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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Petrosian" data-source="post: 146354" data-attributes="member: 1149">"The only real point you seem to have here is that Hero won't exactly model the same powers at the same level as D&D. Big Deal. "Actually, NO. I did not say that at all. Tho that makes for an easily assailable rhetoric so i can see why you would choose it.I am not at all lamenting the notion of the powers not matching DND levels exactly.I am lamenting how a number of the elements i commonly associate with fantasy and legend like turnign people into frogs, paralyzing them or mind controlling them, or general effect things like for instance grease are in NORMAL hero fantasy level games (character base is somewhere between 50-150 pts.) are too expensive to be effective.I lament the notion that the basic pattern makes AOE effect spells relatively useless, along the lines of minion bashers. That too does not mormally git with my notion of fantasy.Last time i checked, the summoning spells were likewise out of range priced to get anything useful. Anyone who thinks the DnD summonings were lowballed does not want to even try it in hero.It has nothing to do with "are the levels the same as DND" as instead the notion of "so given we are all about points, what will be a good way to spend them" and In HERo if it aint damage it aint the way to go.Now as for the general issue of the principle behind transform, it sounds really good doesn't it? "if you can kill them you can transform them" except it fails the PLAY test. In play i don't need to kncok someone to neg body to kill them when i fight. It RARELY happens that way. What usually happens is i knock them to negative stun and/or negative body and they then fall down, are no lnger a threat and are killed later. The point spread fpr transform assumes i must take them to full negative body to gain the effect making it take TWICE the output to take an enemy out in a combat situation.See the flaw.If i choose heros favored attack, do damage-duh simple, then i have to knock them to 0. If i want to turn them into a toad, i have to drop them twice as far.Thats why the effect spell poly fails to be within the reach of the fantasy game. it has to do twice as much work.Turning your question around, what's the difference between knocking him down and out with negative body/stun (and getting interim chances for con stun) and then walking up and killing him when helpless later VS turning him into a carp.Answer: The latter costs about twice as much CONSERVATIVELY.Now the way around this, for very experienced HERO-geeks,  might still lie with SBPs, where you buy an incredibly small cumulative autofire aoe etc etc etc transform to get around the limit, if they never fixed cumulative to work comsistently with the mental version of the adder. However this again is just another bane for the newcomer.And yes, the GM can simply redo HERo and make all these effects do twice what they currently do per point, but isn't that my point? Any Gm can change any game to serve his needs, if it handles the communications between player and GM well enough.However, in a comparison, should one discuss what the system does not what a Gm could change it to do?Just a thought.Note however that many of the things listed above are indeed perfectly fine for superHERO. It serves that genre well enough for "turn the hero into a toad" and "mind control the hero" to be rare and expensive.SuperHEROES in plate mail however is not my vision of fantasy.As for the fantasy hero companions et all... i own all three. Did I mention i have run over half a dozen champions campaigns and 3 different fantasy hero campaigns each of which lasted 1-2 years? Did i mention that i have more time running HERo than i do DnD? I even had a fuzion game run for over a year.Fantasy HERo is a great look at whats bad about HERo. They tried to present a magic system. instead they presented a dozen or two dozen colleges of magic which showed how to create the SAME spell with 1-2 dozen different bow ties. While they do lip service to SFX, they reveal in their own execution no real sense of it as significant.Every school even air, fire water, plant animal has a low cheap spell of their SFX for "force field" (maybe some used the armor power.) in the schools common spells group. Regardless of whether it makes sense for a sheathe of fire around you to stop damage like plate mail and not do any actual fire damage to someone hugging you, that spell is there in the fire school.Why? Because in HERO damage and defense are IMPORTANT and we cannot let silly things like SFX get in the way of the necessary PLUSSES.The best one was the animal school one, where right after they describe the "druids" role as protection of the beasts, the basic general purpose force field spell (everyone has one) has as the SFX birds and varmints jumping in front of the incoming blow or arrow or firebolt to sacrifice themselves for the good of the druid, blocking some of the damage.That one was rich.i didn't find too much useful in any of the FH books from a system perspective or a campaign perspective. Well maybe the gradual effect limitation.I agree... fantasy hero and companiosnet al are PERFECT examples of what you should expect from HERO genre books.I just think that those products MAKE my points more evident.BTW, will be interesting to see if REGENERATION, which allows a typical fantasy warrior to heal back all damage less than lethal within 10 minutes of any fight still costs less than the typical light spell 20' radius would. (Another superism, superheroes rarely take damage other than stun so regeneration is a very cheap ability, but for a fantasy character, its a significant thing. The joys of GENERIC taking precedence over GENRE.Oh wait, i forgot, the Gm can CHANGE that, so the system is fine.).</blockquote>

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