Hero System 6th Edition - Revisited

This is a follow-on from my last post - please excuse anything I repeat or go over again. This post should stand alone, but it might be worth taking a look at the last one, just to see how my feelings and thoughts have changed (or not).

Okay, recently I played (for the first time ever) Hero System. I've bought the 6th Edition (6E) stuff since it came out (and I have a pretty hefty collection of 5th Edition, too), and have been wanting to actually have a game for quite some time.

Well, the opportunity occured: I arranged one of my legendary weekend sessions, where a group of friends come round to my house on Friday night and leave sometime on Sunday, and in the middle there is MUCH gaming.

So, here are some thoughts about it, after the fact - I didn't make any notes while I was playing, so this is all from memory.

I ran a 5th Edition adventure (Champions Battlegrounds, in case anyone knows it), tweaked slightly to fit the 6E ruleset, and everyone was a complete novice to the system. I'm going to take various parts of the system in turn, and just let you know my thoughts.

Character Creation

I have to admit, this is where the Hero System really comes into its own. The character creation system is comprehensive. It quite literally covers everything. Want to create a spell-wielding mage, able to make the laws of physics sit down and shut up? Can do. Want to create a superhero who is faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, and able to leap tall buildings at a single bound? Go for it. Want to make a gritty secret-agent type with gadgets and gizmos? This system can accommodate you.

It's a point-buy system, with differing point totals for different power-levels, and the GM can set the "realism" of the game in various ways, too, but the long and short of it is that points mean prizes. Some of you may recall from previous posts that I like to create certain characters in different games, to see if I can squeeze the concept into the rules, and since I look at Hero System as a Superhero game (though it can be applied to any genre, since it's a completely generic system), and my Superhero Character is Shadowe, I took a stab at crafting him. Guess what? He works like a charm. The character is extremely powerful (his point total puts him somewhere in the Cosmic-level Superhero genre), but that's not the point: the point is to see if it can be done. And it can. Some of his abilities took a lot of tweaking to get right (like the fact that the more injured he is, the faster he heals), but at the end of the day I had a character I would be happy to sit down and say "This is the definitive description of Shadowe" about. Yes, this system really is that flexible.

The greatest feature of the system, to my mind, is the utterly generic "Powers". There aren't things like "Fire Blast" or "Electricity Blast" or "Firearms" in this system. All of those fall under the utterly bland name "Ranged Attack". It then becomes up to the player to determine the "special effect" of their particular version of Ranged Attack. So player 1 might say "my Ranged Attack is called Fire Blast and is a stream of flame", while player 2 says "I can summon lightning bolts to strike my targets" and player 3 says "I have a gun". Each can then tweak their Ranged Attack with various modifiers that increase and/or decrease the point cost of the power. So, player 1 might just stick the basic Ranged Attack to simulate his Fire Blast, but player 2 adds the Indirect Advantage, allowing him to strike at foes behind a wall without them getting the benefits of cover, and player 3 uses the Charges Limitatation to simulate the ammo clip of his gun, and adds the Killing Attack Advantage, to simulate the general lethality of bullets.

So yeah, making a character who can fire electromagentic radiation and particles that are summoned from another reality... is pretty trivial. It's a Ranged Attack.

The skills are comprehensive, and there are character advantages called Perks and Talents (things the character has and things the character can do, respectively), as well as Attributes (which cover everything from how strong the character is, to how quickly he can act in combat, as well as his resilience to mental, physical and energy attacks and so forth).

Another excellent thing to note is that all of these things are balanced against each other with precision - unless you go out of your way to break the game (and it's very possible to do so, but the game very clearly makes the GM the final arbiter of what's allowed and what's not), you can quite happily say that a character point spent in X offers the same utility as a character point spent in Y.

Core Mechanic

It is perhaps unfortunate that the core mechanic for this game is the way it is, but without some sort of comprehensive rewrite, I can't immediately see a good way to fix it: it's 3d6, low roll to succeed. It may just be me, but I hate low-roll mechanics. They're counterintuitive to me. Unfortunately the whole game is written this way, so changing it to a high-roll system would be problematic to say the least. That's not to say it would be impossible - I could easily make a case for changing the Target Number (which is almost invariably based on the character's Attributes) to a Bonus, and it would be pretty simple to figure out how to keep the roll total target to the same probabilities. I could do it. But I don't want to, because the game system should do it for me. This particular downfall is exacerbated by the fact that Effect Rolls, which can include Shadowrun-like numbers of d6s, need high totals. That sort of discontinuity seems jarring to me, especially when trying to teach people how to play the game: "Well, to succeed, you need to roll low, but to see how well you succeed, you need to roll high".

It also makes combat a bit of a nightmare to figure out: 11+OCV-3d6 = DCV hit.

Whu?!

Okay, to remove some of the mystique, OCV is "Offensive Combat Value" (how good you are at hitting things) and DCV is "Defensive Combat Value" (how good your target is at dodging things), but seriously... that is the simplest form they could come up with for an attack roll? How hard would it have been to have made it a high-roll system where 3d6+OCV is your attack roll, and you need to beat 10+DCV to hit the target? Because those numbers have the same probabilities as the ones in the rules. It seems to me that the creators of Hero System have become wedded to their core mechanic (sorry Mr Long, but it's true) and are refusing to change it because doing so, while it would simplify the system no end, will make it look like they're following the bandwagon (hint: D&D 3E removed the low-roll mechanic for a VERY good reason - doing the same is not a bad thing).

As you can no doubt tell, I'm really not a fan of low-rolls.

Combat

The true test of any game-system, particularly one that is meant to be quite as flexible as Hero System, is how well it handles fights. And I'll be honest, it stands up very well, if we ignore the problems I have with the game's core mechanic.

This is not to say, however, that it is without problems. It has one that leaps out screaming at me with neon signs and alarm bells, and it is this: The Attribute called Speed (SPD).

Allow me to explain. A game turn is broken down into 12 one-second "segments". Your characters SPD determined which Segments he gets to act in (when he gets to take a "Phase"). The higher your SPD, the more actions you get in a turn. And it is relatively linear: A character with SPD 2 gets to act in Segments 6 and 12. SPD 3 in 4, 8 and 12. SPD 6 in 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 and 12, and the lunatic player who burns a hundred points in SPD gets to act every Segment.

The average human has SPD 2. Most heroes have a SPD somewhere around 4-7. And any game that allows one player to act 6 times as often as another player has a problem.

This problem doesn't crop up if everyone has roughly the same SPD Attribute - in the game I ran, everyone was in the 4-6 range, and it worked out nicely, particularly since the bad guys tended to be in the same ballpark. But if someone had decided to have SPD 8, I can see that being problematic. Now, I'll admit that the game does include limiting mechanics - acting costs Endurance, and if you act more often, you'll burn through your Endurance faster - so it's not an insurmountable problem, but it is a problem. I got round it by the simple expedient of setting the SPD range I wanted the players to have, but I really dislike such heavy-handed tactics.

Everything else that springs to mind about the combat system works. It's (relatively) simple to grasp once you've got over the insanity of the core mechanic. The fact that there are two different types of damage (BODY and STUN) adds to the system as a whole - I've always had a soft spot for systems that include some form of difference between real injuries (BODY damage, in this case) and what I think of as "getting worn down by the fight" (STUN). Getting players to understand the difference and how to calculate how much they've done of each was simple, but it took a few tries before everyone was comfortable with it.

Adventuring

Now, since I didn't have a lot of time to lay out background, explain the world and setting, and generally get everyone hugely invested (we were all interested in getting down and dirty and trying out those nifty superpowers), and the amount of "out of combat adventuring" was strictly limited. The plus-side being that the game has automatic GM-prompts for things to include in adventures, in the form of Disadvantages - things like Dependent NPCs (DNPC) (think Aunt May from Spider-Man, or Lois Lane to Superman), Hunted (someone looking for you, though whether it's just to observe, to punish or to kill is up to the player), or Social Complications (the ubiquitous Secret Identity). Disadvantages are something a GM should think of including in adventures. In the game I ran, one of the PCs had a DNPC who was the character's girlfriend, and on one memorable adventure involving an amusement park, the girlfriend was there - thus automatically creating an additional source of tension for that player, as he had to decide between normal heroic action and looking out for an important person to his character.

Conclusions

As the D&D 3.5 fan that I am, Hero System 6E is unlikely to steal my affections as my game of choice. That said, though, it is a very robust system, with lots of background material and supplementary rules, and great pains have been taken to make it backwards compatible with earlier editions of the game (so it's trivial to use a 5E adventure in a 6E game, for example). The infinite flexibility of the character creation system means that you can play literally any game you want using the ruleset, with the downside that there are so many rules to take into account that you might struggle to get exactly what you want without spending hours doing so.

The core mechanic is a poor choice. While it certainly isn't flawed, there are more intuitive ways to get exactly the same results, and I would like to see the next edition of the game move in that direction, however unlikely that is. (And for anyone inclined to knowing how I would handle it, and who knows how Hero System works, I would make the base Target Number for unopposed tasks 22, with 3d6 + (current TN) as the roll for success. Penalties reduce the current TN, bonuses add to them, just as in the current game. This would keep the maths essentially the same, and would convert Hero System into a simple high-roll system. Combat would use the 3d6+OCV vs. 10+DCV I mentioned earlier.)

I will definitely be playing it again, and looking for a slower, more measured pace to the adventures I run, and I'm very glad I tried it out, but for now... my weekly game is going to stick with Pathfinder, which is the D&D 3.5 rules with improvements.