RandomCasualty at [unixtime wrote:1126671082[/unixtime]]I'm reasonably familiar with GURPS, so I'm curious as to what HERO does better than GURPS and how.
Mmm...
I'm a big GURPS fan, here. I have literally a hundred GURPS books, not including duplicates, or Fourth Edition (which faces some of these shortcomings).
I also have nearly a dozen BESM books, including four differrent versions of the game.
...And I have three of the four revisions and at least two varints of each for HERO (Champions).
I like point based games - they allow me to put game rules to a setting which came out of a book, the silver screen, or my head.
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Specifically answering your question: Hero has combat rules which are much more detailed, and yet less detailed than GURPS.
GURPS combat is very binary - you get shot, you die. There's a few hitpoints, but they merely represent whether you're bruised, or are missing large chunks of your physical body. Abilities are skill based more than ability, and the Supers/abilities were made in a version long ago - and never updated or rebalanced. This was an achilles heel for the game.
HERO is based up the precept that hitpoints - Fatigue - represent your effectiveness in the world, rather than whether you've been obliterated or not. There is
two or more hitpoint systems concurrently, and all of the defaults set to not doing permanent damage. The standard barroom brawl leaves nothing but emotional scars, Joe Average has a good chance of surviving. Abilities scale nonlinerly. However, their skills either rule or suck, and several of the stats don't really do anything.
GURPS balances the world based upon what a human can do or know; HERO balances the world upon the basic 'Blast' ability cost and effectiveness. All Abilities in HERO are based on this... So there isn't really a way to make one set of plusses and minuses turn out to be 'more efficient' than another.
Any further questions?
Oh! And HERO is all about making the deck ahead of time: Once characters and settings are built, playing the game is really easy: All the math is already done. Unfortunately, deckbuilders aren't happy unless they can make their charges based combo character who breaks so rule. *sigh*
-Crissa