drunkonduty

Hi there. :-)

Thanks for taking an interest in Fantasy HERO Basic.

So to explain my little document. It was inspired by a thread started here about 2 years ago by Brian Stanfield (you'll find he's a regular and thoughtful contributor to these forums) about introducing new players to HERO. The idea was to write something that would make HERO more easily accessible to new players. And Fantasy Hero Basic is my take on that.

I tried to present HERO in ways that made it easier to understand. One thing I did was to rearrange the equation for determining attacks and skills in order to make it a "roll high" equation. It's mathematically the same as the "roll under" version used in the official rules.

The reason I did this is that many beginners are confused by the idea of rolling low for attacks and skills but rolling high for damage. In my personal experience, and in most of the anecdotal experiences I've read/heard about, this is a common problem for new players. By changing to "roll high" I hope to take out one thing that is a barrier to entry.

I made a few other changes. Armour Piercing comes to mind. I took an idea from one of the forum threads here and applied it. It's simpler if not as flexible.

One more thing: FHB is intended as a Low Fantasy rules set. Magic is not as powerful and flexible as many fantasy settings you'll have seen. 

Again, thanks for taking an interest. I'm happy to answer any questions you have about it.

Cheers,

Glen.

Cool. 

What you recommend one start with your guide ... then  go onto FHC or onto FH 6th Ed, or a different sequence?

Yeah - I pretty sure I'm going to use roll over as part of my house rules for combat. I do think the mathematical results are a little different between the  two equations, but close enough. It's just a game, not a bridge.

My intent was to take the rules as presented in FHC and make them into something playable out of the box. So yeah, I'm recommending starting with FHB.

Honestly, I think the FHC is more a set of rules about how to make a set of rules. IIRC, it has a few example spells and some example equipment, then tells you to go out and build your own. And that's fine, but it's hard work. I think that once a player has a good idea of the basics of how the game runs in play they will be able to understand the rules in FHC. You could use FHC to create mods for your game. But there's no need to use it.

I haven't read FH 6e so I can't comment on it one way or another.

Roll over - yeah... I keep going over it in my head and I can never be quite sure if I'm off by 1. Maths is hard. 😞 Another thought I've had since publishing is changing the base target number to 10. Partly because it's easier to add to 10. Partly because as someone said on the forums a while back "it's more fun to succeed at stuff."