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What Hero Is About: Hero is the settingless version of Champions, a superhero combat wargame.
I will be describing the book by section (the chapters in this book are hundreds of pages long, which is why I departed from my normal chapter-by-chapter review), give the miscellaneous notes, and give the final verdict. In addition, wherever possible, I will be giving appropriate quotes from the book.
Attributes
Hero uses eight primary stats: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Body, Intelligence, Ego, Presence, and Comliness. These are priced oddly; anywhere from half of a point (Comliness) to three points (Dexterity) per +1. Generally, although the physical stats usually give you something every 'plus' you buy, you need to buy at least three points of a mental stat before it has any effect on characters in play. Characters can also now 'sell down' stats, to represent a flawed hero -- something that has long been needed.
There are seven figured characteristics; all are used for combat. All can be increased with CP, if you're so inclined.
Caveat #1: Since the stats can now be sold down, they added in mechanics to penalize those with low (below 0) and very low (below 30) stats (there is no lower limit, and stats do not count against disadvantage limits). Which was needed, surely -- but Comliness breaks this. First, you have to pay to have a negative Comliness -- and then you have to make willpower rolls to even move around because you're so very ugly!
Caveat #2: A character has 'casual strength' equal to 1/2 his normal strength that he can use without thinking (for example, to push someone aside). If a character has a Strength of -10, does that then mean his Casual Strength is -5 (twice as strong as normal)?
Caveat #3: There's still a Comliness stat in Hero at all. If you listen closely, you can hear the other games on my shelf snicker (except for CP2020 and ATB, with which it has formed a support group).
Skills
Skills cost a certain amount of points for a base roll of 11 (plus attribute modifiers, excluding certain skills), and then another certain amount of points for a +1 to the roll; each skill is a rule of its own, and requires you to look it up on a table seperately (shades of Palladium!). You also have to buy 'familiarities' for many skill, a boring but acceptable part of character creation.
Caveat #1: Combat Skill Levels. They aren't skills, and they don't always come in levels.
Caveat #2: Overall Skill Levels. As well as penalizing characters who buy heavily-skilled characters, every turn, you can trade them in for 'combat skill levels'. How, exactly, do we do this? Do we trade OSLs for CSLs on a one-for-one basis, or is it point based? How this was done wasn't explained.
Caveat #3: At first glance, it looked like they simplified the skill ssytem. They didn't.
Talents
Talents are the Feats of the Hero System; they're binary abilities you either have or you don't. In an interesting change, all Talents are now bought as Powers; although the costs are now consistent with those of normal 'powers', some of them had to be horribly contrived to fit in Hero's power structure ('Eidetic Memory' as Clairsentience?).
Caveat #1: If Talents were built this way, why weren't Skill Enhancers also built this way?
Caveat #2: Because of the way they priced it, Eidetic Memory is now only 5 points, not 10. Poor move; its price needed to be increased, not decreased, due to its utility.
Powers
This massive section of the book, the lion's share of the book by far, describes innate powers in the Hero System, as well as quick fixes to make it do other tasks that have unfortunately not been dealt with.
The power system requires you to think of the effect you want, and apply modifiers as necessary. However, this is not a pure effect-based system, as are some; each power assumes certain things, and if you want to change it, you must 'buy off' their assumptions. Here's an example: "Handcuffs: Entangle 3d6 (standard effect: 3 BODY), 6 DEF, Takes No Damage From Attacks (+1/2) (67 Active Points); OAF (-1), Cannot Form Barriers (-1/4), Set Effect (Hands Only, -1), Does Not Prevent Use Of Accessable Foci (-1), No Range (-1/2), Must Follow Grab Or Target Must Be Willing (-1/2), 1 Recoverable Charge (-1 1/4), Can Be Escaped Automatically With Modified Lockpicking Or Contortionist Roll (-1/2). Total cost: 9 points."
The most notable changes to powers in this edition were to Aid and Healing (doubling the cost), Change Environment (which does not actually change the environment anymore; rather, it inflicts combat penalties on an area), and to senses and sense-affecting powers (they now operate by sense group instead of by sense, a rule I had been using in my own Fuzion games). Minor changes are made to Luck (optional rules taken from Fuzion and GURPS). Everything else is errata.
Some modifiers were also changed as well. Most notably, to try to handle equipment and magic, the limitation Requires A Skill Roll was enhanced; for example, there's now a 'skill roll' requirement of rolling three sixes on 3d6 (!).
The biggest addition to the rules (no pun intended) is Megascale; Hero can now build Rifts-scale powers now. Good for campaign creativity, bad for balance; you can now fairly easily build a killing attack that has a 'megascale explosion' miles wide cheaper than you can build a guaranteed knockout punch. This section needed much more testing before being incorporated.
Some powers were merged in this edition. For example, Regeneration is now part of Healing (costs 0 END, is automatic, and affects the character only). That's a good thing. However, why stop there? Since Absorb doesn't actually absorb damage, isn't it just an Aid with a Trigger? Shapeshift only affects your form as percieved by others, and does not actually change you -- well then, isn't that Images with Self Only? Isn't Mind Link just Telepathy with a few extra bells and whistles already simulated by extant modifiers? I could go on.
Yes, there's a lot of fluff in this section. However, almost every power, advantage, and limitation has an example power or five showing how it can be used. Although some of the examples are silly and/or stupid ('Supreme Balance' and 'I can drunk just as good fight' being part of the same power?), most of them will do better to explain what the power actually does than a dozen more paragraphs of rulings. This is something Hero has needed for the longest time, and if I gave bonus points, I'd be giving bonus points for this.
Major problem: Unfortunately, Elemental Control was retained in Hero 5. Although it is now more difficult to determine the cost (a needed change), the cost benefits are now as large or larger as they were in previous editions of Hero. (The examples given in the book granted 75 and 100 points free for a drawback that would normally be worth 5 or 10 points, easily making any character with those powers the most powerful in their game.)
Caveat #1: Succor was added so that characters from Hero 4 with Aid could be easily 'grandfathered in' (5 points, costs END, both of which were changed in Hero 5). As well has having a stupid name, doesn't that defeat the entire purpose of fixing Aid?
Caveat #2: For being an effect-based system, not every power is based on an effect. For example, to build a portable hole, you have to buy Extra-Dimensional Movement... which is also the power you buy to travel through time.
Caveat #3: Yes, you still need to know precalculus to do the math in this section. Why not switch to a simpler algebra equation, I don't know; not to mention the fact that a system based on multiples of 5 is virtually screaming for a simple percentile system.
Caveat #4: It costs more to make a power AVLD (reducing a normal defense) than to make it NND (unable to be defended against). WTY?
Caveat #5: A ranged Killing attack costs as much as a melee Killing attack; there is no difference other than one reaches 75 tiles away per level.
Caveat #6: The system only works well for 'flashy', innate powers; it gets less and less usable the further from four-color you get. For example, an effect like 'warm up this room' cannot be built in Hero, because there is no point cost for 70 degrees Farenheit -- you'd have to make it a special effect of a 'real' power, i.e., one that has some kind of combat effect. Good luck writing your own rules if you want Hero to do something that is not an 'innate' feature (such as a divine blessing or D&D-style magic).
Individually, these quirks could be tolerated, but together, they took a point off of Substance.
Bases, Equipment, and Vehicles
Hero 5 makes the simplifying (and incorrect) assumption that something that is balanced for players is also balanced for Ferraris, buildings, and computers. For example, a dagger costs 10 character points; you could buy a Masters in english for fewer points. It is suggested in a few places that there is an option for 'heroic' campaigns to not have to pay points for gear; however, how gear exactly is purchased if not with character points is not explained. As this has not been fixed, a point was taken off of Substance.
Combat
Combat is still based on tactical superhero combat; real-world measurements are eschewed in Hero, replaced by wholly abstract units of measurement. You get so many phases to spend per turn, based on your Speed (which is underpriced; expect to see all types of characters approching the maximum in every genre of game), which can be split up into half-actions. These phases come in segments, twelve per turn; every action you perform comes in one of these segments. Your speed allows you to act only in certain segments, based on a Speed Table.
The basic roll of Hero combat is simple: roll 3d6 under 11+OCV (Offence Combat Value), and the margin of success is the DCV (Defence Combat Value) you hit. However, there's so much to combat in Hero, with so many modifiers relying on other rules, that modifying the Hero combat system is like knocking out individual bricks from a wall: even if you were to work out one 'brick' out under the weight of the rest, the rest of them would become less stable.
Caveat #1: Presence Attacks are still resolved like an energy blast. Even my copies ATB and CP2020 have shunned Hero now.
Caveat #2: Many actions you perform or situations you are in halve your DCV. What happens when you have your DCV is halved twice? Is it reduced to zero? Is it quartered? Does the halving only last for that segment, until the next segment, until the next turn, what? If these questions were answered in the book, I couldn't find it.
Miscellany
The best change in Hero 5, hands down, is the presentation. Editing is tighter, examples are given more freely, and there is actually some sense of humor about the system now.
Some features were taken from Fuzion and GURPS, Hero's progeny; but not enough. DOJ, why do you tease us so?
Many times, you are told to "Roll Xd6 and figure the 'body'". This refers to an obscure section of the combat chapter. Please name this mechanic, if you are going to use it so often!
The book is larger and sturdier than most of my college textbooks; it's definately the physically largest RPG I have ever seen. If I hit you with my Hero 5 rulebook, you would die.
The art is so-so. It is heavily biased towards superheroes, as suits the game's genre; some of the pieces of art are bad or inappropriate to their section (like the pyrotechnic on page 181, the nerd on page 195, or the unexplained... somethings... on page 345), while some pieces are excellent (the art piece on page 347, while simple, may be the best piece of art I've ever seen in a RPG).
Although I praised the book for having better editing than previous editions, there's still room for improvement. For example, there are misplaced words (most notably, there are many examples of a 'what' being where a 'which' should be, and vice versa), and a few tables that are off. However, given the size of this book, I'm letting it slide.
Ignore the index. Although large, many of the page references are wrong; and since this book mentions many important bits of data only once in a place where you wouldn't expect it to be, you will be hunting through the book often. A point was taken off of Style for this.
The phrase 'At the GMs option' is repeated incessantly in the book. By the end, I was wondering what, exactly, players were allowed to do.
The history section has factual errors in it. R. Talsorian is out of business? That's news to me...
A second note on the art: All the females in this book, with perhaps one exception, have Mondo Hooters. (What is that in game terms? "STR +10 (10 active points) with OIF (Wonder Corset, -1/2) and Only To Keep Balance (-1), 4 points"?) A point was taken off of Style for this.
The Final Verdict
This book was not written with old players in mind; a Hero 3 or 4 sourcebook and a few pages of errata are all that are different. This book was not written with people who dislike Hero in mind; many of the same problems are still extant.
This book was written with new players in mind; people who have never seen Hero. Does it succeed in that respect? Well, sort of: more examples, more explanation, crap cross-referencing. If you have never seen Hero before, judge Hero by this book. If you have seen it before, your opinions on it (whether for the positive or the negative) aren't going to change.
