Forking from here. Author is mmadsen. Posted on TBP years ago. All that follows is his work. Enjoy.

STREAMLINING HERO

Preface

Champions has many great ideas, but few of them require the kind of complexity the system's known for. I have a few fixes I'd hoped to see in Fifth Edition. Deriving these fixes might not seem simple, but the end-user doesn't have to follow the derivation; it's the end result that's simple.

Stats and Figured Stats

Champions' stats -- and its figured stats in particular -- are needlessly complicated. Who's the genius who thought we should round stat values for bonuses? So now every character is full of stats like 13, 18, 23, etc. Changing the rounding rules, a trivial change, would lead to efficient characters having nice, round stats: 10, 15, 20, etc., not 8, 13, 18, etc.

Many of the figured characteristics are stat/5, but some aren't:

[table=width: 500, class: grid, align: left]
[tr]
   [td]PD[/td]
   [td]Str/5[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
   [td]ED[/td]
    [td]Con/5[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
   [td]Spd     [/td]
   [td]1 + Dex/10 [/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
   [td]Rec     [/td]
   [td]Str/5 + Con/5 [/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
   [td]End     [/td]
   [td]10 x Con [/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
   [td]Stun     Body + Str/2 + Con/2 [/td]
   [td]2 x Con [/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
   [td]OCV     [/td]
   [td]Dex/3 [/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
   [td]DCV     [/td]
   [td]Dex/3 [/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
   [td]ECV[/td]
   [td]Ego/3[/td]
[/tr]
[/table]


(Also, skills use stat/5 for bonuses.)

If we change those to use stat/5 in all cases, we don't even need any stats beyond 5, 10, 15, 20, etc. For instance:

[table=width: 500, class: grid, align: left]
[tr]
[td]PD[/td]     [td]Str/5[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]ED  [/td]  [td]Con/5 [/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]Spd [/td]    [td]Dex/5[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]Rec [/td]    [td]Str/5 + Con/5 [/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]End [/td]    [td]2 x Con   10 x Con/5 [/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]Stun[/td]     [td]Body + Str/2 + Con/2 (OK, this one needs some work...) [/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]OCV[/td]     [td]Dex/5 [/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]DCV [/td]    [td]Dex/5 [/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]ECV  [/td]   [td]Ego/5 [/td]
[/tr]
[/table]

Moving Spd from 1 + Dex/10 to Dex/5 keeps the norm at 2, and can keep the "human max" at 4. Dropping OCV and DCV to Dex/5 puts them in line with Dex-based skills, and doesn't change the game in any material way; it just makes Dex a wee bit less of an uber-stat (perhaps offsetting any higher Spd stats).

(Aside: Champions' Spd stat has always been too granular at the low end for such an all-important value. Going from 2 (human normal) to 4 (human max) doubles your combat effectiveness. If you're already at "human max", it's still awfully tempting to spend another 10 points (out of 250) to go from 4 to 5 (or even 6) for another 25% to 50% increase in attacks (and moves) per turn. There's no reason Spd has to start at 2. We could define average to be 4 or 6 just as easily.)

Once we've established that we only need stats that are multiples of 5, we can divide those original stat values by 5, making them the same as the figured stats we'd like to get to; we can eliminate the arithmetic.

We could have Str, Dex, Con, etc. scores of 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. instead of 5, 10, 15, 20 -- or 3, 8, 13, 18. And figured stats might look like:

[table=width: 500, class: grid, align: left]
[tr]
[td]PD[/td]     [td]Str [/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]ED[/td]     [td]Con [/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]Spd [/td]     [td]Dex [/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]Rec[/td]     [td]Str + Con [/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]End [/td]     [td]10 x Con [/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]Stun [/td]     [td]5 x Body + 5 x Str/2 + 5 x Con/2 (OK, this one needs some work...) [/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]OCV [/td]     [td]Dex [/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]DCV [/td]     [td]Dex [/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]ECV     [/td] [td]Ego [/td]
[/tr]
[/table]

Then, if we decide to subsume multiple related stats under one heading (more like Tri-Stat, but not so extreme), we might get something like:

[table=width: 500, class: grid, align: left]
[tr]
[td]Body[/td]     [td]Str, Con, Body; separate Super-Strength power for pure lifting and punching  [/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]Dex[/td]     [td]Dex[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]Mind[/td]     [td]Int [/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]Soul[/td]     [td]Ego; Pre; separate Attractive talent for comeliness, Intimidation skill for Presence Attacks [/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]PD [/td]     [td]Body[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]ED [/td]     [td]Body[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]Spd [/td]     [td]Dex [/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]Rec [/td]     [td]2 x Body[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]End     [/td] [td]10 x Body[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]Stun     [/td] [td]10 x Body[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]OCV     [/td] [td]Dex[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]DCV     [/td] [td]Dex[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]ECV     [/td] [td]Soul-- or Mind?[/td]
[/tr]
[/table]

With no adjustments, a level of Body would cost the sum of five points of Str, Con, and (old-school) Body: 5 x (1 + 2 + 2)   25. A level of Dex would cost 5 x 3   15. A level of Mind or Int would cost 5 x 1   5. A level of Soul would cost 5 x (2 + 1)   15.

We'd probably adjust them though. Given the genre, I'd have no problem dropping the cost of a level of Body to 20 points, and, given its history as the uber-stat, I'd have no problem bumping Dex to 20 points.

A larger change would be to shift ECV away from Ego (now Soul) to Int (now Mind), and to use Ego (Soul) for psychic toughness, to parallel the Strength/Agility dichotomy of the physical stats. Then we might price both Mind and Soul at 10 points per level.

In this way, we could have a much simpler Champions stat system, one a bit like Tri-Stat (without going "too far"), that changes almost nothing about the underlying system -- or just a few bits that we'd like to change.

Power Modifiers

Another example of a simple streamlining measure -- one that sounds oh-so-complicated but isn't -- would be to handle advantages and limitations as base-2 logarithms. What does that mean? A +1 advantage would double price (same as now), and a -1 limitation would halve price (same as now) -- but you could add and subtract your advantages and disadvantages the way every newbie thinks you should be able to.

If everyone's already looking up power prices on a chart or whipping out a calculator, is it a problem that +1/4 now means x1.2 instead of x1.25, and +1/2 means x1.4 instead of x1.5?

It's a small price to pay for being able to take an existing power, add an advantage or limitation, and not have to "unroll" all the previous math. A book of powers could list each complicated power with dozens of advantages and limitation as having just one final price. Making the whole thing NND (+1) would double that price. Making it all an OAF (-1) would halve that price.

Champions' complexity doesn't stop at character generation though. Combat is far from streamlined -- even though it wouldn't take much to streamline it.

The first slow-down comes from the Speed Table. At its core, the speed system gives a Spd-N character N actions per 12-second turn. Keeping track, segment by segment, of who can act according to the chart though is a pain, especially if different characters have different Spd stats and players want to optimize their choices based on who can or cannot act before their next phase. Why not just roll a d12 to see if you can act? Or a d6 for Spd stats under 6, and a guaranteed action plus an extra action (depending on a d6 roll) for Spd stats over 6?

The second major slow-down comes from the endurance system. The constant End accounting adds little to the game, and it comes at a clear cost. Most games assume that fighting is tiring, but they don't bother to codify it. I don't see why that can't work for a superhero game. For the few cases where a power should be truly exhausting, it can take a limitation causing Stun damage from fatigue.

Once you get rid of End, you can probably simplify recovery as well. A "second wind" rule, like SAS's, fits the genre better, granting quick recovery only if the hero is driven.

The third slow-down comes from the huge number of dice rolled and the peculiar damage-counting mechanics. Do you really need to roll ten dice for a typical attack? Obviously not. It might feel "super" at first, but it gets old quickly ,and it slows things down. Counting both Body and Stun from the same dice seems like a good idea, but it also slows things down. Killing attacks don't require as many dice, but they suffer from the "Stun Lotto" effect. Roll just a few dice for damage, then multiply that result by another die! I'm sure we can come up with an elegant system that plays "fast and loose".

Linear prices

When it comes to attacks and defenses, linear prices don't always yield the results we want.

Having two different 10d6 attack modes is worth nowhere near as much as having a single 20d6 attack. It should cost less, first, because it's largely redundant, and, second, because the marginal benefit of one more die of damage is so much higher than the benefit of the first n dice (which just get absorbed by defenses). Hero already addresses this indirectly via its multi-power framework, but I'd like to see a more elegant mechanic.

Extra points of defense, on the other hand, are worth less and less the more defense you already have. This is why invulnerability is such a problem in Hero. First, how much defense is good enough to qualify as "invulnerability," and, second, what player wants to waste points making certain that a 20d6 fire bolt can't harm him at all? Is it even remotely worth 60 points to have +120 ED vs. fire only?

If we want to emulate the genre, we want a system that naturally leads to characters with high defenses, but with chinks in their armor. We want it to be easy to be invulnerable to fire, but impossible to be invulnerable to everything.

Sample characters

I thought I'd stat out a sample character following the system I outlined above. Here's how the third-edition Crusader's stat might look:

(I'm not going to HTML tag this, it is too much work)

Then we'd probably add in an Intimidation skill for Presence Attacks (since he used to have an 18 Pre under the old system). The costs come out within a few points, 152 vs. 156, and I think the new system is cleaner.

Here's how the third-edition Starburst's stats might look:

(see above)

The costs come out the same: 109.

(end of document)

{end of mmadsen's work)

As someone who knows nothing about Hero, why does it have attributes that have to be divided by 5 or 3? Is there a difference between a 10 versus 11?

Quote from: Nephil;1144174As someone who knows nothing about Hero, why does it have attributes that have to be divided by 5 or 3? Is there a difference between a 10 versus 11?

HERO's original design rated primary characteristic scores on a range from 1 to 20, but gave them point costs that made it far too easy to buy a stat up to a practically "infallible" level of 16 or higher if you just rolled 3d6 against that stat. So the primary target number for Attribute rolls wasn't the Attribute score itself, but calculated as a formula: 9 + (Char)/5 -- thus, to succeed at a STR roll with STR 17, you rolled not vs. 17, but vs. 9 + 17/5, or 12 (17 / 5 = 3.4, round off to 3). Once you improve STR to 18, however, your effective target number changes to 13, because the rounding off bumps the effective value up by 1.

As a result, HERO characters were chronically prone to having stats set exactly at the "breakpoints" for such rounding, so you'd see everybody with stats rated at exactly 13, 18, 23 (where possible) and so on. Combat Values (the key PC rating for combat) were also determined by dividing DEX by 3 with similar rounding off, so DEX in particular was almost always exactly 18 so as to get maximum efficiency for one's character points.

Ah, so to simplify the system, just have the attributes be 1-4 instead of 1-20.

Quote from: Nephil;1144180Ah, so to simplify the system, just have the attributes be 1-4 instead of 1-20.

Exactly.  In practice I'd design around an upper normal human limit of 5 or 6 for primary Characteristics, just to give a little more room for character variability.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser;1144184Exactly.  In practice I'd design around an upper normal human limit of 5 or 6 for primary Characteristics, just to give a little more room for character variability.

There are already a lot of games with a 1-5 or 1-6 range for attributes and/or skills. What makes Hero so attractive that it should be reworked rather than using one of the games already set up that way?

Quote from: Nephil;1144180Ah, so to simplify the system, just have the attributes be 1-4 instead of 1-20.

Yes:

1 to 2 = 0
3 to 7 = 1
8 to 13 = 2
14 to 17 = 3
18 to 22 = 4

Quote from: HappyDaze;1144187What makes Hero so attractive that it should be reworked rather than using one of the games already set up that way?

Good question, and one to which I can't give an empirically verifiable answer myself, as I've only rarely actually played Champions/HERO and am certainly more a system junkie for its own sake than a devoted fan of the game itself.

That said, I'd suggest that the feel of the game is unique enough that if the mechanics producing it can be simplified, while still creating the same intuitive sense of how the dice probabilities actually shake down in practice, it's worth doing.  For me the core of the system's feel are those things which nobody else does quite the same way: the OCV vs. DCV 3d6 combat roll, the 12-segment combat round structure, the d6 pools creating both Stun and Body impacts, the power construction system, etc.  It's the same reason the d20 has stayed at the heart of virtually all D&D/OSR iterations, regardless of whether attributes are measured as 3-18 or -5 to +5 -- the d20's physical shape and probability distribution just feel like nothing else.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser;1144204Good question, and one to which I can't give an empirically verifiable answer myself, as I've only rarely actually played Champions/HERO and am certainly more a system junkie for its own sake than a devoted fan of the game itself.

That said, I'd suggest that the feel of the game is unique enough that if the mechanics producing it can be simplified, while still creating the same intuitive sense of how the dice probabilities actually shake down in practice, it's worth doing.  ... It's the same reason the d20 has stayed at the heart of virtually all D&D/OSR iterations, regardless of whether attributes are measured as 3-18 or -5 to +5 -- the d20's physical shape and probability distribution just feel like nothing else.

Brand identity is a big factor as well.

As much as 4e was lambasted it still took it's clone a while to start outselling it. WOTC still made a ton of money off of 4e, just not as much as they wanted, and the rise of the clone was a clear market signal that they needed to do something different ASAP if they wanted the D&D Brand to keep the #1 spot.

Hero/Champions still has a marketable brand identity. It still gets talked about, for good or ill, and that's not nothing.

But people need to be given a reason to give it a second look over mutants and masterminds 3e.

IMHO a no holds barred streamlining/simplification of the system is the only way to do that now. (It cannot be more complex than M&M3).

Quote from: HappyDaze;1144187There are already a lot of games with a 1-5 or 1-6 range for attributes and/or skills. What makes Hero so attractive that it should be reworked rather than using one of the games already set up that way?

Pretty much. And there's lot of other ways that this and similar questions can be rephrased to arrive at the same conclusion. I have suggested similar things to what the author in the OP brings up (about reducing the attribute range by 5, since the actual value used for the vast majority of stuff in Hero is Stat/5) in another thread over at RPGPub, but the reality is that if you start hacking everything away after a certain point you're no longer dealing Hero system anymore, so you might as well make a new RPG (which I already sort of am). And there are already some RPG that do what Hero does with half or less the hassle, namely Mutants & Masterminds.

So what's even the point of the Hero System anymore? The system already ran its course, the only way to "save" it is to hack the living shit out of it till it becomes something else, which some systems have already done and you're better off making your own system than fixing Hero's, cuz ALL of these suggestions effectively constitute a different, new system anyways. Why even call it Hero?

Quote from: Nephil;1144174As someone who knows nothing about Hero, why does it have attributes that have to be divided by 5 or 3? Is there a difference between a 10 versus 11?

Not often. The two main cases are:

Your BODY is like your Hit Points, but it measures your actual physical body. So 1 point matters.
Your CON determines how much (stunning) damage you can take before you are Stunned. So 1 point sometimes makes a difference.