Grade the Hero System

[Dannyalcatraz]

That said every negative you listed is a positive to me, and Fuzion is hot garbage.

Fuzion is the one iteration I dumped immediately on contact.

 

[RealAlHazred]

I've played and run Hero System since shortly after its release. For my home game group, its our go-to system. And we don't ever play Champions with it!

Years ago, when I joined what is now my home game, they were playing Fantasy Hero in somebody's homebrew world. When I got a chance to run, I ran a Hârn Hero game which used the FH rules as a basis, but I made major modifications to increase lethality and built the core Hârn spells in the FH engine -- it gave it a very different feel. That campaign ended up going on for over ten years in three "seasons" of campaign play.

During the season 1 and 2 Hârn game hiatus, another buddy ran a game where everybody played whatever kind of movie or TV character they wanted, in a hodgepodge, kitchen-sink sort of setting. One guy made James Bond, another made a low-powered superhero sort of like the Thing, I played a two-fisted pulp vigilante, and so on. It turned out we were all characters being played by patrons of a Virtual Reality Arcade. Cool stuff.

After my Hârn meta-campaign ended, I ran Traveller Hero. Again, I rebuilt the Traveller-style psionics in Hero, and was able to capture the flavor of how it felt to use Classic Traveller psionics, but in a system that didn't have different subsystems for everything (my one real criticism of Classic Traveller -- everything uses a different subsystem). That campaign lasted even longer than the Hârn one did.

In the seasonal hiatus of Traveller, another friend of mine has been running a Battletech Hero game for us. He uses some of the classic Battletech mech rules, grafted onto the Hero System chassis. It worked pretty well, and fights didn't end up taking as long as you might expect from my previous sentence.

My next campaign is going to be an 1870s Mashup game, based on this meme from David J. Prokopetz. Everybody has to play one of: a gunslinger, a samurai, a gentleman thief, or an old, retired pirate; but with Hero System, there's still plenty of character you can put into them to make them very distinct from other characters using the same archetype. I've a few ideas for what's going on in the setting, and I'm playing every single one of those cards so close to my chest they might as well be inside my ribcage...

 

[RealAlHazred]

RE: comparisons to GURPS. While inevitable, there is a fundamental difference to how GURPS and Hero approach the costs of things.

I tell people, my impression running both games is that GURPS tries for "realism" (for some degree of "realism") while Hero tries for the "cinematic." I'll watch a movie sometimes, and you can actually track fight scenes as if they were taking place in Hero System. It's cool!

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

My next campaign is going to be an 1870s Mashup game, based on this meme from David J. Prokopetz. Everybody has to play one of: a gunslinger, a samurai, a gentleman thief, or an old, retired pirate; but with Hero System, there's still plenty of character you can put into them to make them very distinct from other characters using the same archetype. I've a few ideas for what's going on in the setting, and I'm playing every single one of those cards so close to my chest they might as well be inside my ribcage...

The best campaign I ever ran was “Champions 1900” back in Austin in the early/mid 1990s. It was a low-powered supers game based in the world of Space:1889, fleshed out by wholesale importation of appropriate materials from HG Wells, Jules Verne, Wild Wild West, Kung Fu, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Gotham By Gaslight, certain anime and all kinds of stuff from Michael Moorcock, William Gibson, Harry Turtledove, Alien Nation, James Bond movies, Marvel & DC comics, and so forth with the serial numbers filed off.

PCs included an amnesiac Atlantean orphan, a gunslinging secret service agent, and a balding, leopard-skin wearing strongman with a handlebar mustache.

One of the villains had a steam-powered iron battle suit with twin flamethrowers.

That campaign ran for a couple years.

I tried resurrecting it for a different group using Mutants & Masterminds 2Ed (nobody else wanted to use HERO) with some updated elements, but it fizzled for a variety of reasons.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

RE: comparisons to GURPS. While inevitable, there is a fundamental difference to how GURPS and Hero approach the costs of things.

I tell people, my impression running both games is that GURPS tries for "realism" (for some degree of "realism") while Hero tries for the "cinematic."

Look at the basic psionics rules for an example of this. It takes a bunch of build points for a telekinetic character to be strong enough to lift a bowling ball. It’s not until you use the Supers supplements that you can build a superheroic psionicist.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Fuzion is the one iteration I dumped immediately on contact.

Honestly, while the power plug-in was a mess, as a system in other ways it had a lot of virtues.

 

[aramis erak]

I've never really looked at 6th ed. (Nothing against it. In fact I'm a big fan of getting rid of figured characteristics.) So I'm just wondering what the big maths problem was?

The figured stats are no longer figured; they're bought just like primaries, from a fixed base. So no free SPD from Dex 40, no free PD from high (I can't remember if that's STR or CON)...

If anything, 6th left the worst math in (VPPs, Multipowers, and ECs), and pulled out the most easily understood math out. No violence to the playing, only the designing.

 

[aramis erak]

Honestly, while the power plug-in was a mess, as a system in other ways it had a lot of virtues.

Except being clear about where on the spectrum between Hero 4 and Interlock (Mekton, CP2013, CP2020) it was.

CNM played ok... not great, and for real hero action, you needed a copy of HSR4 or the Champions Core (which included HSR 4) to develop new powers, new gadgets, etcetera.

None of my players were willing to give Sengoku a try... mostly because it was essentially Hero System... not even HSR light...

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Revisiting this:

I've a few ideas for what's going on in the setting, and I'm playing every single one of those cards so close to my chest they might as well be inside my ribcage...

If/when you get started running this, I’d love to know what you tell your players. Even though I’m clearly not going to be involved, I’d love to think about what kind of PC I’d run in that kind of setting.

 

[BigJackBrass]

That's one of the things that can make playing a fencer or other martial artist so interesting in the system.

Hero is also one of the very few games where students of martial arts are not functionally indistinguishable. If it matters to you that karate and jiu-jitsu are not the same thing then Hero allows for that.