Toxxus

Chessex has some 6-sided dice that have 1,1,2,2,3,3 as the sides. They might be 16mm, but they're only 50 cents. There's a decent number to choose from.

This is a good summary of one of the challenges of Heroic games where you don't pay for gear. I find the best way is to make sure that along the way each character has an opportunity to find things that help them with the roles they want that character fill. In your example perhaps the GM introduces an NPC Cop buddy that knows John's predilection for punching criminal faces and gives him a pair of prototype weighted riot gloves which give him an extra +2d6 HA and some modest protection for his hands. Now Bob has a lower chance to hit, but does a fair bit more damage (albeit at melee range) while John is still a master of the pistol. When you're managing a campaign the appearance of imbalance is almost as challenging as actual imbalance. Players have to all feel that their character is competitive and brings something useful to the team.

Despite the pretty lengthy write-up of Change Environment I was never very clear on exactly what you could do with those stat roll penalties other than knocking someone down. Are there other options?

I recently bought 12 packs of the Hex Man dice and they are fantastic for my new players. However, there aren't any HERO branded dice for 1/2d6 nor for the classic stun multiplier of 1d6-1. I was going to get some custom dice made for personal use and wanted to know if I could use the logo for that purpose only. Basically sets of 1-1-2-2-3-3 and 1-1-2-3-4-5 with the 1s being Hex Man!

It kind of struck me like a slap in the face why the Fantasy Hero Complete book I was so disappointed with is actually fantastic. My players were all having me assist them with their character building and it wasn't improving over time. Then I realized what it was. They had looked over 6E1 and 6E2 and tilted. It's just too much in-depth detail. I had a couple of my players thumb through Fantasy Hero Complete and said "This is all you really need to get rolling." There was palpable relief on their faces. Lesson learned - I will get my Wednesday night table to buy this book.

Adventurer's Club #3 - Character Rating System. I will email you actual character points.

I think the Deadly Blow talent is especially well suited to handling common Fantasy tropes like backstabbing (only when stealthed or attacking from behind while an ally is engaging opponent) or a paladin's smite (only vs. devils, demons, undead), etc.

Overall - Loved it. Couple spots on the characteristics chart seem to be off-base. I can't imagine a campaign where the fighters had a speed of 5+. Normally I'll let players have a stat or two in your Legendary range as the campaign progresses, but a speed of 6 or 7 seems REALLY high. I will totally forward this to my Wednesday night crew. That's two groups playing HERO now. Now if I can corrupt the guys up at Reaper and draw in another crowd.

The way I run it - You can abort to make the Guarding attack. No held action required, though the defender gets full DCV if you aborted and 1/2 if you held your attack waiting for them to try to move past you.

Nah, I love it. But I do have a bucket list item of getting a working credit for HERO since it's been my favorite game system since the 80s. Send me $1 for running a game at the local mall so I can add it to my resume and I'll be happy. Well that and a shockingly small 1099.

How many weekly Hero games do I have to run for Steve to hire me?

The Champions Cards thing they're doing to simplify character creation could be extended to the other genre's to breathe them back to life as well. Hell, I'd actively work towards creating the cards for Fantasy Hero characters. I've converted one of my D&D tables to Fantasy Hero and after I finish another round of tweaks I'll see if I can pitch it for my Wednesday night group as well.

I'd say the advantage on this power would be based on utility. If I have an Omni Grenade and I can choose which of the various powers effects each target in the explosion that is VERY powerful. Definitely some stacking advantage based on how many equivalent powers you get to choose from. On the other hand if I have a Technicolor Spew ability and each target in the cone is affected by a random power from the list that would actually be a disadvantage since you have no control over what happens. Now that I've thought about it I might just declare this part of the "Prismatic" special effect and call it a wash.

If you allow Grabs as part of the Guarding attack then you give defenders one possible option to stop the heroic charge. But, it shouldn't be a guaranteed outcome. We see attackers smash the line every week during football games. It's a contest.

I struggled with this for a bit and ended up using a variation of the Guarding rule. In my Fantasy Hero campaign I allow the players to Abort to make this attack though the person provoking does not suffer 1/2 DCV unless the character had Held an action. I also allow characters with Held actions to move to intercept an opponent trying to bypass them. Melee stickiness is a difficult thing in all turn-based games, but I find the idea that you can walk right pass defenders unopposed feels wrong. The front line needs some way to actually maintain a front line other than fighting in narrow corridors.

Currently using 6e for Fantasy Hero with some carry-overs from 4e that I thought were handled better (Encumbrance, Weapon & Armor charts). Getting used to the decoupling of Primary stats from Figured stats was a bit of a mind blower. Now that I've gotten used to it I can see that it allows for more character customization while eliminating the sell-back exploits of earlier editions.

Don't forget to take a whack at Adventurer's Club #3. The Character Rating System article will save my soul.

Your final paragraph has the gist of it. You are most likely going to have to go down this painfully complicated and expensive path to model most abilities with this level of differentiation. In some campaigns such as old school D&D you'd probably get to have your Healing 3d6 do 6d6 Blast or even 2d6 RKA based on the special effects of your ability and how the GM determines positive and negative energies interact in their universe. Ghost Bolt you could do with the indirect advantage and a tiny matching disadvantage (-1/4) that the indirect is a pass-through that only works on living creatures. As far as powers like Chaos Bomb or the classic Prismatic Spray / Wall spells from D&D you are looking at Linking a bunch of effects. Alternately you might have a VPP for that spell if the GM allows you to randomly roll the effects of equal active point costs. There's no simple way to construct something like that. D&D doesn't have a good model for it either. They just use divine fiat and often ignore game balance using the Rule of Cool. Hopefully someone has a better idea in mind on how to handle this than I do.

I would absolutely recommend against an instant death effect, but having the sword automatically hit the neck (with a little extra HKA that only activates on crits) gets the job done w/out being an absolute effect. It's possible that someone with sufficiently heavy plate armor and mystical defenses of their own could survive such a hit. Absolute effects, imo, are one of the big failings of D&D. That being said - even in D&D getting decapitated is a big deal. You cannot be Revived or even Raised since you are missing a head unless your DM is feeling generous and lets your party plunk your severed skull back on your neck stump. Most DM's are going to have you in Resurrection territory which is very expensive and high enough level to be problematic for most parties.

I don't believe that I've ever been so disappointed in a software product in all my years as I was when Champions Online came out and preserved virtually nothing of what made Champions / Fantasy Hero great. They essentially built a completely new game engine and kept the Champions / HERO lore and tossed out the mechanics. Seemed exactly the opposite of what they should have done. Keep the amazing game system and introduce new lore.

I think this is true to a degree and a negative reputation that hasn't been dealt with to another degree. Because the system is so open ended it lends itself to unnecessary complexity. With my current Saturday group I've been easing them into the rules one by one as their comfort grows. For the early sessions we hand-waved END tracking and several other factors for the sake of simplicity. D&D 5e which has absolutely exploded due to its streamlined changes AND hitting the free marketing jackpot with Critical Role switching to their system isn't THAT much simpler if the GM intends to match it. HERO presents it's primary stats, previously figured stats and combat stats in one big block. It's a wall of text and intimidating. D&D has almost exactly the same number of things to track, but they're dispersed and packaged more neatly not really less in number. HERO - STR,DEX,CON,INT,EGO,PRE D&D - STR,DEX,CON,INT,WIS,CHA HERO - PD, ED, REC, END, STUN D&D - AC, Hit Dice, Exhaustion Levels, Spell Slots, X per short rest, X per long rest HERO - OCV, DCV, MOCV, MDCV D&D - To Hit Bonus from Stats, Proficiency Bonus, Saving Throw 1, Saving Throw 2 - 6 Where I REALLY see players struggle is in building their own custom powers. It's like playing D&D where the spell book is a math test.

I would model the sword as +8 Penalty Skill Levels to hit area 4 (the neck). Give it base sword stats (+1 OCV, 1d6+1 HKA, Str Min 13) with an additional +2d6 HKA triggered by a critical hit roll. Then add limitations to the PSLs, base HKA and crit-triggered HKA: All attacks must be called shots for the head. Non-crit rolls do damage as though they had hit a random body part (roll hit location normally and ignore the called shot results unless you crit). This way every swing is a called shot to the neck, but you only see the result on a critical hit.

The problem persists in 6e, so it is a 6e issue, regardless of whether or not it was copy/pasted from a prior edition. This would be akin to my heroes telling the king that enslaving the halflings is an embarrassing stain on his kingdom and him replying that the halflings were already enslaved when he took over and therefore it's not an issue for him nor the halflings. Logically, that wouldn't hold water. This isn't to bash on 6e though, I like certain aspects of it. The presentation and the side examples especially are vastly improved. I basically copied over the weapon, armor and encumbrance charts from 4e and started using 6e for all other aspects of the game.

Happened. Bolin.pdf Arden.pdf Darran Redbeard.pdf Gabriel.pdf Udyr.pdf Keira.pdf

I had a steady Saturday D&D 5e group for almost two years and decided since we had burned through all of the main books that we could use a change of pace. I'd grab one of the Pathfinder Adventure paths and run us through that. Since we were going to be trying out something completely new I sold the very steady player base on the idea of trying out Fantasy Hero since I like the HERO system mechanics so much better. I knew there'd be some exploding heads if I didn't ease them into it so we did a couple of mock combats with characters I built for them in HDv6 based on character concepts they told me about. Things went pretty well and to avoid the +10 levels with swords to make eye shots at +2 OCV issue I pre-emptively resurrected the Combat Effectiveness Calculator (Turns out it was Adventurer's Club #3 Character Rating System...) as best I could from 3 decades old memory to keep everyone relatively constrained both by campaign hard caps and a total combat effectiveness. It took the players a few sessions to get their heads around attacks that do normal, vs. killing, vs. use-hit-locations, vs. don't-use-hit-locations and the much larger array of combat maneuvers that are available. The one thing players really like is that their characters are 100% THEIR characters. The lack of class constraints and the flexibility of the system is the key selling point. The interaction of armor in Fantasy Hero (makes you resistant to damage, but slower & easier to hit) resonates well with the group as does the damage scale. Our Dwarven Rogue Explosives expert took a single heavy longbow shot to the shoulder (11 BOD, 33 STUN minus his heavy leathers (3 DEF)) and was nearly out of the fight. The current cast of misfits in our War for the Crown run: 1- The Fire Witch (my wife) - mad social skills and the desire to set everything on fire. 2- Arden the Witcher - Player loves this build to death. 3- Bolin the 2nd to Last Airbender - Defensive CC expert with barrier, heals and stretching (sfx water appendages for MA moves). 4- Udyr from League of Legends. I spent a couple of hours in HDv6 making all of the active/passive/lingering effects work right. Most labor intensive character I've ever modeled. 5- Darran Redbeard - Dwarven Sapper and grenade happy rogue. 6- The fallen angel Gabriel from the Prophecy movies. You can't do this very easily in most games. The players are having a blast and the hexman dice really helped with counting BOD/STUN on normal attacks.