Doc Democracy

OK, I bought it as soon as I saw the news it was live. Not used it though? Anyone given it a road-test? What are the high and low lights? Doc PS: Why isn't there notifications on the site to tout it?

My work goes slowly but I intend to deliver some GM help. I want encounters to be more than just fighting. Spectaculars sets up a scene with things to do, both for the heroes and the villains. It means there is more to do than just whale on the villains (and vice versa) and it puts boundaries on how long a fight will go on. So, what are secondary aims? Secure items, rescue bystanders, stabilise the environment, protect secret ID, deal with environmental issues. What else? And what does this mean and how does it work? Well,I am thinking that I will make heavy use of change environment. I will use distraction style secondary aims to reduce chances to hit until it is dealt with. I am hoping that I can encourage encounters that demand wider use of skills or minor powers, a little bit mire narrative. I am also thinking about setting up everyman-style contacts and reputation. Dealing with these secondary issues should make changes to these things, hopefully driving greater engagement with the setting and NPCs and to drive heroic play. Doc

My secret ID is safe then! Being a Parliamentary officer was very useful though, I was in and out ten minutes after arriving at Westminster.

I only went because 1-my wife wanted to and 2-as a Parliamentary officer, I did not gave to use the public queue. My wife was delighted we got caught on camera. I am the one in the mask...

No offence, and I would not be surprised if there were not many refrains of God save the Queen Long live the King appearing on social media. Personally, I am a republican and feel very few emotions about this. Much more concerned about working out how it will impact my work over the next two weeks.

I think the salutation would be God save the King. We never ask God to save a Monarch that has died.

Sounds like an everyman power pool with no conscious control. Every power in the pool would require an expendable focus which would provide access to a power for a limited period of time. 🙂 The key is how they work in the game and I think that would be down to you. My suggestion above would mean that every character in the game would have the potential of additional power but no direct way of accessing this. The no conscious control aspect takes away the ability of the player to control and manipulate the pool. If you come up with the crest system, then owning a particular crest would "activate" the power pool to do something particular. I think, beyond this, there is no need for any additional HERO mechanic. Doc

My intention is to include at least three or four adventures from what was my last campaign with my home group, one that explains the dynamics, sets up superherodom in Europe at this time, suggests the origins of superpowers in this world and how they will interface with the war, ancient magic and modern science. (No lack of ambition, just the talent and willpower to deliver on it! 😉)

Spend a bit of time to provide pared back character sheets with good descriptions of powers in words rather than numbers...

I want a pretty four-colour game, though pre CCA as I want to learn into the WWII aspect. I think the UK setting needs to be significantly different from US superheroes, more directly involved much earlier in the conflict. However, am digging into the three Golden Age supplements I have to take what I can. Simpler builds, more one-dimensional powers are what I am looking at. Should also have a more detailed focus on UK politics of the time (am considering a bit of a rehabilitation of Neville Chamberlain).

My son is Hotspur, he has a passing interest in HERO and sometimes logs on, we use the same PC sometimes and last night I was browsing this thread and did not notice it was logged on as him. I started to respond, realised it was not me, could not delete the post and was too tired to start again. So it was my fail, not Hotspur's.... less intrigued? 🙂 I plan for the game to hide the vast majority of the numbers (builds available in a download for the HERO-nerdverse). This should make presentation less cluttered but gives me the biggest headache in what to reveal, what to hide and how to present stuff.

I have a very particular campaign in mind, so will be driving the templates towards meeting the needs of that campaign. Have also fixed a few dials for a particular style of play. All of that, currently is secondary to building the on-ramp for new GMs and players. 🙂 Appreciate all the comments. Doc

In my head, and that is the only place it exists, the idea is about options. Each template will have different options to flesh out the character. The complexity, for me, is providing enough meaningful choices for players to provide sufficient diversity of characters and keep the decision making more entertaining than confusing. I am hoping to find ways of choosing a few paths, based on broad brush concepts, that allow a character to quickly be put together. Doc

Thanks for the responses, guys. Appreciated. While I have decided on a new broad approach I have not settled on the details. I think Hugh is right about the split and ditching gadgeteer. I would like a category to include Thing and the Storms and considering whether I should ditch alien or speedster. considering extra-terrestrial instead of alien and perhaps something like Elemental (which could embody Speed, Fire etc). Doc

My lockdown proposal to myself was that I would use HERO to create a game. I wanted to do a powered by HERO type thing that I could share with friends and possibly, if it was good enough, offer here. My God, it was hard. It was hard to sit down and really put the necessary thought into it. It was hard to do writing. It was hard to balance things up. It was hard to decide how much of the system to cover up and how much flex to leave in there. It was so hard, I am starting again for the fourth time. All that effort will inform this next one but it has shown me something. It has shown that I need to hide virtually all of the flexibility. To have something people can pick up and play, the character creation needs to be almost 95% done already. The previous three have floundered on me trying to make decisions easy for complete newbies and it branches out so far that I end up with something possibly more complex than fill HERO but with less agency. 😕 I plan to have a bunch of cookie cutter superhero templates that players can add SFX to and accessorise with secret identity stuff, colour abilities and perhaps a signature move/ability. Each template will have at least one fully formed character derived from the template to demo what can be done. It will be a UK based WWII game with a Campaign premise and three or four scenarios (I have run these scenarios with my home group so they are in playable form for me - lots of derail needed for others). I will outline all my design decisions as a document, the whys rather than the whats of what I did). I plan to bounce things on here as I do this. Big broad issues rather than the build details etc. My first consideration has been archetypes for the templates. As this will be Golden Age focused, my current list is Masked adventurer (e.g., Batman, Sandman, Plastic Man) Gadgeteer (e.g., Iron Man, Blue beetle, Mr Terrific, Green Arrow) Super-soldier/flagsuit (e.g., Captain America, Hourman, Uncle Sam) Alien being (e.g., Superman, Martian Manhunter, Aquaman) Bearer of occult/mythological artefact (e.g., Hawkman, Dr Fate, Zatara) Speedster (e.g., Flash, Johnny Quick) I plan to have three basic builds (these builds will modify CV, defences, and base damage scores) that I build out to each Archetype, possibly offering a build per Archetype (which would push this out to 18 templates with associated characters). Is there anything I am missing that is a MUST HAVE? Doc PS: this has a big potential to be a pipedream and never realised, I can see my biggest opportunity to have gotten it done was in the past two years, the next best time will be when I retire. But until then, gonna keep tinkering and writing as if it is real life thing.

Been interesting reading this stuff as I have not actually used Damage Negation. My instinct is that it is a decent tool for the toolbox as it is a defence that can cut across the traditional defences. I think I would apply it to all attacks that do STUN and BODY within the SFX. If I have DN against fire, then I would indeed apply it to fire-based NND and other attacks. I am interested in the effect on play at the table. My instinct is to lean into reducing the dice used which brings out the "what about advantaged attacks". I heard decent arguments to say that 6D6 with AP should not be reduced the same as an unadvantaged 6D6 attack. No mention is made about limitations though, if that AP attack is limited, should that not balance things out? The logic being that a limited attack is more easily negated than an advantaged one? Anyway, I prefer not to worry about such detail at the table. I might, instead prefer giving some price nuance to the DN. So vanilla DN is 4 points per 1D6. It reduces u advantaged attacks by 1D6 per D6 if DN. If the attack us advantaged, then it reduces 1D6 fircevery 2D6 if DN. Improved DN is 5 points per 1D6 and will reduce attacks with up to +1/2 advantages on a dice per dice basis. Superior DN is 6 points per 1D6 and works purely on 1D6 per D6 of DN. As I said, not used it but, if I do, that is how I plan to try it out - heavily SFX based with three versions available. Doc

Sunak's race is actually an advantage in the current Conservative leadership contest. While the membership might not like the idea of foreign brown skinned people coming into the country in boats, Rishi is one of their own. He is rich, speaks well and went to the right schools. Never make the mistake that English racism is the same as American racism.

I have been around for a lot of iterations of this debate and I had a thought which might be novel. Have we been approaching the problem from the wrong direction. We keep trying to change the way the damage is generated by the attack rather than how the damage is mitigated by the defence. Should we be looking at an advantage on defences that reduce the multiplier? If you have non resistant defences you are prone to greater volatility. If you have resistant defences then you can further advantage those defences to reduce the volatility of killing attacks. A different approach? Doc

For me it provided an SFX related defence. FireGuy can have Damage Negation versus fire based attacks, totally in keeping with the genre, regardless of what the defences are to those attacks. Drains, blasts, mental attacks, anything to do with fire affects him less. Everything else is unaffected. Its use can accentuate the schtick of characters in the game. Doc

I did not play games that were nothing but combat. I am saying that other games now deliver more game out of combat and seek to do more to drive genre emulation in combat than HERO does. I can do things to make HERO deliver more but it does not do these things out of the box. I can throw out house rules and tell players what I want out of the game. That does not help new groups and new players. I have played lots of Champions in my time and, while playing round with these other systems, there are things, out of the box, that feel comic book in ways HERO does not. I can see players, driven by the system, play in a more superheroic way. I am not telling you I feel my HERO games are lacking, I am saying there are lots of places where I need to put in effort and in these other games, I put in much less for the outcomes I want. In short, the system supports the gameplay better.

Not sure where to go with that. 🙂 "I think you've suffered from bland campaigns" kind of writes off my experience with the game I've played for about 40 years... Anyway, I think I actually said HERO was indeed ahead of the game in 1981 with its disadvantages scheme. Those have, as someone said upthread (Scott I think), been diluted over time and I would say they are no longer groundbreaking. I agree, complications encourage roleplaying and interaction. These other systems drive interaction, mandate roleplaying, bake in genre conventions. Of course I am tempted, I appreciate the use of evolving gaming "technology" to deliver better gaming experiences. You asked for examples of what I meant, I gave them. I am not judging your games, would be nice if you did not leap to judging mine. Doc

Well, there is the soap opera element of comics, a team book is often focussed on the personal dynamics of the team with each other and organisations. I think HERO was ahead of its time with this stuff but games like Masks and other narrative systems bake it into the system rather than the added on complications HERO uses. I also like the RYG system of Sentinels that mean some of the more potent powers don't become available until health is low. It shows how comic book characters don't often reach for the big guns first thing in a fight. Spectaculars leans heavily into the flavour of the powers rather than the nuts and bolts. It sets up scenes with different objectives rather than focussing on taking the opponent STUN to below zero. Lots of gameplay stuff that bake in genre emulation. Doesn't mean you cannot do that stuff in HERO but the game doesn't push you into them. I find, in HERO, players often fall into playing the numbers rather than playing their powers. These games incentivise players to think about their powers, to engage with the broader NPC cast and to think more broadly than just fighting the villains.

I almost agree with you. But it is character creation that has been reviewed, deconstructed, balanced etc etc etc. The game system itself is pretty much the same skeleton it was way back in the 1980s. I love HERO, I think in these terms but I am seduced by the clever ways other games have of emulating comics in ways poor old 20th century HERO cannot. There are dimensions that it does not address. I am in the games powered by HERO camp, so I think each and every one of these games could innovate with the game system to achieve desirable genre emulation. As long as every game had a designers booklet (freely available online or sold as a Designer's Insight booklet) to show how the toolbox was used, bent and added to, it fits with the HERO philosophy and folk like us could open up the bonnet, rip out a few bits, bend a few more, IF WE WANTED TO, to achieve good games at the table.

You say you dont need a VTT but there is no reason you could not use a VTT to accomplish this. With the work that has been done to make HERO playable on Roll20, the base level membership of Roll20 should allow you to discuss, share maps, roll dice and play asynchronously. It actually means that Roll20's biggest weakness - its audio and video - vanishes. While it would allow real-time play, there is no need to use it that way and I think it could provide a decent platform for play by post... I would even use the bulletin board attached to the game to do a lot of the discussions - no need to even fire up the game to do those discussions and you get decent threaded conversations. Doc

Thanks for the replies guys. Your responses are what I have done in the past, just say no, put strict limits on SPD (along with probably more lax elements of other things). I was just thinking that the joy of the SPD chart is in all those phase interactions, if there is no real difference in SPDs, then we might as well not have it. @unclevladmentioned that he might manipulate END costs - go for 15 STR, +3D6 HA and then martial arts - that is almost what I am expecting - greater diversity in design, more thought about what is there and then the system forcing him to think hard about END and when to take rests and when to push himself closer to the limits. There is a lot more fun there. With the villain, I actually thought I had underpowered him. The heroes were all reasonably experienced and I had only thrown an extra 150 points on him - against 5 heroes, that seemed fine. It is amazing how long it took them to ensure he was engaged on every segment to reduce his chance of taking a recovery. I was so proud of them when they worked that out!! 😄 Happy for more commentary though.