What makes a successful superhero game?

[Thomas Shey]

Agreed, it's not exactly a physics sim...
But it can be used as one, since the base assumptions of the core engine work relatively well as a physics sim.

There are more accurates ones. It's not quite off-label use, as the variety of spinoff games using the engine approach it as a physics engine, dropping the powers and replacing them with genre specific tweaks to the core engine.

The greater degree they do that, the more they tend to fail though; the assumptions baked into it as a superhero game tend to fail out if you're using any real scope outside a supers game, because they show their roots. This includes such basic things as the fact its far easier to knock someone out than kill them in the game (as compared to the real world where the inverse is, effectively, true)

You can hack on it enough to make that all go away, but it requires considerable hacking.

(Note that most games using Hero use the powers for some purpose; about the only ones that didn't were Danger International and Justice, Inc.). Oh, I guess probably not Western Hero either.

Fantasy Hero was originally a standalone, like Danger International, Robot Warriors, Star Hero, and Justice, Inc. These titles, prior to the HSR4 unification, were adapted cores, with Star Hero and Fantasy Hero being reprised for 4th, and 5th, and 6th as splats.

Like a number of other games (Traveller, RQ, and others), MacDonald and Peterson intended it to be partially a sim...


Simulation is in its roots... just not simulation of the real world as we live in it. "designed to reflect real life (as seen in comic books)" is the key element. Not all physics engines are our physics. (And, while the sheet can be told apart from later editions, it's instantly recognizable as the parent of the later editions' more streamlined sheets.)

However, Hero backs in certain elements that are superhero conventions that are not supposed to be visible to people in the setting. Such as the fact its easier to blow through a concrete wall than kill a human (because beams that do the former in the comics often hit people not avowedly superhuman physically without doing the latter. Its a baked in genre convention and has nothing to do with how the physics of the world is supposed to work from an interior view).