i3ullseye

Don't have much to add yet... but wanted to say this.

You have an amazingly good play group going there. At first read i thought Rook sounded too powerful. but once the concept clicked in my mind, that is an amazing piece of work. And Chitin is wonderful! Kudos to your players.

I have rarely had problems with either.

And yes, Capt. America would be an EC - Super Soldier.

Daredevil wouldn't be, because he really only has one power, spacial awareness. The rest are all skill based. So he is a bad example.

But like any disavantage or limitation, it is not only your right, but your DUTY to abuse the hell out of this and make your players suffer. There certainly should be times they regret building their powers that way, or your not doing everything you can to keep the game 'interesting' for them.

I apologize if this has been asked or covered, but i was wondering....

Was it a conscious decision to remove the bonus points saved from package deals? Is there any benegit to them other than stylistic coherency? Seems in FREd there is no mention of saving points with packages at all. Is this removed now for more balanced points overall?

One note......

To really maintain the feel you want, i woudl make the character use 3 different skills to roll for success with this. And on complex maneuvers, make them use 2 in unison.

I think at this point the future (and current) books will cover the vital aspects of this. Without presenting a history lesson in a book, all you need are some rudimentary military skill packages and some pre-designed tanks and armament and you are fairly set.

Well, I suppose great minds think alike.

When Bruce was still line editor ai emailed him with my plan to do a WarHERO book. He liked the idea but wasn;t sure where things were going company wise. i acquired tons of good resource materials, and was planning the main book to cover both WW1 and WW2, with later expansions for Revolutionary, Civil, Viet Nam, etc......

But with the company issues it was seriously put on the back burner years ago. So just the other day I emailed Steve to see what he thought. Well, seems they are not interested in thsi book right now, but it DOES appear as a title on the HERO timeline. So maybe it is just a great idea that will never fully happen.

The vehicles books have lots of military vehicles. and the skills books will have more military packages. So I guess the source material is already there to do this without a genre book per se. But man this woudl just work so well with this system.

I also planned to work out one with zombies and the supernatural in WWII. Nothing like landing on a beach only to beset upon by werewolves in Camo gear.

Maybe this woudl be a good collective effort to post web only if enough people are interested. Perhaps they could put up a link and post materials for us, and we could funnel everything through a single editor of our own. Kinda cool....

Ran Chill for over 2 years straight with a regular gorup, and my 3 year+ long Fantasy HERO campaign involved a very dark world full of undead like Ravenloft. Lots of great advice here. but heres my few nuggets.

1) Make someone else important to the story.

The reason you do this is they are more easily expendable than the players. Even if you are an unforgiving GM, you still might spare them where you woudl have no restraint gutting one of your own NPCs in front of them.

This also takes away an element of their control. They can pick and choose their own actions, and try to protect themselves. but when another need to be protected, and you don't handle their actions directly, there is a sense of urgency. The control is lost and that security blanket fades away.

2) Use all 6 senses.

Nothing hits home better than describing a smell or taste important to the story. The scent of fomaldehyde, the iron tinged taste of their own blood, the rolling of thunder lasting for 30 second and seeming like an hour. all of this is vital in this sort of game.

Now remember, you are not really there to glorify it. this is not Vampire. Let them know when the hair on the back of their neck stands up from the screeching wail they hear. Make sure they know the goosebumps raise on their arm as they reach blindly in the darkness and feel tattered flesh pull away into their hand.

3) Set expectations, then trounce them....

This is a real winner. If you fight zombies over and over, you begin to know the nature of zombies. Thats when you have one that has an infectious contagion. The vampire you been playing cat and mouse with might start bringing small children along as a diversion. Etc... etc...

Hope these help.

Just had another one.....

Everyman packages tailored for race and culture. human children might not learn mining, but dwarven children shoul have an 8- for example.

I ran an X-Files type game where everyone was 50+25. This was a blast. I think my next campaign will be 75+10. I really like the lower power level because then you rely on the strategy of what combat maneuvers are out there to accomplish your goals. One thing to keep in mind however. lower power level games allow equipment to be purchased, and there are many MANY items out there that actually take the equivalent power level up over 300 or even 500 depending on the campaign. All the lower points at start do is make a more solid base character with skills, and then ensure their 'powers' can be neutralized as items.

Continued......

Now each character, having one 'type' and one 'role' will not overshadow another in their prrime focus. Sure, more than one can have healing, but he will never heal as well as the primary healer can. I went further....

Each Role and Type had certain point spending conventions in place. game was 150 pts. They HAD to spend 50 on Skills, and they HAD to spend 50 on attributes. the last 50 was determined by the type they picked. Superior humans for example spent 100 on stats. hi tech types spent 50 on powers that must be in items. Etc.....

This kept eveything diverse and woudl have made for a much more cohesive team. i say would have because the game never got off the gorud.

One of the many resons it never got started is one player thought these rules to limited. he wanted to play someone who is physically superior, but with a bow like Hawkeye. and he woudl have to be good in hand to hand also, since heros fight. Scrapping the game was preferred to working within the system i had set up for group recruitment.

I did ask why he thought Spiderman just didn't decide to apply his great agility and use a bow also. The logic was lost......

Well...........

I don;t think it is the points that lead to lacking diversity, but the will of the character to do everything. And over time, within each gorup, the more limited the scope of the campaign the more centralization on skills you will see from the players. If you never make them use a knowledge skill, how many will actively buy them? EVERYONE has Stealth and Acrobatics, those become mission/combat neccessities. But how many can FIX a firearm? Maybe the odd weapon oriented character, but everyone else just has equipment. if they never run into the need to repair it, why woudl they spend points on skills for repairing it.

Now as a GM you have to be true to your villans also. if in a 250 pt game, all players have diverse skills, but the villans are built 2 dimensional, they will have the power edge on the heros. and the encounters will rarely use skills for resolution, but rely on what the villan CAn do, which is again the powers.

For the players side of things, you have some players that want to do EVERYTHING. When all 4 characters are HTH combat monsters... well, you will have decent fights where they rip your bad guys apart, and then not have ANY way to actually follow clues to solve the crime.

But here is an approach i take to remedy this, even at lower levels.

I built my recent campaign around the idea of the Vidocq Society. People from all walks brought together to resolve crimes. Further, the oiginal Vidocq was a criminal that decided to use his talents to HELP the police instead, and manyt hings we use today (criminal recors and profiles, fingerprinting, etc...) were actually invented by him (or first put to wide use).

But my society wanted specific types to fill their roles. So they are actively recruiting for this, hence I justified in game why i was giving my players some design limitations on their characters. they were also new to the hero system so this woudl keep them from making broken characters withouth getting TOO detailed as to why their ideas woudl not fly. Let them learn the system with balanced characters, and then let them experiment after bcoming familiar with the rules.

So I set up a list of desired agent 'types' the society wanted. like Psychic, Magic, Superior human, Mutant, etc.... your typical origins.

I then had a list of 'roles' that needed filled. there was the martial Arts/HTH Combatant, the Healer, the Taxi to shuttle peopl around, the Brick, etc.....

Now each player coudl pick ONE item from each list. once filled, the Society woudl not recruit more from there.

This is running long, so i will reply to continue........

Ya know, the original FH and the 2 companions were some of my most prized possessions. They were very well done, and it sounds like you are sticking to a proven formula.

But here are a few things.

Seems you are not going back to the idea of the spell colleges (which was fantastic), but certainly spell SYSTEM examples, not just spells, would be great.

I would like to see an aligment preference of sorts listed for races. and a grid showing the factions within the races. Who loves and hates each other?

The mass combat rules were actually good, and it sounds like you have a battle book planned to cover that later. Need to make sure to include flying mounts and ship based combat. Detail on cost and building times for siege weapons, and full siege rules, wouldn't hurt in the future.