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Message: <blockquote data-quote="woodelf" data-source="post: 2422858" data-attributes="member: 10201">Hero is one game i've noly ever read, never played, so somebody correct me if i'm wrong, but:IIRC, Hero System ha sthe tools for building these sorts of things into your character, yes, but it doesn't have any tools for playing out these sorts of things, really. That is, it can tell you how often your nemesis shows up--and the player can decide when creating the character what the odds will be--but it doesn't have any mechanism to give the player in-game control (a la "i play a fate point; it turns out my nemesis is behind these robberies" or "<tosses three chits into pot> my nemesis shows up, bolloxing the stakeout just as the drug deal goes down"), or to make it a tactical element. In Hero, you can choose whether or not to use your power, but you can't choose whether or not to use your ally--at least, i don't think you can. Again, IIRC, the best you ca ndo is "activate" the NPC, and then it's up to the GM to take it from there. And i don't think it has in-built mechanisms to let you declare someone an ally in the middle of play. [though, i suppose you could save exp, and allow immediate expenditure in that manner.]  So, some of this *is* relatively new, while some of the elements have at least seeds dating back to the early 80s.Really, Hero system is fairly unusual in this regard, precisely because it *does* have mechanisms for quantifying social aspect,s too--though it still doesn't handle story elements, or authorial control. So, if you want to focus on that, rather than focusing on combat, you can do so. Contrast with D&D3E, where you can't mechanically focus on the social stuff the way you can the combat stuff, without extensive houseruls or 3rd-party add-ons.All that said, i concur: it is not inherently tied to rules-lite-ness, that's just the way most of these things have gone. The Riddle of Steel and The Burning Wheel both have extensive narrative-interaction systems, and neither is rules-lite by any stretch. It's rather the converse that has some weight: a rules-lite system that is gamist/simulationist is very hard to pull off, so almost no rules-lite systems go that route. So, there are two skews, one of which i suspect is inherent to a degree (rules-lite games favoring narrativism) and one of which i think is just a market trend (crunchy games favoring gamism/simulationism).</blockquote>

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