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Message: <blockquote data-quote="swrushing" data-source="post: 1492532" data-attributes="member: 14140"></blockquote>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.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.No argument. That applies to every system IMO... although i guess one should add "quality" in there somewhereYes... 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.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.)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.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.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????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.YEs, you will. To me, thats an understood reality... not a bad thing at all.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.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.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. i think hero is unnecessarily crunchy. I think its more work for no gain. 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.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.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.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...[/QUOTE]

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