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Can't grasp Hero System
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Posts: 1,156,071 Arc User
I picked up the PDF for both the Hero System core books and I have read through them. When I got done, I had no clue what to do. I tried to make a character and it is reallly overwelming. I have played various rpgs and I have a hard time grasping this one. I currently run Mutants and Masterminds for all my superhero needs. So I kind of understand how powers and effect are built. I really wanted to like the Hero System but I find it hard to like something I don't get.
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You then apply modifiers to that basic cost.
If you want your energy blast to affect an area it increases teh cost.
In most games teh GM is expected to set a maximum power level, generally based on the active points in the power. So one has to decide whether to purchase more dice of energy blast, or to expand the capabilities of fewer dice through advantages, such as area effect.
Limitations on powers change how many points you actually pay for a power but dont affect the active points. Your energy blast with area effect has all of its active points even if you have taken a real cost reducing limitation that you can only use it while wielding your magic staff.
The difference between active and real point costs has been the single most common question I have had new players ask me over teh years so I hope that this helps.
If you provide more specific examples of your points of confusion I would be delighted to help.
It looks like the Hero System Basic Rulebook is a 'lite' version of Hero; I've never actually seen the book, though.
I was trying to stat up my Mutants and Masterminds hero (a Superman inspired hero) for the Hero System and I don't know what the what is good and what is bad in the system. I don't have a clue of what values I should use for Endurance, what my Strength should be, What should my DCV should be, ect.. I even asked on the board what Superman would look like in the Hero System and all I got was the game master chooses the power cap and that would determine what is a good score and what is not a good score for that campaign.
It just seems so overly complicated but that maybe because I am use to MnM.
1) A 'standard' Hero game has attacks at 8-12 DC, and is roughly equivalent to a 'standard' M&M game that tends to have attacks doing +8 to +12. You won't get perfectly playable characters by directly converting (very different damage mechanics), but they're roughly equivalent.
2) Str scaling (for lift purposes) in Hero is actually identical to M&M, so you can just convert straight across (i.e. a brick in M&M with Str 34, Super-Str 5, has an effective Str of 59 for lifting purposes, which we can round to 60). Note that 60 str == 12 DC, though not all examples will work as conveniently.
3) Endurance and Recovery should be whatever you need to be able to use your powers comfortably. This takes some practice to estimate, but a typical fight probably lasts 5-10 phases, so you should have enough endurance to last that long.
4) How much CV you want depends on how the GM sets world benchmarks, but 1 point of CV difference is about as significant as 2 points of skill difference in M&M.
You can also grab a character sheet, an "Intro to the Hero System" (about two-thirds of the way down the page) and a two-page combat summary here for free: http://www.herogames.com/freeStuff.htm
Good journey.
Rattletrap
The Hero System was created by a math genius, one day, when he was bored in math class.
It really takes a player that has made a character to sit down with ya and help ya make your first character.
Then the sublime, mathematical beauty of the Hero System manifests itself in this simple concept: with enough points you can recreate/create a likeness of any fictional character ever imagined from Dr. Who, James Bond, Superman, Mu'ad Dib, Dark Pheonix, Akira, Bruce Lee, Patton, Perseus, Hercules, Neo, The Road Warrior, Ang, Spider-man, Batman or Robocop , the Predator, The Terminator...you get my point I think.
And i love the "Writes" nickname. Good stuff.
If you have any other questions either post here or create new topics. Happy to help where we can.
Rattletrap
I remember doing that :cool:
Honestly, it's actually kinda funny when you think about it.
People who were playing a "Role Playing Game" (a game centered on IMAGINATION),
were having problems getting around the MATH behind the game to come up with a concept to "fit the math".
Maybe it was because in it's day Champions was one of the first to do away with "pre-designed" concepts of powers and let the player deal with that.
The beauty of Champions was you could:
To this day it remains one of my favorite RPG's of all time.
(It was also the main reason i payed for a LTS up front sight unseen, as i didn't get into closed beta)
It's also the main reason i'm a cranky fussbudget about CO's current incarnation/power structure.
I was expecting something more like the PnP (4th ED.) ver.
Oh well...
4th edition: 215 pages rules, 59 pages on running a campaign, 70 pages world background. Basically 274 pages rules.
5th edition: 360 pages rules (includes campaign stuff above), or about 1/3 more.
5th edition revised: 592, apparently (I don't have a copy)
6th edition: 448 pages character creation, 308 pages combat and adventuring (756 pages total). Roughly equivalent to 5th in what it covers.
For my superhero stuff, I just run Mutants and Masterminds myself. Nice to see a fellow MnM player, by the way.
*ba-dump-ch!*
On a more serious note, I am curious about the rules and accessibility, too. I'm being cautious about investment into the books.
I'd have to agree with this, as new players in games I've run and played in over the last while have depended on experienced players to write their characters for them. One player in a game I run has played for about two years and still does not have a clue how the system works.
I remember on some forum somewhere where "concerned" parents were running pnp rpg's down as a "waste of time." Once defender cited Champions as an example of an rpg that not only stimulated creativity but required junior to learn more math than any other pastime he was likely to engage in.
I think the OP may be in deep because he's attempting to convert a character .. this is an exercise that's tough for any game to game conversion. Have gander at Champions 6th and check in the back, you can piece together a close approximation of your character. Pay for a bit so the system gets comfortable and then tune the character later.
I have to confess I am a gross offender of writing peoples characters for them and the fact that those same people just can't seem to be bothered to actually learn how the game works. There was even a case where I was accused of being grossly OPed compared with everyone else and the accusers even confronted the GM about it. The GM then defended me while dissing the idiots by stating the only reason WHY I "seemed" to be more powerful was because I was *gasp* using the game mechanics to my advantage and they could be just as powerful if they were willing to learn how the damn system worked instead of relying on the experienced players telling them how many dice to roll and for what. :rolleyes:
Still boggles me to this day that math I learned in grade school confounds so many. I mean how hard is it to add X to Y and then divide by Z? The mere mention of math to some causes their eyes to glaze over and for them to start drooling.
Oh sorry......./rant off
Its a real shame there aren't more knowledgeable people like those who have posted in this thread that live in my area.
and for the record......I am pretty entrenched in the BBB (aka 4th ed). I bought the 5th and have used bits and pieces but by and large I found the 4th ed to be the best at covering all you need. Haven't even cracked open a 6th ed book because I see no reason to buy it.
"Where is this Oo-tah you speak of?"
Its that wasteland between Colorado and Nevada :rolleyes:
and sadly yes, its also a gaming desert.
My advice: grab a sourcebook with a bunch of character writeups. Conquerors, Killers, and Crooks is my favorite, but anywhere where you can see some characters actually built--most of the Champions sourcebooks have a few character writeups in them. In fact, most of the characters have a stat block, a plain English writeup of what their powers do, and some notes on their tactics (for the smart NPCs, this will clue you in on how to use their powers effectively).
Use the premade characters to learn the system, and then use them as templates to modify when creating your own characters. Don't try to create a character from scratch unless there's a HERO system veteran in the room.
Excellent advice!
I was lucky enough to learn the game from Glenn Thain at a convetion when Champions was first released, so I learned from a vet right out of the gate...
But none of my RP group ever had the Champions book and no one even tried to make a character without me there to crunch the numbers. They loved the game, as long as I was the one running it so they didn't have to deal with the math...
But once you get it down, the game is an amazing amount of fun! I used to spend hours just making different characters....
Now I do that in CO!
Yes. The Hero System Basic Rulebook, mentioned earlier in the thread.
https://www.herogames.com/viewItem.htm?itemID=242420
RIght.
I made over 1000 mathematically balanced Champions characters, each with a full color picture.
Creating characters, combined with the mathematics involved in combat, allowed me to memorized the Hardbound Blue Champions book (3rd Ed???, the one BEFORE that crappy fuzion junk) so much that I played for 5 years completely from memory.
The fraction division and mutliplication, multiforms, Elemental controls, variable power pools, exponential values like strength, and studying the bell curve probability of 1D6 and 3D6 rolls helped my mathematics out a lot. I heartily recommend teaching children how to play Champions just for the math skills involved in playing the game.
I also did a strength chart for all strength values from 0 to 150 for showing exactly how much a certain strength value could be. I also did the same thing with electricity and fire to show how each 5 points of an energy blast is double the amps or heat content of an attack, and so on.
And the OLD vehicle rules from the FIRST edition of Champions II sucked so bad, and were so hard to comprehend, they were probably the worst thing ever put out for Champions, except adding FUZION. Thank god the 2nd Edition of Champions II fixed the vehicle rules.
Good advice, but for any general PnP game. Best way to learn the system is to use the templates provided in teh book, see how they assembled it, look at their example of gameplays (most PnP games have at least one section devoted tot hat and even several supplement books may have it) and other features. It honestly helps the most to see it in action.
Copy a template, see how it was made, then in the example of play, follow along rolling dice yourself to get a feel and idea.
A player wants a certain power concept and then breaks that concept down in order to construct the in game power from the various building block effects provided. There might not be a Circle of Primal Dominion power but you can certainly build it.
For example, in M&M I can buy a generic "Blast" power. I can describe it any way I want; a Fire blast or an Ice blast work identically within the rules. All else is window-dressing and descriptive narrative elements, really. By default, it's a single-target power with default accuracy, usable once per turn/round. The power's Rank determines both Range and Strength of the attack.
If I want to affect an Area, there's an Extra for that (with several KINDS of area to choose from) - to vary the Area, which is normally based on Rank as well, I can apply the extra to only SOME of the ranks in Blast.
...
I poked my head into a Champions rulebook once. 3E, I think. And, even though I'm a math-loving point-monkey sort of gamer, the sheer breadth of what's covered, is indeed a bit intimidating at first. I've been warned more than once, "bring a calculator to make your character. It's not that the mathis hard - it's that calcualtors have better memory than people. And nothing sucks quite like forgetting to add that sixteen-and-a-half-point power into your running total ... halfway through a four-hundred-point character."
M&M does this too. The GM simply says "sure, keep it to PL10, and however you want to describe it, you can.
There's a few of us kickin' around.
My first character was a Spider-man clone, and not very well realized at that. He became my favourite character to play, in a 5+ year long campaign, but only after several rewrites and updates as I learned the system. I spent my first year in Champions writing up dozens upon dozens of different characters (only a scant few ever even saw NPC status), which was fun ('cause I actually love math), and helped me learn the (admittedly much less complex, back then) system very well. From that point, I never really thought about how hard the system was for new players with each new edition, though I did find myself running more than one campaign in which I as GM took on the mantle of writing up my players' characters for them.
So for the new player looking at 6th edition, I mostly agree with many of the people here who suggest that you start by using a pre-made character from one of the Hero System books/supplements, and concentrate on learning the combat, skill rolls, and all the gameplay mechanics. Once you become comfortable with that, then you can start deconstructing the characters you have been playing and adapting them, or creating your own.
I will say that having read through the books once already will become useful down the road; everything may be confusing now, but once you start learning the game, the things you read way back when will start to resurface and make sense.
It sounds like a lot of work to play a game, but, in my opinion (and obviously in others' opinions as well), it's totally worth it; for one game I was running, I made as an NPC ... "Letter-man" from the Electric Company in the '70's ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UOqSQdpgRI ). Try that with any other game!
-Reverend Spith