Quote from: gleichman;532556IME with HERO groups the GM handles character generation for the players (with their input) meaning that the front-loading exists only for the one person who in general enjoys its.

This approach is how I have dealt with these issues with games like Hero.  I do this type of thing for people that have never played a role-play game before too.  The player makes the minimum number of dice roles, as those required for AD&D 1 ability scores.  It is a character creation interview process. Only when players have taken it upon themselves to become very familiar with a rules set are the players motivated to complete the whole process without this type of interaction, which is more common in the very popular games like the editions of D&D, Traveller and World of Darkness.

Games that have this level of complexity with character creation should include a well thought section on conducting this interview based character creation process.  It would help new referees.

Quote from: Koltar;532680Technically the " 3/e " stuff already IS GURPS 4/e compatible.

In the Update booklet that comes weith the GM screen package - there is a simple conversion system for 3/e into 4/e.
(Converts a hell of a lot easier than 3rd/e D&D to 4th/e D&D - which is practically impossible)


SO......looked at that way you already have plenty of 4th edition GURPS material.

- Ed C.



Oh and B.T. is full of crap......

But I already said that I'm not interested in shelling out $75 for the core books. Also, I borrowed a copy and it bored me to tears.

Yes, B.T. is full of crap.

Quote from: danbuter;532408Both are good games, and the core rules are fairly simple (3d6 roll low). However, they both offer tons and tons of options. This is kind of like having a $10,000 mechanics tool chest with all the doodads, when all you really need is a ratchet set. While everything you can possibly want is in there somewhere, you have to basically know ALL of the rules in order to find the things you want, and to know how the various skills or powers you are not allowing will affect a game.

While you can maybe get away with a general knowledge of stuff to make your decisions, you still have to read everything. I think many people who make the argument that the "base rules are really simple" just completely miss that fact.

What also has really hurt both games, IMO, is that they are now split up into two separate books. Instead of having everything organized in just one rulebook, you now have to have both books open if your running combats (unless you're one of those people who has actually memorized everything). This is clumsy to handle at the table, and also makes looking up rules during play a major hassle. Especially if you think a rule is in book two, but is actually tucked away in a powers description in book one.

This is one of the areas that D&D has improved. By moving characters and combat into the same book (and lately even treasure), players and the DM can find everything much more quickly, if there's a question during play. Hero and Gurps are moving in the opposite direction, and I believe that's a big mistake.

Nice post. I'm sure splitting up systems in several books has, at least in part, to do with profit. But...if people don't buy the books the company doesn't make a profit. So maybe they will discover they can make a reasonable profit by selling a single core book, then sell us more books later.

Quote from: gleichman;532556Only in Part. And mostly for this site which tends towards front-loaded designs. IME with HERO groups the GM handles character generation for the players (with their input) meaning that the front-loading exists only for the one person who in general enjoys its. For the players, it's one of the smoothest gaming systems around.

I hated the Hero System the first couple of times I played and the GM created a character for me.  I read the rules, learned how they worked and how to build characters, and enjoy Hero when I'm running a character that I've built myself, and thus know how to play properly.  The problem that I've seen is that different people tend to build characters a bit differently, putting a different emphasis on attributes, skills, and powers and building powers differently.  As a result, the characters can play quite differently and it's possible for the GM to create a character that clashes with how a player wants to play it.

As for being a smooth game system, I agree that it runs smoothly but there are a few key concepts that a player has to grasp or they are going to have a lot of trouble using the system effectively, including aborting actions in combat to defend.

I don't have a problem with Hero as a player, but I found it a lot of work to GM.  I think having a pool of NPCs to draw from helps.  One of the problems I had with running both Hero and my D&D 3.5 is that it often seemed like it would take me longer to write up NPCs and monsters than the time I'd spend actually using them in a game.  If it takes me an hour to create NPCs that will be gone in half that time, I'm going to start feeling like I'm wasting my time.

Quote from: gleichman;532556A breaking point came when Steven Long decided for 6th edition that he was now God and that he would change major sections of the Rules (including dropping support for maps and minis) and go for a rather horible art style taken from Champion's Online (a IMO failed MMORPG).

Add in the lack of campaign support, the absence of a good setting, edition change burnout, and you have today's state. New players aren't willing to try such a shallow offering and older players are generally running 5th Edition.

It's a sad thing.

To be honest, I never really saw what 5th Edition gave me that 4th didn't except for a bigger and harder to use rulebook.  I do have the 5th Edition rules and some of the 5th Edition genre and setting books (I think the Hudson City book is well done) but I don't own any 6th Edition material.  If they dropped the hex-based combat, then I think I made a good choice to avoid it.

Quote from: gleichman;532556I think it was successful not for it's system so much, but for its resource books for settings and eras. Fine stuff there.

I agree with this.  I own a lot of the GURPS genre and setting books but I've never actually played a game of GURPS, nor have I felt an urge to play it.  Beyond the issue with being attribute heavy and other system-related quirks, the decision to militantly use English system measurements even for things like Traveller, which was always metric, and the use of dollar signs for costs even for fantasy settings always seemed awkward and distracting to me.

Quote from: Marleycat;532599I kind of agree with your take.  Whatcha think of White Wolf?

Serviceable.  Nothing super-exciting but it's simple enough that this isn't really a problem.  The main draw is that using dots makes it easy to visualize different stat combinations and how those could be interpreted in character form.

Quote from: John Morrow;532741I hated the Hero System the first couple of times I played and the GM created a character for me.  I read the rules, learned how they worked and how to build characters, and enjoy Hero when I'm running a character that I've built myself, and thus know how to play properly.  The problem that I've seen is that different people tend to build characters a bit differently, putting a different emphasis on attributes, skills, and powers and building powers differently.  As a result, the characters can play quite differently and it's possible for the GM to create a character that clashes with how a player wants to play it.

These issues are the reason systems with this level of complexity for players should have a concise description of a tailored character creation interview process.  It would alleviate many of the concept conflicts that may occur in the final result.  Of course, one would like players to take up learning a system as a whole with their own copy of a game, but I don't place this expectation upon players.  Well, I don't these days anyway.

Quote from: John Morrow;532741The problem that I've seen is that different people tend to build characters a bit differently, putting a different emphasis on attributes, skills, and powers and building powers differently. .

This is one of the features of HERO, and why a single person designing everything (generally the GM) works best. How a character is built directly effects the flavor of the game world and that character's interaction with all the NPCs in there.

If it isn't done that way you can easily end up in conflict. For example a GM wanting a four color world can build things that way, but that would conflict with a player wanting a gritty death dealer PC. Thus Player and GM expectation  must match or the conflict will be plain in the game mechanics as well as in role-play.

I think highly of you John, but I know your PC expectations will never submit to another's in a game. I wouldn't recommend HERO to you as a result, you'd either end up unable to play the character correctly as you see it- or controlling the game world instead of the GM.

Quote from: John Morrow;532741If it takes me an hour to create NPCs that will be gone in half that time, I'm going to start feeling like I'm wasting my time.

In it's original and best genre of four color supers (and to a lesser extent most other genres) work on a NPC is never wasted in that way.

Doctor Doom doesn't just show up for issue #2 and that's it. He's around as long as the Fantastic Four are. Hydra agents are there for the life of S.H.I.E.L.D., etc.

Outside of supers there is still great reuse, just like one Skeleton in D&D is much the same as any other.

If you ended making a hour long creation one shot- It's because you decided to. Not because the system forced you to.



> To be honest, I never really saw what 5th Edition gave me that 4th didn't
> except for a bigger and harder to use rulebook.

One rule book was the one benefit, the core 4th edition was missing a lot of good things covered in 4th edition expansion. Given the choice, I always want one rulebook to cover the rules 5th was the first edition to almost do just that.

Beyond that, 5th brought little to the table (and introduced the beginning of a number of design mistakes by Steven Long).

I love Hero System; I think 5e is just about the pinnacle of point-buy systems.  For the first time it seemed like the genre books were more interested in presenting a given genre rather than presenting another bunch of powers inside a book with a genre-artwork cover.

Being a Battletech fan, I bought Robot Warriors at the beginning of my 20+ year history with Hero System.  It was and is awful.  There was nothing about getting your giant battlemech on; there were just collections of pre-built RKAs.  Nearly zero flavor.

I felt like Hero System was good only for just that - superhero games - and left it at that.  "Dark Champions" and "Champions Fuzion" was...uh...crap...and I never bothered with it.  Then along came 5e and I was again in love.  Plus the supplement books, as I said, finally seemed to have texture of their own.  So now Hero does what I want it to which is "Everything that isn't AD&D or WHFRP".

Unfortunately, I must agree with everyone who talks about how needlessly complex it is, how it is klunky unless you've spent 20+ years getting used to it, etc.  It is not a "good" game system.  It is simply one I have gotten so used to that I feel it is a good game system.

Quote from: ggroy;532421Now that I think about it more, I suspect many of these same players would have very little to no interest in 3E/3.5E and 4E D&D, if it did not have "Dungeons and Dragons" on the front cover.

The fact that the core books had "Dungeons and Dragons" on the front cover, was the only reason they tolerated 3E/3.5E and 4E.

The D&D artwork attracts a certain kind of buyer/gamer.  Just like with magic cards.  The ones with the best artwork sold more.

Quote from: B.T.;532482No, they're not.  GURPS is awful.  Haven't played HERO but from what I've heard, it is sub-par.  If the designers want to make GURPS work, they need to drastically simplify the system and then create genre-specific splats with self-contained rules that can optionally be grafted onto other games.  GURPS Fantasy Heartbreaker should be a completely separate game from GURPS Space Opera in the way that Werewolf is a completely separate game from Vampire.

www.themook.net/rpg/examples/close/index.php?id=one

GURPS needs to stay different from other RPGs so it can continue to use other games' settings (with little conversion hassle) as its own.  I loved that link.  It shows just how brutal GURPS combat is down to the second!

Quote from: Soylent Green;532592Surely Champions Online has given Hero more exposure than most other games outside D&D ever get. CO might not have been huge in MMO terms, but your still looking at tens of thousands of players who will have tried it, maybe even a hundred thousand. Most games would kill for that kind of indirect advertising.

And just to prove the point, in our group one guy started running published Champions adventures for us based on familiarity he gained with the setting playing CO. However we are using ICONS for the system.

For whatever reasons, software companies and dice RPG companies never benefit or compliment each other beyond their temporary license agreements.  I wonder how many GURPS sales would have been generated for Steve Jackson Games if SJ never pulled its license from Interplay's Fallout?  Maybe RPG designers as a whole don't want to be involved with computer games because another company is then in charge of things on that end?

Quote from: jeff37923;532627Hell, come to think of it, Robert Zubrin gave GURPS: Mars his personal seal of approval.

My GURPS Mars is on my bookshelf next to my Zubrin books.  

Quote from: trechriron;5326741.Choose species
2.Choose a "home world" or nation (determines some skills)
3.Choose culture (determines some skills)
4.Choose upbringing (determines some skills)
5.Choose education or training (in phases based on years in, like a life-path or pick and choose and define time in) (determines some skills)
6.Choose profession (at game start) (determines some skills)
7.Choose social standing
8.Choose important events (these will determine contacts, allies, various disadvantage choices)
9.Have a handful of customization options that help to define the setting and genre

Interesting.  Sounds like SPI's Universe.

Quote from: trechriron;532674Then, SJGames needs to commission the creation of 3 settings. They should have a STRONG focus on adventures. The question "What do the characters do?" should be easily discernible from the book. I would suggest Fantasy, Modern Horror, and Space Opera. These are NOT genre books. They are complete RPGs powered by the GURPS toolkit.

Build it and maybe SJGames will host the site on their server for a license fee.  They have never shown interest in hiring people to write software for them.

Everyday, some kid gets an XBOX or PS3.  How many get a GURPS or a HERO book?

Quote from: thedungeondelver;532753It is not a "good" game system. It is simply one I have gotten so used to that I feel it is a good game system.

Everyone is in the same boat.  This describes nearly 95% of RPG paper & dice players.

Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;532765My GURPS Mars is on my bookshelf next to my Zubrin books.  

You are obviously a man of refined taste.