Possible New Player/GM with Questions

[AURapier]

Hello everyone.

 

I've been wanting to run a superhero game for some time now and everyone always recommends Champions to me and says how wonderful a game it is. I've looked at the Hero System Core rulebook a couple of times but to be honest, it seems kinda daunting.

 

Is the system as complicated as it appears from a quick glance? Is the system easy to learn or will it require a lot of in depth reading?

[John Desmarais]

Re: Possible New Player/GM with Questions

 

Hello everyone.

 

I've been wanting to run a superhero game for some time now and everyone always recommends Champions to me and says how wonderful a game it is. I've looked at the Hero System Core rulebook a couple of times but to be honest, it seems kinda daunting.

 

Is the system as complicated as it appears from a quick glance? Is the system easy to learn or will it require a lot of in depth reading?

 

Game play is easy. Character creation, however, can be daunting. You might actually find it easier to start with the Sidekick book instead of the full rules. It trims out a lot of the more complicated options and is a bit easier to digest. Once you're familair with how things work, the full rules set isn't nearly so scary.

 

Also, ask questions. There are many people who frequent these board who've played the game for many, many, many years and can generally answer any questions you may have.

[Doc Samson]

Re: Possible New Player/GM with Questions

 

Though I agree the point based character generation system can be daunting in the beginning, once you get the hang of it you will never want to go back to another system. The flexibility to be able to create anything you can think of is addicting. As far as game play, the flow of the game is quite simple and can be gotten used to in a single session.

[RPMiller]

Re: Possible New Player/GM with Questions

 

To assist you with character creation you may also want to consider buying Hero Designer. It is a great tool for just poking around at the system and seeing how things fit together without having to do the math and worry about the crunchy bits.

[gojira]

Re: Possible New Player/GM with Questions

 

Welcome Valkyrie... er, AURapier!

 

Yes, character creation can be a bear. The rules in play are easy enough, even simpler than many other systems because they are very consistent, but it may take a couple of read throughs to sus out the important bits. There are also many combat options, which you should ignore in the beginning if you want simple play.

 

I'll second Sidekick, Hero's rules light book. It's available for $7 as a PDF. This is a pretty good deal because Sidekick can also be loaned out to players (it makes a good "Players Handbook") once you get the full rules. I'll second Hero Designer as well.

 

The other thing about Hero character creation is: cheat. Post up here and ask for help. Steal builds from other characters, tweaking here and there to personalize it to what you want. There's a bunch of stuff in the Free Stuff section of the Hero Games main page that has pre-built characters for you to steal ideas from. The Hero System Genre by Genre in particular is pretty good.

 

Also, the genre book, Champions has a "Quick Super Human Generator" section, with is also excellent for stealing from. I've made several characters here on these boards just by opening that section up and stealing builds from the tables there.

 

Finally, for the big guns, the UNTIL Superpowers Database volumes 1 and 2 give lots more ideas to steal from. It's basically a big book of tables printed up just for that purpose.

 

 

In closing, if you do go with Hero, don't be afraid to come here and ask for help. You can get good ideas and even full builds here, so it pays to ask. Take care!

[Philipe d'Oro]

Re: Possible New Player/GM with Questions

 

I'm just trying to learn my way around the system too, and I found Sidekick a great read, much easier to follow then the full rulebook. Now that I've read it though, I don't think I'll ever use it again, except hand to my players to get their feet under them. Hero Designer may actually be harder for a beginner to use then the old fashioned pencil and paper method. I can see it will be invaluable later on though.

 

What I could use is a nice, completely statted out, adventure with pregenerated PC's. (I like to be led by the hand when learning a new system.) Unfortunately all the adventures I've seen for Hero are for Pulp Hero, which seems odd, because judging from forum traffic, it's the least popular genre. If anyone knows of a good starting adventure for Fantasy Hero, please let me know.

 

PdO

[gojira]

Re: Possible New Player/GM with Questions

 

What I could use is a nice, completely statted out, adventure with pregenerated PC's. (I like to be led by the hand when learning a new system.) Unfortunately all the adventures I've seen for Hero are for Pulp Hero, which seems odd, because judging from forum traffic, it's the least popular genre. If anyone knows of a good starting adventure for Fantasy Hero, please let me know.

 

PdO

 

That's an interesting idea. There are several folks here on the boards who regularly hold demo games at Cons. I wonder if they'd be adverse to having their stuff printed up as a PDF?

 

I think a big reason why there aren't more adventures is they don't sell well. I think also both DOJ and it's customers burnt out on the all the Pulp Hero PDFs that were produced. Too many, too fast for the market to absorb. One to four PDFs per year for each genre would feel about right to me.

[The Monster]

Re: Possible New Player/GM with Questions

 

Another thing about Hero is that once you learn how things work, you prety much know how things work. There isn't a whole list of spells or feats or edges that each have their own special little rules, and while the expansions are worth reading, they won't have new rules or tricks you have to keep track of. The mechanics are consistent and robust enough to do practically anything, and to do it without much twisting or exceptions.

 

Character and power creation is scary because you have so many options, and the complexity is all front-loaded. D&D isn't so much less complex as it is easier to enter, since you start (at 1st level) with just a few abilities, which are well-defined, so the decisions are all role-playing and tactical rather than "how do I build this power?" Imagine trying to start playing D&D with a 12th-level character, and having to pick all your feats and skills and spells without ever having played the game before - and that's without even having to decide how all your spells work in the first place).

[casualplayer]

Re: Possible New Player/GM with Questions

 

Back in the day, the rule book came with an adventure where Ogre and two mooks tried to rob a bank. It was just a bare-bones excuse to brawl and break stuff, but by the end you knew the gist of the rules. I whole-heartedly recommend emulating this, if not duplicating it.

 

Also "filing the serial numbers" off The Champions rather than making characters from whole cloth will get you up and running without delving into the lengthy process of making them yourselves. A little tweak here and a little tuck there and Ironclad is now the brick your player dreamed of, and so on. There are also many websites that are massive character repositories as well, Susano's and Killer Shrike's spring to mind.

[Lucius]

Re: Possible New Player/GM with Questions

 

Much of the complication of Hero is "front loaded" - the character generation process, as opposed to actual game play.

 

You can adjust the game play, especially combat, by choosing or rejecting various optional rules. To start with, it may be best to keep it simple.

 

To get everyone familiar with the rules, it may be a good idea to first do a little "arena" style play. Simple environment, everyone just whaling away on each other. Call it a session in the Danger Room if you want to make it part of your "continuity" at all.

 

As for the person asking about Fantasy Hero adventures, do what many of us do - take a D&D module and convert it. If the underlying adventure makes sense, it will probably still make sense in Hero. Balancing the monsters may be a bit trickier - look at their OCV and DCV and ask "will the players be able to hit them? will they be able to hit the characters?" look at their attacks and ask "will they take player characters out in one shot? conversely, will they be unable to hurt the player characters?" look at their defenses and ask "will the player characters be able to hurt them? will something supposed to be tough go down too quickly? if I have a horde of small critters like goblins, is each one weak enough individually that the players will be able to wade through them eventually?"

 

Lucius Alexander

 

Palindromedary Enterprises

[Philipe d'Oro]

Re: Possible New Player/GM with Questions

 

 

To get everyone familiar with the rules, it may be a good idea to first do a little "arena" style play. Simple environment, everyone just whaling away on each other. Call it a session in the Danger Room if you want to make it part of your "continuity" at all.

 

As for the person asking about Fantasy Hero adventures, do what many of us do - take a D&D module and convert it.

 

Those are both good suggestions - thanks. Adapting an old Dungeon module is what I'm doing right now. I also appreciate the comments about balancing combat - which is also a little tricky.

 

I'm coming into Hero from d20, so I'm used to pre-fab modules, and lots of them. So I'd like to see more for the Hero system, but I can see why they don't sell well - because the system is so flexable practically every campaign has different background assumptions for magic, psionics, tech, etc. so adapting a generic module to your campaign is almost as much work as adapting a d20 module would be.

 

I guess I want that flexability more then the convenience. And yes, after a point all those splat-books make d20 much more complicated then Hero.

[ghost-angel]

Re: Possible New Player/GM with Questions

 

Fantasy Hero Battlegrounds gets you about 1/2 the way to a fully statted adventure. Provides, setting, timing and NPCs with motivations. No PCs though - that's all on you. It does assume you're using the magic system from Turakian Age, but that's pretty easily converted to whatever you need it to be.

 

Also the HERO Wiki project has spawned a group that's looking to put adventures and settings together in a cohesive manner, don't know if that particular tree has produced any fruit yet though.

[jelloflechette]

Re: Possible New Player/GM with Questions

 

To the original poster, if you haven't already, you might like to check out the Hero System overview that's available as a free PDF on the homepage:

www.herogames.com/get/HRO_int.pdf

 

It's a pretty good summary.

[AURapier]

Re: Possible New Player/GM with Questions

 

Thanks for the help guys! I picked up the main rulebook on Friday but went out of town over the weekend and didn't have time to give it much of a read. I looked for the Sidekick rules but didn't realize they were a PDF. I'll probably download that today.

 

Another thing I wanted to ask is about all of the Champions supplemental books. Are they still "current" with the new edition? I honestly didn't have a lot of time to look through them and just sort of noticed they were on the shelf. I'm assuming the provide a setting for the supers. Is that correct and is there anything new in those as far as new rules, etc or are they just idea books?

 

Thanks again guys! You've been really helpful.

[CourtFool]

Re: Possible New Player/GM with Questions

 

There is a Champions book which provides insight into how to run a supers campaign and then there is a Champions Universe book which provides a campaign setting. They have been updated to 5th edition. There is also Millennium City and Vibora Bay which provide detailed cities for your Champions Universe. You could also argue that Dark Champions and Hudson City could be useful for a four color campaign.

[ghost-angel]

Re: Possible New Player/GM with Questions

 

Thanks for the help guys! I picked up the main rulebook on Friday but went out of town over the weekend and didn't have time to give it much of a read. I looked for the Sidekick rules but didn't realize they were a PDF. I'll probably download that today.

 

Another thing I wanted to ask is about all of the Champions supplemental books. Are they still "current" with the new edition? I honestly didn't have a lot of time to look through them and just sort of noticed they were on the shelf. I'm assuming the provide a setting for the supers. Is that correct and is there anything new in those as far as new rules, etc or are they just idea books?

 

Thanks again guys! You've been really helpful.

 

Champions is the genre book, it introduces some genre tropes, ways to use the Powers within the genre (how to alter, bend, break, spindle or mutilate them to best get Superhero Gaming Goodness).

 

Everything else in the Champions Line is setting flavor (with the exception of the two sub-genre books Teen Champions and Galatic Champions; both of which also offer a healthy dose of Champions Universe information).

 

Depending on your needs one or more could be potentially helpful in getting a character, campaign or adventure off the ground.

[gojira]

Re: Possible New Player/GM with Questions

 

I have Champions, Champions Universe, VIPER and Villainy Amok, and yes they're all updated. Check carefully but I think like 80% of the books are fully updated. Most that are not are no longer in print (like the old GM screen, which I bought just because it's old school and therefore cool, and some of the obviously older adventures).

 

Sidekick is available both as a hardcopy and PDF. Which ever floats you boat, but I like the PDF because I make characters with a spreadsheet and it's convenient to have it open on the 'pooter screen next to my spreadsheet.