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Message: <blockquote data-quote="buzz" data-source="post: 1492774" data-attributes="member: 6777">I'm not claiming anything's wrong with D&D. I'm a drooling D&D fanboy. I'm just countering your assertion that HERO's toolkit nature doesn't provide any mroe guidance than D&D/d20. I think that it does, because you're not reverse-engineering everything; you've got a system that is designed to build things from scratch. D&D, even at it's most detailed (of which magic item creation is probably the best example), relies more on eyeballing things, becasue the inner workings are much more hidden.That's cool. Again, things boil down to preference.See the magic system creation chapter in Fantasy HERO.Then I'm not really sure what your argument is. If you want to put the same limitation on HERO that you have in D&D --i.e., restriction to a single genre/setting with codified rules and guidelines-- I don't see how points in HERO are any less of a valuable metric than levels are in D&D.Sure, you can argue that, blind, I have no idea how two 350pt HERO PCs compare to each other. You haven't told me what genre we're talking about, or what active point limitations are in effect, and so on. Now, if you asked me whether two standard Champions Universe 350pt PCs were balanced against each other, I'd say odds are yes. As with D&D, there's a context and structure there for me to make a judgement. The points mean something.OTOH, the argument you're making now is like asking me if all FUDGE characters are balanced with each other. Seeing as FUDGE can be used for anything from Watership Down to Dragonball Z, it's a nonsensical question without any context.Ergo, why I brought up comparisons between different d20 games. It puts you in the same boat.The lack of context and structured chargen is the *point* of HERO. You seem to be arguing more against generic RPGs than you are point-based RPGs.There's only a discrepancy here if you're talking about a campaign that consists of nothing but NPCs with 20+ point defenses who always attack one at a time. IRL, campaigns tend not to work that way. The powers balance out due to the trade-off between damage and area of effect.With HERO, the very act of chargen and playing the game is learning how to design with the system. With D&D, there's extra effort involved (IMO); you need to pry open the black box and figure out how it works. With HERO, *you* are the one who built the box in the first place.This does not make HERO "better" than D&D/d20. It just makes it a toolkit. Each approach has its appeal. IOW, sometimes you want to pop open a Terminal window and get at the command line; sometimes, you want to point and click and get immediate results. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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