanics by which their characters and world will function. The distinction between mechanics and SFX, a cornerstone behavior of homebrewers (which Hero makes an explicit intention of its design), further demonstrates this concept. That there are more materials out there that change the spirit of the game isn't obvious to people like me who just bought the most up to date core rulebooks and started reading.

This is the whole strength of Hero. If you're just gonna run straight fantasy, play Burning Wheel. If you're running straight sci-fi space opera, run Traveler. If you want to run both at some point, in your own carefully built settings, Hero is for you. Hero is really a system for GMs that normally homebrew everything. It's the mechanics for designing your own mechanics.

I'm sorry, but he does have evidence. He's not being pedantic or mean, he actually has evidence that the OP is asking an answerable question about RAW. I run into this all the time as a fresh Hero player. Inconsistent answers to what I think are straightforward rules questions. It's as though the game does not have rules at times. Besides, as far as I can tell, uninteruptability is as close to a houserule as is possible achievable in Hero. Everything in the game has built in special counters, "hard counters" in video game lingo. Any power can be Dispelled, and conversely any character can have Power Defenses to protect them from that. There's Normal Damage and Killing Damage, Normal Defense and Resistant Defenses. There's Penetrating and there's Hardened. Everything absolute like Desolidification and NND requires an SFX be specified that just defeats it. It's basic comic book protocol that things escalate in this way, that Superman has a special weakness to kryptonite, or that for one episode there is something that can resist Cyclopse's beam. And while we're not necessarily talking about superhero games, this etiquette is woven into the *actual rules of the game, the ones written in the book I bought, the ones I'm reading and trying to use.* So questions like, "how does interrupting a power using gestures and incantations work", questions that *do have answers*, should be answered first correctly, and then with the caveat, "If this isn't how you'd like it to work, feel free to take off Gestures and/or Incantations and just RP those things as SFX. This way it will take a timely Dispel to counter a spell, and not just any held attack action." I agree with Gnome-body here, this isn't a question of how things could be, it's a question of how the rules work as written. I don't know why everybody assumes that people using the most flexible and toolkit-y system ever created are probably using house rules too. I have a deep love of systems and rules and the games they produce, Hero is more of a homebrew creation system then a game, it makes no sense that I would bend the rules when they're already so fluid. If I'm just making things up, I'm gonna play an easier game to do that in, like Fate or The Fantasy Trip, games with fewer interconnected systems that I have to worry about.

I would please the minimum of strength closer to 12-3 for a navy seal. As I said, 15 is an enormous individual, not just a "strong" one. No navy seal ever has had 19 or more strength. They excel in other areas, like End and Rec, Spd and Dex, sure, but in terms of sheer strength, I would call 15 a generous average, not a minimum.

As a strength enthusiast, realism doesn't really come into the game in terms of strength. The nature of strength and strength tasks is so complicated, it's best to just let it be simple. I tried to create a table for Hero before that created realistic behaviors, and it turned out to be impossible to figure out. I was trying to figure out carrying ability, based on where on their bodies they could set the weight and how well they could grip the object. It just turned into a nightmare, it wasn't worth it. It is best left abstract. What I would do is just give players beneficial modifiers for properly roleplaying the use of their strength, and maybe use some kind " wieldiness" property to items that multiplies the strength requirement to deal with them (a fridge is wieldiness 2, double it's weight for max lift; a car is wieldiness 3) in the normal way (only do this if you desire realistic-ish strength). All you need to know is that, on paper, the strongest men who have ever lived are STR 20. On paper, it's now like 23, but the way throwing and carrying works, it's more like 20, and even then that's too high for certain tasks. If you have STR 25, your character is unbelievably more strong than the upper human limit. He is an enigma to modern strength sport, a veritable superhuman ultrabeing. He is likely 3 meters tall and weighs a half tonne. He is as strong as the legendry of Angus McAskil, but probably much stronger than the actual man. Also keep in mind that STR 15 is pretty much only for strength athletes or enormously naturally strong individuals like a tall and fat Samoan who played football in highschool. Only if you're into realism, maybe for a single campaign or something.

It's worth mentioning that many classless systems actually do have classes in the form of specialization. They're classless only in name, encouraging you to find your class organically over time rather than choose at the start.