m.mavnn

Paladin: You bargained with a fey to gain us passage through the woods?
Monk: Don't make too much of it.
Paladin: What did they demand as payment?
Monk: My firstborn.
Paladin: But you took an oath of celibacy when you became a monk.
Monk: It didn't come up in the conversation.
 
OOC comment by a third player: I would not put it past the fey to foresee a certain ... backsliding ... incident later in his life, and years later they call on the monk to collect and deliver the child he had not previously known he'd sired.

A bit off topic, but to m.mavnn's comment on Star Trek, I've commented in the past that Hero has multiple levels  of task resolution, and could have more options in that regard. We have the "opposed skill check" resolution for tasks expected to be fairly minor in-game and the "detailed and granular resolution" for the big  resolutions.  The latter is combat in Hero, but why does it need  to be in all games?
 
A more robust social conflict resolution would be more useful in a Court Intrigue game, or a Romance game. Mechanics for legal battles, or medical problems, could be more useful in some games (how many Star Trek episodes would be reduced to "make a xenobiology check" in a standard Hero game?
 
In many games where these tasks would benefit from a more granual resolution, physical violence might be reduced to making opposed Fisticuffs or Firearms skill rolls.

This seems pretty much the central point of the whole discussion. RPGs have a limited 'definition' of how granular they can be defining stats before they become unplayable, which inevitably means grouping things together that are related but, well, not the same. 
 
But what's important detail in one genre is window dressing in another; I once saw a Star Trek game that had no physical stats, for example, because it didn't need that detail. It just had a very broad 'physically superior' advantage if you wanted to be Data or Worf. 
 
In your case, both perception and INT skills are absolutely crucial to the genre of the campaign, so I would say your intuition to split them up is a good call *for this game*. HERO is as much an RPG creation toolkit at the end of the day (see heroic vs superheroic options), so if you're going off the beaten genre path you may as well lean into that. 

Second RPG I ever played was a game of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay set in the 40k universe (the fantasy roleplay and 40k Rogue Trader stats were compatible enough you could basically just do that).
 
I didn't have a PC, and the group wanted to get to know me a bit before offering me a place. That was fair enough; I was 14 and the rest of the group were in their 30s-40s and it wasn't clear that we were going to be a good match. And it would have been awkward to bring in a new character anyway, as the party were in the process of trying to reclaim their ship from space pirates and they'd left off half way through the pitched boarding battle (having used their extensive knowledge of their own ship to get back on board).
 
So the GM gave me an NPC crew member to play - and not just any old mook, but the heavy weapons specialist. So we clear out a few rooms, plant sapping charges on the bridge door, blow it off its hinges, and we all burst in! The GM loving describes the senior pirates, including the pirate captain in his shiney chaos marine power armour. Who promptly shoots and nearly kills my character, who's rolled the highest initiative in the party.
 
"That sounds bad," says I, "and very tough. I'm going to switch to full auto on the plasma cannon and empty the clip."
 
The DM considers. Rolls some dice. Looks up some armour ratings.
 
"Well, there's good news and bad news. Good news is, there's nothing left of the pirate captain except a smoking pair of boots magnetically held to the floor.
 
The bad news is, you and the rest of the party are being sucked out of the gaping hole in the front of the bridge out you just opened into deep space.
 
Worst news is, your character just got several holes blown in his space suit and it's no longer air tight."
 
Long story short: they should have given me a power sword...

The animation was based on a discussion that basically said there's no point putting Vadar up against a normal space marine as they can't do much against the force powers, what would happen if he fought one of the space marine librarians (psychic/wizard, there isn't much difference in 40k).
 
Which made a cool animation, but also rendered the question a bit pointless - psychics in 40k range from 'it would hardly make a difference versus Vadar' to ridiculously over powered army killers who would squish him like a bug. So you basically get to just choose which side wins at that point. 

The animation was based on a discussion that basically said there's no point putting Vadar up against a normal space marine as they can't do much against the force powers, what would happen if he fought one of the space marine librarians (psychic/wizard, there isn't much difference in 40k).
 
Which made a cool animation, but also rendered the question a bit pointless - psychics in 40k range from 'it would hardly make a difference versus Vadar' to ridiculously over powered army killers who would squish him like a bug. So you basically get to just choose which side wins at that point. 

The animation was based on a discussion that basically said there's no point putting Vadar up against a normal space marine as they can't do much against the force powers, what would happen if he fought one of the space marine librarians (psychic/wizard, there isn't much difference in 40k).
 
Which made a cool animation, but also rendered the question a bit pointless - psychics in 40k range from 'it would hardly make a difference versus Vadar' to ridiculously over powered army killers who would squish him like a bug. So you basically get to just choose which side wins at that point. 

killer Shrike covered most of it, but it cones down to the bell curve.  When rolling for a Skill check, there is a typical range generated by the results of 3d6.  Your players can expect to roll in this range, and still be concerned about that possible flub and still hold hope of that gkorious perfect success.  
 
If you are inclined to use fumble and critical successes, they still happen on 3d6, but instead of fumbling 5 perxent of the rime (d20), they will only fumble about one-half a percent of the time.  This alows the characters (and by extension, the players) to really be the competent group of highly-skilled adventurers they want to be.  A critical success becones equally as rare, making it something even more special, and therefore more exciting.
 
Skill progression becones more interesting as well, and again, this is because of the bell curve.  Once characters fight there way to 11- or so, each step after that- even a single level, demonstrates a radical leap in ability (owing to the percentage breakdowns of any given result within the curve.  Once the come out of that midrange, they are -demonstrably world-class masters of their skill: a 16 or less means less than a ten percent chance of failure (assuming no penalties are assessed).
 
In regards to damage, the curve works the same way.  It is extremely important when considering this to remember that armor and other defenses are radically different between HERO and the polyhedral game.  In the polyhedral game, better defenses mean the attack misses.
 
In HERO, there no such correlation.  The armor has no bearing on the success of the attack, but does affect how damage is determined.  If a character has an atttack that does 2d6 damage, he can expect to roll somewhere around 7 the bulk of the time.
 
This is not the case with a d12.  Not only can he expect to roll less than 7 about half the he rolls, he can expect to roll a 1 every 12 rolls, which is something he absolutely cannot do on 2d anything.
 
This is important when the GM is trying to balance his games, and it is important when the player is spending his resources.  Both know that defenses at about 10 will mean that a lot of strikes will result in no damage to the character, but it still preserves the fear of mortality by resulting in some,damge from a lot of possible strikes.
 
With a d12, defenses of 10 would make the character nearly invulnerable, meaning he would only take damage one time in six.  If that damage was 1d20, he would take damage haof the time, and a fourth of it would be heavy damage indeed.
 
The d6 bell curve works quite well with the system HERO uses for damage and for skill resolution.  That makes sense, given that the system was designed specifically to take advantage of that curve.  The end result is enough consistency to allow players and gms to determine lumits and levels that make play as light or as deadly as they want it to be and still have a realsitic threat of spectacular success and failure.
 
If you really do want to tinker with the dice, though, I woukd toss out the suggest to try swappibg d6 for d4.  The curve is spectacularly loaded for consistent center-of-the-road results, with the extreme ends being almost eliminated.   It is very remiscent of games that say things like "does 25 damage."
 

 
 
 

I'm all ears!
 
... Well, apart from the bits that aren't. But I'm definitely interested in the realizations.

Thanks @Ninja-Bear , and yes I think I might give it a few trial battles. Especially because I'm still planning to have the bell curve kick in fairly quickly (hence not planning to use d12s; in the progression I'm planning, the 1/2 dice step is the only step in which you'll be rolling less dice my way than the official way). I'm also planning to let people choose one or the other way of rolling as they prefer - as the DM I was just going to use the standard rules given it's convenient to always use the same dice and I know Hero well.
 
That said, I'm sure the excuse to buy a bunch of pretty d6s will not be missed by the dice loving section of the players .

@m.mavnn, since know one has really done it the best advice I’d give is just have some basic mooks and monsters and just have a few rounds of battle. Nothing serious. 100 pt slap dashed characters versus lowly goblins with maybe a simple dungeon crawl -4 rooms tops. See how that plays out. Single dice rolls are swingy but some people see that as a feature. And if you’re group likes it? Go for it. 

Well he showed Polyhedrals  maybe meaningless for Pathfinder but that isn’t the case with all games that use Polyhedrals.  Savage Worlds comes to mind and it’s probably why they make a big deal about static bonuses, +2 is very good.

Honestly, I'm mostly considering it for one player who's first rpg was the Pathfinder game (now into its 3rd? 4th? year) and who has amassed a broad dice collection and likes to pick the 'right dice for the job'. For them it's part of the fun of the game, and I don't see any reason to spoil it 🤷‍♂️

I find all these "how come other supers aren't painted with the same brush" questions interesting.
 
Let me pose a point about racism/hate that may help here:
 
So, because Marvel / Stan brought in the concept of mutants in 1963 and mutant hate sometime later (becoming a main focus of the titles in the '80s), and used Prof. X and Magneto as allegory for MLK and Malcom X; everyone has said "this doesn't make sense as an allegory for racism, because people can't tell the difference between Cyclops and Spiderman, just by looking at them."
 
So, the problem with this viewpoint, is that most people posting are from the era of the mutants as presented in the comics, and thus are thinking about racism in the context of modern times, where it is primarily ethnicity based, and thus is as simple for idiot racist as looking at the target of their hate; because it's as obvious as the target's skin color, hair, etc.  (Which is why they often can make mistakes, calling a Native American a slur for a Mexican, for instance.)
 
However, think about it in the context of the Civil War in the USA.  A political belief motivated war, having nothing to do with race, religion, or any outside, easily identifiable aspect.  It sometimes led to families hating and killing each other.
 
Between WWI and WWII period of Europe, and the Nazi hate for the Jewish.  It is often impossible to discern the difference between a Jewish person and non-Jew Caucasian of the same nation; especially when you start talking about Russian Jews (among others).  A point Magneto himself has made in both the comics and movies; yet ignored by this whole line of thought.
 
How about Northern Ireland?  Same people in every way, hating and killing each other simple because one was a Catholic and one was Protestant (among other reasons)?  
 
Want a more modern example?  How about the Genocide in Bosnia during the Bosnian War (92-95) - three different sub-cultures from the same area, same ethnicity, in some cases same families.
 
My point here is simple; just because it is not "obvious" that Spiderman is NOT a Mutant, and it is NOT obvious that Wolverine is NOT an altered human, but an altered Mutant, simply by looking at them, doesn't mean people still can't hate one, and not the other.
 
Hate and racism have never been isolated to "white vs. black (or brown)", until recent times.  Many times in history there has been hate against a sub-group with no possible way to simply "seeing" the difference; yet the human capacity to hate, and be aggressive toward any sub-group they wanted, has never been hampered by such simple things as having to be able to tell the difference in an obvious way.
 
So, I would challenge that looking at the "Mutant Problem" through glasses colored by today's ethnicity (color) based hate and not understanding the capacity of human nature to hate and somehow figure out who to hate, without it being obvious, is the true "cop-out".
 

First let me say that I was always onboard for the idea of mutants. In Marvel, there are all these people with powers but for some reason mutants are singled out to be feared and hated.
 
But, to me, it always worked. I bought into it. Captain America could be high-fived in public by a little kid, but someone suspected of being a mutant wouldn't be allowed anywhere near that kid, even if that mutant just saved the day.
 
I guess what I'm asking is, What is the psychology of this situation? Why does it work and ring true narratively?

So, I'm considering suggesting a move to Hero from Pathfinder. And I'm not particularly worried about convincing them to try a more flexible rules set, having seen them all get frustrated at (and in some cases try to bend the rules around) not being able to grow the characters to match the story rather than the 'class'. 
 
Which only leaves me with a much more serious issue: they really like their pretty dice
 
Given this'll be a fantasy game, I forsee a lot of killing attacks so I'm considering using dice for the different DCs of KAs. It seems to work fairly nicely, something along the lines of: 1, 1d4, 1d6, 1d8, 1d10 for the first 5 DCs without skewing the resulting body damage too far. In fact, I think they might even be quicker to pick up than the normal Hero progression ("you want me to roll one and a half dice?!"). 
 
Has anyone tried anything like this before? The numbers start drifting rather more if you start using d12s, and I still don't have a good use for d20s so I'm also all ears for ideas there! 

This is from killershrikes site
 

But that only applies when they ARE common to all slots.  Which might be the case here, but he did say only most spells.  
 
At the least, you could build a custom modifier for everything else (Simple Magical Spell, -1) and cut it down to 2 limitations.
 
Side note:  Common Modifiers can also be used with lists, and the same point about suppressing the common limitation applies.  That *really* helps the organization and readability, whether using common modifiers or not.  Lists can denote sections:  Defenses and Senses/LS are two I use a fair bit.  Or Base Powers (all forms) and Empowered (HFO, or when a bunch of stuff is Linked to a core power that effectively defines an "HFO.")  Last:  lists can be copied and pasted from one sheet to another.  All the list entries tag along for the ride.  Can be handy for developing some 'template' power groupings you use a fair bit;  for example, for HTH types, combat skill levels, defense maneuver, defensive attack (from APG),  and rapid attack (HTH).  
 
 

using Hero Designer and going to File>Preferences>uncheck the show common limitations in slots on Lists/Frameworks box
this will only list all common advantages/disadvantages on the list/framework and not on the slots
you may still add advantages/disadvantages on individual slots