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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Petrosian" data-source="post: 145716" data-attributes="member: 1149">Ok some items here...The specific nonsense about the Gm should have limited the iron golem... no... for evidence thats not how HERo did it in their fantasy hero supplements.... for better suggestions there is a rule in HERO4 and HERO3 for coordinating attacks to combine them to penetrate  armor... this rule required no special vulnerability on the part of the monsters. On HERO and fantasy... HERo does not IMO reprsent fantasy well. EFFECT based powers as very expensive in HERO compared to damage. While yes you can build a limited poly other that will turn a human into a carp that will work on normal commoners about 70% of the time and much less on hero types, it will cost you about the same as a 18d6firebolt would. It would exceed the normal DC limits for full fledged superhero games (10-15 dc) and be incredibly out of the reach of most fantasy level games where the characters are built on 50-150 pts. So yes, technically, you can build a poly other, you just cannot afford it in any fantasy game in play.Just like you can build a nuke which will disintigrate a city but cannnot afford it in any game in play.(Assumes HERO4 as HERO5 is not in hand yet.)HERO in general makes simple direct damage easy, firebolt rolls to hit and does Xd6.) Skilled players will also soon figure out the super-baby-power trick where you buy a very small power (2d6 EB or 1/2d6 drain) and apply a ton of synergizing advantages. SBP works well because even though their effects synergize well the cost for all those advantages is based off the original small power cost.Pretty much everything else in between is fairly lame or gets priced out of the game, like poly other.Consider that a good damage set for a melee fighter is about 6 DC per attack and a decent blasting spell does 6d6 to one target.(as a method for comparison)Hold Person: needs about  11 DC Mind Control to have about a 50/50 chance of freezing a commoner for one turn (loses two-three actions.) For the same active cost you could get 11d6 blast. (real cost might be lower.)Darkness to all sight with 18'radius is iirc going to run around the same cost as 8d6 blast.Grease wont be in the ballpark since making a spell do two things (chance of fall and decrease run) is prohibitive.Fireball wont work because in HERO the difference between an area spell and a single burst spell is TWICE the cost, so pretty much once the damage cap is in play (whether explicitly a cap or just a point limit) the area spells will work against minions only. If it can be touched by the area spell then in general it will be dropped one shot by the direct shot counterpart. GMs do not like one shot kills so the limits will be set based on the one target and the AOE spells are just out of luck (exception, SBPs can defeat the caps.)just a few of the issues with HERo and Fantasy.For campaigning, since HERO allows everything, the GM must therefore creat everything. How do you acquire and pay for magic spells? Can a stupid fighter with no brains develop his own magical disintigrate spell if he has the points? Is it uncommon for peasants to throw fireballs, even though they can afford them? In my experience by the time the Gm finishes detailing what is and is not common in the world, he has in effect created classes common for the world, whether they are called schools of magic or templates or packages or whatever "not the c-word" euphemism he chooses to embrace.On HERO math... the general rhetoric and propaganda goes like this... "I loked at hero but the math...yech!" followed by snide "Ok sure, YOU are not right for HERO if you have trouble with simple multiplication and division, go back ti kindergarten."What it fails to realize is its not that the math is hard, its that a LOT of people object to the amount of math, not its difficulty. Every single decision is a number crunch trade off doing your taxes sort of moment. Every skill is weighed off vs another dice of damage on the firebolt, another +1 to hit and another couple of points of stun. Of course, you can simply choose vanilla effects bought quickly but then you will realize you are not in the same league character power wize with the guys who did minimax everything. HERO encourage and presumes minimaxing at every turn.   If you do not do so, you will find yourself a significant power level down if competitive at all. (Many longterm HERO players pride themselves on their "skill" at milking the system.)</blockquote>

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