The myth of Hero

Excitement was in the air, that thrilling anticipation of a fresh rpg. Friends around the table ready to pass through the door of imagination. They sit ready to make bigger than life characters, explore strange worlds, defeat evil, cross and double cross. The GM pitches his world idea and players instantly snap to coming up with character concepts. Someone asks casually, “what system are we using?” The GM pauses, and reaches into his backpack, with a slight grunt he pulls two massive tomes out. Blue and gold graphics start to bring dread into hearts of the players. That internal fear confirmed when the GM says, “Let's try Hero”, as he drops the the books causing a 3.8 tablequake. Instantly fear turns to horror, the joy of the game drains to be replaced by visions of calculus and 4 hour long combats. Another game is a victim of Herophobia.

Hero's reputation as a monolithic impenetrable fortress of rules is well earned. The rule books are huge an imposing. The default setting, Champions, is potentially the most confusing variant of hero that you can run. The quick start rules in their Sidekick editions are good, but no book seems to provide an obvious signpost as to where to start. All of these choices are intentional for better or for worse. The giant rule books are a marketing point, including the famous rulebook can stop a bullet stunt. Champions deserves to be a flagship line because it highlights what hero does better than any other system, but getting that sweet super hero gold requires a lengthy time investment to make it work right. Hero is marketed and designed for Hero players first and foremost, and that has the side effect of keeping hero in the 'hardcore' rpg category during an age of light and story driven rpgs.

Hero has a lot going for it. It has a wonderfully consistent set of rules that once you understand them scales through all kinds of power levels and campaign settings. Layers of complexity can be added and removed painlessly. When people think of hero they tend to think of the full buy in version. High character point super heroes with complicated powers and multi powers. But the true selling point, and the one that puts it in a class above other generic systems is the strength of it base system. The simple bones that build into the variety of beasts it can become. My friend Chris likes to say that Hero is his go to light game. While Hero isn't a light game by the standards of modern rpg design, I know what he means. It is easy enough to apply hero to most campaign concepts, with a minimum of tweaking. For those oddball one shots it is often just as easy to throw together a few Hero characters. In games with no power, or low powers the process of making a hero character offers a lot of control while being pretty painless. At low character point levels fights move extremely quickly, letting you run very action oriented games without a lot of combat downtime.

Easy character generation, quick combats, but that doesn't sound like Hero. That isn't champions, but unfortunately Champions and Hero are mostly synonymous. So what hero needs is a quickstart that plays to those advantages. The allure of the quickstart is that you can hop right into a game quickly, but a hero quickstart would be generic, so suddenly there is a lot of work to build the world. So we need a stripped down quick start game with an easy to understand world tied into it. It turns out that before Hero came out the system published exactly what I described in 1984. It was called Justice inc. JI was a version of Champions with all the powers stripped out, and a really tight pulp hero game theme. All the rules needed to play, with a few little add ons for the sake of theme. A good set of resources for running pulp games. In many ways it was the perfect Hero supplement.

As much as I hate the Fantasy flight new Star Wars model, it might be a good line for Hero games to take. Fantasy Flight with their Star Wars rpg republishes all the core rules with some minor modifications each time they put out a major sourcebook. While this is annoying for a game where the theme changes just a little bit, it is an awesome fit for a generic system that could have wildly different settings and themes. I think a hero curious person might be more likely to buy a small tight game like JI to get a feel, then if they enjoyed it, it would be easy enough to expand into the wider game. It of course doesn’t have to be JI, a cool post apocalyptic game, some unique take or licensed fantasy game. The easiest and quickest way to learn Hero is to play with those already converted to the cult of Hero. Currently there really is no good way for new players to easily get in.

I recommend giving hero a shot. Especially if you are the kind of person who wants a game that is mechanically deeper than most. The mechanical depth is offset by its logical consistency. The math involved is very straight forward.  Hero just isn't as inscrutable as people make it out to be, if you are capable of splatbook surfing 200 pathfinder books to make some crazy build you should be fine playing some good old 1980 rpg technology. Long live Hero.

Keeping the straight man fun

We just started a new tabletop game a few weeks ago. I have been trying to get my head around my character. Some characters just click, they have a hook that makes them interesting and easy to play.  My last rpg character, Bracket, was an easy one. He was an exchange student from Brazil, and also a semi pro star craft player and steamer. I instantly had a lot of hooks to make the character fun to play and memorable.

My new character captain Slocum, is a different story. He is an industrial star ship captain, who was riding out his career as a cruise ship captain when an evil AI started a war and space faring civilization blasted itself back to the industrial era.

Now he is in his sixties working as a smuggler when our game begins. The party consists of a drug dealer, a permastoned space hippy, and an idealistic naive doctor. This puts me in the position of being the level headed one, the practical planner, the wet blanket straight man. This kind of party dynamic is common in rpgs. What fun is it to play the brash rogue without a palladin around to vex? But how can the lawful good pally still have fun role-playing without falling into the wet blanket party dad role?

I think it's important to not make the conflict between your level headed character and the more rebellious trouble making characters your defining character trait. It can be fun sometimes, but can grow tedious quickly, and you have to leave room for the other players to do their thing. If all you do is try to enforce your characters rules on other characters, a few things might happen. One everyone does what they want anyway, and your character becomes ineffective and unfun for you to play, or you impose your will on everyone else and their characters become less fun. Or the other characters start cutting you out of the plans and have to do everything behind your back. Find some other angle, personality trait or motivation to take center stage for you.

If you do find yourself in a situation where your moral character is getting marginalized, bypassed, and isn't very fun to play, it is probably time for some out of game conversations with the other players. Talk to them about what you want out of the character, and how you don't think things are going well. Find something to bring the characters together. Make your character less judgey, hopefully they can make their characters less evil. Embrace the power of compromise and communication.

With Slocum I'm thinking he is one of those guys that thinks everything was better when he was younger. In this case he is probably right. He feels that honor and trust has been destroyed, leaving people to revert to their selfish motives. So he has a nostalgic side. Even though he works with criminals as a smuggler, he holds himself and those he works with to a higher moral standard. Having come up in the civilian sector, he doesn't have the beatings will be administered until morale improves mentality. His management style is softer. So I'm going to play him as even tempered, perhaps a bit frustrated, but not one to get angry. Still boring, but at least a motivated boring. As a humor gimmick I'm going to call back to his cruise ship captain days and make terrifying announcements over the ships coms in a soothing captains voice. It's already happened once, "if you look out the side Windows now you will see the asteroid about to crush us into oblivion".

He possess important skills that nobody else has, and similarly has contacts everywhere. So I think he will garner his share of game spotlight naturally, without the need to force the matter awkwardly. I can keep his personality subdued and still have fun with him. My goal is to let the other players indulge in their crazy with mild disdain and simmering frustration rather than anger. I plan on keeping him from being the alpha character by deferring the big choices to the naive doctor who in theory will own the ship we fly. I will give options, and take options, avoid the "my way or the airlock" style.

I still think he still needs a little something more to make him a standout character, but those kind of things often emerge during game play. I like to think I have my basics covered. I know my main role is to keep the ship and the plot moving forward. Secondarily I serve as a foil to the other characters. My goal is to have a good time enabling the other characters as much as possible.