Quote from: jhkim on February 22, 2023, 07:49:40 PMEven at the time, though, I feel like pulp was one of the worse fits for the HERO System. Pulps by their nature are not very detail oriented, and HERO is very detailed by its nature. To me, it feels more pulp if the gadgeteer can pull out random stuff from his kit that might not fit with what went before, or a hero suddenly pops up where he's least expected, and so forth. I feel like a more rules-light system is a better fit.

This is an issue with gaming any sort of fantastic fiction. The readers of a story might not know the exact extent of a character's power or knowledge, heck even the writer of the story might not know, but the character himself would certainly know the limits of his own powers or skills. So then it becomes a case of whether or not the player needs to know the extent of what his character can do. I can see it both ways, where the player knows exactly what the character is capable of and makes decisions as if he were the character, or, as with a rules light system, a random player roll determines if the character can do something, possesses a certain knowledge, or is carrying a specific gadget.

My argument in favor of something like the Hero system (or Justice Inc) is that is already possess rules for a huge variety of superhuman abilities. And, from my experience, it works well for normal people as well. Keep in mind that when I run the system, I usually don't show the points to the players so they don't need any system mastery to play.

Amazing Adventures by Troll Lord Games. If you're gonna try and cram D&D into a non-Elf Game shell, ya might as well use Siege engine.

Quote from: hedgehobbit on February 28, 2023, 06:50:42 PM

Quote from: jhkim on February 22, 2023, 07:49:40 PMEven at the time, though, I feel like pulp was one of the worse fits for the HERO System. Pulps by their nature are not very detail oriented, and HERO is very detailed by its nature. To me, it feels more pulp if the gadgeteer can pull out random stuff from his kit that might not fit with what went before, or a hero suddenly pops up where he's least expected, and so forth. I feel like a more rules-light system is a better fit.

This is an issue with gaming any sort of fantastic fiction. The readers of a story might not know the exact extent of a character's power or knowledge, heck even the writer of the story might not know, but the character himself would certainly know the limits of his own powers or skills. So then it becomes a case of whether or not the player needs to know the extent of what his character can do. I can see it both ways, where the player knows exactly what the character is capable of and makes decisions as if he were the character, or, as with a rules light system, a random player roll determines if the character can do something, possesses a certain knowledge, or is carrying a specific gadget.

My argument in favor of something like the Hero system (or Justice Inc) is that is already possess rules for a huge variety of superhuman abilities. And, from my experience, it works well for normal people as well. Keep in mind that when I run the system, I usually don't show the points to the players so they don't need any system mastery to play.

This is a good point. However, there is a difference with genre.

You say that in a rules-light system, "a random player roll determines if the character can do something, possesses a certain knowledge, or is carrying a specific gadget."  I'd agree. A downside of this is that it can mess with internal consistency. What a character knows and/or what they carry shouldn't really be random, and if you're keeping track of such things, then lack of consistency can hurt the game.

But in a genre like pulp, there isn't much value placed on internal consistency. A pulp hero really will be different from week to week, and that's no big deal.

That's very different from a genre like hard science fiction.