Doc Democracy

Extreme Physical Limitation.  Wrote up this one:
 
Phys. Lim.:  When fully shrunk, 8- to fall into the microverse for 1d6 weeks (Infrequently; Fully Impairing)
 
Or, alternately, Extreme Side Effect.  Extreme starts at -1.  If it always happened, it'd go to -2.  OK, so for something intermediate...happens on an 8- might be another -1/4, 11- another -1/2.  You're saying the NPC's power simply does this sometimes, and he's got no control...so I'm taking the additional -1 for "it always happens" and reducing it based on how often it happens.
 
 

I would use Accidental Change for this.  Depending on how often he shrinks down to the dangerous size it would be worth about 5-10 point on an 8 or less roll.  The change is that he goes to the other universe.

Some interesting ideas overall, folks. I agree with Doc about the paying points bit. All three of these solutions are pretty cool and have given me something to think about. Didn't even think about using Accidental Change. 

@Grailknight has made a good suggestion but it feels off to me if the NPC has to pay points for something that complicates their life or disadvantages them.
 
I would be more inclined to make it a custom complication.  It might be a small value one, maybe five points, when using full shrinking, on an 8 or less he gets trapped in the Microverse for 1D6 weeks.

@Grailknight has made a good suggestion but it feels off to me if the NPC has to pay points for something that complicates their life or disadvantages them.
 
I would be more inclined to make it a custom complication.  It might be a small value one, maybe five points, when using full shrinking, on an 8 or less he gets trapped in the Microverse for 1D6 weeks.

And that pretty much is the same for all versions of Hero. Technically, as long as you are not worried about point values and worths, you can have a character made from 1st edition play in a 6th edition game.

I'm terrible at drawing maps. I'm the kind of draftsman who draws a straight line when I'm trying for a crooked one. I save every game-applicable map I come across, in hope of repurposing them later.

I usually cobble my homebrew campaigns from different sources. I'm not good at designing urban areas, but I have city maps from different rpg products, so I just adapt them to my game. So what if my fantasy version of San Francisco looks more like Lankhmar? It's FANTASY after all. It just makes my life easier.

Those interested in a medieval England campaign set during the reigns of Kings Richard and John might be interested to know I'm working on a setting book for Chivalry & Sorcery entitled Sherwood. As well as C&S rules it will have an inbuilt system based on Colin Speirs' rules-light Essence Core and stats for HârnMaster. We've no plans to include Hero stats in the book, but as an old Hero fan I'd like to do a free PDF appendix with Hero stats (note that 'like' is not the same as 'definitely will'). Either way, setting information will far outweigh rules information.

You can see much of the raw research for the project on my World Anvil site, Fabula Mundi.

The baseline setting is built as far as possible on detailed historical and archaeological research. The setting covers everywhere from York and Skipton to the north and Lichfield and Grantham in the south, including the whole of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, and parts of Lincolnshire (including Lincoln), Staffordshire and Leicestershire. The area is chosen such that the published map will print on A0 paper (c. 33 inches by 48 inches) at a scale of 2 miles to the inch.

The setting is being written with three primary modes in mind:

Historical - the baseline for the setting. As much historical and archaeological detail as I can squeeze in and make interesting. I'm knowingly allowing only three anachronisms, which I'll explain below.
Medieval Fantasy - the historical setting with the prodigies and wonders written about by chroniclers of the day: devils, revenants, sorcerers (low and high magic), saints' miracles, werewolves, and things 'neither of heaven nor of hell' (the fey, but of the medieval variety not the early modern variety).
Romance - modern ideas overlaid on the historical setting, such as the modern versions of Robin Hood, Saxon rebels versus Norman masters, powers of light and darkness, pagan survivals and so on. Think Ivanhoe, any Robin Hood film or book, and Graham Staplehurst's Robin Hood (ICE), or the Robin of Sherwood TV show that inspired it.
 
Within that there's guidance for several themes: the nobles campaign, the urban/merchant campaign, the outlaw campaign, the agent campaign (PCs working as troubleshooters for the crown, church or a great noble), and a little guidance on specialised campaigns (the monastic and the village life campaigns). 

Known anachronisms: The Trip to Jerusalem pub in Nottingham claims to date from 1189 and to have been a meeting place for crusaders heading out on Richard's Crusade. The first recorded pub on the site was in the 17th century, when it was known as The Pilgrim. Nottingham's two other pubs that claim to be medieval, The Bell and the Salutation. are in buildings dendro-dated to the 1440s. The Salutation claims to date from 1240, but its first recorded mention is in 1414, when it was known as The Archangel Gabriel Salutes the Virgin Mary. And that is a pub name I definitely want in the setting. Since I'll be including the Sal, it seems churlish to exclude the Trip and the Bell.

The attached map is a reduced-scale work in progress. It's built in QGIS. I haven't included the villages in this version as they clutter too much at this resolution. I've a lot more information than I can put on to the printed map, so things like feudal holdings, parish boundaries, rural deaneries and peculiars and so on, will likely be done as individual maps in relevant chapters. I plan to release the map alongside the book as a layered PDF, allowing people to turn the various details on and off.

A lot of the grunt work you could delegate out on the boards.  Am sure you would find plenty of folk happy to generate stat blocks or proof text etc.  All for the kudos of being involved.  🙂

I've come to a particular meta-explanation for the relation of magic to science for my own games. Since it seems relevant to this discussion, and in case someone might find it interesting or even useful, I'll briefly transcribe how and why I came to it. There's more involved than what I'm putting down here, but that's not germane enough to this discussion.
 
Most folks here probably know that I'm fond of gaming in the various iterations of the published official Hero Universe time-line, with my own modifications of course.   In those settings it's repeatedly mentioned that magic has the effect of warping physical laws, so that normally impossible events become possible, at least in certain circumstances. That led me to speculate that magic could be fundamentally aligned with Chaos, and opposed to the laws of science which are a manifestation of Order. Scientific laws are dissociated from a person's perception of reality. They exist in and of themselves, objective, unvarying and inviolable. Science studies those laws, and discovers how to direct them to serve our purposes. But magic is a subjective force. It follows no laws except the will and the imagination of the mind of one who uses it, and it bends reality to conform to that imagination and will.
 
However, a while back when I discussed some of these ideas with Dean Shomshak, he pointed out that real-world magic traditions have their own philosophies and laws and techniques needed to utilize magic, which argues against it being wholly within the realm of Chaos. While that's true, I can't help but notice that those laws and techniques are multitudinous across human history and around the globe; and they can differ widely and fundamentally from each other in terms of what magic is and how it works. Moreover, there are numerous beings and creatures in myth and folklore who produce magical effects at will, without any of the trappings typical for mundane spell casters, even in fantasy magic systems.
 
I decided to try to reconcile those paradoxes, by saying that beings and creatures who are fundamentally magical by nature, including the rare "wild talent" magicians, utilize magic instinctively, without conscious thought, the way we all walk or breathe. But the great majority of sapient beings aren't able to access magic that way. They have to approach it intellectually, by imagining a conceptual structure for it that they can comprehend, and symbology, formulas and rituals consistent with that structure, by which they can focus and channel the power of magic. Such a structure is not fundamental to magic, but it is fundamental to and necessary for the creation and casting of spells, enchanted items, and other magical crafts which can be studied and taught.
 
Now, since I know someone will say this means that all magicians are really narrow-minded deluded fools , I'll just respond by pointing out that if magic alters reality, then the magic system from any tradition creates a reality in which these laws are true and necessary for the practice of magic by anyone from one of those traditions. Another point reiterated in the Hero Universe is that with magic, belief that something is real makes it real. (We've all seen plenty of examples of that kind of magical thinking in the real world today, but without actual magic it's much harder to pull off.)

Just doing what I do best!  Although this time you might have mistaken me for someone else.
 
 
 
 
 
This is a good point, although I have to mention that spells can do things that clubs and crossbows cannot.  It is hard to turn someone into a newt with a crossbow.
 
 
 
This is an excellent method to keeping magic mysterious: sheer complexity.  And it's something I ought to have thought of myself, given my line of work.  But yes, for the vast majority of people, modern devices are akin to magic items.  Motorcycles and mobile phones alike are such complex creations that very few individuals would be capable of explaining, in detail and completeness, how they even work.  Even those of us in the field are often reduced to the role of Adeptus Mechanicus: lubricating the sacred sprockets with mystical unguents without understanding why, copying the script of the python into the wizard's window in blind faith that it will find meaning in a page of gibberish.  Indeed, this is what Vancian magic actually is--distant descendants of a once-advanced society, memorizing and forgetting the last spells with no comprehension of how the spell causes the effect.  Wandering the ruined Earth in search of more priceless fragments of knowledge.
 
So you take this phenomenon and apply it to a culture where literacy is so rare that the mere act of reading and writing is viewed as near-witchcraft, with suspicion and distrust, and it almost doesn't matter whether magic/technology is learnable and teachable.  Because you don't even know whether it can be understood, let alone understand it.  Even now there are technologies and mysteries that have been lost to the ages.  We don't know how Archimedes burned the ships at Syracuse.  We don't know where Ulfberht steel came from.  We think we know what Greek fire was.  We think we know what Viking sunstones were.  We don't know who built the Antikythera mechanism and we only figured out what it was for in the last few years.  Knowledge gets lost; advanced knowledge gets loster.
 
Mechanics aside, that's why I appreciate things like Gloranthan disease spirits--it evokes a time when people simply didn't know what was going on.  That, in and of itself, lends a sense of mystery to the setting and the magic within it.  It doesn't even matter whether that's canonically how disease actually works in the setting, what matters is that that's how the characters understand things to be.  A world that is poorly understood has exponentially more possibilities than one which is not.  You don't get to write "Here be dragons" on a thoroughly explored, dragon-free part of the map.

I should admit, it was me being a bit grumpy, and a bit less courteous than I ought to have been.  @Doc Democracy I hope you'll accept my apologies for that.  And I hope in my latter post I was less grumpy about it.  

I am going to embark on thus epic.  I have NO idea how you type all this on a phone....
 
I think that it is not going to work with a vancian style magic which, itself, is written as a technology in the dying earth books, ways of harnessing ancient power with the trappings of magic.
 
So yes, I agree, slots and unreliability don't work.  I would also say there is a lot of ground in between getting effects so defined you can throw a fireball to hit opponents in melee with your friends and not even singe their eyebrows and starting the magic with no idea of the effects you expect or hope for.
 
 
Well, because technology is measurable and semi-dependable.  It is something people, as you say, utilise but rarely are able to explain, nevermind maintain. 
 
Technology works, utilises measurable forces and anyone doing the right things with the right kit get the same results.  If that is what you want in your game, why call it magic, it is technology and might as well be presented as such, no?
 
 
This is indeed a big thing.  No point in looking too hard at the literature because you xan actually find anything and everything to support stuff because, to our understanding, there is no such thing as magic. 😀
 
Technology is learnable and teachable.  If there are, like you say, restrictions on who can learn magic then magic is not universally learnable or teachable. I think that is one of the significant differences.  Only those with talent can do more than dabble (sometimes not even that) and some folk can, fir some unknown reason, become adepts.  Now that might be seen as similar to maths.  some folk find it hard to add up single figures, others solve quadratic equations in their head - we don't really understand how that happens either.
 
 
And yet, in Fantasy literature, they rarely are. Grimoires are often the personal notes of an adept.  Others trying to use them approach with care, like dealing with an unexploded bomb, trying to extract meaning and understanding to create their own grimoire.  Each adept adapting the teachings to their iwn situation.
 
I reckon that is another feature, for me, of magic.  Technology is universal, it works the same way regardless of who applies it.  Magic is personal and individual, and every practitioner begins with a broad understanding but needs to fine-tune the process to accommodate their particular relationship with the magical powers.
 
 
I love this analogy, but you are almost arguing against your statement that you xannot teach what you do not know, possibly because these things are not binary until you get to the point where you either do it absolutely right or die.
 
Beyond that a whole range of approaches get a number of outcomes that approximate OK, those closest to "correct" go faster/straighter/longer.  I think that feels magical to me but with magic, there is no single correct way, there is probably only one way for any individual but not one that you can reliably teach.
 
 
Yes! The difference though is that while the technology folk are working to a template, knowing where they are making compromises from an ideal and seeking a physical harmony, the magician is "listening to the vapours" hoping to find a place where they properly resonate to deliver the right harmony.  More art than science and influenced by who is doing it.
 
 
I think that it is more likely to be secret from the cgaracter than the reader.  Or they both share a belief of what is true, like the motorcyclists you talked about, they think they know what is true, they believe what they are going to will result in a particular outcome.
 
Thing is, even with technology there are the pioneers who do stuff for the first time,teaching themselves through trial and error.  With technology it is better as, when you find something out, you can show someone else in the firm knowledge they will be able to do it too. With magic, none of that is a given. It is where not only finding a teacher, but the right teacher is important.
 
 
I hear you but you realise you have probably now put more thought into the basics than most people who love reading about it.  You are even getting close to gave written as many words on the matter as a Fantasy writer.
 
Doc

I am going to embark on thus epic.  I have NO idea how you type all this on a phone....
 
I think that it is not going to work with a vancian style magic which, itself, is written as a technology in the dying earth books, ways of harnessing ancient power with the trappings of magic.
 
So yes, I agree, slots and unreliability don't work.  I would also say there is a lot of ground in between getting effects so defined you can throw a fireball to hit opponents in melee with your friends and not even singe their eyebrows and starting the magic with no idea of the effects you expect or hope for.
 
 
Well, because technology is measurable and semi-dependable.  It is something people, as you say, utilise but rarely are able to explain, nevermind maintain. 
 
Technology works, utilises measurable forces and anyone doing the right things with the right kit get the same results.  If that is what you want in your game, why call it magic, it is technology and might as well be presented as such, no?
 
 
This is indeed a big thing.  No point in looking too hard at the literature because you xan actually find anything and everything to support stuff because, to our understanding, there is no such thing as magic. 😀
 
Technology is learnable and teachable.  If there are, like you say, restrictions on who can learn magic then magic is not universally learnable or teachable. I think that is one of the significant differences.  Only those with talent can do more than dabble (sometimes not even that) and some folk can, fir some unknown reason, become adepts.  Now that might be seen as similar to maths.  some folk find it hard to add up single figures, others solve quadratic equations in their head - we don't really understand how that happens either.
 
 
And yet, in Fantasy literature, they rarely are. Grimoires are often the personal notes of an adept.  Others trying to use them approach with care, like dealing with an unexploded bomb, trying to extract meaning and understanding to create their own grimoire.  Each adept adapting the teachings to their iwn situation.
 
I reckon that is another feature, for me, of magic.  Technology is universal, it works the same way regardless of who applies it.  Magic is personal and individual, and every practitioner begins with a broad understanding but needs to fine-tune the process to accommodate their particular relationship with the magical powers.
 
 
I love this analogy, but you are almost arguing against your statement that you xannot teach what you do not know, possibly because these things are not binary until you get to the point where you either do it absolutely right or die.
 
Beyond that a whole range of approaches get a number of outcomes that approximate OK, those closest to "correct" go faster/straighter/longer.  I think that feels magical to me but with magic, there is no single correct way, there is probably only one way for any individual but not one that you can reliably teach.
 
 
Yes! The difference though is that while the technology folk are working to a template, knowing where they are making compromises from an ideal and seeking a physical harmony, the magician is "listening to the vapours" hoping to find a place where they properly resonate to deliver the right harmony.  More art than science and influenced by who is doing it.
 
 
I think that it is more likely to be secret from the cgaracter than the reader.  Or they both share a belief of what is true, like the motorcyclists you talked about, they think they know what is true, they believe what they are going to will result in a particular outcome.
 
Thing is, even with technology there are the pioneers who do stuff for the first time,teaching themselves through trial and error.  With technology it is better as, when you find something out, you can show someone else in the firm knowledge they will be able to do it too. With magic, none of that is a given. It is where not only finding a teacher, but the right teacher is important.
 
 
I hear you but you realise you have probably now put more thought into the basics than most people who love reading about it.  You are even getting close to gave written as many words on the matter as a Fantasy writer.
 
Doc

Agreed.  However, it also needs to be reasonably consistent and more-or-less reliable to be useful for players-- or at least for other players to risk allocating resources on even a periodic basis.  In DnD, why would I waste a spell slot on something that, when cast, does whatever the heck it wants without regard to what I need?  A spell from which any utility is unlikely and coincidental.  In HERO or GURPS terms, why would I spend points on magic with unknowable results when I can buy a club and a crossbow  that do more or less the same thing every time?  Mysterious magic is a risk: it is an expense with zero verifiable benefits.  In HERO fandom terms "I cannot be assured that I will get what I paid for."   You might frequently find yourself _not_ getring what you pay for, but I suppose this can be rectified by making such magic free in points systems and require zero spell slots in others.  Thus, when they bite you in the backside, it cost you nothing and you had the option to use something reliable that you acquired normally.
 
But moving beyond another rehash of something whose key points game-wise I _think_ we more-or-less understand each other on I have need of clarification on one of your points of contention:
 
 
 
 
I do not see the similarities.  I certainly do not see how making magic measurable and semi-dependable makes it technology.  Realistically, I don't see how it can exist in a non-measurable, non-quantifiable state.  Even before its discovery, mathematics comfirmed the existence of either a Higgs bosun, or something very much like it.
 
So I want to take a look at the similarities- or potential similarities, since one of these things does not actually exist- between the two.
 
Technology is learnable and teachable.  I have never encountered any genre source of magic that was not the same, though typically magic has score and score of restrictions on who can learn it, to include teachers who, out of genre convention if nothing else, are incredibly rare and usuallly unwilling.
 
Both _can_ be studied; both can, to varying degrees, be classified by results.  That is, they can both be used for construction, destruction, support, etc.
 
If you accept the existence of grimoires or teachers or magic items, then both can be mass produced.  There are restrictions on who can learn to do what, and some people take to it better than others. 
 
I would tentatively put forward the idea that, in fiction, whether or not the reader is aware of it, that magic has always been this way, simply because anyone wielding must have some way to figure out at least rudimentary control of it, and at a minimum, how to turn it on.  How to turn it off might be useful, but I suppose that isn't entitely necessary if you have no plans for "...and after _that_-"...
 
Keeping secrets from the reader isn't terribly hard.  Murder mysteries absolutely rely on it.  There is nothing about the reader's ignorance that must translate into ignorant characters, though.
 
_Somehow_, the control the magic.  _Somehow_, they get results that line up with their goals.  _Somehow_, they can assemble the components or lay out the circles or prepare the sacrifice or know the proper position of the moon and the incantations and just how many fairie farts are required--
 
They have learned the results and how to get them.  They may not be entirely accurate (looking at you, Nazi who who looked into the Ark of the Covenant and then went all claymation-under-a-buffet-heat-lamp), but they have a solid enough idea of everything that they have learned what to do before they did it.
 
It is extremely difficult to teach something that isnt quantifiable.  It is extremely difficult to learn something that isnt quantified with at least partial accuracy.
 
My favorite example of this is actually kind of useless amongst the general public, simply because it requires an intimate knowledge that the general public does not possess:
 
Teaching and learning motorcycle riding.  Most people have no idea that the _vast_ majority of motorcycle riders in North America do not actually  know how to ride a motorcycle.  They know how to _operate_ one.  They know how to work the controls, how to to start it and get where they want to go, but when a truly bad thing comes along, they will make the worst decisions because they actually have no idea how the motorcycle works.  Why?  They were taught by people who really didn't know, either.
 
You cannot teach something you do not know.
 
As You go through your life, as you encounter a bike at the gas pumps, as the operator how the motorcycle steers and how do you make it turn.  Pay special heed to the number of different answers you get.  Ask why this works.  Again, note the number of differenr answers you get.
 
There is only _one_ correct answer, and one correct reason, and anyone who doesnt know what they are is foinf to be doing a whole lot of the wrong thing in a situation that calls for flawless action in order to make it through.
 
Yet these people still operate motorcycles and do not die.
 
Why?
 
Well, for one, they haven't ever been in a flawless-or-die situation.  Moat importantly, they have stumbled upon the correct thing to do _in general_ even though they are unaware of it.  They learned something, on some level, even if it isn't in the conscious decision making part of their brain.
 
Sure, that is a technological example, but  as magic is entirely fictional, I cannot really offer a graspable real-world example of controlling magic.
 
Except through Clarke's Law.
 
I think it is safe to assume that most people here can operate a car.  That most people here can operate an elevator.  That most people here can ride a ship to sea.
 
How many of those people,understand how they work?  I do not mean,how many people can google it up; I mean how many of those people understand each and every principle at work at every moment from the tiniest flow of electrons to the starter solenoid (or relay, in some cases) to the balancing of tidal forces to the shaping of an,explosion to the tempering and cooling of different metals to the scavenging effect that _pulls_ exhaust from the engine to the venture effect and,why it shapes gasoline into a perfect droplet and why this is critical and so on and so forth?
 
I dont profess to be a great wizard with a terrible burden of knowledge.  There are _lots_ of us.  But I am,willing to bet that even here, that group is a smaller set than the group who can operate a car.  I am also willing to bet that if we looked into that group for people who could diagnose a problem in the automobile- from crank,bearings to a missing counterweight on a propshaft, that number gets smaller still.  Then going,into,that group we look foe those who understand what repairs must be made, then to those who know how to do the repairs, then to those who are actually,capable of doing the repairs...
 
And,at some,point from the group of people who have seen but never been,inside of a car, we cross into magic.  At some point, that same thing that a group of us take for granted as we sit on the side of an Arizona state highway with the starter of an old KZ 400 pulled apart and scattered on the jacket we threw down to keep the parts out of the sand, as we work patiently with a pocket knife cutting strips from a discarded Pabst can in the hopes of wrapping enough layers around the rear of the armature shaft to properly center the shaft in the over-worn bronze bushing in the DE Frame so that it would properly contact all four of the worn-too-short brushes, so that maybe we can get out of the sun... As we dip a strip of cloth cut from a spare pair of socks into the crank case to draw,up enough oil to hopefully keep out aluminum-lined bushing from galling the second we hit the start button...,as we cuss ourselves for,the hundredth time for not going ahead and installing new roll pins,in the kickstarter before heading to California....
 
At some point,between those two people, we have crossed into magic.  Ritualistic magic using materials gathered from the countryside and the blood of the dead beast, its organs,revitalized and life restored (for,what it's worth, I replaced both the bushings and the entire brush rack in the starter as well as the roll pins in the kick stick at the very first bike shop I found in California).
 
At some point, what I looked at as "sunburn as punishment for my own impatience" was intricate and puzzling magic for the lizard resting in the shadow of the bike and the one roadrunner that briefly paused on the grassless sand ridge and studied me, first with one eye, then the other, before trotting off to wherever he was headed.
 
It took me a lifetime od helping my father do things I did not want to do, and then helping other people do things I did not want to do, but did because they couldn't, and they needed help- to develop the knowledge and skills that revived the bike that afternoon (I also learned that if there is noone else on the road, leave the bike running while you pee; it isnt _that_ much gas!)
 
I wasn't quite thirty then.  I have lived more than that liferime,over again, and the things I know and am capable of now would aabsolutely impress that younger, more muscular, head-full-of-hair version of me, so far are they beyind his own abilities.
 
But it is safe to say that magical or not, he _can_ learn them.  Some,through trial and,error, some,through education, some,through repetition and,study, and all of them one little bit at a time.
 
I poatulate that, whether or not it is secret,from,the reader, rhe characters in a book,must have learned their magic controlling abikities similarly, else how could they have them?  Even beinf "born with the power to summon magic and bend,it to his will" is insufficient: at some point, he has to digure out what makes,it appear, and what he must do or think,or want to make,it work.
 
 
In this way, like,it or not, it has _always_ been like technology. I suppose.  Some people are less likely to want to notice that than others, I guess.
 
The difference-  the primary, fundamental,difference, in my own opinion, is that infinite or finite, fragile or vast from,time itself, anyone can be trained to _make_ technology, eventually, but magic comes,from somewhere else.  No matter what we learn,about controlling it or summoning it or  supressing it, we may never know where it comes,from, or why it exists, and we will never, ever be able to duplicate or create the magic itself.
 
I can speak only for me, but for,me. That is different enough, and wondrous enough, and also why I really,don't like it.
 

 
 
 
 
 
I've been at this for a couple of hours now; I will stress,a couple,od other points at some,later time, if I remeber to,do so.
 
Later, Amigo!
 
 

Later editions, yes (e.g., spells that are increasingly limited by numbers, powers refreshing after "short" rests, the blast-happy Sorcerer, the nigh-infinite font of scratch damage known as the Warlock, et cetera); it's a consequence of WOTC consciously competing with video games/MMORPGs. Early editions feature magic that is potent yet limited (Mages receive a wide pool of potential options, but their spellcasting endurance takes time to deepen and spell components are a factor; Clerics must abide by theological strictures and/or Alignment); granted, it's still not as free-form as some would prefer, but at least there wasn't an incessant push for "balance".

I think a game needs a narrative structure in its magic and there needs to be a way in which players interact with that.  I still claim that it does not need to be like technology.
 
 
But throughout human history we have had folk "practice" magic that was neither reproducible, consistent (beyond not actually working) or reliable.  People want power and they are often willing to risk inconsistency, unreliability or reproducible results if there is a chance of that power.
 
I think it is possible to make it gameable but I get that it is not for everyone.
 
 
Tell me, do you need to know what is true, or do you need to know what the wizard thinks is true?  Personally, it us the latter for me, I like to know what he wants to achieve and what he wants to be true. He might be right, he might be partly right, sometimes things might happen, other times they don't.
 
There are quite a few studies showing how animals pick up superstitions, relying on actions that seemed to work once or twice, hoping that will work again. People are animals in this.
 
 
I kind of missed Vampire, the folk playing it never appealed to me and I stuck with Runequest and Champions.  one of my friends though did a few Mage one-offs.
 
 
My son is far more emotionally developed than me.  I had to work hard at modelling that behaviour for him.
 
 

@Gauntlet you have hit the Godwin's Law of HERO boards, when you suggest Transform, you lose the argument! 🙂
 
I reckon, in this case there are too many mechanical berriers for it to work properly. Another hoary old fallback is Mind Control - only to tell victim they cannot see anything....
 
Doc

What I am not seeing is the "reasonably common and obvious set of defenses that cancels out the attack" required by any power bought as usable as an attack. The player should be rolling you directly how you bypass the effect.
 
Doc

I will have a go.  I think the key issue, like Hugh says, is that it demands a generic campaign setting with a lot of dials set to begin with.
 
I might see if I could mock up what the default would look like, the "everyHERO" baseline.  Then provide a finalised version.
 
The more I think about it, the more I think we would need several starting points - Brick, Mentalist, Martial Artist, Energy Projector etc.
 
I would need to sit down and deliver possibly 250 point "everyHERO" templates.
 
I need to find the time.  Wish I was retired!

What I am not seeing is the "reasonably common and obvious set of defenses that cancels out the attack" required by any power bought as usable as an attack. The player should be rolling you directly how you bypass the effect.
 
Doc

This gets back to something that we've discussed before, a unified standard for the Hero Universe.
 
It would require all official Hero products to be examined and modified by a common editorial standard. There can and will be variation but there would need to be a consensus on levels of play like High and Low Fantasy, Heroic Adventuring (Westerns, Espionage, Black Ops, etc.), Beginning, Standard, High Power and Galactic Supers/ Magic campaigns and the spectrum of Martial Arts. And these editors would need real control over the ranges of what is allowed to be labelled as each.
 
Not a change of the game per se but a change in editorial direction. You can still have Dr. Destroyer and the Geodesics in the same universe, but they would not appear in the same product.

Before I start, I should apologise, this is likely to be long and rambling. I am visiting my wife's mother, so I often lie in bed in the morning, delaying getting up and thinking.
 
Today my thinking is about HERO (recently it has all been about Baldurs Gate!).
 
HERO is a detail game and we build characters to have game effect.  It is seen as a difficult game because there is so much detail and new folk find it difficult to make effective characters.
 
I have been wondering whether that is because we start with everyman stuff and begin adding to it.
 
What if we started with a Hero?
 
If the focus was on game effect, then your standard hero would go, for example, five times a round, hit 60% of the time doing, on average, 15 STUN through defences and moves 20m.
 
You define your schtick, your attacks are because you are Strong, or because you have eye beams etc etc
 
You could then add "upgrades".  The first half dozen are "free", you could hit more people at once, move faster, have more actions, improve your defences, extend your attacks (versus different defences, more effective versus heavy armour, etc). You could add movement, add senses, add various things.
 
If you want more upgrades, you make compromises.  These can either be limiting the effectiveness of existing powers or taking on complications.
 
I wonder, perversely, if this focus on effectiveness would bring more attention to the powers rather than the mechanics. It would mean the players would have a big signpost to a standard that they deviate from rather than a base level they need to build from.
 
It would lend itself to big books of upgrades! 🙂 I can imagine the Ultimate Speedster book having lists of upgrades and compromises.
 
Obviously, those upgrades and compromises would all be coated and built (for the GM) rather than being black boxes like other games.
 
That's it.  An idea for a new way to play the build a character.  No other changes. And focussed on new players not existing experts...
 
Doc

Question everything.
 
Can you create one character using this method? 
Personally, I have a tough time doing anything other than building up from a few mechanics. Seeing a rough draft would help he a lot.