Quote from: gleichmanHey! He screwed over the greatest published game system of all time and some people think he's the sow's ears!

I call that overrated :hissyfit:

Hmm... you may have a point.

Eh. I consider Star Hero, Pulp Hero and Dark Champions to be three of the best ten RPG books of the last decade, but that's just me.

Any changes he's made to the HERO rules are so arcane that only multi-decade die-hard could even notice them, let alone care. He's left 95+% of the system alone, which is more than enough for me.

Quote from: YamoEh. I consider Star Hero, Pulp Hero and Dark Champions to be three of the best ten RPG books of the last decade, but that's just me.

I gave up on him before the first two, but I fell for Dark Champions.

It is the worst HERO book of all time IMO, and one of the worse RPG books for that matter. It was completed the run to my current opinion of him that 5th edition started.

As for not noticing his changes...

Anyone who seriously played, understood, and used HERO would notice the changes within a handful of gaming sessions. I've even had people new to the product point out how stupid some of them were.

I don't have Star Hero. I don't have Pulp Hero but I hear from people I trust that it's great. I do have Fantasy Hero for 5e, and it IS great. It has all the goodness of a Fantasy Cookbook/Bible that 4e's version had, minus the chip on the shoulder about D&D and stupid reservations about using the power system to its fullest to do magic.

I was following Hero 5e, but when it became clear I was not going to get my play-time money's worth out of following the line, I decided it was time to cut my losses.

So, what is so bad or good about the Hero line these days (Star Hero in particular)? What am I (not) missing out on?

Quote from: Caesar SlaadI don't have Star Hero. I don't have Pulp Hero but I hear from people I trust that it's great. I do have Fantasy Hero for 5e, and it IS great. It has all the goodness of a Fantasy Cookbook/Bible that 4e's version had, minus the chip on the shoulder about D&D and stupid reservations about using the power system to its fullest to do magic.

I was following Hero 5e, but when it became clear I was not going to get my play-time money's worth out of following the line, I decided it was time to cut my losses.

So, what is so bad or good about the Hero line these days (Star Hero in particular)? What am I (not) missing out on?

Hudson City is an excellent city book for any kind of "dark" modern genre (Punisher-style super-vigilante, gritty crime, etc).

Terran Empire for Star Hero is a really good space opera setting. It's kind of like Traveller in tone without the decades of detail baggage, conflicting canon, etc.

Turakian Age is one of the best high fantasy settings I've ever seen. See my review on RPG.Net for more details on this one.

I don't know much about the Champions line. It's huge, though, so it probably varies a lot.

Quote from: YamoHudson City is an excellent city book for any kind of "dark" modern genre (Punisher-style super-vigilante, gritty crime, etc).

Terran Empire for Star Hero is a really good space opera setting. It's kind of like Traveller in tone without the decades of detail baggage, conflicting canon, etc.

Turakian Age is one of the best high fantasy settings I've ever seen. See my review on RPG.Net for more details on this one.

I don't know much about the Champions line. It's huge, though, so it probably varies a lot.

I do have Turakian Age. Seems a bit bog standard. Which I guess would be just what you'd want if you want fantasy hero over d20, but no siren song for me there.

Don't follow champions so much. I mean it was cool in the day, but DC Heroes is my mainstay supers game. I started Hero with champions, but what really kept me there was the fantasy and martial arts stuff.

Well, so long as it lasted, at least.

Quote from: Caesar SlaadI do have Turakian Age. Seems a bit bog standard. Which I guess would be just what you'd want if you want fantasy hero over d20, but no siren song for me there.

For me, it's a craftsmanship thing. Standard material, perfect handling. Like the most superbly-tailored cotton t-shirt ever crafted by the hand of man.

HERO5 nearly doubled the pagecount from the basic 4th edition rules. This was bearable, although I could never stop wondering why so many extra pages were needed- was it crunch or verbiage in other words. Then I started investing in the genre books and the Ultimates line. Fantasy HERO5 I agree is very, very good indeed. The single best supplement in the entire line IMO, and probably the best encyclopedia of how to set up a fantasy campaign that has ever been published. It was probably still too long though. The other genre books and the Ultimates line books I bought were OK.

It was Steve Long's approach to package deals that first made me feel that something was going wrong. In the rules he talks about them being around 15pts or so max. In the various supplements he was dishing out cookie cutter package deals costing 80pts or more. These were poorly conceived, badly designed, and of limited utility in any case I felt. And then I began to get tired of reading the same 'copy-and-paste with minor edits' in the different genre books, eg. the sections on power levels and so on. The munchkinistic points-bloat and legalistic verbiage was beginning to get to me.

The last straws for me were HERO5R and Pulp HERO.

The former added some 140 pages to the already bloated big black book. I couldn't fucking beleive it. Not just overblown, but the new book's pagination also meant that all future rules references would be utterly useless unless I chose to shell out for the same game all over again.

It was the superskills in the latter which I couldn't take. One of them was 'Strong Swimmer'. What was this?- 1" extra swimming. Long wrote an entire paragraph explaining that the way to be a strong swimmer was to buy more... swimming (a basic attribute btw). And that was only the most egregious example of a design philosophy gone utterly bonkers.

Long later erected the headstone on the grave of this fan's willingness to buy into his edition any more when he wrote on HERO forums about the work he was doing on The Ultimate Skill. He proudly told us that he had written 12000 words about one single skill! I rest my case, sad to say.

Quote from: JMcL63It was Steve Long's approach to package deals that first made me feel that something was going wrong. In the rules he talks about them being around 15pts or so max. In the various supplements he was dishing out cookie cutter package deals costing 80pts or more. These were poorly conceived, badly designed, and of limited utility in any case I felt. And then I began to get tired of reading the same 'copy-and-paste with minor edits' in the different genre books, eg. the sections on power levels and so on. The munchkinistic points-bloat and legalistic verbiage was beginning to get to me.

I have different issues with them, but package deals are my main letdown for 5e.

Quote from: JMcL63Long later erected the headstone on the grave of this fan's willingness to buy into his edition any more when he wrote on HERO forums about the work he was doing on The Ultimate Skill. He proudly told us that he had written 12000 words about one single skill! I rest my case, sad to say.

He also created Sidekick, which makes the BBB look like a bloated slab of a tome.

Seriously, though, I guess that kind of thing doesn't bother me. Do you look at a whole buffet and get pissed because you can't eat it all?

Just take what you want/need and leave the rest.

Quote from: Caesar SlaadI have different issues with them, but package deals are my main letdown for 5e.

Are you perhaps referring to the dropping of the package bonus? I didn't like that either. It would've been the easiest thing in the world to allow the bonus to apply only to normal/heroic characters IMO.

My main beef was that package deals were initially supposed to be templates representing the utterly typical example of their kind. Under Long they essentially became bloated pregenerated character classes. Heck, some of them even included characteristics increases, eg. Priest, +5 EGO. And then Long had to go and explain how package deal costs might have to be adjusted if the included characteristics violated maxima. He couldn't even just say that you should assume these were bought before you spent your other points on characteristics. Legalistic pettifogging of the worst sort IMO. Sheesh.

Quote from: JMcL63Are you perhaps referring to the dropping of the package bonus?

I mean I understood that the whole "racial stat limits" thing wasn't working, but the package "kickback" was the one thing that kept HERO in my constellation of "structured games". It's like it fell from grace at that point.

Not like I couldn't house rule it back in, but it sort of sets the tenor for the nature of the game as a whole.

Quote from: YamoHe also created Sidekick, which makes the BBB look like a bloated slab of a tome.

Seriously, though, I guess that kind of thing doesn't bother me. Do you look at a whole buffet and get pissed because you can't eat it all?

Just take what you want/need and leave the rest.

Sidekick was a failed attempt to solve the problem of introducing new players to HERO. It failed not because Sidekick didn't work as HERO-lite, but because it was the wrong way to approach the issue, and because Long showed no further interest in it.

And my problem with HERO is that I really just can't be arsed with the effort anymore. I just don't have the energy to deal with it as a would-be GM. Meanwhile Steve Long has taken a system that I still love and systematically drained it of all interest and excitement with a range of products that I feel are increasingly blatant attempts shamelessly to milk my loyalty to a vision of the game that Long himself is no longer propounding.

If a GM wants to run it I'll play it happily. And I might even just consider running an SF campaign or somesuch using HERO (M&M is an option, but it just can't deliver quite the same detailed crunch to the armoury). But I'm fed up with DoJ's iteration of HERO. Pissed off? You bet. And not just at Long, but also that it's come to this at all.

Quote from: Caesar Slaad

I mean I understood that the whole "racial stat limits" thing wasn't working, but the package "kickback" was the one thing that kept HERO in my constellation of "structured games". It's like it fell from grace at that point.

Not like I couldn't house rule it back in, but it sort of sets the tenor for the nature of the game as a whole.

I know how you feel with that last point. Long was determined to raise overall points levels in keeping with his cost restructuring while simultaneously stripping out all the minor freebies that were so useful for low powered characters. Remember the 'Real Frees'?- that AK: Home, PS: a job, and Native Tounge 4 that you used to get as real points? Gone too. Why? Why? :confused:

And I did come up with a fix for the racial stats thing that worked for me: the package paid the points for increased maxima, and they increased the base value too- eg. pay 3pts for STR max 23 and you had base STR 13. At the same time I included the cost of increased characteristic maxima in the total cost of the package for the package bonus, and expanded the package bonus table up into the high 100's. This proved to be really handy for designing templates for alien beasties, eg. Tyranid hiveships.

Quote from: Caesar Slaad
Not like I couldn't house rule it back in, but it sort of sets the tenor for the nature of the game as a whole.

My point about my own version of the species package characteristic maxima has rebounded off this remark of yours with another thought: the big difference between HERO5 and 4th ed. is that the sheer bulk of legalistic verbiage in the former discourages the very houseruling that I found so easy to do in with my work on alien bugs under the reign of the latter. 'Sets the tenor' indeed wouldn't you think?

Quote from: joewolzBased on my experience with game designers:

They all seem like nice noraml people, like me and you all.  I've encountered nothing that makes me think rating them is even worth it.

To me, they're all overrated.

I agree completely, but some are less normal than othersl