The Ferrett (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} theferrett) wrote,@ 2008-03-14 12:35:00 |
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Let's Try This Again: Hero System vs. D&D
I've been running a Planescape campaign for about five years now, where the players are based in the floating city of Sigil and explore all of the classic D&D planes: The Nine Hells, the Seven Heavens, the Astral Plane, and so forth.
But I began to run into problems with the D&D rules. Eventually, though I kept the D&D trappings, I switched the internals of the campaign over to a whole other system - that would be Hero System, a roleplaying set of rules designed to emulate the world of superheroes. And I thought today I'd discuss where Hero is better than D&D for pure combat excitement, and where it's worse.
First off, though, let me address the way I handle combat.
See, for me, "combat" encounters are where players can actually die. Some GMs run combats that are, essentially, setpieces - there's no way the characters can lose, and it's all about how they defeat the villains. To me, that's boring. When you know how every game is going to turn out, why bother?
So my combats have stuff at stake. I don't set out to kill the PCs, of course, but it's always possible that the heroes will be routed in the course of any battle, and if something goes drastically wrong they might lose their lives. That provides a tension for me that I think is satisfying; you have a good chance of winning, but you never can assume it. Which means you have to think carefully about your next move, because it might be your last.
Now, people always tell me that a good GM can just make up maneuvers on the spot. "Who needs to look at the manual?" they cry. "Just adjudicate something and move on!" But to me, that's not fair, because as the GM I know how inconsistent I can be when I'm making shit up on the fly. One day, I could decide that a surprise backflip maneuver from a Pit Fiend does double damage, and the next day a similar backflip does triple damage, or one-and-a-half damage, or does something else. That might be fine in a game where the PCs are expected to win... But when I am, essentially, playing games with the lives of characters they have grown to love, I don't want to risk killing them because I was like, "Oh, yeah, that's um... Deadly damage." (And my PCs are not the only ones who make surprise maneuvers.) They shouldn't die because I made up a number.
What I want is a system that covers 98% of what a player is likely to do. I can adjudicate that 2% as it comes up, but I want a rules system where most of the time, whatever they come up with, it's been planned and anticipated. And that is Hero System.
Hero System is designed to carry out superhero combat. Pretty much anything you want to do in the system has been outlined comprehensively (if not always clearly). And unlike D&D, which has several bullshit maneuvers that do nothing at higher levels (dodging does what?), everything you can do in Hero System has some effect, even if you may not be powerful enough to have it matter. (You can grapple the rhino, but I wouldn't advise it.)
So let me outline, briefly, my problems with D&D:
1) AC is the only armor. Basically, in D&D, you get hit or you don't. Armor makes you harder to hit, but it doesn't actually reduce damage at all. Which means that if you get whacked by a guy with a baseball bat and he connects, you're going to take the same amount of damage whether you're in a suit of plate mail or wearing nothing but a pair of dockers. The only difference in D&D terms is that the guy with the bat has a harder time hitting you at all, which is silly.
This also means that every attack does full damage if it connects. And at higher levels, the bad guys are almost guaranteed to connect, meaning that you take a lot of damage no matter what.
2) Hit points are meaningless until you don't have any. As the only real measure of health (barring characteristic damage), you act perfectly healthy right up until the moment you are dead. Which means that a pit fiend reduced to a single hit point after a long fight can still dish out the same damage.
What was happening in my high-level campaigns is that the combats had been reduced to hit point attrition wars. The PCs were merely trying to do the maximum amount of hit point damage to the monsters, and in return I could either give the monsters such an AC that the PCs couldn't hit them, or give them so many hit points that they could absorb a couple of fifty-point hits.
In return, to make the monsters dangerous, I had to give them attacks that would pretty much decimate the PCs. So every combat turned into a rather strategy-free race of "hit the monster, hope the monster doesn't hit you twice (because if he does you're dead), monster dies." (The problem is outlined in more detail here.)
So I went to Hero System. And Hero System is a lot more complex, but it's also much more strategic.
The big change between D&D and Hero System is that Hero System draws a distinction between Protection and How Hard You Are To Hit. You have defenses that actually reduce the amount of damage you can take, and you have a Dexterity-based stat (DCV) that makes you harder to hit. (And unlike D&D, where high-level monsters automatically have a better chance to hit, in Hero System there's a bell curve, where a guy who's really hard to hit is really hard to hit for just about anyone.)
So unlike D&D, you can have a tank who has huge defenses, getting hit a lot but with enough armor to absorb a punch without getting hurt too bad. And you can have a thief who is incredibly hard to hit, but once you connect he's going to take most of the damage.
That alone was worth the change.
But it gets better. See, unlike the stat dump of Hit Points, one catch-all stat to measure your overall health, in Champions your health is broken down into three categories:
1) BODY. This is how much damage you take before you die. You typically don't take a lot of BODY.
2) STUN. This is how much damage you take before you get knocked out. You generally take more STUN than body. You can recover some STUN in combat by doing nothing for a round.
3) ENDURANCE. Unlike D&D where you can wail on someone with a sword all day, everything you do in Champions costs you Endurance. When you're low on Endurance, you may not be able to use certain powers, making long battles wars of attrition. You can also recover some ENDURANCE in combat by doing nothing for a round.
Champions is designed so that, much like superhero battles, you can get knocked through a wall without actually getting killed. The attacks are, on the whole, designed to knock you out as opposed to frying you.
This actually allows for more bravery in combat. Because you'll frequently be low on STUN but high on BODY and ENDURANCE, you'll have to make a decision whether to take some rounds to recover and get back up to full health, or do you charge in, knowing the bad guy might take you out of the fight... But maybe, if you land a lucky punch, you can knock him down first!
Choose your weapon.
Separating the BODY so that "being dead" is a very separate thing from "being out of the fight" changes things dramatically. It allows you to put your players up against very tough opponents, and by and large they're going to have some broken bones but they'll be okay if they win the battle. This is as opposed to D&D, where so many of my PCs were being brought to -10 that half of my adventures had become resurrection crusades.
But it gets even more complex than that, and in a way better - there's not one catch-all defense, but rather four kinds of defense, which defend against different types of attacks. In Champions, having a big plate-mail suit may make you nigh-invulnerable to physical attacks, but there's no guarantee it's going to shield you when a dragon breathes on you. You have to choose what sorts of attacks you'll be protected against.
What this means is that everyone has a set of characteristics that are unique to them, and everyone has their own vulnerabilities. Your PC might have a high defense against energy, moves quickly, but has a glass jaw if anyone punches them. Or she might be easy to hit, but is well-defended against every kind of attack. Or she has practically no defense at all, but is a gigantic cannon who relies on getting the first punch in. You can't have everything, but Champions makes each PC feel very different in a fight. No two fighters do things exactly the same.
And the good news is that combat in Hero System? It's very strategic. As opposed to the "dog pile on the rabbit" move in D&D, where everyone just unloaded their big attack on the monster because every attack did the same kind of damage, in Hero System you'll often have the players talking like this:
"I'm not getting through his defenses! Nariska, can you take a shot at the guy?"
"I would, but he's moving too fast! I can't hit him!"
"Okay, let's gang up on him. If I hit him from behind, he'll have to deal with me and then you can get in your attack. He can't take all of us at once."
"Too bad, folks, because he's dodging..."
Hero System is marvelous because it feels like a cinematic combat. Not every attack is guaranteed to connect. When it connects, there's no guarantee that it's going to hurt. (Hey, you might be able to take a shot.) And every round, you have to make real choices about whether to advance the fight, or back off and recuperate, or try to coordinate things.
After playing a few rounds of D&D under the Hero System, I wasn't going back. Every single combat I've ever had in Hero System has felt unique, and not just because of the flavor. The actual strategy of each combat was different, as opposed to D&D, which always seemed to boil down to "I do as many HP as possible" no matter how the PCs tried to make it otherwise.
The very first fight I had in Hero System, the characters won because they took the correct approach to the battle. That didn't happen in D&D, where the dragon just breathed on them and they either made the save or not.
Now. Is Hero System perfect? Oh God no.
For the first thing, it's hellishly complex, and the manual kind of sucks. The Hero System is one of those annoying manuals that's organized from a "feature" perspective, not a "usability" perspective, which is to say that if it was a car manual it would list the features of the car from A to Z, starting with the Air Conditioner and ending with the Water Reservoir, without ever saying, "Oh, here's how you drive the fucking thing." If you don't have a mentor, you're in for a lot of desert-dry reading.
Which means the players will have difficulties. Much more so than D&D. There's just a lot more going on.
Also, from a character creation perspective, Hero System is maddeningly open-ended. This is great for guys like me, who went, "Fuck, I don't want a first-level thief - everything's pregenerated for me!" But one of the things I've come to realize is that a lot of players don't want open-ended. They want a Paladin, with a carrying case full of authorized Powers, and just to tack some bits on around the edges. I've had this conversation with players more times than I can count:
"Okay, Ferrett, I want a thief. What powers does a thief have?"
"What powers do you want them to have? You can do anything in this campaign. Anything you can imagine, I can make it happen."
"But what does a thief do?"
"There is no 'thief' template. There are a bunch of powers that you can purchase, many of which do thiefly things. So you have free rein to make your thief do anything you want! What kinds of things did you envision your player doing?"
"...but what powers does a thief have?"
I don't know whether it's years of conditioning by D&D's level-based systems, or just a want for more structure, but the fact that every PC is built from scratch really seems to confuse the hell out of players. They seem to expect that Champions will tell them what they should have, and getting them to grok that it's up to them usually takes some time.
Also, Champions is very much about character creation, and if you're not careful a clever player with experience can find all the loopholes and create a guy way above everyone else's power levels. It's not that Champions is broken per se - actually, it's the most balanced game I've ever played in - but rather that it's like the tax code. If you have a clever bookkeeper, he'll find the shortcuts and save you some money. Likewise, knowing the Champions rulebook from cover to back can clue you into the really good powers - which, to be fair, the book itself has generally marked with a "STOP" or a "CAUTION" flag. But if you haven't GMed Champions before and someone else has, then you have to watch them like a hawk.
And lastly, the combats can get confusing. Unlike D&D, which consists of "I roll, I hit," Champions often consists of several phases: Rolling to see if you hit, rolling your damage, subtracting the defenses, and each of those stages is a lot more complicated than D&D. People often forget they have powers, or don't remember to do something optimal. All of the options come with a cost, and that cost is often players going, "Oh, yeah, that Damage Reduction would have kept me in the game!" long after the combat is done.
That goes away in a long-term campaign, where they come to sniff the character sheet intensely, but in a short-term game it's a hazard.
Oh, and people say that Champions combat takes too long. It does take a while, but something's happening all the time. It took two hours to get through four rounds last night in our climactic battle to the death, but each of those four rounds had something so crazy happening that everyone else had to adjust their strategy. If you do it right, it's not boring.
So that's Hero System for you: Really, really good for producing cinematic fights. Takes much longer to get used to than simple ol' D&D (which isn't even that simple). But it's exceptionally rewarding once you get through it, because the complexity produces actual strategy.
And that's my two cents.
I've been running a Planescape campaign for about five years now, where the players are based in the floating city of Sigil and explore all of the classic D&D planes: The Nine Hells, the Seven Heavens, the Astral Plane, and so forth.
But I began to run into problems with the D&D rules. Eventually, though I kept the D&D trappings, I switched the internals of the campaign over to a whole other system - that would be Hero System, a roleplaying set of rules designed to emulate the world of superheroes. And I thought today I'd discuss where Hero is better than D&D for pure combat excitement, and where it's worse.
First off, though, let me address the way I handle combat.
See, for me, "combat" encounters are where players can actually die. Some GMs run combats that are, essentially, setpieces - there's no way the characters can lose, and it's all about how they defeat the villains. To me, that's boring. When you know how every game is going to turn out, why bother?
So my combats have stuff at stake. I don't set out to kill the PCs, of course, but it's always possible that the heroes will be routed in the course of any battle, and if something goes drastically wrong they might lose their lives. That provides a tension for me that I think is satisfying; you have a good chance of winning, but you never can assume it. Which means you have to think carefully about your next move, because it might be your last.
Now, people always tell me that a good GM can just make up maneuvers on the spot. "Who needs to look at the manual?" they cry. "Just adjudicate something and move on!" But to me, that's not fair, because as the GM I know how inconsistent I can be when I'm making shit up on the fly. One day, I could decide that a surprise backflip maneuver from a Pit Fiend does double damage, and the next day a similar backflip does triple damage, or one-and-a-half damage, or does something else. That might be fine in a game where the PCs are expected to win... But when I am, essentially, playing games with the lives of characters they have grown to love, I don't want to risk killing them because I was like, "Oh, yeah, that's um... Deadly damage." (And my PCs are not the only ones who make surprise maneuvers.) They shouldn't die because I made up a number.
What I want is a system that covers 98% of what a player is likely to do. I can adjudicate that 2% as it comes up, but I want a rules system where most of the time, whatever they come up with, it's been planned and anticipated. And that is Hero System.
Hero System is designed to carry out superhero combat. Pretty much anything you want to do in the system has been outlined comprehensively (if not always clearly). And unlike D&D, which has several bullshit maneuvers that do nothing at higher levels (dodging does what?), everything you can do in Hero System has some effect, even if you may not be powerful enough to have it matter. (You can grapple the rhino, but I wouldn't advise it.)
So let me outline, briefly, my problems with D&D:
1) AC is the only armor. Basically, in D&D, you get hit or you don't. Armor makes you harder to hit, but it doesn't actually reduce damage at all. Which means that if you get whacked by a guy with a baseball bat and he connects, you're going to take the same amount of damage whether you're in a suit of plate mail or wearing nothing but a pair of dockers. The only difference in D&D terms is that the guy with the bat has a harder time hitting you at all, which is silly.
This also means that every attack does full damage if it connects. And at higher levels, the bad guys are almost guaranteed to connect, meaning that you take a lot of damage no matter what.
2) Hit points are meaningless until you don't have any. As the only real measure of health (barring characteristic damage), you act perfectly healthy right up until the moment you are dead. Which means that a pit fiend reduced to a single hit point after a long fight can still dish out the same damage.
What was happening in my high-level campaigns is that the combats had been reduced to hit point attrition wars. The PCs were merely trying to do the maximum amount of hit point damage to the monsters, and in return I could either give the monsters such an AC that the PCs couldn't hit them, or give them so many hit points that they could absorb a couple of fifty-point hits.
In return, to make the monsters dangerous, I had to give them attacks that would pretty much decimate the PCs. So every combat turned into a rather strategy-free race of "hit the monster, hope the monster doesn't hit you twice (because if he does you're dead), monster dies." (The problem is outlined in more detail here.)
So I went to Hero System. And Hero System is a lot more complex, but it's also much more strategic.
The big change between D&D and Hero System is that Hero System draws a distinction between Protection and How Hard You Are To Hit. You have defenses that actually reduce the amount of damage you can take, and you have a Dexterity-based stat (DCV) that makes you harder to hit. (And unlike D&D, where high-level monsters automatically have a better chance to hit, in Hero System there's a bell curve, where a guy who's really hard to hit is really hard to hit for just about anyone.)
So unlike D&D, you can have a tank who has huge defenses, getting hit a lot but with enough armor to absorb a punch without getting hurt too bad. And you can have a thief who is incredibly hard to hit, but once you connect he's going to take most of the damage.
That alone was worth the change.
But it gets better. See, unlike the stat dump of Hit Points, one catch-all stat to measure your overall health, in Champions your health is broken down into three categories:
1) BODY. This is how much damage you take before you die. You typically don't take a lot of BODY.
2) STUN. This is how much damage you take before you get knocked out. You generally take more STUN than body. You can recover some STUN in combat by doing nothing for a round.
3) ENDURANCE. Unlike D&D where you can wail on someone with a sword all day, everything you do in Champions costs you Endurance. When you're low on Endurance, you may not be able to use certain powers, making long battles wars of attrition. You can also recover some ENDURANCE in combat by doing nothing for a round.
Champions is designed so that, much like superhero battles, you can get knocked through a wall without actually getting killed. The attacks are, on the whole, designed to knock you out as opposed to frying you.
This actually allows for more bravery in combat. Because you'll frequently be low on STUN but high on BODY and ENDURANCE, you'll have to make a decision whether to take some rounds to recover and get back up to full health, or do you charge in, knowing the bad guy might take you out of the fight... But maybe, if you land a lucky punch, you can knock him down first!
Choose your weapon.
Separating the BODY so that "being dead" is a very separate thing from "being out of the fight" changes things dramatically. It allows you to put your players up against very tough opponents, and by and large they're going to have some broken bones but they'll be okay if they win the battle. This is as opposed to D&D, where so many of my PCs were being brought to -10 that half of my adventures had become resurrection crusades.
But it gets even more complex than that, and in a way better - there's not one catch-all defense, but rather four kinds of defense, which defend against different types of attacks. In Champions, having a big plate-mail suit may make you nigh-invulnerable to physical attacks, but there's no guarantee it's going to shield you when a dragon breathes on you. You have to choose what sorts of attacks you'll be protected against.
What this means is that everyone has a set of characteristics that are unique to them, and everyone has their own vulnerabilities. Your PC might have a high defense against energy, moves quickly, but has a glass jaw if anyone punches them. Or she might be easy to hit, but is well-defended against every kind of attack. Or she has practically no defense at all, but is a gigantic cannon who relies on getting the first punch in. You can't have everything, but Champions makes each PC feel very different in a fight. No two fighters do things exactly the same.
And the good news is that combat in Hero System? It's very strategic. As opposed to the "dog pile on the rabbit" move in D&D, where everyone just unloaded their big attack on the monster because every attack did the same kind of damage, in Hero System you'll often have the players talking like this:
"I'm not getting through his defenses! Nariska, can you take a shot at the guy?"
"I would, but he's moving too fast! I can't hit him!"
"Okay, let's gang up on him. If I hit him from behind, he'll have to deal with me and then you can get in your attack. He can't take all of us at once."
"Too bad, folks, because he's dodging..."
Hero System is marvelous because it feels like a cinematic combat. Not every attack is guaranteed to connect. When it connects, there's no guarantee that it's going to hurt. (Hey, you might be able to take a shot.) And every round, you have to make real choices about whether to advance the fight, or back off and recuperate, or try to coordinate things.
After playing a few rounds of D&D under the Hero System, I wasn't going back. Every single combat I've ever had in Hero System has felt unique, and not just because of the flavor. The actual strategy of each combat was different, as opposed to D&D, which always seemed to boil down to "I do as many HP as possible" no matter how the PCs tried to make it otherwise.
The very first fight I had in Hero System, the characters won because they took the correct approach to the battle. That didn't happen in D&D, where the dragon just breathed on them and they either made the save or not.
Now. Is Hero System perfect? Oh God no.
For the first thing, it's hellishly complex, and the manual kind of sucks. The Hero System is one of those annoying manuals that's organized from a "feature" perspective, not a "usability" perspective, which is to say that if it was a car manual it would list the features of the car from A to Z, starting with the Air Conditioner and ending with the Water Reservoir, without ever saying, "Oh, here's how you drive the fucking thing." If you don't have a mentor, you're in for a lot of desert-dry reading.
Which means the players will have difficulties. Much more so than D&D. There's just a lot more going on.
Also, from a character creation perspective, Hero System is maddeningly open-ended. This is great for guys like me, who went, "Fuck, I don't want a first-level thief - everything's pregenerated for me!" But one of the things I've come to realize is that a lot of players don't want open-ended. They want a Paladin, with a carrying case full of authorized Powers, and just to tack some bits on around the edges. I've had this conversation with players more times than I can count:
"Okay, Ferrett, I want a thief. What powers does a thief have?"
"What powers do you want them to have? You can do anything in this campaign. Anything you can imagine, I can make it happen."
"But what does a thief do?"
"There is no 'thief' template. There are a bunch of powers that you can purchase, many of which do thiefly things. So you have free rein to make your thief do anything you want! What kinds of things did you envision your player doing?"
"...but what powers does a thief have?"
I don't know whether it's years of conditioning by D&D's level-based systems, or just a want for more structure, but the fact that every PC is built from scratch really seems to confuse the hell out of players. They seem to expect that Champions will tell them what they should have, and getting them to grok that it's up to them usually takes some time.
Also, Champions is very much about character creation, and if you're not careful a clever player with experience can find all the loopholes and create a guy way above everyone else's power levels. It's not that Champions is broken per se - actually, it's the most balanced game I've ever played in - but rather that it's like the tax code. If you have a clever bookkeeper, he'll find the shortcuts and save you some money. Likewise, knowing the Champions rulebook from cover to back can clue you into the really good powers - which, to be fair, the book itself has generally marked with a "STOP" or a "CAUTION" flag. But if you haven't GMed Champions before and someone else has, then you have to watch them like a hawk.
And lastly, the combats can get confusing. Unlike D&D, which consists of "I roll, I hit," Champions often consists of several phases: Rolling to see if you hit, rolling your damage, subtracting the defenses, and each of those stages is a lot more complicated than D&D. People often forget they have powers, or don't remember to do something optimal. All of the options come with a cost, and that cost is often players going, "Oh, yeah, that Damage Reduction would have kept me in the game!" long after the combat is done.
That goes away in a long-term campaign, where they come to sniff the character sheet intensely, but in a short-term game it's a hazard.
Oh, and people say that Champions combat takes too long. It does take a while, but something's happening all the time. It took two hours to get through four rounds last night in our climactic battle to the death, but each of those four rounds had something so crazy happening that everyone else had to adjust their strategy. If you do it right, it's not boring.
So that's Hero System for you: Really, really good for producing cinematic fights. Takes much longer to get used to than simple ol' D&D (which isn't even that simple). But it's exceptionally rewarding once you get through it, because the complexity produces actual strategy.
And that's my two cents.