The HERO System

mmadsen said:
Could you please dial down the snarkiness? You're debating rules minutia. I know I certainly wouldn't base my decision on whether to use Hero, Tri-Stat SAS, or M&M on one bad ruling by Steve Long on where the limitation should go, Str & Dex or Extra Limb.

Ok but would you use the printed rules from the book specifically stated in the power in question?

Its not "one bad ruling." its specifically stated in the book. its under extra limb.

all the long reference was was a confirmation thats that what he intended, with much the same example given.

As for tone, when someone laughs about people inaccurately using examples few posts after erroneously claiming i was wrong, they ought to have at least cracked the book to see if i was right... don't you think?
 
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drnuncheon said:
Well, I like HERO a lot, but he's got a point - there's a lot of granularity that, because of things like skills being based on 9+CHA/5, and CV being based on DEX/3, doesn't really matter.
By the way, is there any rationale for CV being based on Dex/3 rather than Dex/5?
 


I suppose that's because otherwise the differences would be almost non-existant. ;)

And don't forget, that DEX is quite expensive (3 per point) compared to many other stats.

Bye
Thanee
 

buzz said:
It seems to work with how attack rolls are figured (11 + OCV - DCV).
That doesn't make much difference since DCV = OCV (w/o levels and such). The roll would always be the same regardless how CV was calculated.

Bye
Thanee
 


Less granular, I suppose. Seeing as you saw Stat/5 as too granular for characteristic rolls, I figured you'd be happy about Stat/3 being used for combat. :)
 

buzz said:
Less granular, I suppose. Seeing as you saw Stat/5 as too granular for characteristic rolls, I figured you'd be happy about Stat/3 being used for combat. :)
I didn't see Stat/5 as too granular for characteristic rolls; I just thought we should divide all stats by five to get to the real stats underlying the actual game mechanics.
 

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buzz said:
When I say "a difference between subjective and arbitrary," I'm not trying to assign either adjective to the systems being discussed. I'm trying to say something about how you're using the word "subjective." The tone of your post implied (to me) that by saying point costs in HERO are "subjective", you're saying that they're "arbitrary." I.e., that the designers just assigned point values willy-nilly, and the costs of individual powers have no relation to each other.
OK, lets try this then...

when i say "subjective", how about you assume i mean "subjective". Then you don't have to spend a lot of time refuting an argument i never made.
buzz said:
Ergo, in the settingless "baseline" of HERO, the point costs are generally in balance with each other. Work continues, of course...
however, this is one of the rubs. I don't know of anyone who has ever run a "settingless" game. Do you? A perfectly balanced settingless system does not mean you get a "more or less balanced" setting system. Even if HERO managed to achieve perfect balance in its settingless system, it manages to perfect a game no one plays.
buzz said:
designing for D&D takes *research*.
No argument. That applies to every system IMO... although i guess one should add "quality" in there somewhere
buzz said:
E.g., I can't just follow the fairly complicated rules for assigning costs to a magic item. I have do that, *as well as* compare my new item to similar items and see how the costs compare. It's entirely possible to design an item by the book that is either too expensive or too cheap when finally compared to like items. And as for spells, the system of design is basically "look at other spells and make a judgement call."
Yes... and that is because they know that a point buy system does not work, or at least, does not work infallibly enough to eradicate the "look at it and see if it makes sense" final stage.

HERo doesn't either. otherwise Long wouldn't be citing his "use common sense, dramatic sense, common sense and a sense of balance" mantra so often.

buzz said:
What I like about HERO is that I'm not left with just the judgement call. Within or without the context of a setting, I can look at powers and evaluate them based on points, *in addition to* how they will be used. And, in general, I think that the points in HERO are balanced pretty well.
So if i get this right... using your chosen example of DND magic items, in DND you use the cost structure to get a value and thenyou also have to use a final judgement/comparison test, and thats whats wrong with DND design.

In HERo, you can get a number and use it as well as the final judgement stage and thats whats right with hero.

Is that about right?

FWIW, for me, just skip directly to the final judgement and comparison, based on your campaign, story, characters etc. the numbers are so often wrong as to be more of a distraction than a boon. (Thats for both systems.)
buzz said:
IOW, with d20, I feel more like the designers give me a machine in a sealed black box that I need to reverse-engineer. With HERO, it feels more like they're giving me a bunch of parts and some blueprints.
and the rub is... how accurate are those blueprints?
if you were building a house and got blueprints for a boat, that wouldn't do you much good now would it.

The hero numbers are accurate if and only if the GM runs his game to make those numbers accurate. They are not accurate because of years of tweaking.
buzz said:
I'm not just saying older is better, as I have explained above. And to address another point, there tends to be just as much (if not more) quibbling about the accuracy of spell levels in D&D. E.g., 3.0 harm or haste. We just went through a major revision and people are still arguing about which spells are under/overpowered.
YES YES YES YES!!!!

Whether its HERO5 with millenia of complex comparisons done by cloned einsteisn or DND with decades of extensive playtest done by trained monkeys, there is never uniform agreement on the "right" values. The reason is simple... values depend on usefulness and usefulness varies from campaign to campaign and that wont change no matter how many numbers you crunch.
buzz said:
Right. And the genre books publshed for HERO talk about this in depth. The end goal usually being an adjustment of costs for a given genre so that, you guessed it, the point values indeed mean something relative to context.
Really... see i own star hero and champions genre books for 5e and i really do not recall any "in depth" cost changes running around. As matter of fact, those genre books seemed to do not a lot with the system costs at all, beyond provide a number of character templates and prefigured gear using basically the normal rules.

If i go home tonight and pull star hero from under the table, wioll i be able to find 10 confirmed "change this cost from the core rulebook" examples specifically and in depthly discussed... maybe for instance they told you something like "hey, as compared to the baseline game, safe environment vacuum is very useful in space opera games and should cost more than 2-3 pts."

I am out on a limb here, because i really don't recall. What value did they suggest raising "safe in a vacuum" to for these campaigns?

???
buzz said:
Not saying that at all. I will say, though, that the unbalanced stuff I see is more experienced players trying to get away with something than it is newbies. Newbies tend to make balanced stuff because they don't know any better. :)
Actually i see a lot more imbalance among newbies. It is frequent that newbies create characters in hero way too weak to be comparable in performance to their fellow players who have more experience. Newbies don't automatically jump into the basic system milking expected... milking the myriad breakpoints, not recognizing the "not worth what its costing" hero-isms like area attacks and such. (imbalance in the other direction is just as bad, perhaps worse if it convinces a new player to drop it.)

the "learning curve" and its impact on character construction is one of the big negatives to hero... imo.
buzz said:
You'll need one to make an accurate spell level assignation, though.
YEs, you will. To me, thats an understood reality... not a bad thing at all.
buzz said:
Yes, IMHO. The number is backed up by a system and is not, as you seem to be asserting, wholly meaningless. I mean, I know that a 10th level character is more powerful than a 7th level one, in general, even if circumstances of setting make this less clear-cut. It's a baseline.
But see, thats the difference... within say DND setting, 10th level has meaning because the class structure means a common set of traits.

In HERo, "built on 350 pts" does not mean anything. It could be 350 pts of skills, it could be 350 pts of all combat crunchiness. It could be 350 pts milked to the max by an experienced hero guru using ECs, MPs, VPPs, well contructed synergies, etc or it could mean 350 pts built with basi flat out powers without frameworks and a whole lot less power even with the same design goals.

A level within a structured set of classes does indeed provide you with some meaning, does indeed serve as a shortcut for guestimating the "general power level" but total points in HERo does not.
buzz said:
I'm not sure I can address this, as IDHMBIFOM, and I don't know how you're arriving at these point costs. I'm also not sure how you can make a point-for-point comparison if you're possibly altering how figured characteristics are handled for one PC and not the others.
Uh, i am simply following the rules. Unfortunately, the rules leave it to GM judgement to a slight degree on whether or not the figs come free or not when a lim is applied. I would rule, using the stated rules, that the limitation to the strength and dex does not limit the figs and thus, by the book, the figs are lost.
buzz said:
(Granted, that may be your point, but I don't see how it really supports what you're saying. I'm not claiming that HERO is perfect; I'm claiming that it simply gives you more pertinent data to work with. Which is really nice *if you like that sort of thing.*)
I love pertinent data. We just disagree on whether the math and costs and final prices produced by HERo are pertinent data. I think the final results are nothing more than values the Gm can use to script his encounters to make "turn out to be right". I don't think DND or stargate or anything else is more accurate, just easier and quicker to get to.
buzz said:
You're welcome to feel this way. As usual, I think that arguments like these ("HERO is too crunchy," which is basically your argument) eventually boil down to taste, and nothing more.
i think hero is unnecessarily crunchy. I think its more work for no gain.
buzz said:
Still, I think you're adding a level of arbitraryness to make your argument that I don't think really happens IRL. IME, a GM, as with any system, will set some ground rules, e.g., "Power X is not allowed in this setting," or "its cost has been adjusted for this setting to Y points per 1d6." I don't think any GM worth playing with is going to adjust the rules on a per-character basis.
Would it surprise you to find many GMs, some considered decent, do just that? The PHb and DMG go into some degree of detail on altering the rules for chargen for character-by-character basic... tweaking classes, skill lists abilities etc. I know i have and i know the best Gms i have run under did do this.
buzz said:
Sure, a 150pt PC with access to magic or superpowers might in no way be balanced with a 150pt PC in a real-world military campaign... but I don't think HERO (or any other point-buy RPG) makes this claim. Comparing 10th level D&D and d20M PCs would be equally silly (as would comparing 10th level Midnight PCs with 10th level Living Greyhawk PCs).
Well all i can say is, i have not mentioned comparing characters across genres. I don't do cross genre campaigns.

However, i have heard hero players on the boards tout hero as good for cross-genre campaigns, since they can just port the characters over.
buzz said:
Which may be your point. :) Ultimately, balance in any RPG is in the hands of the GM. However, I still don't think that you've made a good case that point values in HERO are wholly worthless. "45pts" means something in HERO the same way that "5th level" means something in D&D. The difference is that HERO *shows you how they arrived at the 45 pts.* It's an added level of detail, that, IMO, gives a player or GM more to work with when assesing the value of a given construct in their campaign. The bricks you've posted above are themselves examples of this.
5th level means something given their are a prescribed set of classes.

45 pts does not have the same meaning, Nor does 350 pts, because of the lack of context and structured chargen.

Again, would you be willing to say that in a HERO-powered campaign (say modern supers of the Avengers flavor built onn 350 pts using the baselines established by the FRED/CHAMPIONS book for defenses of 20/10 and such) that two 60 pts power are of equal effectiveness?

Is that too broad?

What if we limit it to attack powers?

is that still too broad? Too shakey ground to commit to? too uncertain in hero terms?

lets limit it to ~45 ap attack powers built on an energy blast base? I add the "~" because hero math wont let me make everything exactly 45 pts. give me say 44-46 pts.

I will save you some time...

Against 20 pt defenses...

Firebolt: 9d6 EB (45 pts) gets something like 11 stun thru conservative average per hit. Thats a reasonably effective power.

Fireball: 4 1/2 d6 Area Of Effect 2" radius (46 ap) will average little if anything thru... most of the time doing nothing, but doing it to more people.

This isn't a complex hero build power, or some oddball crooked up "players would never imagine that" type of thing.

both 45 pts, or close.
buzz said:
I'm not sure who you're talking to here, as I did not tout HERO as being for inexperienced GMs (neither does Hero Games, really).

you however did bring to focus the need for experience to design for d20.

So in D20 a problem is that you need experience to design stuff, but HERO is not good for inexperienced Gms anyway.

So, if you are an experienced Gm with an experienced eye, you have what you need to design for either system, but with HERo, you have a lot of nifty math too!

is that right?

Hmmm...
 

(This was a response to mmadsen's last post; but I wasn't quick enough.)

Oh, so you want to play Fuzion, then? :D

As was pointed out earlier, the stats do matter as-is, even if (in cases like INT or PRE) it's just how the points interact with Drain/Aid. As was also pointed out, HERO isn't alone in this regard (e.g., d20), so I don't know it needs to be singled out.

For sake of discussion, what system(s) do you think does what HERO does but does it with numbers you find more streamlined? TriStat? M&M? GURPS? the aforementioned Fuzion?
 
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