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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Agback" data-source="post: 1485324" data-attributes="member: 5328">G'dayI first took up the Hero System in its incarnation as Justice, Inc. in about 1985. I have also played and/or GMed it in its incarnations as Champions (a superhero RPG), Danger International[ (spy/thriller), Fantasy Hero, and in its generic form in SF, pulp adventure, action/thriller, and non-traditional fantasy genres. Indeed, I played in a mystery/thriller SF adventure under generic Hero System just last weekend. The summary of my considerable experience would be that Hero System is good for superhero combat campaigns and passable for other campaigns provided (in the latter case) that the GM does a lot of work cutting the system down to suit.I think the first problem is that the Hero System gives players way too many character points for taking on disadvantages. The theory is that the points only compensate for the disadvantages, so that in theory a character with disadvantages ought to be no more or less capable overall than one who is built on base points. Experience shows that this is utter bunk: characters who do not take the maximum points allowed are not capable enough to take their places alongside characters who have gone the whole hog. This leads to the phenomenon of trolling for disadvantages, with players either forcing in irrelevant weaknesses that are not called for by the character concept, or else being driven towards bizarre character concepts. Fair enough in superheroes, bad in other games.Another problem is that the game makes absolutely no allowance for encouraging players to take on disadvantages that improve the game (providing the GM with robust grommets for plot hooks, constraining the characters to act heroically, etc.). I find that it is bad enough that players decide that their characters are sullen jerks and insist on playing in charcter without rules support. When the rules encourage them to do it you can face a nightmare. So my advice to any GM is to use his or her powers of veto with great liberality, and to feel free, even compelled, to adjust disad points by guess, without feeling bound either by the rules or the examples. Having a code of honour is not as crippling as blindness, but blind characers are a pain in the arse to GM, and ought to be discouraged. Characters ought to be forbidden to play autistic charcters, not bribed to do so. A character nearly crippled by OCD is interesting while that is what the campaign is about (see the TV show 'Monk'), but will be a major pain for all the other players (including the GM) if they had something else in mind.While we are in that rut, the points listed for various disads seem to me to bear little correlation to how crippling a disad actually is, but you have to change them all anyway.On another point, the scale of character representation in Hero System is not really suitable for characters in the human range. For example, there are twenty values in the human range for, say, intelligence. But only five are distinct: 1, 3, 8, 13, 18. For abstruse reasons, INT 17 is as far as teh game is concerned just an expensive kind of INT 13. And the blessed values vary from attribute to attribute: in DEX they are 2, 5, 8, 11, 14, 17, and 20. This is a morass, guaranteed to make sure that inexperienced players will be disapointed with their character designs.Martial arts in Hero System are grossly overpowered for 'heroic' (ie. less-than-superheroic) campaigns. Don't allow their use, or tone them down, or apply low damage caps, unless you want the pulpy feel of heroes successfully engaging in fisticuffs against soldiers armed with firearms.The skill system in  Hero System is designed to give huge rewards to generalising, with the result that wise players do not buy their skills up above base, but buy levels with categories of skills and buy those up in time to 'overall levels'. This is mmerely a manifestation of the fact that the design is fraught with clever, inobvious ways to get a lot more bang for your buck than by taking the straightforward approach. This means that the system gives a lot more power to experienced players than to novices, and that the learning curve is shallow. (Popular error aside, a steep learning curve means that people learn quickly, a shallow learning curve means that people learn slowly.)In this rut, beware of the fact that Hero System encourages players to arse about with clever tricks in which something is represented by something else with a misleading special effect. (Eg., the rules [used to] suggest that if you wanted a character who could run very fast you buy not lots of Running but Flight subject to the limitation 'only in contact with the ground'.) This sounds very powerful and flexible, but in my experience it only causes problems because it means that things don't work that ought to or work that ought not to. And therefore leads reliably to tears before bedtime. For instance, a tanglefoot bag bought as 'Suppress [Running]' would not work on 'Flight [only in contact with the ground]', even though by world logic it ought to. Similarly, if you design a character who has a field that turns everything around him 'Desolid [area effect, usuable against others, uncontrollably continuous, no range]', you will find that you need to add in a lot of 'Missile Deflection' with the special effect that the missiles turn desolid without the charcter seeming to do anything about this. By game rules this character is susceptible to heavy missiles thrown from outside his or her area of effect, but don't count on the players to work that out, because in world terms it doesn't make sense.Before Hero System was genericised, when it appeared with 'heroic' rules in different products from its superhero rules the heroic versions used to have an excellent set of rules for characters concealing weapons around their perssons. For some reason, these were not taken up into the generic game, which is a great pity. Nowadays a Desert Eagle is just as concealable as a Beretta .25 with a skeleton grip, and a pistol in a belt clip is just as discreet as on in a small-of-back or anle holster.The Hero System system of superhero powers, limitations, and power advantages (and, to a lesser extent, martial arts manoeuvres) is very flexible and powerful. In fact, it is easily flexible and powerful enough to tear a hole in your campaign world. To apply restrictions on what powers players can buy, impose caps on their power levels, and lay down compulsory limitations and disadvantages requires some work and care, and worse, considerable familiarity with the system. It is best as a start to lay down a limited menu of things that magicians &c. can do.Finally, like a depressing majority of RPGs, Hero System has no specific rules for anything that happens outside of combat. And quite a lot of powers that are well balanced in combat are devastatingly effective at non-combat tasks.So: it isn't the game I play by choice. But you can make it work if you want to.Regards,Agback</blockquote>

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