Long time Hero players not liking 6e non-figured characteristics

[Istaran]

A couple of comments from me.....

 

1. If the argument is that people are resistant to change then why would you ever allow or support any newer versions of a game system? If your argument is that "gamers are lazy" and don't want change then you are stating that the whole CONCEPT of New Versions is flawed and the entire purpose of revision is to change (and hopefully improve) a system and if the players are "too lazy" to want to adapt to the changes then the new versions will not be successful at all. If you prefer an older version then you are free to play in that, but that doesn't make you lazy, necessarily, it just means that you don't agree with the changes that are made.

 

2. One of the reasons I would argue for the CV's and such to NOT start at 0 is that all the characteristics start at some "base" level which is considered the norm for an "average" human. That is one of the concepts of the game. Not to mention that DCV 3 is the same difficulty as hitting a target hex so your "base" DCV makes you as hard to hit as a stationary object. The same could be argued for the MCV's, even people with no psychic ability would conceivably have some defense against it, and some ability to use psychic powers if they were to obtain them in some fashion (the wide open world of HERO SYSTEM provides MANY ways in which a person could obtain psychic powers without necessarily gaining any ability to use them). In game terms OMCV/DMCV 3 is simply considered the "normal average" baseline just like INT 10 is considered the same. You could definitely set all stats to 0 if you wanted and then require every player to buy them all up from there if you wanted (providing bonus points to compensate for this need) , but since starting stats can be sold back for points this really wouldn't have any net effect on character building. Of course to each their own.

Starting everything at 0 would (by default) substantially affect the costs of multiform, duplication, summon, follower, vehicle and base. It would add 186 to the cost of every character (which is fine for PCs/NPCs as you just add 186 to their starting points), which adds about 37 base active points to those powers/perks. You could maybe make this even more extreme by making people buy the standard human senses. (And maybe 5 points to have the default limbs. 0 point characters can be senseless spheres)

[Old Man]

I have to say, while decoupling is a highly visible change, I wouldn't call it drastic. Especially when, again, it fixes a rules area that was obviously, mathematically, broken. Drastic would be going off 3d6 or getting rid of half the powers in the powers list.

[PaycheckHero]

I imagine this topic has been beaten to death repeatedly since before the publication of 6e, but I just started looking a 6e so this is very much a topic of interest to me. If nothing else, I'll have to eventually decide if I'm going to adopt 6e, and really one reason I finally created a forum account is to find out what has been happening with both Hero Games and the Hero System recently.

 

There seem to be two separate discussions going on: what the effects of eliminating figured characteristics is, and whether those effects are on the whole good or bad. It would probably be a lot more useful to discuss them separately. In particular, it would probably help people like me who are late to the discussion and are still trying to work out what what it means for their games. Keeping in mind that I haven't actually used 6e yet, the most obvious consequence seems to be that characteristics are more expensive. That in turn seems to have several further consequences.

 

The standard point levels have been bumped up to compensate, but one thing I haven't seen yet is anyone discussing how the balance between powers and characteristics has been altered. Given that powers remain largely the same costs and effects, I would think that the most effective thing for many characters to do would be to put some of the consolation points in powers rather than buy characteristics all the way back to what they would have been in 5e. I would also expect it to be more efficient to be more selective about what characteristics you buy; for example, I'd think that with the new cost structure, bricks would be advised to buy their OCV back to 5th ed levels, but not buy dex and DCV all the way back but rather put some of those points elsewhere. And the consequence of that seems like it would be a greater variety of character abilities, but also perhaps less well-rounded characters (since the free figured points tended to be spent in one particular way that encouraged dex to correlate with spd, stun to correlate with con and thus the ability to resist being stunned, and so on).

 

I'd be interested to know if those guesses match the experiences of those who have actually run 6e. I can think of other consequences, but that'll do for now.

[PaycheckHero]

And you're focusing on the "less important than" rather than the "coming after" or "or resulting from" in your comment.

Why yes' date=' yes I am. It did after all suit my argument and word play to do so.

You're arguing statistics and numbers.

I'm arguing game mechanics for a game based on statistical models (bell curve, effect) and numbers (point costs)...so...yeah, I am.

I'm referring to people. People generally are lazy' date=' don't want to have to change from comfortable ways of doing, or deal with change. [/quote'] This same argument comes up a lot in my line of work (software development). "We can't change things even if we should, because our users are stupid / lazy / set in their ways / or otherwise resistant to even positive changes". It's usually self-serving bs, that is often more true of the speaker than of the general user base they cast such flaws upon. But, even taking this as a given...if your point is correct and people are generally lazy, then it follows that they will do what is easiest / requires the least amount of effort on their part. Figureds require you to remember more "hidden" information in the form of additional calculations and math checking. Further, if new material is being published in a new edition and you don't want to make your own material or modify the published material, then it makes sense to use whatever the current edition is in its entirety. Finally, it takes effort to hold a strong opinion and more effort to type complaints about something into a message board and push a button...more effort than not doing so at least. Therefore, if the "people are lazy" argument is valid, the same lazy people would not care that much about Figureds going a way, would not complain about it on message boards, would not spare the effort to think about making their own custom implementation of the new edition plus figureds, would not consider modifying published material to "retcon" figureds back in, and would not mind no longer having do extra calculations and point checking for figureds.

I still work with 5th. It isn't a matter of the changes. I haven't seen a copy of 6th to peruse to make reference to full on changes. Since I don't have access to those rules I have refused to look at lists of what exactly was changed. The reason I haven't looked at 6th is purely financial.

And I fully respect that. If you like 5e or it doesn't make financial system to move to 6e' date=' then the sensible thing is to stay on 5e. I did a tremendous amount of content for and ran a lot of games in 5e; its a great system, flaws included. Same for 4e. I'm not an upgrade or get out snob. Bottom line, I'd far rather you and your group play some version of the HERO System than some other game entirely. I'm just really, really tired of the same old figured characteristic remonstrances.[/quote']

 

I've studied under developers/implementers and all of them had the same horror stories. "I don't have time to learn this. I have to get back to working." Even though what they were being taught was how the job was going to go.

 

As for gamers being lazy, why do you think so many of them play D&D and nothing else? I've played Hero since '83. And several other systems. This in the one I prefer for supers. For Fantasy I prefer SPI's old DragonQuest. Right now I'm lucky if I get a game in at all, which is why I'm writing.

 

And if you're tired of the discussion, why participate in it?

Wow--someone who knows what DragonQuest was, let alone plays it? I have the book, but never got a chance to actually play it. Admittedly, it looked like it would be a lot more playable with the supplement which I gather only exists as a bootleg draft.

[ghost-angel]

I've built and run in several 6E campaigns - one Fantasy (with multiple PCs per player no less), one Standard Superheroic, one Heroic Time Traveler, one Teen Superhero, and am in the building stages of a High Powered Superheroic.

 

For the lower point characters, the difference and choices are too drastic, buying some fantasy abilities (Paladin abilities, or Cleric's spell casting) became a little easier, and more customizable. The superheroic ones the deviations from what they'd look like under 5E vs 6E deviate more. I'm able to focus on specific abilities more, like if I don't need lots of END, but I still want a higher CON, I don't end up with a high END that garners little benefit. On the other hand, it's nice that I can buy up OCV past what my DEX would get me under 5E with the some points I'm not spending in DCV (which is below what my DEX would get me under 5E) with the high powered character (OCV 9, DCV 5, DEX 18) - it's also nice that it's pure OCV, and not "Skill Levels" which operate under slightly different (if similar) rules.

[Tasha]

I imagine this topic has been beaten to death repeatedly since before the publication of 6e, but I just started looking a 6e so this is very much a topic of interest to me. If nothing else, I'll have to eventually decide if I'm going to adopt 6e, and really one reason I finally created a forum account is to find out what has been happening with both Hero Games and the Hero System recently.

 

There seem to be two separate discussions going on: what the effects of eliminating figured characteristics is, and whether those effects are on the whole good or bad. It would probably be a lot more useful to discuss them separately. In particular, it would probably help people like me who are late to the discussion and are still trying to work out what what it means for their games. Keeping in mind that I haven't actually used 6e yet, the most obvious consequence seems to be that characteristics are more expensive. That in turn seems to have several further consequences.

 

The standard point levels have been bumped up to compensate, but one thing I haven't seen yet is anyone discussing how the balance between powers and characteristics has been altered. Given that powers remain largely the same costs and effects, I would think that the most effective thing for many characters to do would be to put some of the consolation points in powers rather than buy characteristics all the way back to what they would have been in 5e. I would also expect it to be more efficient to be more selective about what characteristics you buy; for example, I'd think that with the new cost structure, bricks would be advised to buy their OCV back to 5th ed levels, but not buy dex and DCV all the way back but rather put some of those points elsewhere. And the consequence of that seems like it would be a greater variety of character abilities, but also perhaps less well-rounded characters (since the free figured points tended to be spent in one particular way that encouraged dex to correlate with spd, stun to correlate with con and thus the ability to resist being stunned, and so on).

 

I'd be interested to know if those guesses match the experiences of those who have actually run 6e. I can think of other consequences, but that'll do for now.

The biggest change you will see with 6e characters is that Dex is suddenly less important. You don't need to buy your dex up to the stratosphere to have high SPD, CV and dex rolls. So esp in Superheoic campaigns I have found Dex has gone down to nearly heroic levels.

 

As for the idea people will take their extra 50 superheroic character points and spend them on powers doesn't wash in the real world. Characters still NEED Stun, Recovery, End, PD, ED and SPD to not suck. In fact IMHO those 50 character points make 6e characters on average LESS powerful than their 5e counterparts.

 

As Balabanto pointed out some Adjustment Powers have been buffed and some nerfed in 6e. On one hand draining DEX doesn't hose your SPD and CV, OTOH it doesn't cost as much to do so. I think on average Adjustment powers probably work out to the same effect esp if you want to drain everything that was drained in 5e.

[Greywind]

And you're focusing on the "less important than" rather than the "coming after" or "or resulting from" in your comment.

Why yes' date=' yes I am. It did after all suit my argument and word play to do so.

You're arguing statistics and numbers.

I'm arguing game mechanics for a game based on statistical models (bell curve, effect) and numbers (point costs)...so...yeah, I am.

I'm referring to people. People generally are lazy' date=' don't want to have to change from comfortable ways of doing, or deal with change. [/quote'] This same argument comes up a lot in my line of work (software development). "We can't change things even if we should, because our users are stupid / lazy / set in their ways / or otherwise resistant to even positive changes". It's usually self-serving bs, that is often more true of the speaker than of the general user base they cast such flaws upon. But, even taking this as a given...if your point is correct and people are generally lazy, then it follows that they will do what is easiest / requires the least amount of effort on their part. Figureds require you to remember more "hidden" information in the form of additional calculations and math checking. Further, if new material is being published in a new edition and you don't want to make your own material or modify the published material, then it makes sense to use whatever the current edition is in its entirety. Finally, it takes effort to hold a strong opinion and more effort to type complaints about something into a message board and push a button...more effort than not doing so at least. Therefore, if the "people are lazy" argument is valid, the same lazy people would not care that much about Figureds going a way, would not complain about it on message boards, would not spare the effort to think about making their own custom implementation of the new edition plus figureds, would not consider modifying published material to "retcon" figureds back in, and would not mind no longer having do extra calculations and point checking for figureds.

I still work with 5th. It isn't a matter of the changes. I haven't seen a copy of 6th to peruse to make reference to full on changes. Since I don't have access to those rules I have refused to look at lists of what exactly was changed. The reason I haven't looked at 6th is purely financial.

And I fully respect that. If you like 5e or it doesn't make financial system to move to 6e' date=' then the sensible thing is to stay on 5e. I did a tremendous amount of content for and ran a lot of games in 5e; its a great system, flaws included. Same for 4e. I'm not an upgrade or get out snob. Bottom line, I'd far rather you and your group play some version of the HERO System than some other game entirely. I'm just really, really tired of the same old figured characteristic remonstrances.[/quote']

 

I've studied under developers/implementers and all of them had the same horror stories. "I don't have time to learn this. I have to get back to working." Even though what they were being taught was how the job was going to go.

 

As for gamers being lazy, why do you think so many of them play D&D and nothing else? I've played Hero since '83. And several other systems. This in the one I prefer for supers. For Fantasy I prefer SPI's old DragonQuest. Right now I'm lucky if I get a game in at all, which is why I'm writing.

 

And if you're tired of the discussion, why participate in it?

I've got the boxed set, the hard cover 2nd, and TSR's warpment of it. I've been able to find some of the modules for it and some third party stuff, as well as scour the net for things. People still play it. There's some online activity geared towards it.

[PaycheckHero]

And you're focusing on the "less important than" rather than the "coming after" or "or resulting from" in your comment.

Why yes' date=' yes I am. It did after all suit my argument and word play to do so.

You're arguing statistics and numbers.

I'm arguing game mechanics for a game based on statistical models (bell curve, effect) and numbers (point costs)...so...yeah, I am.

I'm referring to people. People generally are lazy' date=' don't want to have to change from comfortable ways of doing, or deal with change. [/quote'] This same argument comes up a lot in my line of work (software development). "We can't change things even if we should, because our users are stupid / lazy / set in their ways / or otherwise resistant to even positive changes". It's usually self-serving bs, that is often more true of the speaker than of the general user base they cast such flaws upon. But, even taking this as a given...if your point is correct and people are generally lazy, then it follows that they will do what is easiest / requires the least amount of effort on their part. Figureds require you to remember more "hidden" information in the form of additional calculations and math checking. Further, if new material is being published in a new edition and you don't want to make your own material or modify the published material, then it makes sense to use whatever the current edition is in its entirety. Finally, it takes effort to hold a strong opinion and more effort to type complaints about something into a message board and push a button...more effort than not doing so at least. Therefore, if the "people are lazy" argument is valid, the same lazy people would not care that much about Figureds going a way, would not complain about it on message boards, would not spare the effort to think about making their own custom implementation of the new edition plus figureds, would not consider modifying published material to "retcon" figureds back in, and would not mind no longer having do extra calculations and point checking for figureds.

I still work with 5th. It isn't a matter of the changes. I haven't seen a copy of 6th to peruse to make reference to full on changes. Since I don't have access to those rules I have refused to look at lists of what exactly was changed. The reason I haven't looked at 6th is purely financial.

And I fully respect that. If you like 5e or it doesn't make financial system to move to 6e' date=' then the sensible thing is to stay on 5e. I did a tremendous amount of content for and ran a lot of games in 5e; its a great system, flaws included. Same for 4e. I'm not an upgrade or get out snob. Bottom line, I'd far rather you and your group play some version of the HERO System than some other game entirely. I'm just really, really tired of the same old figured characteristic remonstrances.[/quote']

 

I've studied under developers/implementers and all of them had the same horror stories. "I don't have time to learn this. I have to get back to working." Even though what they were being taught was how the job was going to go.

 

As for gamers being lazy, why do you think so many of them play D&D and nothing else? I've played Hero since '83. And several other systems. This in the one I prefer for supers. For Fantasy I prefer SPI's old DragonQuest. Right now I'm lucky if I get a game in at all, which is why I'm writing.

 

And if you're tired of the discussion, why participate in it?

I have the softcover SPI 2nd edition and the first two adventures (Palace of Ontocle and Blade of Allectus). The modules are labeled a dollar each, I probably picked them up at a store that was trying to clear them off the shelf. I hadn't thought about the game since, well, before everything was on the net, so I went googling and sure enough Arcane Wisdom is easily downloaded--I wonder who owns the copyright and if they care. Maybe not, since it doesn't generate revenue for anyone.

 

I always suspected that DQ left way too much up to the GM without guidance. Rituals have material components sorts of limits, but I wasn't clear on how hard they should be to obtain. There may have been a similar problem with Namers obtaining True Names, though I kind of have a vague memory of some kind of mechanism that might be clearer than I remember. And rumor was that the biggest flaw was that there was no reason to not be a member of a college no matter how little your interest in magic, because it was essentially free. But I never played, so maybe those things would have become clearer with practice. It did seem like it was ahead of its time in a lot of its mechanics, however.

[Killer Shrike]

I imagine this topic has been beaten to death repeatedly since before the publication of 6e' date=' but I just started looking a 6e so this is very much a topic of interest to me. If nothing else, I'll have to eventually decide if I'm going to adopt 6e, and really one reason I finally created a forum account is to find out what has been happening with both Hero Games and the Hero System recently. There seem to be two separate discussions going on: what the effects of eliminating figured characteristics is, and whether those effects are on the whole good or bad. It would probably be a lot more useful to discuss them separately. In particular, it would probably help people like me who are late to the discussion and are still trying to work out what what it means for their games. Keeping in mind that I haven't actually used 6e yet, the most obvious consequence seems to be that characteristics are more expensive. That in turn seems to have several further consequences. The standard point levels have been bumped up to compensate, but one thing I haven't seen yet is anyone discussing how the balance between powers and characteristics has been altered. Given that powers remain largely the same costs and effects, I would think that the most effective thing for many characters to do would be to put some of the consolation points in powers rather than buy characteristics all the way back to what they would have been in 5e. I would also expect it to be more efficient to be more selective about what characteristics you buy; for example, I'd think that with the new cost structure, bricks would be advised to buy their OCV back to 5th ed levels, but not buy dex and DCV all the way back but rather put some of those points elsewhere. And the consequence of that seems like it would be a greater variety of character abilities, but also perhaps less well-rounded characters (since the free figured points tended to be spent in one particular way that encouraged dex to correlate with spd, stun to correlate with con and thus the ability to resist being stunned, and so on). I'd be interested to know if those guesses match the experiences of those who have actually run 6e. I can think of other consequences, but that'll do for now.[/quote']

 

The key thing that most players I've encountered never seem to really grok is that almost everything in the HERO System is relative to other characters and the environment. (NOTE: I am not lumping you into this category; its just a general observation).

 

This relativism is primarily due to the bell curve, the subtractive nature of standard defenses, and direct "higher value wins" comparisons like initiative.

 

---

The main exception to this is Strength, due entirely to the Strength chart giving specific strength to weight guidelines. While I understand the desire people have for that sort of concrete guidance, the fact that none of the other stats are concretely measurable is a good clue that it doesn't make a lot of sense. I could go on a tangent about how ignoring the Strength chart altogether and using a relativistic model instead makes the game more scalable, but I'll save that digression for another time.

---

 

For instance, if your character stands alone on a Cartesian plane stretching in all directions and populated only by themselves, it doesn't matter if they have 10 DEX or 50 DEX.

 

You have to put something or someone else in this vacuum for the DEX (or whatever value) to matter.

 

If character A's OCV is 9, we only know if that's relatively good or bad by also knowing that character B's DCV is 3 or 6 or 9 or 12.

 

Similarly if character A has a 12d6 attack, we only know if that's relatively good or bad by knowing if character B has 10, 15, 30, 45, or 60 defense (or equivalent).

 

And so on, etc.

 

 

Thus, it is the context that matters...the environmental details, the "reality" being simulated, the abilities of other characters...etc.

---

Put more plainly, a reduction across the board generally affects all characters equally and is thus generally a wash. Though there are corner cases, the 6e removal of figureds falls into this category.

 

My finding has been that it overall leads to a nice deflation of stats that had suffered from mounting inflation over several editions.

 

In particular, deflated SPD and DEX has resulted in a reduction of the often nonsensical time dilation that happens in the HERO System when characters have higher speeds.

 

I.e., in 4e and 5e combats with characters averaging around 6 SPD and 30 DEX, entire combats in which many (often epic) things occured would take between 1 and 2 Turns and thus elapse in 12 to 24 seconds of "chronological" time as measured by the game.

 

This oddness had many subtle nuances; the most noticeable of which was that the "normal" world of 2 SPD people were literally irrelevant, practically immobile statues standing frozen while the hyper-violent combatants flung themselves around in a blur doing all sorts of improbable things.

 

I recall one session where a newer player whose character was being pinned down behind a barricade plaintively asked "Why haven't the cops shown up yet?", hoping for a rescue. I smirked and pointed out that though we had been grinding thru it for over an hour in real time at the table and many actions had been taken by both sides, only 16 seconds of game time had elapsed since the start of the combat. No police force without teleporters or equivalent technology has a reaction time that good....and besides, what good would they do unless they were built with sufficiently inflated SPD and DEX to allow them to actually participate in the combat as anything other than a distraction.

 

---

When the "SPEED ZONE" rules were introduced in the Ultimate Speedster, I laughed and pointed out to a player in my group at the time that characters with 9+ SPD were already effectively operating in a "speed zone" all to themselves as lower SPD characters could barely interact with them until the lower half of the speed chart.

---

 

Along the same lines, CV's have come down into sane levels. Though, on the subject, I think the pricing of CSL's is slightly out of line with the new cost of OCV / DCV as stats...the limited CSLs still make sense, but the higher cost CSL's are not safe at all speeds...its usually better to buy OCV or DCV outright.

 

The lowering of base CV has a lot of positive benefits, the most noticeable being that it makes MANEUVERS, both martial and standard, much more relevant and encourages more nuanced usage of them by players...at least in my group, as the bonuses and minuses (usually in the +/- 1 or 2 range) have a lot more impact.

 

Conversely, 1/2 DCV is no longer as severe of a penalty for most characters as their DCV is lower, and I've seen a lot less hesitation to use 1/2 DCV maneuvers by players as often the net impact is in the -1 to -3 DCV range.

 

---

As to players moving points into Powers vs stats...I haven't seen much of a difference in this area. Stats are still just as good as they ever were, you just have to buy them up a la carte.

 

What I've seen is that the classic 1/3 stats, 1/3 powers, 1/3 skills & etc. "balanced" hero is still viable as a baseline, "skill mongers" and "stat mongers" (with the exception of high-strength bricks in supers who still continue to be potent) still struggle a bit unless equipment (magic items, etc) plays a major role in the campaign, and "power mongers" still tend to be glass cannons or one trick ponies unless their powers in some part compensate for a lack of stats and skills / etc,

 

Others mileage may vary.

 

---

Overall, though there are a couple of things that irritate me, I like 6e better than 5e.

[PaycheckHero]

The key thing that most players I've encountered never seem to really grok is that almost everything in the HERO System is relative to other characters and the environment.

 

Actually, almost the first thing I noticed about Champions was that the probability to hit is purely a function of (OCV - DCV), which leads to the scaling property you mention. I noticed it because I'd been playing with GURPS 1e, and the hit probabilities there were (in hero terms) functions of OCV and DCV separately. At least at that time GURPS did *not* scale with dex; even with the feint rule, as dex increased hits would become less and less probable. I thought about this a lot, because it seemed to me to encapsulate a lot of the difference in thinking behind the systems. Real fighting isn't precisely the same between novices and experts, and you can see that in any sparring sport (which I'll take as sufficiently close to fighting for this purpose, even though it definitely isn't fighting). (More to the point, it isn't the same in movies and stories, and of course games generally try to be true to the source material and not "real life".) In that sense, at the beginning, gurps was more true to the sources; if you chose the dexes correctly, you could get something like the battle between Inigo and Wesley, where a lot of fancy time-consuming swordplay happens before anyone gets the upper hand. But I think you'd have had to pick the dexes correctly, because the scaling was built-in, and if they were too low you didn't get the epic battle, while if they were too high eventually the sun burnt out while the battle was still raging. In otherwords, at at very dexes, it seemed to just plain break down. Hero, by making the hit rolls the same at high and low CV, clearly intended to scale up much better. It was a very good "big picture" moment for me. It made sense that a game that started at superhero power levels and branched out would scale more robustly than a game that started at human power levels and branched out (though I thought at those human levels gurps combat was often more satisfying if the genre wasn't too epic).

 

That said--not everything in hero scales the way CVs do (unopposed skill rolls don't, for example, but that's kind of trivially necessary), and I actually tripped myself up by unthinkingly assuming they did. The first time I designed my own campaign, I lowered the normal dex range from what the official writeups showed on the logic that I wanted normals to be slightly more relevant to combat, particularly if they could get ahold of a big gun. At least they'd get off a shot or two so the heroes couldn't totally ignore them. I didn't change any other parameters. It took me a while to realize that I'd inadvertently made combat take longer, because I'd effectively increased the frequency of post-12 recoveries.

 

It also made the lowest spd less attractive because there are two scaling laws involved with spd, neither of which are the simple CV scaling law (which in fancy terms amounts to translational symmetry). In terms of character to character comparisons, spd scales not as a pure function of the speed difference, but rather the ratio of the speeds; what matters is how many phases I get compared to how many you get, and 5/3 is a bigger difference than 6/4. That's why in heroic games the spd range isn't really 2-4, since (at least in the games I've played in) nobody wants to be half as fast as the speedsters (I sure don't). So effectively heroic games in my experience are spd 3-4 games, and this makes sense; observationally, it seems that it isn't as fun for the players if the speed ratio between the fastest and slowest characters is more than about 1.5. (That obviously doesn't apply to NPCs; they can be slower because nobody is waiting while others are playing, though I personally don't like them faster than the fastest PCs unless they're a big master villain fighting the entire team, because I don't want the whole group waiting too much while the NPCs take turns).

 

The other scaling law involved comes from the fact that seg-12 recoveries don't change no matter what the PCs' speeds are, which means that end consumption scales linearly with spd (in a typical hard-fought battle where you can't afford to take a phase to recover if you don't have to). I think the idea is that higher point characters will have higher end totals, but I don't think it actually scales linearly in practice (keep in mind, this is mainly about 4e, where I have the most experience) for a few reasons, such as the effects of figured characteristics and the fact that damage scales closer to how CV scales (on average, it does, but the standard deviation increases as, hmm, the square root of the damage and that matters for how much PD/ED you want to have).

 

The bottom line is that I screwed up by tweaking one parameter by being too naive about how champions scales and made combat longer than necessary. Oh, well. I'm older and have less time now, and my boy is young enough that he has an early bedtime. For the campaign I'm designing for him I'm trying to do the opposite and engineer in slightly faster (for champions) combat just as a matter of practicality. I won't know if I like the result until I try it though.

 

The main exception to this is Strength, due entirely to the Strength chart giving specific strength to weight guidelines. While I understand the desire people have for that sort of concrete guidance, the fact that none of the other stats are concretely measurable is a good clue that it doesn't make a lot of sense. I could go on a tangent about how ignoring the Strength chart altogether and using a relativistic model instead makes the game more scalable, but I'll save that digression for another time.

 

I've thought of doing that, but didn't ever really need it.

 

Size also doesn't scale if you use the growth/shrinking powers as your guidelines; at least in 4e, two really small characters would never hit each other. I think it was tolerable mainly because the intended use case was a shrinker fighting normal-sized characters, not another shrinker. I suppose anyone who wanted to play an Ant Hero campaign probably just re-scaled everything to the campaign normal size. I didn't look to see if this was fixed, but it's at least somewhat better because now you're not supposed to use the growth powers for permanent size changes as we did (rightly or wrongly) in 4e. "Just buy the effect if it is permanent" probably makes the above problem rare in actual games. Or so I'd guess.

 

Hero's scaling choices (and why they're different than gurps) is purposely "unrealistic for both playability and source material fidelity--comics don't scale anything like the real world. For size changes, jjust the fact that enormous characters have human proportions proves that, as does the fact that really tiny characters don't encounter increased viscosity, and so on. That's why it's playable over such a wide range of power levels.

 

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For instance, if your character stands alone on a Cartesian plane stretching in all directions and populated only by themselves, it doesn't matter if they have 10 DEX or 50 DEX.

 

Moreso in 6e, because of the elimination of figureds. That's obviously true for CV, but before 6e dex bought you spd, which means it doesn't scale purely that way. I think that was never a problem mainly because people always bought up their spd further anyway, so that the dex/10 bonus was in practice a package deal point break rather than something that set the typical speeds in a campaign.

 

Champion's scaling properties are well worth a thread of their own, especially since it has a lot of effect on setting campaign parameters, and I'm glad you made me think about this again because it's going to be useful for figuring out how to use 6e's characteristics.

[Killer Shrike]

The key thing that most players I've encountered never seem to really grok is that almost everything in the HERO System is relative to other characters and the environment.

 

 

Actually, almost the first thing I noticed about Champions was that the probability to hit is purely a function of (OCV - DCV), which leads to the scaling property you mention. I noticed it because I'd been playing with GURPS 1e, and the hit probabilities there were (in hero terms) functions of OCV and DCV separately. At least at that time GURPS did *not* scale with dex; even with the feint rule, as dex increased hits would become less and less probable. I thought about this a lot, because it seemed to me to encapsulate a lot of the difference in thinking behind the systems. Real fighting isn't precisely the same between novices and experts, and you can see that in any sparring sport (which I'll take as sufficiently close to fighting for this purpose, even though it definitely isn't fighting). (More to the point, it isn't the same in movies and stories, and of course games generally try to be true to the source material and not "real life".) In that sense, at the beginning, gurps was more true to the sources; if you chose the dexes correctly, you could get something like the battle between Inigo and Wesley, where a lot of fancy time-consuming swordplay happens before anyone gets the upper hand. But I think you'd have had to pick the dexes correctly, because the scaling was built-in, and if they were too low you didn't get the epic battle, while if they were too high eventually the sun burnt out while the battle was still raging. In otherwords, at at very dexes, it seemed to just plain break down. Hero, by making the hit rolls the same at high and low CV, clearly intended to scale up much better. It was a very good "big picture" moment for me. It made sense that a game that started at superhero power levels and branched out would scale more robustly than a game that started at human power levels and branched out (though I thought at those human levels gurps combat was often more satisfying if the genre wasn't too epic).

 

That said--not everything in hero scales the way CVs do (unopposed skill rolls don't, for example, but that's kind of trivially necessary), and I actually tripped myself up by unthinkingly assuming they did. The first time I designed my own campaign, I lowered the normal dex range from what the official writeups showed on the logic that I wanted normals to be slightly more relevant to combat, particularly if they could get ahold of a big gun. At least they'd get off a shot or two so the heroes couldn't totally ignore them. I didn't change any other parameters. It took me a while to realize that I'd inadvertently made combat take longer, because I'd effectively increased the frequency of post-12 recoveries.

 

It also made the lowest spd less attractive because there are two scaling laws involved with spd, neither of which are the simple CV scaling law (which in fancy terms amounts to translational symmetry). In terms of character to character comparisons, spd scales not as a pure function of the speed difference, but rather the ratio of the speeds; what matters is how many phases I get compared to how many you get, and 5/3 is a bigger difference than 6/4. That's why in heroic games the spd range isn't really 2-4, since (at least in the games I've played in) nobody wants to be half as fast as the speedsters (I sure don't). So effectively heroic games in my experience are spd 3-4 games, and this makes sense; observationally, it seems that it isn't as fun for the players if the speed ratio between the fastest and slowest characters is more than about 1.5. (That obviously doesn't apply to NPCs; they can be slower because nobody is waiting while others are playing, though I personally don't like them faster than the fastest PCs unless they're a big master villain fighting the entire team, because I don't want the whole group waiting too much while the NPCs take turns).

 

The other scaling law involved comes from the fact that seg-12 recoveries don't change no matter what the PCs' speeds are, which means that end consumption scales linearly with spd (in a typical hard-fought battle where you can't afford to take a phase to recover if you don't have to). I think the idea is that higher point characters will have higher end totals, but I don't think it actually scales linearly in practice (keep in mind, this is mainly about 4e, where I have the most experience) for a few reasons, such as the effects of figured characteristics and the fact that damage scales closer to how CV scales (on average, it does, but the standard deviation increases as, hmm, the square root of the damage and that matters for how much PD/ED you want to have).

 

The bottom line is that I screwed up by tweaking one parameter by being too naive about how champions scales and made combat longer than necessary. Oh, well. I'm older and have less time now, and my boy is young enough that he has an early bedtime. For the campaign I'm designing for him I'm trying to do the opposite and engineer in slightly faster (for champions) combat just as a matter of practicality. I won't know if I like the result until I try it though.

 

 

The main exception to this is Strength, due entirely to the Strength chart giving specific strength to weight guidelines. While I understand the desire people have for that sort of concrete guidance, the fact that none of the other stats are concretely measurable is a good clue that it doesn't make a lot of sense. I could go on a tangent about how ignoring the Strength chart altogether and using a relativistic model instead makes the game more scalable, but I'll save that digression for another time.

 

 

I've thought of doing that, but didn't ever really need it.

 

Size also doesn't scale if you use the growth/shrinking powers as your guidelines; at least in 4e, two really small characters would never hit each other. I think it was tolerable mainly because the intended use case was a shrinker fighting normal-sized characters, not another shrinker. I suppose anyone who wanted to play an Ant Hero campaign probably just re-scaled everything to the campaign normal size. I didn't look to see if this was fixed, but it's at least somewhat better because now you're not supposed to use the growth powers for permanent size changes as we did (rightly or wrongly) in 4e. "Just buy the effect if it is permanent" probably makes the above problem rare in actual games. Or so I'd guess.

 

Hero's scaling choices (and why they're different than gurps) is purposely "unrealistic for both playability and source material fidelity--comics don't scale anything like the real world. For size changes, jjust the fact that enormous characters have human proportions proves that, as does the fact that really tiny characters don't encounter increased viscosity, and so on. That's why it's playable over such a wide range of power levels.

 

 

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For instance, if your character stands alone on a Cartesian plane stretching in all directions and populated only by themselves, it doesn't matter if they have 10 DEX or 50 DEX.

 

 

Moreso in 6e, because of the elimination of figureds. That's obviously true for CV, but before 6e dex bought you spd, which means it doesn't scale purely that way. I think that was never a problem mainly because people always bought up their spd further anyway, so that the dex/10 bonus was in practice a package deal point break rather than something that set the typical speeds in a campaign.

 

Champion's scaling properties are well worth a thread of their own, especially since it has a lot of effect on setting campaign parameters, and I'm glad you made me think about this again because it's going to be useful for figuring out how to use 6e's characteristics.

I have to pop out to run errands, but a quick response:

 

RE: Unopposed skill rolls -> the scaling here is a function of the GM assessing modifiers, and the diminishing returns nature of the bell curve. "Unopposed" is a misleading term...they are unopposed by another character, but they are "opposed" by the environment and situation in the form of assessed penalties. They are also "complemented" by the environment and situation in the form of assessed bonuses.

 

Also, a factor in this area is whether the GM makes a character roll or not; for casual uses of skills a competent character doesn't need to roll at all. If there is a risk of failure, if the outcome is significant, if a roll adds some dramatic tension to a situation, if it is borderline whether the skill applies to the situation at all...those are the cases when a skill (or stat roll) is relevant. The scaling is a function of the bell curve, and the fact that past +/- 3 further penalties or modifiers have drastically diminished effect.

 

RE: lowering SPD resulting in combat taking longer / the correlation between higher SPD and higher END costs. This is also a form of scaling. Lower speed requires lower END (and STUN), and also allows REC to be more relevant. Higher speed encourages more END (and STUN), diminishes the role of REC unless it is similarly inflated, makes END Reserves and Charges more effective, makes Reduced END more attractive (at additional cost), decreases the effectiveness of Block and Dodge, increases the effectiveness of Dive For Cover, increases the effectiveness of passive mitigation such as Armor / rDef, and so on and so forth.

 

RE: BIG vs BIG, SMALL vs SMALL: its not clear in my memory any more, but I'm pretty sure there is rules coverage somewhere that indicates that the size based modifiers are relative to size differential, such that two same sized characters fight as normal, and if one character is more grown or shrunk than another character the modifiers are prorated by the difference.

 

RE: Cartesian plane with figureds vs without...it still does not matter. Even with a higher SPD, the character on the infinite empty Cartesian plane would just be moving faster across an infinite empty plane of identical sameness...while their Cartesian coordinate would change faster, they still would find themselves in effectively the "same place" as they started as there is nothing else but themselves to interact with and nothing to differentiate one coordinate from another.

 

So, when I say the stat rating has no meaning or relevance without something to compare it to, I mean that it literally doesn't matter what the values are until you have a frame of reference.

 

As soon as we add another entity into the plane such as a "monster" that is trying to capture the first character, or some environmental effect such as if the plane itself is disintegrating from one edge at a steady rate that the character must outpace...then a higher or lower value of various abilities becomes relevant, such as overall movement speed relative to the speed of the the monster or the plane. And so forth for other abilities.

[PaycheckHero]

This thread was up to about three pages a while ago, and now it is down to one and most of the posts I was following were among those that disappeared. What happened? It didn't look like the thread needed moderation or anything....

[Killer Shrike]

This thread was up to about three pages a while ago, and now it is down to one and most of the posts I was following were among those that disappeared. What happened? It didn't look like the thread needed moderation or anything....

The new forums software is super buggy. One of the bugs is that it often gets confused by multi-page threads and only displays the first. It also loses track of pagination across refreshes.

 

You can try changing the Filter to "Discussions Only"; this works for me. You can also increase your number of posts per page setting to minimize the impact.

[L. Marcus]

This thread was up to about three pages a while ago, and now it is down to one and most of the posts I was following were among those that disappeared. What happened? It didn't look like the thread needed moderation or anything....

Or just put your marker in the Page # square and hit enter. That ought to make all pages show up.

[Barwickian]

I appreciate the delinking of primary and figured characteristics because the formulae were off, as Killer Shrike points out on his website.

 

However, I did find they provide players (and myself) with a useful handle on what typical values could be - it makes some sense that endurance and constitution are related in some fashion, for example.

 

Here's how I handle it: http://www.penultimateharn.com/hero/6echaracteristics.html

[Dino]

If it's that they like the relationships between the values of the Primaries and the Figureds in the old system' date=' then perhaps leave the costs as standard for 6E, but make it a campaign ground rule that the formerly-Figured Characteristics must be bought to at least the level of their starting value under the old system (except one, which can be lower than that, as though it were the one CHA that you "sold back"). So for example, PD has to be at least STR/5, OCV has to be at least DEX/3, STUN has to be at least BODY+STR/2+CON/2, and so on. The costs would still look different than they did under 5E, but functionally, they'd be the same (except for the broken relationships between Figured Characteristics and other game elements that 6E fixed).[/quote']

 

 

I'm with Derek on this one. There is no need to go changing anything with costs or switching systems. Just use the old formulas as a guide line for what to buy and buy it, points be damned. I've been playing since third edition, and this is how we've been handling it in our group. If a PC has an 18 DEX, then he needs to have an OCV and DCV of 6. If the player wants to buy CV higher or lower than that, he needs to justify is with special effects, just like everything else in character generation....

[PaycheckHero]

This thread was up to about three pages a while ago, and now it is down to one and most of the posts I was following were among those that disappeared. What happened? It didn't look like the thread needed moderation or anything....

Thanks, both of those workarounds work for me.

[Balabanto]

My big problem with the shift to non-figured characteristics has to do with the failure (And I stress this is my biggest 6e bugbear) to properly balance adjustment powers with the shift. When they shifted to 6th, they balanced everything to standard effect while making drain ranged. What this did was that it made drains absolutely devastating, and most fantasy characters are going to have a Power Defense score of 0.

 

The end result is that certain drains (END, REC, and even STR) became way more effective than they did in previous editions. Fantasy characters don't have a lot of END. Consider that you are multiplying by 5 before dividing by 2. A 3d6 END drain is going to pretty much collapse a PC to burning stun for the entire combat. A 3d6 REC drain is going to put a character out of the fight.

 

This would be the ONLY reason to recouple characteristics. Everything else about it is better. The onus falls upon the GM to figure out a way to balance that out. It stinks, but that's the reality.

[Balabanto]

attributes are secondary' date=' not because they are less important, but because they are dependant on the primary characteristics [/quote'] I think its amusing that this was the take away you felt compelled to comment on. The comment was re: "The inherent relationship between primaries and secondaries, regardless of the accounting arguments, were a major part of the system." The point being I do not agree with this statement, that the mathematical relationship itself was a "major part" of the HERO System, nor do I think that decoupling them was a major change. If things like SPEED, REC, STUN, END were removed from the system that would be a major change. Just changing how much of it a character gets for free is not. As to semantics.... [h=3]sec·ond·ar·y[/h] /ˈsekənˌderē/ [TABLE=class: vk_txt ts] [TR] [TD] Adjective [TABLE=class: ts] [TR] [TD] Coming after, less important than, or resulting from someone or something else that is primary.[/TD] [/TR] [/TABLE] [/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD] [/TD] [/TR] [/TABLE]

Well, unfortunately, they were. Here are the major features you have to address between 5th and 6th and what they mean. If your world is thematically driven, you have to figure out what to do about Power Defense and attacks that work vs. Power Defense. Drains became 1 1/2 times as powerful because they all became ranged. Now, any idiot can tell you that 60 does not equal 90. But between 5th and 6th, that's exactly what happened. What it means: This means that unless power defense becomes more common, characteristic drains are one and a half times as effective as they used to be, because these powers now gain range for free against progressively cheaper characteristics. The two big winners were END and REC. Whereas these characteristics used to be problematic to drain, now they're truly hideous, especially END. Most characters don't have more than 50 to 60 END, nor is there a reason for them to ever buy more. Whereas before, you were being drained of about 28 END for 60 points, now you're being drained of a whopping 52. Most characters will be burning stun after just a couple actions. However, Power Defense is difficult to justify and can't be put on every sheet so easily. Stun became half as expensive, while defenses stayed the same. Players began building characters that had lower defenses (around 20) and buckets of stun, because it was more cost-efficient to do so, and you stayed on your feet while your opponent dropped like a stone. The only way to correct this, as near as I can figure, is hard maximums for who can buy how much STUN. In a fantasy game this is less of a problem, but the math remains the same. What it means: It means that attacks vs. Power defense are going to become a lot more common, in order to circumvent the ridiculously high stun totals characters can generate. Growth: Growth in 6th edition works great, except for creatures whose only main ability is the ability to change size. This is a problem because the ability's most basic use should be the ability to change your size. In-between numbers generate absurd amounts of effort and calculation for very little end result. This is frustrating.

Regarding Drains, is it really imbalanced though? Drain v STUN is 10 points to do 1d6 STUN only, OCV v DCV, resisted by power defense. Mental Attack is 10 points to do 1d6 STUN only, OMCV v DMCV, resisted by mental defense. Blast (AVAD: Power Defense or Mental Defense) is 10 points to do 1d6 STUN only, OCV v DCV, resisted by the chosen defense. The only real difference between the Blast and the Drain is how they are recovered. Blast will combine with other typical attacks for REC recovery per Turn (and subject to taking Recoveries), while Drain will be recovered 10 STUN/turn independently from REC. The drain still seems weaker, at least at this level. Draining END instead is a little more unclear. As you said, you can quickly get someone burning STUN for END. So at that point your 60 AP power has them taking 3d6 every time they use a 60 AP power. So after two of their phases they've taken the equivalent of one of those above 60 AP powers. Every Turn, they get back 25 END, which is enough to use 4 such powers, so you probably have to reapply regularly. It -could- get out ahead (though far less likely to stun them), but on the other hand there's a lot of ways to get around it. If they have a no-END attack, for example, possibly built on Charges. If Drain is more powerful, maybe it's simply that it used to be too weak? On the other hand, Suppress is now a -1/2 instead of half base cost. Otherwise, Suppressing STUN could be kind of out of hand.

 

Trust me. It wasn't too weak. I write for the system and playtest everything. Drain was too powerful before. Action denial is the most powerful thing in any game, and the simplest of drains produce tons of action denial.

 

All it takes is a STR drain followed by an entangle, and a character is pretty much doomed.

 

Characters will burn Stun like water after being affected by END drains. Remember that most combats only take one combat turn. By the time that the third END drain hits, they're burning stun. And remember, that assumes a 6d6 END drain attacking a character with 60 END. Most starting characters have between 40 and 60. You're looking at the high end, not the average or the low end.

 

You can't compare Drains to other forms of attack that lower STUN, because you can lower ANYTHING with it for the same cost. Recovery Drain is also particularly heinous, even though it's a defense. Remember that if I drain your INT, I eat your Perception Roll. If I drain your EGO, I remove your ability to resist your psychological complications.

 

Your problem is that you're looking at things as mechanics driven and not concept driven. This punishes characters for building a tight, well designed concept and rewards polyglot point crunching. Sure, I can have a bunch of attacks that fire off on Charges to resist END drains, but how much sense does it make on my sheet?

 

Trust me, I've extensively playtested this stuff or I wouldn't be griping about it. Drain is too powerful in every way. Remember that they gave range to a whole bunch of powers that never had it, so now every character who used to have a drain just got a bunch of free points to use. In a concept driven game, you don't just throw Power Defense on your sheet. The GM determines whether or not you can justify Power Defense in your concept.

 

Consider also the context of the OP. The Figured Characteristics aren't drained in the same way as they are in 6th. Drain didn't become a problem until this edition of the game. Now it is one.

[bigbywolfe]

Your problem is that you're looking at things as mechanics driven and not concept driven. This punishes characters for building a tight' date=' well designed concept and rewards polyglot point crunching. Sure, I can have a bunch of attacks that fire off on Charges to resist END drains, but how much sense does it make on my sheet? Trust me, I've extensively playtested this stuff or I wouldn't be griping about it. Drain is too powerful in every way. Remember that they gave range to a whole bunch of powers that never had it, so now every character who used to have a drain just got a bunch of free points to use. [b']In a concept driven game, you don't just throw Power Defense on your sheet. The GM determines whether or not you can justify Power Defense in your concept[/b].

It could be argued that in a "concept driven game" you don't just have a Drain divorced from any SFX on your sheet and that the GM determines if they are justifiable or not as well. Now, I'm not saying the GM should have to force players to take Limitations on their Drains or find ways to avoid the SFX chosen or anything like that. I'm just pointing out that you can't claim one thing is a problem because the GM must approve it when he has to approve the other thing you yourself are complaining about.

[PaycheckHero]

The key thing that most players I've encountered never seem to really grok is that almost everything in the HERO System is relative to other characters and the environment.

 

Actually, almost the first thing I noticed about Champions was that the probability to hit is purely a function of (OCV - DCV), which leads to the scaling property you mention. I noticed it because I'd been playing with GURPS 1e, and the hit probabilities there were (in hero terms) functions of OCV and DCV separately. At least at that time GURPS did *not* scale with dex; even with the feint rule, as dex increased hits would become less and less probable. I thought about this a lot, because it seemed to me to encapsulate a lot of the difference in thinking behind the systems. Real fighting isn't precisely the same between novices and experts, and you can see that in any sparring sport (which I'll take as sufficiently close to fighting for this purpose, even though it definitely isn't fighting). (More to the point, it isn't the same in movies and stories, and of course games generally try to be true to the source material and not "real life".) In that sense, at the beginning, gurps was more true to the sources; if you chose the dexes correctly, you could get something like the battle between Inigo and Wesley, where a lot of fancy time-consuming swordplay happens before anyone gets the upper hand. But I think you'd have had to pick the dexes correctly, because the scaling was built-in, and if they were too low you didn't get the epic battle, while if they were too high eventually the sun burnt out while the battle was still raging. In otherwords, at at very dexes, it seemed to just plain break down. Hero, by making the hit rolls the same at high and low CV, clearly intended to scale up much better. It was a very good "big picture" moment for me. It made sense that a game that started at superhero power levels and branched out would scale more robustly than a game that started at human power levels and branched out (though I thought at those human levels gurps combat was often more satisfying if the genre wasn't too epic).

 

That said--not everything in hero scales the way CVs do (unopposed skill rolls don't, for example, but that's kind of trivially necessary), and I actually tripped myself up by unthinkingly assuming they did. The first time I designed my own campaign, I lowered the normal dex range from what the official writeups showed on the logic that I wanted normals to be slightly more relevant to combat, particularly if they could get ahold of a big gun. At least they'd get off a shot or two so the heroes couldn't totally ignore them. I didn't change any other parameters. It took me a while to realize that I'd inadvertently made combat take longer, because I'd effectively increased the frequency of post-12 recoveries.

 

It also made the lowest spd less attractive because there are two scaling laws involved with spd, neither of which are the simple CV scaling law (which in fancy terms amounts to translational symmetry). In terms of character to character comparisons, spd scales not as a pure function of the speed difference, but rather the ratio of the speeds; what matters is how many phases I get compared to how many you get, and 5/3 is a bigger difference than 6/4. That's why in heroic games the spd range isn't really 2-4, since (at least in the games I've played in) nobody wants to be half as fast as the speedsters (I sure don't). So effectively heroic games in my experience are spd 3-4 games, and this makes sense; observationally, it seems that it isn't as fun for the players if the speed ratio between the fastest and slowest characters is more than about 1.5. (That obviously doesn't apply to NPCs; they can be slower because nobody is waiting while others are playing, though I personally don't like them faster than the fastest PCs unless they're a big master villain fighting the entire team, because I don't want the whole group waiting too much while the NPCs take turns).

 

The other scaling law involved comes from the fact that seg-12 recoveries don't change no matter what the PCs' speeds are, which means that end consumption scales linearly with spd (in a typical hard-fought battle where you can't afford to take a phase to recover if you don't have to). I think the idea is that higher point characters will have higher end totals, but I don't think it actually scales linearly in practice (keep in mind, this is mainly about 4e, where I have the most experience) for a few reasons, such as the effects of figured characteristics and the fact that damage scales closer to how CV scales (on average, it does, but the standard deviation increases as, hmm, the square root of the damage and that matters for how much PD/ED you want to have).

 

The bottom line is that I screwed up by tweaking one parameter by being too naive about how champions scales and made combat longer than necessary. Oh, well. I'm older and have less time now, and my boy is young enough that he has an early bedtime. For the campaign I'm designing for him I'm trying to do the opposite and engineer in slightly faster (for champions) combat just as a matter of practicality. I won't know if I like the result until I try it though.

 

The main exception to this is Strength, due entirely to the Strength chart giving specific strength to weight guidelines. While I understand the desire people have for that sort of concrete guidance, the fact that none of the other stats are concretely measurable is a good clue that it doesn't make a lot of sense. I could go on a tangent about how ignoring the Strength chart altogether and using a relativistic model instead makes the game more scalable, but I'll save that digression for another time.

 

I've thought of doing that, but didn't ever really need it.

 

Size also doesn't scale if you use the growth/shrinking powers as your guidelines; at least in 4e, two really small characters would never hit each other. I think it was tolerable mainly because the intended use case was a shrinker fighting normal-sized characters, not another shrinker. I suppose anyone who wanted to play an Ant Hero campaign probably just re-scaled everything to the campaign normal size. I didn't look to see if this was fixed, but it's at least somewhat better because now you're not supposed to use the growth powers for permanent size changes as we did (rightly or wrongly) in 4e. "Just buy the effect if it is permanent" probably makes the above problem rare in actual games. Or so I'd guess.

 

Hero's scaling choices (and why they're different than gurps) is purposely "unrealistic for both playability and source material fidelity--comics don't scale anything like the real world. For size changes, jjust the fact that enormous characters have human proportions proves that, as does the fact that really tiny characters don't encounter increased viscosity, and so on. That's why it's playable over such a wide range of power levels.

 

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For instance, if your character stands alone on a Cartesian plane stretching in all directions and populated only by themselves, it doesn't matter if they have 10 DEX or 50 DEX.

 

Moreso in 6e, because of the elimination of figureds. That's obviously true for CV, but before 6e dex bought you spd, which means it doesn't scale purely that way. I think that was never a problem mainly because people always bought up their spd further anyway, so that the dex/10 bonus was in practice a package deal point break rather than something that set the typical speeds in a campaign.

 

Champion's scaling properties are well worth a thread of their own, especially since it has a lot of effect on setting campaign parameters, and I'm glad you made me think about this again because it's going to be useful for figuring out how to use 6e's characteristics.

There may be a rule about relative sizes--I'm not sure anymore, nor for that matter which edition I would remember.

 

As for scaling, it may be that we use the words differently, but as I use it it is simply not true that *everything* scales to the environment. The most obvious one is SPD; if you increase a character's SPD with everthing else held constant, he will fly faster but run out of end quicker. Even if you argue that velocity can't be measured without something else in the world to specify another inertial frame to compare to (which is technically true in empty space, but not in a space with any kind of "cartesian plane" since I can measure velocity perpendicular to the plane), the increased end consumption is quite clearly a function of the character's attributes only and can be measured (in anything like a Newtonian universe, anyway). (The acceleration can also be measured locally by the character in terms of real-world physics, but I don't think the game itself treats it in a way that is clearly measurable.)

[PaycheckHero]

Having had time to think more about this for a while, a couple of more subtle points occur to me. The first is that the way figureds were eliminated (if not the elimination itself) is another step in the general DOJ-era trend for Hero to aim solely for the experienced Hero gamer without any consideration for bringing in new gamers. The reason for that is partly because you *have* to deal with more variables directly during character construction: the beginner probably has a crude idea of the likely game effect of a stat named "strength," but none about a stat named "recovery." The figureds offered some help in not creating captain fragile (though in fact it wasn't terribly good help, especially in the case of spd where it was basically a necessity to buy it up beyond what dex itself gave you).

 

But there is a second, more subtle reason: that the names of the stats-formerly-called-primary now are to some extent actively misleading. The beginner buying a high dex probably expected it to give him what OCV and DCV actually do, and in 5e- you could get a reasonable CV without buying beyond what dex gave you--indeed, the cost of dex was low enough for what it gave you that it was common to set your dex by the CV you wanted. You can't do that any more--in fact, it is all but certain that a beginner trying to build a character based on guessing what the names mean is now nearly guaranteed to be dissatisfied. That is a problem. My guess is that not too many people on this board will agree, but that isn't how hero is going to survive long-term as an active system and as a company.

 

I don't know that those problems are inherent in eliminating figured characteristics--they are more a sign of just how little the current incarnation of Hero Games cares to attract new players. I can think of some ways that might work. The simplest (for the case of dex, you'd treat other things similarly) is to rename dex to something like Initiative--of course, that would call into question why it is the base attribute for skills, so maybe better would be to rename it to something that reflects its current role as a simple package deal for skills (it's cheaper to buy up your dex roll than to buy up each dex sill individually) and then say something like "your initiative defaults to your skill base." Yes, that makes it a mini-figured, but the other choice is to split dex even more atomically, into Initiative and Dex Learning/Dex Skill stats (you see I'm trying to figure out what the non-technical short description would be for that concept) that have no mechanical connection to each other. In any case, that would then leave the term "dexterity" open to once again mean something like what every role-player is conditioned to think it means. At that point, it would make sense to make it an explicit package deal, as some clearly are doing. Side benefits to that are that you could do better than the old stat at hinting the beginner--nobody bought a 30 dex but kept the default 4 speed anyway, so you might as well cost it so that you get, say, a point of speed for every five dex or so. I don't really want to get into the argument about package deals, though--my real point is about how beginner-hostile the *terminology* has become. Mechanically, things can be named anything--DCV could be called "strength", running could be called "charisma," or whatever you like. The only reason for terminology is to make things easier by choosing it well. Unfortunately, the 6e terms are set for the convenience of experienced players (who at least know why Initiative + Skill Bonus has retained a name that is no longer descriptive) at the expense of new players trying to learn from the book rather than an experienced group (which apparently we have now given up on entirely, an odd business decision).

 

I have some further thoughts on how in a sense 6e chose to go "too far, and yet not far enough," but I'll leave that aside for now so as not to distract from the one point I wanted to make, which is evolution into a game that can't outlast the gaming lifespan of the current generation of players. If that's not true, it at least makes for an interesting (I hope) thesis to discuss.

[Jagged]

Thus when people say "I prefer figured characteristics"' date=' what I hear is "I don't understand math" or "I don't care about balanced game mechanics". [/quote']

 

Comments like this is why I gave up on this forum.

 

[bigbywolfe]

Thus when people say "I prefer figured characteristics"' date=' what I hear is "I don't understand math" or "I don't care about balanced game mechanics". [/quote']

 

Comments like this is why I gave up on this forum.

Absolutely serious and no snark intended: Can you define "gave up on this forum" for me?

 

That aside, people disagree and some (especially on the internet) are less sensitive than others in their wording. So what? This is still the friendliest, most easy-going gaming forum I've ever been involved in. Also, personally I think you are taking that quote very much out of context. I mean, the sentence starts with "thus" and is obviously concluding a thought. Do you have an answer to what he actually said before the one line you quote?

[Old Man]

5th is fine for folks who are used to it, and who are used to working around the obvious imbalances in the figured characteristics system. But I must gently disagree with Paycheck's assertion that it's an attempt to 'leave veteran players behind'. Hero Games could either keep publishing books for a set population of Hero grognards, or they could try and improve the system to get new players on board. I had many years of fun playing 3rd, 4th, and 5th ed Hero, and I loved every minute, but I'm not blind to the system's flaws either.

 

Seriously, it doesn't take long for new players to figure out how messed up the original figureds system is. After that you're building characters with this giant elephant in the room, which is that the system favors a STR 100, DEX 30, CON 30 brick with a little multipower tacked on. Build anything else and you're leaving points on the table. For all that the non-figureds system may be slightly counterintuitive, at least it isn't radically unbalanced. And again, it only matters for ten minutes of character creation; once the dice start rolling, figured/non-figured is in the past.