Khymeria

Happy Halloween, Everyone!

Right.  People view D&D as simple for one of two reasons:
1) familiarity; its easy because you have been playing it for a long time and are very used to it
2) nostalgia to when it was actually a simple system back 40 years ago.
 
Hero is simple to play, if a bit crunchy to build a character.

And this is why my blood boils every time I hear someone complain that Hero is too complex.  The time I tried to play Pathfinder 2e it took me days (not an exaggeration) to wade through the classes, subclasses, traits, feats, skills, specializations, and spells to make a character that still didn't fit the concept in my head. 

I was one of the contributors and playtesters for 5E D&D for WotC from the beginning and the first half of the edition cycle, and what you have said about D&D being more confusing than Hero System is spot on. Hero System, learn the rules and put some effort into really learning character creation and your done. In D&D, everything works differently, every class ability, spell, racial ability, magic item, and monster. Each has statistics, just like Hero System, but each also has the dreaded text to be interpreted, misinterpreted, misconstrued, and the second paragraph, the one that has the negative, always gets forgotten by the player and you have to go and look it up, and interpret it, misinterpret it, etc. D&D/Pathfinder appear to have a million options, but if you have to take them to keep up with the neverending encounter scale and the rest of the party, are the really options? If 80% of the advanced paths and feats for martial characters require either Power Attack or Weapon Focus, then is it really an option. If there are a million different choices that will never get chosen, then they are just noise. I will take the system that lets me and my players build exactly what we want, learn one system for everything, and the system is a formula that is consistent in nearly everything in the game. 

I was one of the contributors and playtesters for 5E D&D for WotC from the beginning and the first half of the edition cycle, and what you have said about D&D being more confusing than Hero System is spot on. Hero System, learn the rules and put some effort into really learning character creation and your done. In D&D, everything works differently, every class ability, spell, racial ability, magic item, and monster. Each has statistics, just like Hero System, but each also has the dreaded text to be interpreted, misinterpreted, misconstrued, and the second paragraph, the one that has the negative, always gets forgotten by the player and you have to go and look it up, and interpret it, misinterpret it, etc. D&D/Pathfinder appear to have a million options, but if you have to take them to keep up with the neverending encounter scale and the rest of the party, are the really options? If 80% of the advanced paths and feats for martial characters require either Power Attack or Weapon Focus, then is it really an option. If there are a million different choices that will never get chosen, then they are just noise. I will take the system that lets me and my players build exactly what we want, learn one system for everything, and the system is a formula that is consistent in nearly everything in the game. 

I was one of the contributors and playtesters for 5E D&D for WotC from the beginning and the first half of the edition cycle, and what you have said about D&D being more confusing than Hero System is spot on. Hero System, learn the rules and put some effort into really learning character creation and your done. In D&D, everything works differently, every class ability, spell, racial ability, magic item, and monster. Each has statistics, just like Hero System, but each also has the dreaded text to be interpreted, misinterpreted, misconstrued, and the second paragraph, the one that has the negative, always gets forgotten by the player and you have to go and look it up, and interpret it, misinterpret it, etc. D&D/Pathfinder appear to have a million options, but if you have to take them to keep up with the neverending encounter scale and the rest of the party, are the really options? If 80% of the advanced paths and feats for martial characters require either Power Attack or Weapon Focus, then is it really an option. If there are a million different choices that will never get chosen, then they are just noise. I will take the system that lets me and my players build exactly what we want, learn one system for everything, and the system is a formula that is consistent in nearly everything in the game. 

I have played a bunch of other modern systems and while each has their nice features or ideas, none of them are superior to Hero overall for me, at least.  I see no reason why on earth I would ever change to any other game except to just try it out or for a specific play session.

Great. Someone learned Pun Fu.

Chuck Norris doesn't wear Sunblock - the Sun wears Chuckblock.

As a mostly-lapsed (since COVID) mercenary minis painter my advice is that if someone is offering to pay you to paint, at least consider giving it a shot.  That's how I got into it, and it provided a very solid secondary income for over a decade.  You never know if it's going to be a thing you enjoy doing until you try, and if nothing else it's a chance to practice on figs you didn't have to pay for.  Pretty sure every minis painter that ever lived thinks their work is much worse than it actually is, and if the customer's happy with the outcome that's what really counts. 
 
Lot worse ways to get paid for a hobby.  

There is definitely a level of player buy-in that needs to exist that no amount of challenge, setting, or ambience is going to overcome if it isn’t there. Excellent point! 

There is definitely a level of player buy-in that needs to exist that no amount of challenge, setting, or ambience is going to overcome if it isn’t there. Excellent point! 

Comic book, Duke...and I know you don't read them, but they had an extended run at one time where trying to figure out how they got from 2 or three issues back to here was an adventure all its own!

I always liked having a couple of major scenarios going on at once, with an occasional one or two game session buried in there.
Back in the day, I had the series tracked, complete with occasional Annuals.

I've often thought about cribbing and modding some ideas from Amber Diceless for D&D-ish character generation.  Give everyone in the group (say) 100 currency points/quatloos/gamebucks/whatever for a budget, then put one stat at a time up for auction, each with a number of values (running intermittently from maybe 6 to 18) equal to the number of players and auction each value off.  Do that one attribute at a time in whatever order amuses you.  Highest final bid takes the highest attribute value on offer, and so on down the spread.
 
For extra spice don't offer the same value spread for each attribute - maybe there's no 18 at all for one attribute, or nothing below a 12 for another - but don't let anyone know what spread is available in advance.  Offer some other perks (an innate spell, noble heritage, extra HPs, etc.) at the end of the stat auction for people who have some leftover points, but don't let them know what they are or how many there are until each comes up to auction - just that there will be something else to spend on beyond stats at the end.
 
Not quite as evil as Amber, but watching the psychology of bidding is a game unto itself.  Way more fun than set arrays.  Be sure to emphasize that whatever's currently on auction is the MOST IMPORTANT THING YOU CAN BID ON regardless of what it is.     

Good. Now we just need a permanent link on the Hero home page.

Please, no. That's being done right now, to scare people into running from a fictional world, straight into the arms of an even worse reality.
 
And I can't say more about that outside of the Politics thread. 🤐

Life it too short for a bad game. Admit to being anti-social or better, admit to being an introvert. Tell your husband that the GM creeps you out, and that it's fine if he wants to play, but you don't like 5e, and you definitely don't like being railroaded. This game feels  bad, and remind him of the Wednesday game.

Failing that, have the character become reckless, and try the impossible. If the character dies, Immediately pick up your things, tell your husband that you will pick him up at the end of the game and leave quickly.

If the GM Bends the rules to keep you alive, then you have evidence of railroading, and you have a reason to leave, as well. 
 
In any case you are going to have to be firm. Loving, but firm.

The original 1933 King Kong is very pulpy.   The Peter Jackson one is good too.

First I call each session an “issue” and not “episode.” Anyway, I get inspiration from comics, often team books because I have a group of players. The Defenders, Avengers, Justice League (to a lesser extent because of the high power level) in a standard game, but that would change based on the campaign. Outcasts or teen games would be different. 
 
I like to watch old crime shows from the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s because it’s pretty easy to change victim and location and boom, now you have a whodunit that was pretty easy. 
 
A supers game can pull from anywhere because of the range of abilities and power level. Supers can handle a Cthulhu so bust out your Lovecraft. Digitize the heroes and put them in a video game, Tron style. Perhaps they need a Fantastic Voyage and will figure out unexpected and unintended ways to use their abilities. 

True.  But...
 
6e2 has a number of pregen characters in the HERO System Genre By Genre section.  6e1 has multiple sets of Characteristics guidelines by power levels on pages 35 and 48.  And then there's us, here at the boards and on the Discord server. 
 
And there's a ton more information available in the other supporting books. Champions, Fantasy Hero, Star Hero for 6th edition alone.  Champions Complete and Fantasy Hero Complete.
 
A person new to 5th edition is going to be in exactly the same place as a person new to 6th edition with respect to expectations of where stats should be.  In this regard, reducing the amount of math by eliminating Figured Characteristics is reducing the mental load.  I can't comprehend how the opposite could be true.

Hero System has an intellectual buy-in to open the locks, but once you pick the lock you’re done. Many other systems (looking hard at you d20) have different rules for everything and everything has a description that is open to interpretation. You can’t just read the formula and you need to constantly memorize what you saw and where. 

Most people bought SPD up rather than let the "wasted" decimal value languish.  You were leaving money on the table if you didn't. 
 
That aside, I would posit that, for instance, the mental load involved in minmaxing your CON alone to the point that the effort needed to figure out the return on saved points in ED, REC, END, and STUN, having been completely eliminated, results in a net reduction in mental load. 
 
In what possible way does the elimination of Figured Characteristics result in an increased mental load, especially in light of the above?  I'm listening.

Oh, it's not the system that is complicated, because it's the math, that gets complicated. But once character creation is done, Hero just flows, in combat.

Hero is not overly complicated. It is overly frontloaded. 

I think that if anything it's gotten less complicated since, say, third edition.  Mainly from capping Disadplications, changing the way END costs were figured and modified, having more powers (so you wouldn't have to go down rabbit holes to create certain effects) and in 6e, eliminating Figured Characteristics. 
 
YMMV on whether anyone in particular agrees with or likes the changes, but they're less complicated than they used to be.  (And I'll note that back in the 80's we didn't have software for building characters with; we had to scrawl them out on cave walls by lamplight from a lamp made out of a rock and animal fat.)