Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Croesus" data-source="post: 5717220" data-attributes="member: 35019">Hero is also my favorite system, and I would argue that it's in large measure because it gets the level of rules detail right for what it is trying to model. The rules for creating characters are very detailed, very granular - you can design pretty much anything you want, which gives players incredible flexibility in crafting exactly the character they want (within the limits of the genre, of course). This isn't every player's cup of tea, but for those who love to tinker, it's a major plus of the system.Yet once you get to actual play, how many times do you really have to crack open one of the books? Energy blasts use the same rules, regardless of whether you're talking about throwing a club, shuriken, Cyclops' eyebeams, or Superman's heat vision. The special effects may be different, but the basic rules don't change. Same for armor piercing attacks, explosions, area effect, no normal defense, and so on. Similarly, skill use is simple to apply. Most skills have a target number, or an opposed check. Roll the skill and compare. No checking a half page of details to see if you successfully tracked the bandits back to their hideout, or succeeded in hacking the villain's mainframe. With the exception of a few clunky systems, such as turn modes for flight or vehicle movement (rules which have been improved and streamlined with each new edition), there are very few corner cases during play, and rarely does a GM have to make a judgement call. Compare this to 3.x, where every spell, feat, skill and item seems to work differently, with different corner cases that have to adjudicated on a case by case basis. Both systems have roughly the same page count in the core books, but I find myself checking the Hero books once or twice in a game vs. constantly in a 3.x game. Fundamentally different designs, despite both systems being considered rules heavy.</blockquote>

Verification