Starting a new campaign

[aramis erak]

I won't lie: HERO is crunchy. But most of HERO's crunch comes in character creation; between the crunch and the vast array of options, that's where you will invest your time.

However, once characters have been made, the rulebook sits, virtually untouched. You almost never need it in play, since everything you need is on the sheet in front of you.

Quite true, most of the time. It rewards GM prep time heavily, tho', and that gets a bit crunchy for most. Now, for Fantasy Hero, there are the bestiaries that massively reduce prep by having pregen opposition to pick from...

Combat runs very smoothly, and the system is very playable. High learning curve at first.