HP Inflation In The HERO System?

[Ganbare Gincun]

One of the major issues with D&D 3.X is the system's damage and defense systems to scale upwards as characters gain levels. One of the bigger issues is that players end up with giant piles of HP once they get to higher levels, which in turn causes the game to slow down because players are calculating bigger numbers and more dice have to be thrown around in order for damage effects to be relevant.

The HERO System also uses HP to track damage, but does it suffer from the same issues with HP inflation? If so, what is the best way to mitigate HP bloat? Would it be possible to just re-tool the combat and health system in HERO to a "box and soak" system like Frank has discussed (and Shadowrun actually uses), or would that be too cumbersome/unnecessary to implement?

[deaddmwalking]

I think there are two related issues.

In the first case, you could have the numbers be pretty easy to add. 2d6+5 isn't appreciably easier than 2d6+50. If you scale the damage on the '+' side rather than the variable side, things remain easy to calculate but the dice 'don't matter'. Players feel rewarded when rolling a bucket of dice. While 12d6+5 means more dice and more time to add and usually results is less damage, players tend to prefer it.

There are ways to make the dice matter, but 'trick' players into feeling that the dice are bigger. For example 2d6(x10) is easy to calculate, the dice 'matter', and players feel that they're better than when they were not just rolling plain dice... But multiplication outside of x2 and x10 isn't usually fast - and it's hard to have an advancement scheme that works on those kinds of metrics.

So, ultimately, it tends to be a problem with solutions that are worse than the problem itself. One potential mititating factor is if your 'minimum damage' is enough to drop an opponent (this works decently well with henchmen). A 'great cleave' where you only have to resolve the hit (because minimum damage guarantees a kill) is quick. Extra time on 'important' enemies isn't that big a deal.

[Ice9]

I haven't seen it be much of a thing, for two reasons:
1) By default, HERO doesn't have characters scale nearly as much as D&D. You start out at a given level of power (often fairly powerful already) and then slowly creep upwards. I've never seen a game where the PCs became ~250x more powerful over the course of a few months (a D&D adventure path going 1st - 16th), for example.

2) Toughness is more likely to be represented by PD/ED and Damage Reduction (halves/quarters damage) than by only increasing HP.

[kzt]

Also fights are designed to run differently in HERO. There is a lot of concern expressed in the rules about character balance, with the GM supposed to impose limits on max and min defenses, attack active points, con and stun points so that fights work.

[Josh_Kablack]

One of the major issues with D&D 3.X is the system's damage and defense systems to scale upwards as characters gain levels. One of the bigger issues is that players end up with giant piles of HP once they get to higher levels, which in turn causes the game to slow down because players are calculating bigger numbers and more dice have to be thrown around in order for damage effects to be relevant.

The HERO System also uses HP to track damage, but does it suffer from the same issues with HP inflation? If so, what is the best way to mitigate HP bloat? Would it be possible to just re-tool the combat and health system in HERO to a "box and soak" system like Frank has discussed (and Shadowrun actually uses), or would that be too cumbersome/unnecessary to implement?

It's obvious that you have never played nor read HERO from that question. And that's a shame, because the system could stand to be more popular.



First, HERO uses STUN and BODY to track damage. That may seem like a quibble that it splits HP into 2 different pools, but it's actually pretty important to the superheroic genre that HERO defaults to that most attacks incapacitate nonlethally. It's also just sane game design to make any system with complex chargen highly nonlethal.



Second, the main scaling in HERO is actually Damage Class (1 DC = 1d6 normal damage, various fractions of other types of damage) vs Defense Values. In terms of 3e D&D, it's like if your defensive bonuses from leveling meant that you increased in DR/- instead of in HP. It's hard to buy enough defense to be totally immune to likely attacks, but it's kind of expected that you will have enough to be nearly immune to the BODY (life-threatening wounds) damage from common attacks and also resist a big chunk, of the STUN (temporarily incapacitating wounds) from the average damage rolls of typical attacks from un-boosted attacks.

Thus in HERO you tend to have a lot of heroes who are like Iron Man or Green Lantern - protected by armor or a force field, but otherwise only as resistant to wounds as a normal guy (10 Body). A single spear through the chest will bring Tony Stark or Jon Stewart seriously close to death, but getting that spear through their defenses is unlikely to happen.

Editing in an actual math example for this:

in HERO FrED (superheroic), a Spear is a DC 5 Killing Attack, DC 7 if wielded by an enemy with normal human strength. Thus is deals 3d6+1 BODY damage. Tony Stark is more or less normal and has a BODY of more or less 10. If he's out of the armor and doesn't have the chestpiece on or some sort of forcefield or kevlar trick he has a PD in the normal human range -- but that doesn't matter because none of it is resistant and therefore does not apply against killing attacks. So if he does get speared in such a way, he is on average below zero BODY left and therefore incapacitated and subject to whichever bleeding to death ruleset you are using. Conversely, if that same spear hits him while he is in the armor, then he has something like 15rPD (stats for the Iron Man knock off in the 5th ED Champions sourcebook) which applies against that attack, so on average zero Body damage gets through, and he only has to worry about the STUN damage from the attack or the occasional enemies getting a damage roll lucky enough to cause a lasting injury -- and even there the worst case will not take him out of a fight on BODY unless it happens three times)

So if you had an arms race to keep up, it would be between Damage of attacks and the equivalent of DR, not the equivalent of Hit Points.



Third HERO is a point-buy, and not a level system. so "scaling" is totally different. There is no such thing as "level appropriate damage and defenses" because there is no such thing as level in HERO. This means that one of the keys to breaking the HERO system is to have a massively lopsided point allocation and one of the necessary gentleman's agreements to make HERO work is to have a list of "campaign appropriate" ranges for things like Damage Class of attacks, numeric value of defenses, as well as CVs (to hit bonuses and AC). In fact having such ranges is all but mandated by the sections of the book about campaign design, the "gentleman's agreement" part is exactly which tactical boosts (adjustment powers, pushing, surprise bonuses, haymaker, movethrough, etc.) you allow to temporarily exceed those values and which you don't.


**********************

All of the preceding aside, my own past experience running many years of three and a half different editions of HERO has been that the "arms race" of point buy between players is never between Damage and Defenses, and but tends to be almost always about Combat Value and Speed. There are various reasons for this -- getting extra actions gives more turns in which to DO STUFF, and when other players get to do stuff then you have to buy extra actions to be able to DO STUFF just as relatively often; Once all the players start committing advancement points to going faster that means they aren't committing points to Defense, so they are less likely to stay upright when hit by enemies and so going first becomes more important; and no matter how buff your defenses are, there will be some type of exotic attack (Drain, Entangle, Flash, Mind Blast, NND, etc) that you are not immune to.

I strongly recommend that you have no more than 3 legal SPEED values (Default,. Speedster, Slow and Tanky) for PCs in HERO, and Frank has made a decent argument in the past for having only 1.

[Ganbare Gincun]

I'm interested in either playing or running a FRPG as of late, but the various D20 systems floating out there all seem to have some major issues, so I was considering using the HERO System rules to that end. It's good to hear that power creep and game balance issues are manageable, and that it doesn't have *fundamental* issues with scaling and balance as characters reach higher levels. Thank you very much for your input!

[hogarth]

I haven't seen it be much of a thing, for two reasons:
1) By default, HERO doesn't have characters scale nearly as much as D&D. You start out at a given level of power (often fairly powerful already) and then slowly creep upwards. I've never seen a game where the PCs became ~250x more powerful over the course of a few months (a D&D adventure path going 1st - 16th), for example.

2) Toughness is more likely to be represented by PD/ED and Damage Reduction (halves/quarters damage) than by only increasing HP.

And 3) even beginning characters have a huge pile of dice to throw around (by D&D standards, anyways), so the difference in terms of aggravation between rolling 10 dice and 14 dice isn't a big deal.

[kzt]

And 3) even beginning characters have a huge pile of dice to throw around (by D&D standards, anyways), so the difference in terms of aggravation between rolling 10 dice and 14 dice isn't a big deal.

And if the GM has done their job, the damage every player character rolls should be enough to damage a significant opponent is virtually all fights - and they should be able to hit them fairly often, while the player characters should not be very susceptible to one-shots (unless they deliberately choose to build unusually weak defenses - usually in exchange for being VERY difficult to hit) and should be effectively impossible to be actually killed in a single hit or rapid sequence of hits that doesn't give them a chance to react.

[hogarth]

And if the GM has done their job, the damage every player character rolls should be enough to damage a significant opponent is virtually all fights - and they should be able to hit them fairly often, while the player characters should not be very susceptible to one-shots (unless they deliberately choose to build unusually weak defenses - usually in exchange for being VERY difficult to hit) and should be effectively impossible to be actually killed in a single hit or rapid sequence of hits that doesn't give them a chance to react.

But that's exactly how player/GM arms races start. The GM establishes a baseline of how tough the average enemy is (whether that's in terms of defenses or damage or accuracy or whatever), then he throws in a tougher-than-usual enemy as a challenge. Then the players have some trouble against Mr. Above Average so they take that as a signal to step up their power level. So then the GM raises the baseline level of toughness because he thinks the players will be bored by the previous level. Lather, rinse, repeat as needed.

[Josh_Kablack]

and that it doesn't have *fundamental* issues with scaling and balance as characters reach higher levels. !

Fair warning: it does have a boatload of other fundamental issues, they are just in different places than you may be used to coming in from a D&D or other class/level background.

[Neurosis]

One of the major issues with D&D 3.X is the system's damage and defense systems to scale upwards as characters gain levels. One of the bigger issues is that players end up with giant piles of HP once they get to higher levels, which in turn causes the game to slow down because players are calculating bigger numbers and more dice have to be thrown around in order for damage effects to be relevant.

The HERO System also uses HP to track damage, but does it suffer from the same issues with HP inflation? If so, what is the best way to mitigate HP bloat? Would it be possible to just re-tool the combat and health system in HERO to a "box and soak" system like Frank has discussed (and Shadowrun actually uses), or would that be too cumbersome/unnecessary to implement?

Really really short answer: no. The HERO System doesn't even really use an HP System.

[Ganbare Gincun]

Fair warning: it does have a boatload of other fundamental issues, they are just in different places than you may be used to coming in from a D&D or other class/level background.

What are the nature of these issues, and what is the best way to mitigate them in a campaign?

[kzt]

Combat is often slow. Not usually because of padded sumo (though you can get that too) but because of the number of times people act per combat turn. The best way to make this faster is to insist that people rapidly decide what to do and then roll all the dice needed at once, using different colored dice. So if you have a 12 die attack you roll 15 dice, 3 of which are a different color to show the attack roll and the others are damage.

The GM really needs to do this too. You can also modify the game by limiting that range of character speeds.

There can be other combat issues, depending on the style of the game. Endurance can become a pain, as can in combat recovery.

Another problem is character creation. You pretty much can do anything, which is fine if you know the game and mechanics and have some idea what you want to do, but is a major problem if you don't. It also rewards mechanic mastery. A 350 point character can be very powerful or almost worthless depending on the players choices. And in addition, the best way (as in most cost effective) to achieve an effect is sometimes not at all obvious to a new player.

For example, there are reasons you might want a low dex, low speed character with a pile of combat levels. I've build and played characters like that. But unless you really know what you are doing it is a trap option, as spending the points on dex and speed vs levels is almost always more effective and you don't sit there watching the other players do stuff while you wait.

[Josh_Kablack]

What are the nature of these issues, and what is the best way to mitigate them in a campaign?

It boils down to 2 big umbrella categories

Fundamental Issue Number 1. Complexity.


Lemme start with a short and strained metaphor:

Complexity of chargen:
a superheroic character in HERO will be somewhere in power level equivalent to a teen-leveled 3.x D&D character. No imagine you have never seen 3e D&D before and are told "make a 13th level character, the following dozen splatbooks are allowed, blah blah blah". That's a pretty close metaphor for what a player new to HERO faces the first time they try to build a character. Except it's not perfect, as at no point in 3.x D&D are your required to divide fractions by other fractions to determine how many levels of a PrC you need, while you totally are required to do that in HERO to determine the cost of any powers with both advantages and limitations.



Complexity of combat:

Rather than give a strained metaphor, lemme just walk you through the basics of combat in superheroic HERO as I understand them (note I'm not fully up on the 6e changes so parts may be slightly different now)

Part one: initiative / turn order in HERO:

In Hero, combat Turns are divided into 12 Segments. During each Segment you add each character's SPEED value to an ongoing count, and on any Segment when that puts a given character's count over 12, you subtract 12 and they get a Phase in which they can take actions. Within a given Segment, Phases are resolved in Dex order - aside from characters using Mental powers, (who resolve those powers in order as though their Ego was their Dex: unless they are both using a Mental power and taking a physical action like Mind Blasting while running) in which case their actions are split between the 2 values) or characters using maneuvers which have the Abort property (like Dodge) or a character has a held action from a previous Segment, subject to the rule that you cannot hold any action any longer than end of the Segment before your next Phase (of course you can re-hold the same action when your Dex/Ego comes around in your following Phase and the optional rules for Covering somebody --- which are totally different than the options for "Cover Me!" situations, which should use the Suppression Fire optional rules)

Part Two: To Hit Rolls and Target Numbers in HERO:

So, once you've figgered out that it's your turn, or decided to use your held action and you try to megablast a fool, you roll some dice to see if you hit or not. You roll 3d6 against a target number of ( 11+ your OCV - their DCV ). Both OCV and DCV will be modified by current allocations of skill levels and likely by whichever combat maneuver the attacker are target made most recently - for the attacker this is easy because if they are using Brace or Set or Martial Strike or something, they are using it right now. It's worse for the defender, because you may have to remember that they used Defensive Strike or Dodge or something on their last action phase. The attack will also also be modified by range penalties, which start at 4 hexes on the table. And if you want realizm, you'll want to use the built-in OCV and range modifiers for real world weapons the mooks are using. So after you roll to hit...no wait, before you roll to hit, the target may get to try to Block or Missile Deflect the incoming attack - which they can Abort to do even if they don't have an action held - although in that case it costs them a full phase, whereas if they'd held an action it would only cost them a half phase. Anyways, for Block and Missile deflect you turn the roll around and the Defender makes a to-hit roll with a target number determined by their Block or Missile Deflect OCV against a DCV equal to the OCV of the incoming attack. And anyone who is designed to make reasonable use of Block or Missile Deflection is very likely to have a better OCV with it than their usual DCV. If the Block or Deflection is successful, the attack is negated. If the Block is not successful then you proceed to actually roll to hit for the attack..no wait, if the target didn't block, they can instead Abort to a Dodge, which increases their DCV by +3 against the incoming attack, or +5 if they bought Martial Dodge, or possibly more if they have Combat Skill Levels they can apply to Dodge or Martial Dodge. But once they've either used an Abort or declined to then you finally roll your OCV to hit their DCV UNLESS it's Mental Power or an Area of Effect power. Mental Powers use Mental Combat Value, which will be different numbers than OCV/DCV for most characters. Area of Effect attacks roll to hit against the DCV of a target hex on the battlemap (usually 3), not the DCV of a target enemy -- unless the AoE attack was bought with either the Selective or Nonselective modifiers, in which case you first roll to hit the area and then also have to roll to hit each target within that area. In either case, AoE attacks that miss their target hex are subject to grenade scatter rules. Area of Effect attacks cannot generally be Blocked or Dodged, but your game may be using the optional Dive for Cover maneuver which allows characters to Abort to leaping away from CGI fireballs. Additionally, some particular types of AoE attacks might be eligible to be Missile Deflected depending on MC call and magic tea party.

Part Three: Fiddliness of damage tracking in HERO.

Okay, so once you're taken a turn and resolved rolling to hit a fool in HERO you get to do damage. Most attacks deal STUN damage and also BODY damage and also some amount of Knockback. There are all packaged together in one die roll. for Normal Attacks the Stun is the total of the numbers shown on the faces of the d6s of damage you rolled and the Body is the number of D6s you rolled +1 for each 6 shown on a die face and -1 for each 1 shown on a die face. Then you take the BODY damage and subtract another roll of 2d6 from it and that is the number of hexes on the battlemat that the target is knocked back. For Killing Attacks, the Body is the total of the numbers shown on the d6s you rolled and the stun is that multiplied by another die roll (1d6-1 in editions before 6th, 16d/2 in 6th), and the knockback is a number of hexes equal to the Body of the roll minus a roll of 3d6. So then you compare the Stun and Body of the attack to the relevant defense (PD, ED, rPD, rED) of the victim, making the necessary subtractions for that defense and reduce their current totals for Stun and Body by the appropriate amount. Compare the amount of Stun that gets through to their Con to see if the are Stunned for a Phase or not. And then resolve the Knockback, moving figures on the battlemat. If the victim was knocked back into a solid object, they take another Normal Attack with a number of d6s equal to the number of hexs they were knocked back (but only up to a maximum of a number of d6s equal to the DEF+Body of that object, since getting slammed into a brick wall has a higher upper maximum of damage than getting thrown through a window). Compare any damage done by being Knocked Back into such obstacles to their Con to see if they are Stunned. then check their remaining Stun total to see if they are still conscious or how unconscious they are. If a character is unconscious, all non-persistant powers turn off and their personal END is set to zero. If they are only a little unconscious, they will Recover, gaining back and amount of both STUN and END equal to their REC on their very next Phase.. If they are kind of unconscious, they will have to wait until the end of the TURN to Recover, and if they are more unconscious, then they are probably out of the fight. Note that Recovery only restores Stun and END, it does not restore Body lost nor Charges spent, nor will it (usually) restore END spent out of an Endurance Reserve.


Got that?

You have a turn order that requires memorizing a 144 entry chart and rewards carefully hoarding actions, you have a to-hit roll that has more steps to figure than THAC0 did, and which also has a bunch of exceptions which change to math and the process in the middle of an attack being made. You have two different formulae for figgering the damage of attacks which all generate two different types of damage which are then applied against one (or more) or four different defense types and said attacks also often generate secondary attacks. You have two different types of temporary incapacitation from the most basic damage type, and multiple values resource values which go both up and down during the course or a combat.

And that's just the basic skeleton, it doesn't get into any of the exotic attacks vs exotic defenses or some especially ugly edge cases. Now you can make a number of ad-hoc simplifications to the game, but the thing is that it's all balanced against other parts. Killing Attacks have a different formula than Normal Attacks because they cost significantly more points to buy and the defenses against them are slightly more expensive. You track Endurance, because END-requiring powers are cheaper than similar powers which don't require END (see Force Field vs Armor). The whole game is a fractal of 80s design by overcomplication, but the basic math is all very largely balanced to all the basic options (roughly) even.

Of course no complex system is immune to breaking, and once you get past the basic options and start actually dividing those fractions by each other to get the really funky stuff, it's kind of trivial to break the HERO system...which brings me to the second truly fundamental problem of HERO:


2. Having the whole group on the same page about the acceptable limit to stretch the rules for in chargen and advancement optimization.

..and crap, that's all the time I got, to be continued..

[kzt]

Well, you typically just use the speed chart to determine who acts on a given segment, there is no math needed there.

I'm pretty sure everyone gets to act on DEX, including metal attacks. That might have been a house rule, as mentalists are annoying enough already.

You can't block a ranged attack. You can missile deflect, but it's pretty darn expensive and I can't think of a PC that did that offhand. It's pretty much an NPC trick. You can abort to a couple of defensive maneuvers, but then you lose your next action.

The roll is simply 3d6 with a target of less then or equal to (11 + OCV - DCV). Both OCV and DCV are based on dex/3 with modifiers. However as it's bell curve, the modifiers matter a lot for small numbers and very little at high numbers (14 or less is 90% success iirc) It's pretty simple to actually do, if people understand the combat system. It can be painfully slow the first few times. It's even worse when people don't understand what their characters can do and ask questions about that too....

[Ice9]

HERO definitely can run slowly, but I disagree that those are the major issues.

Speed - not complicated at all. There's a chart. When you make the character, you look up what phases you act on. Speed 4 => Phases 3,6,9,12, for example. No worse than looking up your max load in D&D. In terms of initiative, the best way is to make a Speed chart. This takes either ~1 minute per combat, or ~2 minutes once at game start, depending how organized the GM is.

The part that sucks about SPD is that having a SPD lower than the rest of the PCs is a one-way ticket to boredom-town, as it means you act less often. PCs should probably all have the same SPD, or at most a 1-point difference.


The hit roll. Not complicated, but annoying because it requires subtraction. The reason is just to make it be roll-low, for consistency with the skill system. If you converted everything to roll high, it would be clearer. Also, the way it's described in some editions is a stupid way to do it, in that it adds an extra step:

Bad:
PC: I have an OCV of 5.
DM (knows the enemy DCV is 4): You need to roll 12 or less.
PC (rolls a 10): I hit.

Better:
PC (rolls a 10, has an OCV of 5): I hit a DCV of 6.
DM: You hit.

Best (converted to a roll-high system, DT = Defense Target = 11 + DCV):
PC (rolls a 12, has an OCV of 5): I hit a DT of 17.
DM (knows the enemy DT is 15): You hit.


There are some actual issues though:
1) Effect rolls are slow to add up.
2) There are a lot of subsystems (knockback, hit locations) that slow things down further if you use them.
3) For that matter, some of the base rules (END, range penalties) are kind of unnecessarily fiddly.
4) Timing tactics (block, cover, delay, aborting) are pretty important, so you lose depth by ignoring them. But they also slow things down.
5) IME, people like to throw Activation/Skill rolls for powers in all over the place, which just slows down things even more.

[kzt]

The main problem I've seen (though I haven't played HERO in a few years) has been people who don't bother to learn the mechanics (or are new players) and/or can't decide what to do when it's time to act. Sometimes it's because they don't pay attention until it's there turn to act and want a full briefing then (These people I hate, except when I am one...) or have characters that have a lot of capabilities and can't decide what to do, so keep talking about options and questioning rules.

That said, I have found that it is rare to have really fast fights in HERO with a multiple players. The players need to be organized, familiar with the rules, play attention and know their characters. The GM also needs to be the same, where the bad guys act decisively and fast when it comes to their actions. It also needs to not have some sort of GM run opponent that is crazy hard to put down. This sort of opponent is certainly possible to create in HERO, but needs to be used very rarely.