Well, as anyone might have guessed, life has been a little hectic lately, so I’ve not been keeping up with my blogging, which I’ll have to admit is a great shame.
Having listened to (most of) the latest offering from the guys at the Limited Edition podcast, and partway through it there was a brief interlude where Hero System 6th Edition was discussed.
Now, being the RP-fiend that I am, I couldn’t help but decide that I needed to put my thoughts about that system down, and this seemed like a good place to do it.
What is Hero System?
Well, it’s a roleplaying system that was originally designed for a Superhero game, and has grown into a generic system that can be used for any genre you’d care to think of. Importantly, I don’t mean that it can be adapted to fit any genre – I mean that the game as written can be used for any game you can imagine.
It is an incredibly powerful set of tools but, like all powerful tools, it has some drawbacks.
How does the game work?
This is the sort of thing you could write a six-thousand word essay on. It’s a point-build system, and everything gets purchased using the points. Skills, powers, stats, you name it, you pay points to have it. There are 17 distinct statistics for a character, an insane number of skills and an effectively infinite variety of powers that can be constructed. Dice rolling in the game is, unfortunately, a combined “high and low” system. Roll high to determine effects, roll low to determine success. Success rolls are all based around a 3d6 roll vs target number – the lower the target number, the harder the task is, so “bonuses” increase the target number, making it easier to succeed. Once you’ve got your head round that, though, it’s actually fairly simple to understand.
The combat system is quite complex, dividing a single 12-second “turn” into 1-second “segments”, on which your character may or may not be able to act, directly dependent on his Speed stat (if you have a speed of 4, you act in segments 3, 6, 9 & 12, for example). In any segment in which you get to act, you have a “phase” (turn, go, chance to take an action), and various actions use up some of all of your activity for your phase. So far so good, though it does mean that high-speed characters (who, admittedly, will have spent a LOT of points getting the stat that high) have the potential to dominate the action. The choice of actions is huge, covering pretty much every possible eventuality.
As I’ve said previously, superhero games tend to get judged by me on their ability to simulate a particular character of mine, and, true to form, I’ve dug in and started trying to model Shadowe using this system. And it works. Oh, how it works. In fact, it works so well that I keep refining things, adjusting the particular advantages, limitations and even entire powers, just because I can make it better, more accurate. And, because of the complex nature of the system, I went ahead and purchased the Hero Builder application, which lets me do it all on my computer (which, considering that the character creation system is very maths intensive, is a VERY good thing).
Now, at this point, it’s worth me mentioning that I’ve never actually played the system. I’ve never seen it in action, and I have no idea how it pans out at the gaming table – I intend to change this as soon as possible, but for the moment, I have no idea what the experience will be like.
It’s worth noting that the game comes in two books: Character Creation and Combat & Adventuring. Both books are hardbound with glossy paper. Book 1 is all about the rules that let you make your character, and is a good two inches thick. It contains nothing but rules for making your character, in incredible detail. Book 2 is about 2/3rds the size of the first one, and is all about the rules for combat, the environment and so forth.
There is also a “Basic Rules” book, which I also got my hands on, which covers the bare essentials of the system, and is a great aid for creating characters and quick rules references. I’m extremely glad I got it.
Now, the downsides. The biggest problem with a freeform system like this is that it is essential that you have a good idea about the character and abilities you want that character to have, before you even pick up the book. Creating a character without having an idea of what you want the character to be able to do (and pretty detailed idea, at that), is an exercise in futility. So my advice is to pick concept first, and the more detailed the better, because what the Hero System lets you do is create that concept in extreme detail. In the interests of game balance, it might be weaker than you originally intended (particularly if you have lot of powers – since your points have to be spread around more, the individual powers are going to be less, well, powerful).
On balance, if you’re looking for a system that lets you tell freeform stories with minimal rules, this one is NOT the system for you. Alternatively, if you like a well-balanced system where you can control every aspect of your character’s capabilities, not being restricted to the “powers” that the game lets you have, then it actually doesn’t get more comprehensive than this. I certainly fall into the latter group – I love options, but I love rules that work to make those options fit with the options everyone else has. I love this system, even though I’ve never played it (I will persuade my Wednesday night group to dig in and have a go at some point), and I can’t get over the flexibility of it. There are other generic systems out there, certainly, but they tend to generally be quite freeform in some aspects (not all of them, I know) – Hero System is fully unified.
I know that this system is not for everyone – my wife prefers either rigid structure to her games, or incredibly freewheeling, rules-light games, and while the combat rules of Hero System are clearly delineated, the character creation rules are so utterly open-ended that she can’t always decide what she wants from a character, which makes building them pretty difficult.
If crunching numbers and the prospect of fully detailed and well-balanced abilities appeals to you, though, this is a good system.
One other thing that puts people off about the Hero System is that the core rulebooks, at about 3 ½ inches thick, taken together, are actually imposing. They look daunting. Well, the Basic Rules are a soft-cover 138 page book, and contain everything you actually need to play the game. The core rules themselves just provide more options.
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