Re: Hero vs D20 Future
Greetings,
I am also a newbie to HERO, and I also played d20 before, as others in this thread. We are still playing an Eberron campaign with d20 at the moment, but I am not satisfied anymore.
I must admit, that I am sometimes lazy as a GM and was glad to see, that d20 had so many sourcebooks which made my life easier at first glance. But after some time I recognized that with more sourcebooks more problems evolved, a feat here, a spell there, a new prestige class somewhere else. Life as a GM became more complicated as I saw how unbalancing many of these options were.
Furthermore I became frustrated with the whole class and level system, exp for slashing monsters and so on. Finally I wanted to start a new campaign as You are planning at the moment. A mixture of SciFi and Fantasy and I saw that d20 wouldn't suit my needs. I stumbled across the HERO system in a German online bookstore and read some reviews. At first I never thought I would buy HERO, sounded kinda complicated, but then I just bought it, began to read it and was caught in a bonfire of upcoming ideas.
It was really a problem to get my players to have a start with HERO, but it was worth the effort. I set up the campaign, made some riddles about the human population in an unknown sector of the milky way galaxy and let my players get stranded on an unknown planet with some hints of their origin. The whole setting is a mixture of Star Gate, Sliders, Tsubasa Chronicles and Babylon 5 with the option of evolving the characters into Superheroes with a lot of anime-style.
I found the starherofandom site quite useful, and the alien wars and worlds of empire sourcebooks. No other system qualified for my needs but HERO alone.
On the other hand one thing is more important than any other, fun with roleplaying does not come from the system you are playing with. It's only a tool, not even a set of rules. Fun comes from your campaign, your adventures and your interaction with the players. If the setting is interesting the system doesn't matter.