Shoug

I totally agree with this. In fact, I already plan on running such a game. I think there could be a lot of ways that you could approach the topic. What would be extra cool would be a "Mythic Hero" done in a "Powered By Hero" style. 3 pantheons to choose from, Greek, Norse, and Hindi, mix and match to your pleasure. Guides on building godlike powers, guides on setting up your own pantheons using the power system n stuff. I know this isn't really the vision for e current concept, I just think it would be cool. t

I would like to see a section on the concepts of chaos and order. Such a chapter would not only provide useful food for thought about all the other pantheons, but a good framework for figuring out stuff like The Force. And I know that intellectual property is prohibitively hairy business, but it would be cool to see popular fictitious religion in general. The Force, Triforce, The Nine Divine, stuff like that.

Well, in the case of creating objects out of thin air, there is a power in one of the APGs called "Object Creation" that helps you... create objects. They recommend using it for mostly only things which couldn't be represented with another power, mundane objects that you'd probably pay money for, but that does seem to be what you're talking about. I recommend checking those books out. But I also definitely see what you're saying, but I have to disagree a little bit. I think you're having a classic case of "They hinted at a certain design paradigm, but didn't take it to its logical conclusion." I think Hero does better than almost any other system at interacting with the environment in a consistent way with the game mechanics. For most of the really powerful effects that something in the environment can have, there is a power that can be used to represent it. Not all, but most of the ones you really need to be thinking of. The important action set pieces are well thought out in terms of game mechanics. Breaking things is part of the fundamental nature of damage in the game, for example. So it's a situation where the game has done so well at setting up your expectations for how everything works, because it's in general so consistent, that when you find gaps like "what are locks?" and stuff like that, it feels like some kind of massive inconsistency. But the reality is, no other games really do anything like this.

This is important. All you need to do is define a mechanical effect that's so solid that you really don't have to think about it during play anymore. If you spend a healthy amount of points to build the most robust and "kludgy" effect for the spell, then you can relax during play, comfortable with the knowledge that all you need to know is you can press this button and unbind things. Hell, you could think of it not as banishing the restrictive object, but banishing it's restrictive nature. Whatever portion of a thing's nature is restrictive is erased from reality. Locks become paperweights that look like locks, chains and cages become uselessly maleable and soft, ropes lose the ability to tie into knots, and Lock/Knock spells are just erased from existence completely (because all they are is pure elemental restriction, so there is no portion of their nature that can be retained).

I never said the special effects justify any kind of mechanical handwave. Of course he will have to buy some kind of strange molecule of Linked powers in order to achieve his desired game effect. All I was saying is that the special effect is cool. It's delicious and beautiful. It's magical. If feels like something a powerful wizard from some classic fantasy would do. Not hard magic, but soft (but in the context of Hero, of course it would be "hard"). "Reinard heard footsteps coming from the dark hallway at the end of which his cell was located. His heart dropped when he saw Dohl Faendar, the wizard. 'You're time has not yet come.' he said, and Reinard's cell door fell ajar." It's mysterious and badass and is a black box because magic (at times, depending on the setting) is a black box. "Thaumaturgy" literally translates to "Miracle Working." It's a miracle. To me, SFX doesn't mean, "What does it look like?" but "What is the concept you're trying to capture?" I think the concept here is perfectly strong enough to justify building such a unified power as "picks locks and escapes entangles."

Respectfully, I couldn't disagree more with "This spell has no clear special effect." It's an incredibly elegant special effect, especially because it is magic and not superpowers. The spell isn't some kind of idiot lockpicking ghost, or merely "telekinesis with fine control so he can pick the lock without lockpick, oooooh." Those obviously do not free you from an entangle. No, the spell could be called, "Liberate." It just... liberates things. Locks unlock themselves, ropes untie themselves, chains break, the spell liberates anything which is physically confined in some sort of concrete, physical way. It can't change the intentions of captors or make them let you go, it can't magically teleport a priceless jewel out of a guarded museum, and it can't emancipate you in the eyes of the law. But if you were trapped in a steel cage welded shut, it could break the cage. If you were buried alive, it would make the soil sink around you and the casket come unnailed. This is a wicked cool spell.

Consider that the difference between 6 charges normally and 6 shared charges is that something can be used 6 times a day with regular charges, and something could be used up to 6 times a day with shared charges. That means either zero or 6, meaning the average amount of charges you actually get is 3, generously yet strictly assuming that you use only 2 powers that draw on the shared charges equally often. So here's how I'd cost it at first glance. I'd figure out how many shared charges I want total, and then divide them into all the powers I want to power with them based on how often I think I will be using these powers (but still keeping the distribution roughly even, this choice could be easily abused). Then I would just buy the amount of charges for each power that I assigned charges from the greater pool to earlier. Then you just use the old whole total as a pool of charges usable with any of the abilities you granted access. So let's say you want to have an energy rifle that has 3 abilities sharing 12 charges representing nuclear battery-capsules that are basically nukes as sudden hi voltage batteries, one time use. Buy each of your three powers with 4 charges. Now just start sharing 12 charges. Might make everything using a shared charge pool cost one notch up on the Charges table or something to represent the advantage of being flexible. I think this is the most accurate and logical way you could design this ability in homebrew.

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.

I would just make you buy the inverse of Distinctive Features as a talent. "Sell it back," so to speak.

Most of these seem like "artists" and/or "gift makers" to me.

I think the best explanations for the inclusion of swords in a setting include magic. I don't mean that in a demeriting may, and I also don't accept "science magic," or rather, using a rather cursory interpretation of some very broad and disparate scientific concepts as an explanation for "The tech really did just advance all the way back around to swords." I'm talking about mystical magic. Magic that is purposefully left vague and purposefully made to function as magic achetypically. Stuff like The Force, Psionics, and The Spice (much of Dune is drenched in mysticism). If I were to approach this subject in my own worldbuilding, my solution would stick it's tongue in its cheek and say "I know I'm magic." I think I'd include Qi and Kung Fu, basically. Once widely known to be extremely deadly, Kung Fu could never match the speed, range, and flexibility of small arms combat, and so it slowly died out. Now that unpowered (not mechanized) armor has gotten to the point where small arms are ineffective against it, some are relearning the ancient arts of Kung Fu to gain an advantage in violent encounters. Kung Fu is combat of the Qi, and can only be defended against by Kung Fu. A sword strike charged with Qi would pass through armor, leaving it undamaged, and slice down the man inside it. If a Kung Fu user is caught without his armor, surrounded by people with guns, he would be in a bit of a pickle.

I think the best way to name a character is with some combination of a 1 syllable word and a 2 syllable word. This makes things sound very "Star Wars" in the best possible way. Some recent names I've used, Jorai Grix Yit Efek Ural Thahn Ysban Lod I find these easy to pronounce, memorable, and fun to say.

This is now a poop thread: A thread for and about poop. Another use for poop could be as an alchemical reagent. Dragon dung is a terrific source of sulfur for gunpowder, but the smell is so bad that only Dwarves are capable of collecting the substance.

I've wanted to do this for a long time with TFT, except with an escape built in. I made it as an introductory 1 shot for TFT. Everybody wakes up in an earthen pit with high walls and are told to fight. They only remember their name, but the wizards remember all their spells. The players don't know that they've been injected with an experimental superserum called Bloodlust, but as they fight to survive in the pits (probably with many death which will just be fixed by throwing them in with a new character, there are many slave here), they will be growing. 1 attribute point (which is a damned lot in TFT) per killing blow landed. Escape from the fighting pits would be so difficult that it would require very high attributes (the walls are so tall they take 17 DEX to climb, the gate so heavy it'd take 15 STR to lift, and any spells that could get you out would be at higher IQ levels). After that, I would have them face some guards, leveling up even more, but ultimately be captured. They wake up in the dungeons leveled up one more time, locked in the belly of a mad wizard's labyrinthine lair. They might never find out about the nature of Bloodlust, but if they do, they will understand their doom. They eventually start taking damage proportionate to the amount of kills they made during the labyrinth, because Bloodlust is so unstable that every dose the wizard has administered so far has been lethal. They're growth tears them apart and they die. It was meant to be a tutorial for all the mechanics of the game while also giving you a taste of all the different power levels.

I think you're right. My point is that, as "Realism" is already being taken further in TTRPG than in fiction, why push more into Realism than the game already is structured for. It would be very tedious to write up complications for riding animals that make you roleplay out realistic horse handling (even if you didn't have to write up the complications and instead decided to just roleplay it out), when in almost no genres are those details relevant. My point is, it is neither relevant to the genre nor easily supported by the system. So it's not a matter of "TTRPGs just tend to be more realistic than fiction," when such compunctions don't necessarily originate from the system, and also aren't represented by source material.

I think at this point it would be worth giving OP and many others in this thread a new name for their genre, "Historical Fantasy." Almost every single piece of source material that inspires my generation diverges completely away from historical precedence. In none of the video games, shows, movies, or books that I consumed growing up did anybody ever worry about a horse throwing a shoe, or having a chamber pot emptied onto their heads, or getting poisoned by heavy metals in the food and water and dying around 45 from it. These things just don't come up. We're trying to emulate the genre we acquired The Taste for when we grew up, which is largely based on video games and anime. This is what's so great about Hero. Me and my friends can build the Rage Meter from WoW, or the Assassin's Rush spell from Fable, or Mana that's limited but recharges quickly, or whatever. If I want to play some lowdown fantasy where my players' characters are dying every few sessions from a lucky arrow to the heart, I'll play TFT thank you.

20 is way closer to the limit for humans, but that shouldn't affect your fantasy games. It's not a strawman, it's a Reductio Ad Absurdum.

My mom was using Morrowind to stop herself from murdering my infantile self. So first it was that, then WoW, then Oblivion. Around this age my dad used to improvise fantasy stories for us which we would directly impact with our input so he would know when we'd fallen asleep. This was my first exposure to fantasy storytelling proper. Then I watched Avatar: The Last Airbender, which is to this day hands down the best story I've heard told. Nothing in any media has come close. The first fantasy I ever read was A Spell For Chameleon, and around that time I first saw Naruto (which I have not seen since, it peters out quick, but the setting is phenomenal), then it was all scifi and (lord have mercy) a lot of fantasy power metal for me during high school. Since then I've read Nine Princes in Amber, Kingkiller Chronicles, and the first three Dark Tower books. I recently was exposed to the first 2 anime that I've been able to take seriously: Demon Slayer and My Hero Academia. Demon Slayer is really perfect so far, unbelievably tight worldbuilding, all the concepts and imagery in perfect sync. That and RPG has been my entire experience with fantasy.

This isn't Quite the same as what I was talking about. I don't mean fantasy has borrowed from supers through the presence of fantasy crossovers in kitchen sink superhero canon. I'm talking about airtight fantasy worldbuilding taking on the meta-structure of superhero literature (mostly through anime). In standard fantasy, the magic available to characters is some subset of a collection of spells which represent all of the magic in the setting, and it is all done by mages. Fighters and cleric/paladin style characters represent the majority of the characters who do physical combat, with more lightweight characters having practical skills and knowledge like rangers and thieves. In anime fantasy, each character represents a powerful but narrow band of the supernatural nature of the setting, and all are physical fighters, such that vanilla fighters with no magic are seen as a unique type character all on their own (deathstroke/batman (in justice league)). To me, this is the best type of setting: Fantasy, but modeled as a supers setting. I'm not interested in crossovers, I like thing like Demon Slayer, where the worldbuilding is perfectly circular, simple, harmonious, and sound.

Honestly, the superhero model is a good one to use as the foundation for a generic system like Hero. Supers have come to have an enormous influence on Anime, and therefore Fantasy. In superhero settings, everybody has a few powerful and unique abilities of enormous implication, unlike fantasy where everybody for the most part shares the same abilities and the story is about characters and plot surrounding those abilities and how they're concentrated. Fighters do violence, rogues have skills and backstab, wizards have magic. But Anime has bridged the gap with increasing success over the years with shows such as Naruto (where Ninjas are warrior mages with completely unique magical Jutsus), Demon Slayer (where Demon Slayers are warrior mages who use breathing techniques to empower themselves until they are strong enough to cut through boulders and use special moves mostly unique to each character), and JoJo (where Stand users are able to exercise the physical manifestations of their own fighter spirits to be warrior mages). The days of the "Warrior, Mage and, Rogue" are over, Hero system has ushered forth unto me the dawn of taking a character concept as far as you want to go mechanically with no restrictions. I wanna be a pyromancer? I don't have to look through the spell tome and find all the fire themed spells, pick all but one them because that one basically sucks, and I'd rather just have something useful like misty step or greater illusion. I want to be a battlemage? I don't have to multicast and then just be a mediocre fighter who can sling a few spells that a wizard could use since lvl 3. EDIT: In Hero, I'm able to make a barbarian who accidentally goes berserk, which turns him into a "whirling devil of burning red elemental rage" granting him fire breath and flight. It's awesome.

I agree with you here, but I'd like to point out the hypocracy of the double standard we're respresenting. Why, when in capes settings strength great enough to lift cars is practically an "Everyman Power", should barbarians not get to wield "unrealisticly large" weapons?

In my setting, any dwarf younger than 30 years old you'd look at and say "That's a hobbit." As they age they become denser and denser, until finally in their late 300's they finally become entirely stone. These statues called Elderstones comprise the walls of the inverted spires they build religiously downward into the earth. It can take years for an Elder dwarf to walk to his position in the mausoleum of his Hall. You take that back right now! Fairy tales are so underused! I find that folklore and mythology lend an ominous yet familiar vibe to whatever I do with fantasy. I quite like this. I mean, I highly recommend trying out Endless Legend. It has a really fleshed out fantasy work that all fundamentally depends on it's "ancient futuristic tech". The world is full of "Dust" which is this golden dust that can be used to do anything (like magic (up to and including instantly finishing buildings that you're building for your empire)) and it has become the defacto currency of the whole planet. It's awesome.

Ah, I'm running into a problem. I want the Mirror images not just to be a location from which I can cast my spells. I want them to cast their own spells (so I do not necessarily have to do all the Gestures and Maintaining Eye Contact and stuff). So they pretty much have to be Summons, or Duplicants. EDIT: UGH, I also have to figure out how to make their FFLs that they're wearing on their necks to work with my Teleport.

So, I built them this way in the end, but will probably be changing over to either Summon or Images. I built the Duiplicants as myself with all my powers, but with none of the characteristics (-15 total cost on characteristics). I then gave them Telepathic and "Recombine as action which takes no time." to basically make them impervious to harm. If anything would happen to them, I would just recombine instantaneously and say "The Mirror Image bursts into a cloud of smoke." This is deliciously elegant, but I want to actually strategically play around with the images. One of the powers they'll be copying is the Floating Fixed Location of my Teleport (a medallion that I wear on the neck) and my Teleport ability. I'll be using those powers to exchange position with any of my images at any time, such that I can tactically fool my opponent. Probably buying this whole thing as DCV would be a safer and more reliable way of protecting myself, but I want to have fun with this ability too. This is going to be the way I build this in the end. It seems vastly cheaper and gets the job done. The problem here is that I would also like to split up from my mirror images and be able to control them remotely. I'll probably end up buying Clairsience that works through my medallions as FFLs, then maybe I could construe that I always have LOS on my Images for control purposes. IDK.

I want to use Duplication to build a Mirror Images spell. I am trying to figure out how to make them ephemeral. I want them to vanish if anybody touches them, but I don't want to use Images because I want them to be capable of 2 of my powers (a Teleportation FFL and a "Hypnotic Gaze" style Mind Control). Anybody have any ideas how I should build this?