The HERO system is awesome.

[Surgo]

I got the 6th edition HERO books, and this is way more flexible and usable than both high-level D&D and low-level D&D. My group is currently transferring our campaign to it.

And, uh, that's all really. Just wanted to shout out about how awesome this is.

[Prak]

Isn't HERO the really clunky, flavourless textbook of a game system that can stop a bullet?

Or was that Champion?

[Surgo]

The 5th edition book could stop a bullet, but I wouldn't really call it clunky. I've heard it called something of a "meta-system" for building your own system (the DM has to provide extensive rules as to what you can and can't do beforehand), and that sounds pretty accurate to me.

As for flavorless, the 6th edition books have some of the best art I've ever seen in game books.

[PoliteNewb]

Isn't HERO the really clunky, flavourless textbook of a game system that can stop a bullet?

Or was that Champion?

Champions is a superhero game using the HERO engine...it was originally published as a standalone, but at some point the whole thing was just published as "the HERO system".

I bought the 5th edition, and honestly I find it a lot more confusing to work with than the old 1980's softback of Champions that I still have kicking around.

How's the 6th edition, in terms of both mechanics and "readability"? I see on the wiki site they got rid of figured characteristics? That seems like a pretty major change.

[Finkin]

As for flavorless, the 6th edition books have some of the best art I've ever seen in game books.

If this is the case, maybe there will be a mass migration of Paizo fans.

[hogarth]

How's the 6th edition, in terms of both mechanics and "readability"? I see on the wiki site they got rid of figured characteristics? That seems like a pretty major change.

All the same characteristics are there, you just have to buy them a la carte, similar to how Mutants & Masterminds works.

If this is the case, maybe there will be a mass migration of Paizo fans.

Paizo's main product is D&D modules. There's not much point in buying D&D modules if you're going to have to rewrite them in HERO terms, although I know at least one person who's doing it.

http://paizo.com/paizo/messageboards/co ... HeroSystem

[mean_liar]

Any decent effects-based system will do the trick.

HERO has the advantage of having a gritty wound mechanic, as opposed to MnM's "pulp-only" method.

[Finkin]

If this is the case, maybe there will be a mass migration of Paizo fans.

Paizo's main product is D&D modules. There's not much point in buying D&D modules if you're going to have to rewrite them in HERO terms, although I know at least one person who's doing it.

http://paizo.com/paizo/messageboards/co ... HeroSystem

Lies. Everyone knows that the Pathfinder fanbase buys the books for the pretty, pretty pictures.

That has to be the reason, because it sure as hell isn't for their solid game mechanics.

[MfA]

HERO has the advantage of having a gritty wound mechanic, as opposed to MnM's "pulp-only" method.

Advantage to some, for me there are few words to predispose me against a rule system faster than "gritty".

[kzt]

HERO has the advantage of having a gritty wound mechanic, as opposed to MnM's "pulp-only" method.

I love HERO, but the damage system is still much more adept at doing superheros than normals with guns. But doing normals with guns in a non-stupid way is actually pretty hard and I can't think of a decent approach that isn't insanely clunky.

[hogarth]

Any decent effects-based system will do the trick.

HERO has the advantage of having a gritty wound mechanic, as opposed to MnM's "pulp-only" method.

None of the Champions games I ever played in were "gritty" (resistant defenses are cheap and Stun is easy to recover). Maybe the game has changed since my day, though.

[Username17]

I genuinely don't even know what "gritty" even means. But killing attacks and autofire being what they are, people occasionally take really big piles of Body damage and explode. But by and large yeah, player characters normally just take Stun damage, and stun damage recovers completely the next "scene" even if you get KOed.

-Username17

[hogarth]

I genuinely don't even know what "gritty" even means. But killing attacks and autofire being what they are, people occasionally take really big piles of Body damage and explode.

When I was GMing, my reading of the rules for the Force Field power was that as soon as you're stunned your force field goes down. I changed my mind after an incident where an NPC was stunned by the first shot from a machine gun and reduced to a fine red mist by the remaining shots.

[Red_Rob]

HERO is a toolkit more than a game. Like most toolkits it sits on a sliding scale with "easy to use" at one side, and "powerful/flexible" at the other. I'd put HERO pretty far on the Flexible side, with the downside being it has some pretty steep math crunch to learn before you can really use it well (multipowers and variable pools boggled me a little when I first got the game aged 16).

My main issue with the system is the amount of work you have to put into setting up a campaign. Creating all the background organisations, working out all the racial, cultural and occupational package deals, creating a list of martial arts and weapons, it can be a lot of work. Especially if the campaign falls apart after two sessions

[mean_liar]

"Gritty" in the sense that it can be lethal for low-power games and rewarded clever melee tactics with it's OCV/DCV/rider effects tradeoffs in the various melee maneuvers. However, I was thinking of it in context of fantasy.

For straight men-in-tights superheroics I think it's complexity is a pile of shit since yes, resistant defenses, piles of STUN, CON (limitation: only for Stun calcs) or whatever the hell else is all over the place.

[TarkisFlux]

Any chance of more specific reasons for / examples of the awesome there Surgo?

[Surgo]

HERO has the advantage of having a gritty wound mechanic, as opposed to MnM's "pulp-only" method.

Advantage to some, for me there are few words to predispose me against a rule system faster than "gritty".

The different combat rules are pretty much entirely optional, and they don't expect you to use every one of them.

[Josh_Kablack]

The 5th edition book could stop a bullet,.

The ballistic resistance of reFred has been demonstrated as being not quite that good:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3Wmj46S5qo

[CCarter]

There's not much point in buying D&D modules if you're going to have to rewrite them in HERO terms, although I know at least one person who's doing it.

This site as a pile of very old D&D modules that someone rewrote for Fantasy Hero...
http://www.kestrelarts.com/gamedls.html

[hogarth]

There's not much point in buying D&D modules if you're going to have to rewrite them in HERO terms, although I know at least one person who's doing it.

This site as a pile of very old D&D modules that someone rewrote for Fantasy Hero...
http://www.kestrelarts.com/gamedls.html

Sure, but at a guess, the guy probably bought them in the first place for playing D&D.

[Psychic Robot]

Can you go into detail about the wound system?

[Surgo]

Sure. To have it make sense, I'll go over basic combat.

For combat, there are the following relative attributes: OCV (your pluses to hit), DCV (how hard you are to hit), BODY, and STUN. (Note that attributes are generally quite cheap, and there are a lot more of them than in a game like D&D -- they don't mean quite the same thing). There's two types of damaging attacks: normal attacks and killing attacks. Which see the most use depends on the type of game you're running (supers games generally use mostly normal attacks).

To make either a normal or killing attack, you roll 3d6 and subtract it from 11 + your OCV; that number is the highest DCV you can hit. There's all sorts of situational modifiers you can add or the GM can choose to use for the game (if I was running, I'd give everyone a +1 or +2 to their OCV for describing their action really awesome). Once you hit, what happens is slightly different for normal and killing attacks:
[*] With a normal damage attack, you roll your d6s. The total is the amount of STUN you do, and the amount of BODY you do depends on which numbers came up on the dice (1 -> 0, 2-5 -> 1, 6 -> 2).
[*] With a killing damage attack, roll your d6s. The total is the amount of BODY you do, and then roll 1/2d6 and multiply that by the total, that's the amount of STUN you do.

You also have defense stats -- when you take damage, subtract your defense stats from the damage taken (this can reduce it to zero). You need to pay a little more for defense from killing attacks.

One neat thing is that attacks are actually measured in "damage classes", so a damage class 5 normal attack will roll a lot more dice than a damage class 5 killing attack, and the GM can slide up or down the dice equivalence based on how effective they want the attack types to be compared to each other.

Anyway, on to the details of the "wound system" -- this is a number of optional rules you can play with.

Wounding: you have to make an EGO roll, or in your next phase (kind of like SR initiative passes) you can't make an offensive action. It's recommended that this rule be applied to NPCs but not PCs.

Hit Locations: A table to roll on for hit locations that have multipliers for BODY or STUN. You can make called shots, if allowed, and you take various penalties to OCV depending on where you want to hit. There's other rules located here and there to make you perhaps want to aim for something other than the head.

Impairing: A rule paired with hit locations where bad things happen to people who get their hands blown off. See what I said about earlier rules -- if there's a really tough guy who is massacring everybody with a laser beam shot out of his hands, it can make sense to aim for his hands instead of his head.

I'm bored of typing now, but there's also rules for knockdown, knockback, bleeding...all sorts of stuff that you can choose to use or not use. It's really easy to plug in or out of the combat system.

[Josh_Kablack]

I got the 6th edition HERO books,

Good.

I haven't gotten around to checking HERO 6th out yet, as I have been working like crazy and actually you know GAMING a bunch lately.

The Champs Forefront game is in FrED, and as a group we decided that it would be too much work (not to mention a couple of pricey hardcovers in a tough economy) to update the existing campaign, but I have heard many good things about it.

And for editions to date, Hero reFrED (5th, revised) is only about as different from Champions 1st ed as 3.0 D&D is from 3.5 D&D, so I think we can live without effective Force Wall characters for the time being.

and this is way more flexible and usable than both high-level D&D and low-level D&D.

As a raving HERO fan, I'll give you more flexible than low-level and more usable than high-level.

Although, I'm not so sure about being more usable than low-level, or more flexible than high level.

My group is currently transferring our campaign to it.

Unless you are the only HERO neophyte in this group, I have to ask flat out: Are you crazy?

I loves me some HERO, but the complexity and learning curve is such that there ain't no way I would try to push it on an existing game group that didn't already have a couple of members who are familiar with it.

And even with a group that had a number of folks familiar with it, I'm not sure I'd want to convert an existing campaign midstream. (See above note about not converting HERO 5th campaign to Hero 6th despite similarities.)

And, uh, that's all really. Just wanted to shout out about how awesome this is.

Dude, you might wait for the honeymoon to end. HERO may be the best universal rules-heavy system out there, but it has issues, and there are many times that rules-light or non-universal systems are much better choices.

and Here's the link to the thread that links to most of the rest of what I have said about Champions/HERO on this board in the past.

[Surgo]

The group is three people total, high level D&D, and we all feel that immunities are making the game not-fun anymore. So I don't think it's so crazy. A not-fun game isn't a game at all. HERO happens to be in vogue here at the moment.

[ScottS]

My experience with using Hero 5th for a fantasy game was negative. I think the combat system was OK (d20-ish with 3d6 randomizer etc. mentioned above), but their point-based char-gen system applied to fantasy is kind of terrible.

The game makes the assumption that all characters from all genres can be placed on a single point scale, and that fantasy characters are intrinsically "less powerful" than comic-book superheroes (I don't have the rulebook any more, but I think the pt values were something like 500 for Champions chars vs 100 for Fantasy Hero chars). When you build your fantasy character, you're buying all the same sort of abilities that superheroes have from the main rules, but in order to make them fit your reduced budget, you have to apply multiple "limitations" on them to get the point costs down ("can only use while holding a sword/wand" etc.). The math isn't particularly taxing, just adding/subtracting fractions and multiplying the base cost by the total. You can also standardize it to some extent by making assumptions like "all magic spells have the -x1/4 'must chant out loud to use this ability'" and such. It starts to get silly when you have to engage in this rinky-dink point-mongering every time you want to upgrade an ability or buy a new one. Essentially, you're continuously throwing all these fractions around in the effort to keep your char balanced against characters from another game/genre that you're not even playing (Champions).