One thing I REALLY liked about HERO over D&D

[swrushing]

[/QUOTE]

How high a level in D&D have you played? IME, once spells like See Invis and True Seeing enter the picture, Invisibility ceases to be anything but a single-round bonus at best for all but a handful of situations.

My DND 3.0 game went for 3 years thru level 15.

your game was clearly a lot different than mine. A good percentage of my encounters were against multiple opponents... say for example, against a moderate to high level drow party including clerics, mages and fighters.

the cleric or the mage could, frequently, run either of the spells you mention, but that did not mean all their fighter flinkies got the benefits. Same thing happened with the PCs when th drow mages went under imp invis or invis... they cannot all see what the PC sorcerer sees.

did they seek potions and such for handy use when they could...Sure. Did the mages sometimes try gitterdust and such... such. but counter and thrust is part of the game.

simply put, in my experience, your view of how easily DND counters invisibility and the one round except rarely... is way off, much different than i have seen.

obviously, our campaigns vary somewhat.

Items, targeted dispels and a host of other solutions exist to counter-act Invisibility. And when you have characters who can routinely get spots in the 50s and 60s...well, you get the idea.

i never had characters between levels 2-15 who could routinely get spots that high, so, again, a significant difference in our campaigns.

The same applies for etherealness and incorporeality. There are lots of counters in the D&D realm...from ghost touch weapons and force effects to a host of spell effects. When the attackers can become incorporeal or ethereal, or simply throw the target into a maze, it becomes an academic problem, mostly. It's only a question of how many resources they might consume against an unprepared group, as opposed to being anything close to invulnerable.

How that applies towards Hero, I couldn't say...but in D&D, there are many counters and limitations to those abilities built into the system as part of the many balances present.

ghost touch weapons in DND... affects desolid advantage in HERO.
force effects in DND ... a specified "common FX" in HERO

the huge honking difference between HERO and DND incorporeality is that in DND many attack forms can be used to full effect by the incorporeal guy... while in HERO as a matter of balance an desolid guy cannot attack at all unless the attack is bought with a +2 advantage for
"can affect real world"... tripling the cost of the base attack power... which usually means minor damage done. Not only does this fact really impact the "its much more powerful in DND side" but also the "HERO nerf's things less" side... anyone who has played HERo for significant periods knows how hard it is "within reasonable points" to build characters such as Deadman or any relying on desolid due to this massive point cost for desolid attacks, possession (frequently written up officially as desolid and mind control with a bunch of stuff crammed in and some handwaving) being likewise affected.

 

[WizarDru]

your game was clearly a lot different than mine. A good percentage of my encounters were against multiple opponents... say for example, against a moderate to high level drow party including clerics, mages and fighters.

I'd say that's probably true. My group has gone from 1st to 23rd level, and the game is still going (although it's going to go on a short hiatus for a little while, soon). You can judge for yourself in my Story Hour, which is linked below in my .sig.

 

[Sir Whiskers]

ghost touch weapons in DND... affects desolid advantage in HERO.
force effects in DND ... a specified "common FX" in HERO

the huge honking difference between HERO and DND incorporeality is that in DND many attack forms can be used to full effect by the incorporeal guy...

A couple quick points:

1. I believe 3.5 clarified that ethereal and incorporeal are two different states. As far as I know, there is no spell or magic item that will allow a character to become incorporeal. There are a number of ways to go ethereal. Ghost touch weapons only affect incorporeal, not ethereal.

2. As far as I know, ethereal creatures cannot affect the Prime Material plane at all. No spells, no attacks, nothing. Ethereal creatures can be affected by creatures on the Prime Material in a number of ways, such as force effects and gazes.

As always, if I'm wrong about either point, anyone feel free to post a correction.

while in HERO as a matter of balance an desolid guy cannot attack at all unless the attack is bought with a +2 advantage for
"can affect real world"... tripling the cost of the base attack power... which usually means minor damage done. Not only does this fact really impact the "its much more powerful in DND side" but also the "HERO nerf's things less" side... anyone who has played HERo for significant periods knows how hard it is "within reasonable points" to build characters such as Deadman or any relying on desolid due to this massive point cost for desolid attacks, possession (frequently written up officially as desolid and mind control with a bunch of stuff crammed in and some handwaving) being likewise affected.

This gets to the heart of my point. SWR is absolutely right that the example I proposed is expensive in Hero terms, though it is barely doable in a normal supers campaign - the character will likely be a "one-trick pony".

But notice the differences:

Hero: Invisibility: 69 points, invisible to everything (60 points gets you invisible to almost everything).
D&D: Improved invisibility: invisible to sight, see invisibility spells. Vulnerable to true seeing, blingsight, tremorsense, certain spells.

Hero: Desolidification: 40 points, vulnerable to Affects Desolid powers and one special effect.
D&D: Ethereal: invisible to sight, immune to most effects. Affected by see invisibility, other detection spells, all force effects, gazes, certain spells.

Hero: Energy Blast: 60 points, 2d6, Affects Physical World, NND, AE: Radius (5"), Invisible power effects
D&D: No attacks possible from Ethereal plane to Prime Material.

With Hero, the player (with GM approval) decides on the scope of the power (just what is the character invisible to, what is he vulnerable to), while D&D "hard-codes" these aspects. It is possible, though expensive, to create a character in Hero who is almost untouchable. It's impossible to do so in D&D (at least without using non-core, usually non-WOTC sources).

If Hero operated in the same manner as D&D, it would ban certain powers as inherently problematic. The same with certain combinations. It doesn't. It warns against them. The closest the system comes to banning things is to focus on certain methods used by players to munchkinize their points (putting a multipower inside an ec, etc).

D&D, on the other hand, allows problematic abilities only after they've been significantly limited. If an ability might become a problem (stacking of critical threat ranges), the system bans it (in this case, the stacking of crit ranges). Because D&D's limits are hard-coded, the system is constantly being tweaked in an effort to keep ahead of the few who abuse the system. The system takes on this role, rather than leaving it to the GM.

Lastly, I think we should be careful of losing the forest for the trees. Detailed examples can help illustrate a point, but they can also obscure it. Viewed from a distance, the difference in the systems seems fairly obvious - Hero provides the basic building blocks and trusts the GM and players not to put them together in a way that ruins a campaign. D&D has already assembled the blocks into larger, fairly inflexible, units.