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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Felon" data-source="post: 1485101" data-attributes="member: 8158">I used to among HERO System's greatest advocates. Now I think I'll never run a HERO System game again. HERO provides a great deal of utility for superhero games and other high-powered genres. It made a groundbreaking move in realizing that many powers that seem very different actually have the same effect as far as the game was concerned. I think they were also among the first systems (if not the first) to start categorizing Powers by their duration and effect. The idea of layering on advantages and limitations went a long way towards allowing players to create just about any power that you can think of. HERO's designers also realized that action and adventure games needed to take place outside of reality, and thus didn't fall into the grim-n-gritty trap that other systems that viewed themselves as "D&D alternatives" fell into back in the eighties and early nineties. The level of realism is for a GM to decide. In staying true to that, HERO offers lots of optional rules for making combat more deadly or more colorful, and that's probably another area where it was an innovator. If all of your players are great at fleshing out their character's concepts--both their strengths and their weaknesses--then HERO's an ideal system. But if you have people that want to generate a character in 5 minutes and jump in and smash and kill things, you have a problem. As a player, think of playing HERO kind of like playing a CCG, a la Magic or Pokemon. In those games, the strategy has largely to do with how well you put your deck together. In HERO, you had better be the type of person who enjoys pondering over your character sheet to see where you can squeeze that 12 points you need to buy that power that's vital in defining your character. Like any point-based system, there's a great deal of room for exploiting the sytem and the temptation to build a kitchen-sink character that's effective in any given situation, or worse, an ugly-but-unbeatable combat god. HERO has more than its share of areas where the mechanics are just way off, and the point costs are just too high or too low. For instance, when playing Champions it's not uncommon for every single PC to have Strength scores of 30 or higher, simply because the cost of Strength is too low in respect to all of the benefits it provides. In the eyes of a powergamer, it pays for itself many times over. Another area full of inequities is the Disadvantage system. In theory, players earn character points in exchange for rounding out their characters with weaknesses. In practice, it can be hard for even someone with a solid design concept to come up with enough reasonable Disads to gain the maximum allowed points--and everyone wants the maximum. One of the odd design elements about this system is that most Disads seem to be of about equal point value, so for instance, a Psychological Limitation that mandates quirky behavior in certain roleplaying situations is worth about as much as a damage Vulnerability that can get your character killed. And the designers are quite resolute about not making any changes to the broken areas. They're too invested in them, emotionally and intellectually, to accept what needs to be done to give HERO the degree of "powergamer-tolerance" that is needed for GM's to stop giving up on it, as I did.</blockquote>

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