[OT] Hero System Fifth Ed Review

[Psion]

1) Despite the hype, the Hero powers system isn't supremely flexible.

Translation: It can't do the impossible. Of course not. But there is no other system out there that even comes close to giving you such a nicely defined system for creating powers, effects, spells, etc.

2) The slowness in character creation isn't becuase the math calculations are difficult, it's because there are so damn many calculations to make, and much of the system is non-intuitive to those who havn't memorized the game from cover to cover. If Hero still makes the Heromaker software, buy it. I find the game all but unplayable without it.

My group never used hero maker. Earlier I mentioned that the power system put off some players; this is true. However, I see nothing non-intuitive or especially difficult about the base system and I was able to run a fair cross section of players through it with little difficulty.

3) Hero is not a good system for GMs who like playing fast and loose, or improvising.

I thoroughly disagree with that. Points are for players; as a GM you can just use the effects as a menu and pretty much do anything.

4) The system doesn't encourage player creativity during the game. It's almost impossible to create 'power stunts' on the fly.

Again I disagree. The combat system makes provision for things like deflecting or spreading out shots, surprise maneuvers, and so forth. Now if you are talking about spontaneously allowing players to use powers in ways they weren't intended, well you are correct. But then, I don't agree you should give players capabilities for free in ANY game.

 

[NLP]

1) Despite the hype, the Hero powers system isn't supremely flexible. For 95% of power concepts it works well, but for the other 5% it's abyssmally awful. Those 5% can still be technically done, but not at all elegantly or sussinctly.

Examples please? You can make a broad statement like that about any game system. Before 3e, D&D didn't allow you to create a human Fighter/Mage like Elric. It took 25 years to fix that problem.

2) The slowness in character creation isn't becuase the math calculations are difficult, it's because there are so damn many calculations to make, and much of the system is non-intuitive to those who havn't memorized the game from cover to cover. If Hero still makes the Heromaker software, buy it. I find the game all but unplayable without it.

And to think, thousands of gamers managed to play the game for over a decade without character creation software. Those must have all been relatives of Einstein.

The game is not that hard to learn. It is not that hard to play. It just take getting out of the D&D mentality and expressing your own creativity.

3) Hero is not a good system for GMs who like playing fast and loose, or improvising. It's rigid structure has benefits, but also drawbacks, especially since it takes an hour or more to create a new character or monster.

I run a great deal of my games "fast and loose". Yes, we have all stated that it takes a long time to create a character unless you know the rules well, but that's just part of the perks of getting to make exactly what you want. If you just want to play a character for the night, and plan to play him as fodder, you can make him in ten minutes or less too.

4) The system doesn't encourage player creativity during the game. It's almost impossible to create 'power stunts' on the fly. By 'power stunts' I mean creative new uses of powers that are thought up during play. All PC powers must be bought and calculated during character creation or advancement, and no improvisation is possible during play, unless you have a power pool. This isn't a big concern for fantasy games, but is very important to me in superhero games.

This I really take exception to. The Hero System is no different that most other game systems when players want to go outside of the rules. Creative play is based on the player and GM in question. It has nothing to do with the rules. For example, in D&D you might have a player that is getting ready to fire a magic missile spell. The player decides to coat his hand in red dragon blood before he casts the spell, wanting to see what happens. Now at this point the GM has two options: He can state nothing unusual happens or, he can immediately devise some new and spectacular effect for the spell. That creativity has Nothing to do with the rules. That is strictly between the players and GM.

Some GMs like to follow the rules to the letter. Other GMs like to go with the flow and create ambiance. If you're playing Hero and tell your GM you want to do something unusual and he or she doesn't let you, then you know all you need to know about that GM.

 

[KDLadage]

Um, these two where statements of how the system works not evaluations, so I don't see how this is an opinion.

Perhaps I am over-analysing, but I figured that the way you stated them, it was an expression of why HERO is better (or works) than (while) GURPS is (doesn't work).

If I misread, then I apologise.

 

[Laslo Tremaine]

I just wanted to add something to the Fantasy Hero discussion.

First off I should make a disclaimer. I am a HUGE fan of the Hero System. I've been playing since 1st edition (1980?) and it has been my group's main game system ever since. We have played most every genre and had a great time.

Almost everything that has been discussed so far is pretty much on the mark to one extent or another. On problem with Fantasy Hero in particular has not been mentioned yet, that is...

It can be tough to maintain a high-fantasy flavor in the Hero System.

What I mean by this is that the Hero power meta-system does a great job of defining what a spell or power can and cannot do. But it does so in a fairly anti-septic manner.

Want to create a Fireball type spell? Well, that's pretty damn easy. Let's call it a 10d6 Energy Blast with the Area Effect advantage and a special effect of Fire. Done (well maybe you will want to add your genre-specific disadvantages like, requires gestures & incantations and any other defining features of your magic system).

How about Magic Missile? That one is a bit tougher since the Hero System does not have a rule for attacks that automatically hit, so let's try this. 1d6 Energy Blast with the Auto-Fire advantage, the No Normal Defense advantage (this lets the damage ignore armor), and the Indirect advantage (this means the attack does not need to go in a straight line from the caster to the target). Now we will add +10 combat levels to the OCV (Offensive Combat Value). Now add your magic system limitations and you're pretty much set.

Now you may be asking yourself why I've gone off on this tangent when I was complaining about the system lacking flavor. Well, I've found that with a bunch of seasoned Hero players, all of the meta-system terminology becomes a shorthand for describing actions and their effects. Instead of saying "My mage invokes his eldretch powers and summons the Inescapable Hail of Conflagration!!!" You get players saying, " I do a 4d6 ranged killiing attack, explosion. I shift a couple levels into my magic skill and couple levels into OCV, I roll a 9 to hit and hit a DCV of 8. The primary damage is 14 body and 42 stun, the next range increment does 9 body and 27 stun, the next does 4 body and 12 stun and the last does a piddly 1 body and 3 stun..."

That is the problem. You have to work against the system to keep any sort of flavor... I don't seem to have a problem with super-heroes; people tend to say, "I hit the bad guy with my Nova Blast." But for whatever reason, with fantasy, I find it to be a bit cumbersome...

 

[2WS-Steve]

If you'd like a magic system for Hero with more flavor you might check out the Fuzion version of Shards of the Stone. It translates easily to Hero and keeps a better feeling of magic. In general I think the way to do Fantasy Hero is to break out some books like Ars Magica or the PHB and start translating the effects into Hero terms. You can use the underlying point system in Hero to help gauge what the power level of the effect should be. However, it'd probably be best to scrap the old Fantasy Hero method of pruchasing or organizing spells and go with something like a flat point cost for Wizard Caster Level (if using the PHB) or point cost for Form and Technique levels if using Ars. Ideally the next version of Fantasy Hero will do something like this.

 

[Geoff Watson]

Some of the things that have been noted over the history of the game (not sure about 5th edition, mine will not be here until Wednesday):

• A normal human can completely demolish a car in less than 60 seconds using nothing but his bare feet.
• A typical baby can throw a football over 80 meters.
• A character with a high speed score gets more actions per turn -- and thus can drive faster than someone with a low speed score (I cannot recall, but this may have been corrected in 4th edition).
• etc...

The majority of the 'Murphy's Rules' are wrong. Whoever writes them seems to rely on hearsay with no effort to see if they are correct.

Geoff.

 

[Geoff Watson]

I just wanted to add something to the Fantasy Hero discussion.

Now you may be asking yourself why I've gone off on this tangent when I was complaining about the system lacking flavor. Well, I've found that with a bunch of seasoned Hero players, all of the meta-system terminology becomes a shorthand for describing actions and their effects. Instead of saying "My mage invokes his eldretch powers and summons the Inescapable Hail of Conflagration!!!" You get players saying, " I do a 4d6 ranged killiing attack, explosion. I shift a couple levels into my magic skill and couple levels into OCV, I roll a 9 to hit and hit a DCV of 8. The primary damage is 14 body and 42 stun, the next range increment does 9 body and 27 stun, the next does 4 body and 12 stun and the last does a piddly 1 body and 3 stun..."

That is the problem. You have to work against the system to keep any sort of flavor... I don't seem to have a problem with super-heroes; people tend to say, "I hit the bad guy with my Nova Blast." But for whatever reason, with fantasy, I find it to be a bit cumbersome...

You get the same problem with any ruleset with detailed rules.
Do you complain when D&D mages say how much damage their spells do, or when fighters declare they are putting points into Power Attack or Expertise?

Geoff.

 

[coyote6]

I guess Hero 5 didn't eliminate the "long, inflammatory, ultimately fruitless pro-Hero/anti-Hero/GURPS vs. Hero" threads. Nice to see some backwards compatibility for the Internet fans.

Now, has anybody mentioned BESM yet? BESM vs. Hero seemed to be fairly popular the last couple of years. Surely that hasn't changed.

Just think, soon we can have SAS vs Hero vs. what, 3 different d20 superhero games? And maybe, in a couple of years, we can add GURPS 4e to the mix. Won't that be swell.

 

[Michael Tree]

Translation: It can't do the impossible. Of course not. But there is no other system out there that even comes close to giving you such a nicely defined system for creating powers, effects, spells, etc.

I'm not talking about the impossible, I'm talking about character concepts and powers that other systems have no problem with.

Here are a few examples from the top of my head, which came up in our game:

Try to make a shapeshifter elegantly, and without costing 500 pts for only moderate capability.

Try to elegantly create a character who can summon black force which he can move and form into any shape, like Marvel's darkforce. This is a simple enough concept, but is a nightmare do implement. In the end I made it a power pool, and had to precalculate 6 or 7 pages of different effects.

Try to create a character who can freeze time, like in the time stop spell. For fairness he can't harm anything while time is frozen, but he can move objects or himself.

Try to create a character who can manipulate metal, and shape it into mechanical or mobile form.

These are superhero powers, but no doubt there are numerous spells in the PH that would be very difficult to implement as powers in champions. Polymorph other and shadow evocation and conjuration come to mind.

I'm not saying that the system is awful, because it most cases a power is relatively easy to convert into Hero terms, I'm just saying that because of the way the system works, many power concepts either become needlessly bulky and complicated, or cost way too much for what they actually do.

My group never used hero maker. Earlier I mentioned that the power system put off some players; this is true. However, I see nothing non-intuitive or especially difficult about the base system and I was able to run a fair cross section of players through it with little difficulty.

I played without heromaker for a while, but saw the light when I finally bought it.

The power system isn't what takes so long. Calculating costs, and figured characteristics, and determining costs for power frameworks and advantages with disadvantages, and so on, is daunting. Even the simple addition of all the costs can take a while.

I thoroughly disagree with that. Points are for players; as a GM you can just use the effects as a menu and pretty much do anything.

So it only takes 45 minutes to create a character, instead of an hour and a half.

Besides, NPC creation wasn't only what I was talking about.

Imagine, for example, a situation where a huge Iron statue is rampaging, and is extremely tough to actually hurt. A character with fire powers and another with ice powers think up an idea where the fire character heats up the iron statue, the cold character then freezes it, and they repeat this a few times until a superstrong character then bashes the hopefully-brittle iron statue.

I as a GM like to reward this kind of quick creativity. However, by the Hero rules, each would be making completely seperate attacks, and the combination wouldn't do a thing unless they had previously bought it as a power combination. This kind of strict mechanical determinism bugs me.

If a player on the fly thinks of a new way he can use his power - not a new capability mind, but a new way the power he has always had could be applied - good for him. I like it when players think of novel solutions to problems, ones that I hadn't thought of and which are nevertheless completely within the capabilities of the character.

Another example from the same session was the fire character attempting to weld the statue to some Iron girders the character had lured it on to.

We see this sort of creativity in comic books all the time, but Hero doesn't reflect it well.

Granted, D&D's magic system isn't really great at this either, but I never said it was, and it isn't as important in fantasy as it is in the superhero genre.

 

[Michael Tree]

I guess Hero 5 didn't eliminate the "long, inflammatory, ultimately fruitless pro-Hero/anti-Hero/GURPS vs. Hero" threads. Nice to see some backwards compatibility for the Internet fans.

*Grins*

I don't think anyone actually expects to resolve the argument, which essentially boils down to a matter of taste: some people prefer fast and loose systems that are quick and flexible, wheras others prefer mechanical precision and detail. No one's going to 'win', the fun is in the arguing.

Now, has anybody mentioned BESM yet? BESM vs. Hero seemed to be fairly popular the last couple of years. Surely that hasn't changed.

Bah. Marvel Superheroes (the one from the 80's) all the way.