Cloppy Clip

In my opinion, you can get a lot of mileage by considering how the different demihumans would have interacted through history. Even if you start with the most stereotypical set-up imaginable, by thinking through the consequences of trade and migration you can create a rich setting that has some unique twists while still feeling familiar. For example, if you have elves be treated as the wisest and most intellectual race then, regardless of whether or not that has any basis in fact, other demihumans will adopt elvish philosophies and ideas to their cultures. A large motivation for the development of Islam was taking the Abrahamic faiths like Judaism and Christianity, that were popular in the region but associated with foreign powers, and reframing them as an Arab religion. In the same way you'd probably find concepts from elf society popping up among dwarves, halflings and orcs, but refocused on those communities. Another thing to consider is that if a minority community doesn't take on the practices of the dominant culture then there's likely going to be a lot of discrimination occurring, as the minority becomes siloed off from the rest of society and an easy target for harassment, which can reinforce the choice of the minority to keep to themselves where they can. If left to go unchecked this can end in an ugly way, as when many medieval countries, low on funds, forced their Jewish populations to convert or face exile and the confiscation of their property. In general, there's a lot of good material to be taken from real life history too. Pick some interaction between two different cultures and transpose that to your setting. You're not beholden to how it turned out in real life, either, so you can let your imagination run wild as you come up with different twists on history. This post has been all over the place, so apologies for that. But hopefully there's something useful here.

This is an interesting scenario with a lot of different ways to play out at the table. I'd be interested in hearing about how it goes for anybody who gets a chance to run this. If I wanted to guess how things will turn out then I suppose it would depend a great deal on what the dragon's government was like before it was deposed. If the dragon was mostly hands-off and left the day-to-day running of the country to mortal servants then that infrastructure could quite easily survive the transition. People probably won't approve of the dragon's servants, but political inertia and the fact that they're the ones paying the wages for the armies and mercenaries will go a long way to keeping them in power. There would be a number of better options for government, no doubt, and many will spring up in the wake of the dragon's death, but I can easily see these reformist factions fighting each other over the best way to fix everything unless you give them something to rally around. Of course, I'm sure the heroes who slew the dragon could serve as this focus for a new society, if they were so inclined. On the other hand, if the dragon was a micro-manager who had to oversee every stage of the government machine no matter how inefficient it was (in the way that a lot of dictators tend to do in real life) then there's the possibility that whatever political apparatus is in place isn't robust enough to handle its overlord disappearing. If the country is wholly focused around the dragon as the supreme ruler then it might not have enough redundancy in place to cope, which would create an opening for a more radical faction to take over. So a lot of this scenario would depend on what kind of ruler you see the Dragon King as having been, to my mind. While I can see the appeal of a truly intelligent dragon who defies convention by setting up an efficient society, I do think it's not unlikely that the sort of personality given to this kind of dictatorship be the sort to run it haphazardly. Horses for courses and all that.

Thanks, both. If I'm understanding things correctly then, the 5-point doubling was originally intended to be used only for mundane equipment and was later extended to equipment built as powers? When I looked at the current rules it seemed to me that the intended use was to double up on attacks cheaply and, in that case, that it didn't make much difference whether the attack was bought as a Focus or not, so I couldn't see why the equipment restriction was in place. But if the current set-up where any power (not just an attack power) can be doubled is a bit of an aberration caused by rule updates over the years then that makes a bit more sense. If you restricted yourself to the main use I saw: one attack doubled once or twice, without Reduced END or any similar advantages, and nothing egregiously broken like doubled defences then is there any benefit to this rule over just building the attack as an Autofire power? It seems that the two methods fill a similar niche in this case, so are there any uses of the 5-point doubling rule that would be all right and don't have alternatives already baked into the rules?

If I create a Variable Power Pool it gives me the option to define its Type: Gadget Pool, Magic Pool or Mimicry Pool. At first I thought this would apply some pre-defined modifiers but that doesn't seem to be the case. Is there any mechanical impact to picking a Type, or is it just a way of reinforcing the fiction like the Special Effect option does? Very impressed with the program by the way; I keep discovering new things I can do with it, but at the same time the interface is surprisingly elegant for something so complicated. A huge well done to its designers!

I've been playing around with HERO Designer, and have finally spotted the Quantity option for powers that lets you apply the 5-point doubling rule from 6E2 p181. That rule says that it's only available for equipment though, and explicitly rules out innate powers or abilities, which has me wondering: what exactly defines equipment bought as a power? Does it mean the power has to be bought as some sort of Focus, or is it a matter of SFX? If the character concept justified it then would the game break down terribly if you allowed 5-point doubling for any power, or would you want there to be some checks and balances in place?

I think that a big problem HERO poses for new players is the hidden fixed variables. It's all well and good to present the game as a toolbox that let's you finetune it for your own purposes, but there are some factors in the design that do need to be accomodated. Often I find that once you identify these factors you can appreciate the underlying structure of the game even more, as I did when I bumped up against low-DC Mental powers in another thread, but without the proper guidance or experience these hidden assumptions can derail a game before it's even begun. So I'm all in favour of specialised presentations of HERO, that don't change the fundamental mechanics but just put some guidelines on the game for new players, to help us avoid traps and pitfalls that more experienced players would know to avoid.

Thanks for the tips, everyone. Christopher, I'd seen the Damage Over Time advantage, but I think I must have misinterpreted it (I took the quote "assuming the GM were willing to waive Healing's rule about repeated use" to mean the advantage wouldn't work with Healing without explicit GM fiat, but that it was possible for the GM to ignore the Re-Use rule entirely). But if you can just apply DOT to Healing without needing to jump through hoops then that makes the Regeneration UOO power build (that is explicitly turned down by the book) much more straight-forward to build, so thank you!

That's a perspective I hadn't considered, Doc, and one that I think highlights the trouble of healing. You want healing to be difficult in combat, and don't mind it being easy to heal up out of combat. Someone else wants healing to be limited out of combat, but is all right with it keeping up with damage in combat. And a third person might just want healing to be easy full stop. It looks to me like there's not going to be one solution that suits all groups, which might go a way to explaining the different approaches to healing over the editions. This thread's responses seem to say to me that, as long as it suit's the group's goals, there's no right or wrong way to go about it. 4E Healing might work for a larger-than-life superheroic game that doesn't mind protracted combat, while 5E and 6E Healing seems more suited for the attrition-based gameplay where characters wear down over the course of the adventure. So that seems to answer my original question of why they changed so dramatically: the designers just had different ideas in mind of how healing should play out. I hope my threads asking questions like these don't wear too thin, but your collective experience with the game does really help me build a picture of things, so thank you very much, everyone!

Thank you for the added context, everyone. So it seems that 4E was something of an aberration when it came to Healing mechanics, which is a bit misleading when that's the earliest book I own! Does that mean that, if I'm playing in a game that doesn't depend on attrition, unlimited healing would be mostly fine? As long as you're happy for characters to start each fight in top condition, which I feel is more accurate to a lot of genres we could use as inspiration, I think the main concern would be that Healing doesn't outpace damage. Is that accurate? I notice in both cases of 4E Healing being broken we're using 1d6 Aid with modifiers to keep it going all the time for free; does that mean that the problem was mostly with turning Healing into a cheap Regeneration, and not so much with the Healing itself? The page unclevlad mentioned in 5E Revised even says characters with Aid should be grandfathered in unless the GM found it unbalancing, which implies to me that for a lot of groups it wasn't too bad in play if you avoided the builds that gave you infinite Healing for free. But, of course, I wasn't playing at the time, so I don't have any firsthand experience myself.

That's interesting. I only have the 4E core, and nothing from 3E or before, so I'd assumed earlier editions would have used the Healing-as-Aid model too. When you say restrictions, do you mean the same as 5E and 6E, or did it work in a different way to those editions?

Thank you, Hugh. Is this the sort of thing that worked all right for what the designers intended (Xd6 Aid, Healing Only for example), but quickly broke down when Advantages like Reduced Endurance and Persistent were applied? Or was the ability to repeatedly heal someone without having to wait 24 hours too powerful on its own? And that's an interesting note on why Aid costs 6 points. Since all the other attacks are multiples of 5 I'd wondered about that. Now I know, so thank you for that tidbit!

I was looking through the 4E core book, and was wondering why Aid and Healing changed so much in between editions. In 4E they were one power, 5 points per 1d6 with Healing being a -1/2 Limitation on Aid, that also didn't fade away over time. Then in 5E it changes to two separate powers, each one 10 points per 1d6 (although Aid for some reason doesn't cost END in this edition), and now Healing has the re-use limit on it, which carries forward to 6E, in which Aid goes down to 6 points per 1d6 and costs END again. So I can guess that Healing was considered too strong back in 4E, but that's a pretty steep change to make all in one go. Was it really that unbalanced in play for those who used it at the time? Or could this have been a bit of an over-correction? And why was one power split into two? I can see how intuitively it makes sense for Healing to be its own power, since people will look for it under that name, but was there a mechanical problem to having it be a part of Aid?

Thank you for the explanation, and in that case I don't need to muddle things up by putting more on your plate. I don't have a problem telling players what the probabilities are, but you raise a good point that, for situations where there's an unseen influence affecting the roll, the current system either has you reveal that to the players or do some mental arithmetic behind the scenes and then explain why a roll of 12 on a 13- didn't actually succeed. So switching to the roll vs difficulty model will give you a new option to play around with. And, if you're aiming this at teaching a new player while the GM still has plenty of experience, you can offload nearly everything but Skill Levels to the GM's discretion and keep calculations relatively simple for the player. Obviously everyone's an individual with their own likes and dislikes, but I can definitely see this being a smoother introduction for new players.

Would you both say then that Presence Attacks work best when it's one character with a much higher PRE going up against disposable mooks? It does look like that's what the rules are geared up for, which is useful to know. Good news is that, if the rules aren't concerned too much with the social combat idea I have for this game then I'm free to define my own guidelines as I please. Thank you very much, both!

@Sketchpad It looks like, to answer your original question, nobody's tried this method before, but that doesn't mean it's not worth testing out. If you do get a chance to try this in a game, I'd love to hear what the feedback is, as I can see the potential advantages and, like you say, it's interesting to see how far you can push the system. Even if you have to reprice defences, or change the mechancis more to balance things out, I think more tools in the toolbox can't be a bad thing. So please don't let the downsides dissuade you, since there's no harm in trying out new ideas like this.

Then you're free to play around as much as you like, which takes a lot of pressure off. I'm not an expert by any means, but I'd recommend looking at different RPGs to get an idea of what you like and don't like about different mechanics. Since you're on this forum, you can probably use HERO as a base for your game if you like, but there's a lot of great ideas in other games, and not just superhero ones, if you're able to go looking for them. If you do go for a points-based approach like HERO, though, I'd say you want to get an idea for what a point is worth early on, since you can use that to guess what different powers should be worth as you go on. For HERO, it's based on 5 points equals 1d6, or one doubling, so if you were designing HERO from scratch and you had a new power idea, you could use that as a guideline for what 5 points of this power should get you. Like I said, I'm not an expert at all, but there's a lot of fun to be had in creating your own RPG. Please let us know what developments you make!

I couldn't find a rule against double-posting, but please let me know if I've overstepped any boundaries by doing so. Building off my last post, I've been looking into Presence Attacks and I've hit another snag. So it seems that, on average, two characters with equal PRE aren't going to do much to each other with their Presence Attacks. Since you're comparing each 1d6 to 5 points, the average attack won't hit PRE, let alone PRE+10 or so on. You're expected to try and leverage the bonus dice from complications, roleplaying and other situational modifiers to try and make up the difference, but I haven't seen anything saying how many bonus dice you're expected to score on average. Obviously the actual amount can vary wildly from roll to roll, but I'm sure there must have been a baseline the designers had in mind. Assuming PRE 20, 6d6 feels like it gives a good spread to me, which would say +2d6 for a heroic level game, but that's just my intuition. Has anybody had much experience using Presence Attacks at the table?

One important question is, do you have any dreams of publishing the system, or is this for your own personal use, maybe to be shared with friends and online? Because if you're not planning on a wild commercial success, you have much more freedom to put whatever you like in your game. As long as you and your players are happy with it, the sky's the limit and there's not really a wrong way to go about things.

Have you decided when the conversion of skills from original HERO material is going to be made? There seem to be two ways of doing it, and depending on how you frame it, I can see it opening different possiblities for the new system. As I understand it, the two choices you've floated are: 1 - Convert the characteristic to a modifier first, then apply the skill as a modifier on top of that. So an 18 INT raised to a 15- skill would first convert to a +2 INT, with another +2 from the skill for a total of +4, or 2 - Calculate the final skill, then convert that to a modifier. So you'd take the 15- skill and convert it to a +4 straight away, crucially leaving the 18 INT in place. Either one works, but I realised when I sat down to reply that my suggestion was assuming one case, and wouldn't work as smoothly in the other. So, if it's not too much trouble, are characteristics staying as-is, or are they being converted to modifiers too? Hope the revisions are going well, and looking forward to hearing more soon!

I've done a little playing around with the probabilities and I've noticed that, assuming 5 EGO gives you 1d6 for your roll, you'll be rolling fewer dice on average than the attacker would in a normal example. You can get around this easily enough by reducing the target number set by the attacker's power (so a 12d6 power might give a target number of 30 instead of 60, for example), but the reduced variance means you'll be much less likely to get greater effect results. I played around with making greater effects kick in at EGO+5, EGO+10 and so on, and that gave you much higher chances of the greater results. So there'll probably be an answer somewhere in the middle, but that's one thing to watch out for. Of course, if you're happy either way, you can accept that it'll play differently to standard HERO and just treat this quirk as one of the features of the new system. I'm sure the original design of HERO wouldn't fall apart if EGO+10 results were more or less likely to occur.

Ah, if the goal's to have something that can be passed on and used at the table with current HERO material then, yes, I agree that messing around with the presentation of characteristics probably goes a bit too far. It would remind me of the OSR games that use Ascending AC, because no matter how much I prefer Ascending AC, having to convert on the fly when using books that used the traditional AC system took me away from what I was trying to do, and added another point where something could go wrong. Which I could easily see happening if people were looking up a villain in the middle of combat and thinking to themselves "80 STR, so that would be +16? Or is it +14, or something else? Oh dear..." For the critical hit solution, an exact equivalent of the probabilities would be rolling (21 + n)/2, where n is the number you need to roll on the dice. For the critical hit example, n would be 10 + DCV - OCV or better. Which would mean that you'd score a crit on a roll of (31 + DCV - OCV)/2, which with a bonus of your OCV gives a target number of (31 + DCV + OCV)/2. So, since 31/2 is roughly the same as 15, you could set the target number for a crit as 15 + the average of the attacker's OCV and the defender's DCV. Now that is quite messy, so I understand completely if you don't want to use it, but that gives you nearly the exact same probabilities as the current HERO crit system, so it might be worth checking whatever method you go for against that to see if they give comparable results.

Thank you both for the feedback. Grailknight, if it helps, this campaign is modelled around social matters, where the genre doesn't support violently attacking people in conversation, so while the opposition will respond negatively, they'd be limited to doing so with their own Drains, Mental Powers and Presence Attacks, much as you are. I decided to do some digging in my Champions Villains books, and it looks like most villains have between 20-30 EGO. Going by my rule-of-thumb of 1 Mental Defence per 1 DC of Mental Power (the villains in these books seemed to have nearer 1.25 Mental Defence per 1 DC, but I prefer the round numbers of a straight 1:1), a 12 DC Mind Control will average 30 EGO, giving an EGO Effect for the high-end, and an EGO+10 Effect for the low-end. As this rule-of-thumb means that adding 2 DCs of the Mental Power adds 5 to the average Effect Roll, I can scale my numbers up or down depending on how heroic or superheroic I want the campaign to be. So, for a totally average world where average people just happen to have psychic powers, an average DC of 8 pairs up with 10-20 EGO. Or I could beef the players up to 15-25 EGO and get an average DC of 10. Or even go full Champions and go with 20-30 EGO and 12 DC. This method looks to be nicely future-proofed, since I can tweak the numbers and use these guidelines for different campaigns working on different principles. So, again, thank you for the input and hopefully this information will be of use to someone reading this thread. If not, at least it's sorted me out for a while!

Not having the older books available, were Talents still set up as pre-set power builds in earlier editions? Because if not, could you take some of the more niche Talents and just reprice them based on how likely it is to affect a campaign? For example, I had to look it up, but apparently Universal Translator is indeed worth 20 points based on how its built in 6E, but I wouldn't consider the roleplaying utility of that ability to be worth 20 points. I think the Other Talent category is a good solution, since it lets you tweak the pricing and, if a GM wants players to personalise their characters with these little quirks that give them some colour, they can give out free points that can only be spent on Other Talents. So, not much to add, but I like what I'm seeing here!

Like Hugh says, this is mostly just presenting the HERO mechanics differently, so I don't see it affecting gameplay that much. Building on your ideas, though, have you considered dividing all characteristics by 5 and making them the same as the modifiers? So a 10 in the old system would become +0, and for 5 points you could raise a characteristic by 1. You'd lose a bit of granularity, and you'd have to decide whether to put a cap on negative characteristics or not, but since figured characteristics are out in 6E everything seems to work out to multiples of 5 now. Regardless of whether that's useful or not, I'm interested in hearing about your further ideas for this, particularly the expansion on Presence Attacks. EDIT: And then my brain caught up to my mouth and remembered the 2d6 damage you start with from STR. So maybe have characteristics start at +2, and set target numbers to 12 by default? It loses a little of the aesthetic appeal, but otherwise I don't think that should break anything.

I think it would help if I had a better frame of reference for what a mental power is supposed to accomplish. For example, I have a rough guideline taken from Tasha's guide of 2 Def per 1 DC, with enough CON to take an average attack and enough STUN to take 2-3 average attacks. Then tweaks can be made around that guideline to personalise characters. Now, for mental powers, that guide recommends 1 MD per 1 DC, which works out to a nice 2.5 points of effect per DC on average, or +5 to the Effect Roll for each +2 DC. So, let's say we have a 12 DC mental power going up against someone with 12 MD, and they have an average roll of 42 - 12 = 30. What is 30 expected to accomplish? You'd get an EGO+10 effect if the average EGO is 20, or an EGO effect if the average EGO is 30, but what would you consider an acceptable result for an unmodified power like Mind Control or Mental Illusions? Once I have that, I can start building my base to tweak numbers around, and that will make the whole process go much more smoothly.