Quote from: Steven Mitchell;1013535For Fantasy Hero, 1E was OK but flakey.  It was built on the Champions 3E model, but not nearly so clear.  In fact, if we weren't already playing Champions, I might have had trouble getting the campaign off the ground.  We were already discussing a Champions hack for fantasy when FH was released.  FH 4E fixed a lot of problems with the fantasy side.  But as you say, it also introduced some.  At the time, though it wasn't so bad.  Everyone we knew had started with Champions 3E, and thus had the basics already.  So we felt fine picking and choosing stuff from 4E, and treated it like the toolkit it was.  As the starting place for an introduction to Hero, 4E left a lot to be desired.

It was still better than 5E or 6E, though.  Steve Long's ability to pick exactly the wrong things to break rules on and exactly the wrong things to be a stickler to the design, is amazing in its consistency.  Hero is, at heart, a much simpler system than GURPs.  If the same team that produced GURPs 3E were charged with producing a clean version of Hero, it would be amazing.

I do agree that 4th was probably the best set of HERO rules, my only real complaint being due to 4th being a generic game and by default making things transfer from genre to genre without need to adjustment. My perfect set of HERO rules would probably be more of a 3.75 edition.

Steve Long did a lot for the game, but making it appear less complex was not one of those things. I've often thought he might have preferred GURPS but HERO was for sale, GURPS wasn't.

It would be interesting to see a version of HERO made with an eye to reduce the apparent complexity without gutting it. HERO is actually a fairly simple game at the core, it is the tool box aspect and  Supers foundation that really makes it seem so complex. That is where I think the 3rd ed non-supers games really stood out. There was no need for players to look behind the curtain to see the guts of the game, but the guts were available in the form of Champions if one wanted access to them.

A Hero 3.75 sounds great to me.  I might play that again.  

Quote from: Toadmaster;1013557It would be interesting to see a version of HERO made with an eye to reduce the apparent complexity without gutting it. HERO is actually a fairly simple game at the core, it is the tool box aspect and  Supers foundation that really makes it seem so complex. That is where I think the 3rd ed non-supers games really stood out. There was no need for players to look behind the curtain to see the guts of the game, but the guts were available in the form of Champions if one wanted access to them.

Bar having 3.75, my next choice would be Steve Long being charged to do a 6.1 design, with as few exceptions as he can possibly manage, and all of those documented.  Then someone like the GURPs team presents a subset of it.  Best of both worlds. You get a complete, consistent underlying model, but the individual genre books are only the subsets/widgets useful for that book.

I think that is kind of what they tried to do with the various Hero 6 "Complete" books, but the problems are their funding, and then the mindset that goes with working in the Hero line since 4E. They know intellectually that they need to simplify things for presentation, but their hearts aren't in it.  I sympathize even while not preferring the output.    I don't blame Steve Long for that.  If he hadn't done what he did, it might be a dead game.  Cutting my interest was a side effect of what they did, though.

I picked up a bunch of HERO 6e in print and PDF. I thought the changes made the game less likely to be abused in char gen. I liked what I was reading. I had the benefit of having not played HERO for some time (the last version I did play was 5er).

I actually liked the changes in HERO 6th edition but I only had the Basic book.

Quote from: joriandrake;1013543OK, here it goes.

Spell components.

95% of them are nonsense and unnecessary, only adding to the heap of tracking scrap & junk in your char sheet.
Mind you, I have no idea how most systems handle this, only D&D, and I don't know D&D 5th Edition yet.

Quote from: Player's Basic Rules, D&D 5th EditionCasting some spells requires particular objects, specified in parentheses in the component entry. A character can use a component pouch or a spellcasting focus (found in chapter 5) in place of the components specified for a spell. But if a cost is indicated for a component, a character must have that specific component before he or she can cast the spell.

If a spell states that a material component is consumed by the spell, the caster must provide this component for each casting of the spell.

Where the material component has a cost and is consumed, it is not uncommon to simply mark off the cost without the complication of purchasing or making the exact component.

Quote from: trechriron;1013615I picked up a bunch of HERO 6e in print and PDF. I thought the changes made the game less likely to be abused in char gen. I liked what I was reading. I had the benefit of having not played HERO for some time (the last version I did play was 5er).

Quote from: David Johansen;1013627I actually liked the changes in HERO 6th edition but I only had the Basic book.

Heretics

Quote from: David Johansen;1013627I actually liked the changes in HERO 6th edition but I only had the Basic book.

If the 6E contents had been the 5E contents, I might have kept at it a little longer.  I could have made my subset of the rules, like I always had, and kept going.  But by then, I had Hero fatigue.  6E was too little, too late for my purposes.  I've got it, but I doubt I'll ever use it.

Quote from: trechriron;1013615I picked up a bunch of HERO 6e in print and PDF. I thought the changes made the game less likely to be abused in char gen. I liked what I was reading. I had the benefit of having not played HERO for some time (the last version I did play was 5er).

You're right. The ruleset is such that it is harder to game the point-buy system. You can't buy the optimal Dex for the optimal speed per point or the like. But... and this is the problem with making balance be your primary goal*, is that you can just shift your optimization game to taking limitations which you know your GM will never bring up, or make your powers attack versus defenses you know your GM won't put on his opponents very often (and when he does, they won't likely also have the defense vs your backup plan). Unbalanced games aren't such a trivial issue that I think one shouldn't work to minimize them when designing a game, but abuse starts at the knowing-your-GM level and preventing abuse starts at the managing-your-players level.
*aside from the fact that game balance, while nice, just isn't people's primary goal. 4e D&D made this mistake as well.

I tend to agree that 6e would have been a perfectly fine game if 5e hadn't come out and been 90% of the way in that direction. It also didn't help that complexity fatigue had hit by then, both for me and the general game buying audience (4e GURPS also never caught on quite the same as their 80s+90s edition did).

HERO 6 came too close on the heels of HERO 5.  The thing that becomes a problem is that you still need to buy figured stat levels at least where they would have been to have an effective character but the advantage is that the book keeping is much more straight forward.