JesseBFox

I never got a game of Living Steel going. Loved the concept. I played 1 session of Aftermath and Phoenix Command each. I enjoyed Phoenix Command but my players couldn't grasp it. For a gaming store I ran a 5 hour session of the Aliens adventure game, which is basically Living Steel but set in the Aliens movie. The players played as colonial marines and had to deal with corporate nonsense. That session I ran had human adversaries, not aliens, but also involved some combat between a drop ship and ground based AA. It was fun, but the players were overwhelmed. I imagine like anything, once you get it down things move a lot faster. I also played a long campaign that my brother ran of Rolemaster, where he used every optional rule he could, from the action points on. I ran about a 9 month campaign of Space Master back in the day. Those old complex games were a ton of fun in the day if you got the right crowd. With all of those, it never really made me think Hero was overly slow or complex. it felt very modular and all the mechanics worked pretty similarly. This thread has been a jaunt down memory lane.

This. I think this adds to the slowness of other systems. They seem quick, and like combat resolution shouldn't take long, but with all the rules references, calculations, etc it seems to take time to grow. I find once the GM knows Hero, things can move pretty quick because the rules are so modular, and what seems to take the most time for new players is learning to count body + stun on normal attacks. 6e I find myself looking things up during character gen to make sure it still works the same because I haven't run it a billion times yet, but actually during the session, lookups rarely occur.

Thank you for a good idea. I do not have the equipment guide. I may pick up the character pack to get the Hero Designer files, that should cut a lot of time off my prep. Sometimes you need someone to say something obvious for it to occur to you 😛

Wow, yes people are. And Aftermath! Flashback, I had completely forgot about that game. It lasted 1 session with us. Back then in one of my gaming groups, half the group were cops. One guy really really loved the concept of aftermath and the detail of it. I can picture this guy you are talking about like that but to the nth degree to where it just isn't fun. Living Steel did seem like it could be fun, I never actually ran it. Just read the rules thoroughly and did some solo testing to make sure I understood how it all worked. I found Champions somewhere around 84 I think it was. An early edition, my brother introduced it to me. If I recall correctly, he had 2nd edition but picked up 3rd brand new and I was with him, and we played (He is 8 years older than me and introduced me to RPGs). It was totally different than D&D, Gamma World, mutants and masterminds etc. I fell in love. I was visiting him in Wash DC, and when I got home I had to find a copy for myself and introduce it to my friends. We loved it. I had no idea it had other genres until I saw a fantasy hero book and then my mind was blown and I started to use it for almost every game I played. I ran it exclusively for a long time, but still read other systems as a nut for game design. It was either homebrew or hero for many years. Then life put me in situations where I had no face to face group. I didn't roleplay consistently for a long time. I had a champions campaign I ran that I literally drove 3 hours one way to get to. That lasted about 5 months. Well 2 years ago I found a local gaming group, but they were all about D&D. After a few months I introduced them to shadowrun as an alternative and they fell in love, and been slowly introducing them to new stuff since. But most weren't interested in supers, until recently a couple people started, so I was able to introduce them to hero....That's when the bug bit me again, I was like "Why did I not introduce them to this before?" and so now I am doing the shadowrun crossover to try to plant the seeds. So yeah, slowly converting them. We went way off topic, but yeah it's great to reminisce. Aftermath. Holy cow did that bring back a flood of memories and ideas from back then. Yeah that is over 35 years ago. Wow.

Piercing, not penetrating. From Advanced Players Guide #1.

I was using it as an extreme example. I read through the rules, and even had 2 of it's "Lighter" version, the aliens adventure game and Living Steel. The latter was a rulebook filled with awesome one liner quotes, such as 2 of my favorites that were from a legal judge in the setting "If you cooperate we will reduce the charge from hit and run manslaughter to littering" and "I might have ruled it an accidental shooting if you didn't reload. Twice." Anyway you can see the wiki here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Command The system was incredibly detailed. Like a bullet you would track what hit location of many, if it would penetrate armor, it entering the body, any vital organs in that location, if the round would penetrate bone, if it travels to another body part due to angle of attack, if it exits or bounces, etc. Oh. My. Word. Reading it as a teenager, it sounded like the most realistic awesomest game ever. Then I tried to run it. Lesson learned. Anyway, between that, and rolemaster, spacemaster (whipping out the pythagorean theorem anytime you need to navigate) and a number of late 80s super complex games, I just never thought of Hero as the slowest ever. Finding out about phoenix command and reading into it may prove entertaining as to the level of detail they went to, and if you get tickled by it at all looking into it, I am glad I could introduce the entertainment. It was cra-cra. And vehicular combat was just as detailed. it makes shadowrun look like fudge in comparison.

That is a possibility. In the end, I broke it down in my head and realized I really don't need many levels of different resistance for armor. But needed more granular control over how much some weapons penetrated defenses without being crazy. In the end, I settled on the optional piercing from Advanced Players Guide. The reasoning, is to simulate the various levels of penetrating, and keep the flavor I was looking for I needed various effectiveness levels of piercing. With AP/Hardened it is either: Full defense, or Half defense. Also the straight up reducing the defenses applied makes a few things easier and quicker when it is on the table, in addition to being able to calculate averages in my head a little easier. Basically every point of piercing is the same as +1 damage, only vs armored enemies. If you follow what I am saying. It also allows a weapon that is good at penetrating personal armor (Such as a high powered sniper rifle) be able to use bullets designed to pierce defenses (APDS) and actually have it impact the damage done. Where the straight AP vs Hardened, it would be a double penetrating weapon, which means against 99% of the targets it has the same effect (Half the armor). In the end, both would work. It's just how you want the end results to play out. In the end, for me and in this particular case, I think piercing is just right. Damage negation would introduce more slowdown than desired, as others pointed out, and basic AP would not allow enough granularity while also introducing more slowdown than piercing (1/2 the armor is slower than a simple -2 armor).

I suppose agree to disagree then. I don't think Hero system is "fast" (Cypher system I would call "fast") but I certainly don't think it's the slowest. Phoenix command was lovely to read and think of, but even the scaled down light version of the Aliens adventure game was a slog to run.

Exactly, and exactly what I was thinking. I was pondering going further and building armor with resistance to piercing but I think that is unnecessary. Instead I will just build the armor with enough resistant defense to take into account the piercing of weapons. Also thinking of building advantages/limitations into ammo. So Gel rounds would be reduced penetration & +1 stun multiplier as an example. But I think piercing is the way to go for the more granular flavor of the setting, where each weapon has a penetration factor, which is then modified by the choice of what kind of rounds the character is using. It will be more overhead and things to keep track of, but less than the system they are coming from.

I need to read the APG front to back. I have not yet. I think maybe piercing (pg 113 APG) that I saw referenced in another thread regarding AP may be more appropriate, and quicker to use here. Does anyone know if there is a similar defense built for this in a book? I could homebrew it easy enough if I needed to. Like Reinforced, for every point that is reinforced on a defense, it negates 1 point of piercing. I didn't see anything like that in the APG but maybe I missed it. If I use piercing (I likely will) I probably won't bother with anything special on the defenses, just make them higher as appropriate.

Have you ever played Shadowrun (Any version) or Phoenix Command? Or in fact D&D with newer players who are cycling through a list of abilities and dealing with spell slots, and have to re-read every spell before they can cast it. Out loud. To the group. Just to find out it doesn't apply to the situation? I agree, it can be slow. There are a number of things to keep track of that other systems do not have. It will take some getting used to. But these particular players are coming from shadowrun. In which the simplest character has a combat round like this: (not even factoring in intiative and combat passes) I want to shoot something. Hmm Yes, with this ak-97. OK. So um, single shot, short burst extended burst? Ok short burst. oh focus the burst for more damage, or a spread short burst to cause the enemy to lose defense pool? Hmm spread. Ok. That's 3 bullets. What did I do last round? I shot a single shot. The round before? Shot then moved. OK, so that is 1 recoil from last round + 3 from the bullets this round. Recoil of 4! But my gas vent on my gun gives me +1 recoil compensation plus 2 more for my base strength means I have 3 points of recoil compensation. 4 recoil - 3 = 1 dice penalty for recoil. What are the lighting and wind conditions DM? OK range? ok got all that down. I now roll 11d6 and count successes (5's and 6's). Oh wait there are a bunch of 1s there too, are there 6? If so that is a glitch. No no , just 4. OK, so I got 4 successes. Now the defender rolls his defense pool, reaction + intuition. Wait, does he have enough intiative that he can abort to a defensive manuever? Or has he already done a full defense manuever? Add the dice from that. He rolls and gets only 2 successes so I hit! I have net 2 successes over him. My gun does 9 base damage + the 2 extra successes is 11 base damage. So now the defender has to roll body + armor. He has 5 body and 12 armor. But my weapon has a -1 AP so that reduces his armor by 1. What kind of ammo am I using? I have APDS loaded, that is -2 AP, for a total of -3... so their armor is 9 and 5 body. GM rolls 14 dice and counts successes to negate the damage. What? We forgot to do penetration? Oh well the modified armor is 9 and the modified damage is 11, so the damage is more. so this penetrates and is physical damage, not stun. Phew. OK, where were we? Oh yes GM soaks the damage, rolls 5 successes. So 6 damage boxes get x'ed out. Bad guy is still up, but let's look at his damage monitor. OK, now he is at -2 to all dice rolls due to his condition monitor because he has no pain negating cybernetics... No joke. This is not even calculating cover, casting spells, deckers performing matrix actions and attacks during the combat, riggers and their drones or any of that. Hero isn't the quickest to resolve an action, but at the same time you rarely have extended combats like some other games with tons of HPs and you go many rounds in a big fight. But hands down the slowest combat system for any tabletop RPG? I disagree there. However any system, introducing the crunch slowly is a good idea for people. But coming from Shadowrun I have a feeling they will have a sense of the combat being quicker and easier. Which is one reason I am hesitant of adding in the extra overhead of the damage negation. But some players I think will appreciate how the armor piercing factor works. My main concern is balance of weapons vs armor and how it will change fights to make them longer/shorter or have a different feel. And the extra time of damage negation factoring in and that they will need to have a DC chart to start letting them know how it scales (and anyone using a Katana may need to know that anyway for str bonuses and str boosts) Point taken on the crunch. But I also think you underestimate the slowness of some other systems and their complexity.

Hi there, I plan on running a hero session in September where I am taking existing Shadowrun characters, converting them to Hero 6ed and running a shadowrun story. I am converting the characters and world in general now, looking at different ideas others have done. Here is one I haven't quite seen and I think is unique to 6ed: So I was thinking about ballistic armor (I am using sectional defenses and hit locations) combined with the penetrating power of some firearms over others. What affects APDS and AP rounds have vs gel etc. I had an idea, which I wonder if anyone else has used in practice. I think before I am happy with it I will have to run it in a computer simulation so I can see what the results will look like with different weapons vs different armor, but here is the idea: Ballistics armor would have resistant pd & ed (more pd than ed) but also would have 1-3 levels of damage negation based on the type of armor, with the damage negation only vs small arms fire. Then when I build the firearms, if they have a high amount of penetration the firearm would be built with reduced negation, with more reduced negation the more penetration the weapon should have. AP/APDS rounds would be built as reduced negation as well. I wanted to get opinions on this idea, and if anyone has ever done this before could they tell me the results and if it seemed to work out well? It seems like an interesting solution, if a bit complex at the table as you are reducing damage from a killing attack in real time which will take a little explaining since the players are all new to hero. But heck, everything will be a little explaining anyway. On a side note, for balance, the armor would be less resistant defenses than I normally would give them to keep the APs about the same. It also means that the ballistic armor will be more vulnerable to things like knives and melee weapons, due to the damage negation not applying towards them.

Interesting question. If you look at the hit locations I provided above, the second solution, as it turns out the only difference between that chart, and the chart you propose, is that the chart you propose has a stunx on thighs of 1, where the one I list has it at 2. To answer your question, it looks like this: So average of 1.93 vs non hit location of 2. And the spread is closer than the one I proposed. However you bring up very good points about the hit locations giving a stun modifier for normal attacks too. Personally I am going to use the default hit location chart for my upcoming game. One thing I think will mitigate the high stun results from some shots is how I will be handling armor. But that is a discussion for another thread, I think and too far off topic for here.

Just a thought, if you cap the stunx, you are essentially tinkering with the hit locations again, and the result would be 62.5% of all hits are at x3 stun multiple, 31.02% at x2 and 6.48% at x1. In other words, x2 really rare, and x3 shows up twice as often as x2. As long as you are ok with that spread I say go for it. It only lowers the average multiplier from 2.87 to 2.56 so not a big impact on the overall damage, but very much reducing extreme results. But you are essentially tweaking the chart again, just in an indirect way. And I can completely understand once you get to higher power levels wanting to reduce the multiplier to prevent these extreme results.

I agree with the reasoning that in superhero games killing attacks should do less stun (and more body, and be more erratic with more swing in damage) The more I dived into the math of the special hit locations, the more I appreciated the balance of the hit location chart. As a personal note, I have run a lot of 3e and 4e in all kinds of genres. 6e I have only run superheroic and not that many. Next month I plan to run a heroic one-off with my gaming group hoping to get them interested in hero and also to see how well 6e runs the setting I want to try it with. I will likely use the default hit location chart for that session. It worked out well for me before, and being a heroic dark and gritty campaign, it will be dominated by killing attacks anyway, so they just have to compare to each other. However, if someone wanted to keep the hit location chart inline with the non hit location chart rules for stunx, these are some things to think of and charts to look at.