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Post by HourEleven on Sept 1, 2014 10:06:50 GMT -8
Hero experts, I've spent 20 years hacking Gurps into any genre I've thought of. I recently picked up the core Hero books and started studying.
I'm looking for general information about hacking the system. What parts of the system should you not mess with because of the unexpected ripples it causes in other parts? What parts are the safest to muck with? Is there a more expansive guide to genre hacking than the relatively small handful of pages in volume 2?
At the moment I'm not looking to do anything in particular, just to get a leg up on it before I start testing things (oh the mistakes that were made in Gurps before I learned the ropes...).
While it feels as versatile as Gurps, it seems to be in a totally different way. For example, the easiest way to genre hack Gurps is via the character rules not the game mechanics. Building what amounts to something like a racial template that all PCs build their characters on is the safest way to change the feel of the system. My gut reaction in Hero is that changing character bits is the most dangerous because of the ways everything is a building block that locks together...
Thoughts, experiences, what hacking have you done, etc. Get nuts and bolts-y, I love that crap.
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Post by jazzisblues on Sept 1, 2014 17:58:57 GMT -8
The biggest difference between GURPS and Hero is in the real of active defense vs passive defense.
In GURPS you make an attack roll, if you succeed, the target makes a defense roll. If they succeed nothing happens. In Hero you make attack roll agains their defense, if you succeed you roll damage. Both have their advantages and disadvantages, but that's the difference.
The easiest way to hack Hero (you don't really need to hack Hero per se) is to make the things you want the way you want them to work. In a recent game I ran the player characters were demons in a modern super natural setting. Because demons don't need to eat or drink, and are not susceptible to things like poisons I created a power that used the life support power as a base and gave them the capabilities they needed. I did the same with things like their ability to change between their mortal form and their true form. I then put those things along with some common skills that I felt they should all have and some disadvantages that I thought they all needed into a package deal and applied it to each of the characters, et voila they all had their common powers without me having to make everything and it all had the flavor and feel that I wanted for the game.
Because Hero is even more of a toolkit for making games than GURPS is (This is both a strength and a weakness in my opinion) it's not really a question of hacking it rather it's a question of making what you want that works the way you want it to work.
JiB
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maxinstuff
Supporter
Posts: 1,939
Preferred Game Systems: DCC RPG, Shadowrun 5e, Savage Worlds, GURPS 4e, HERO 6e, Mongoose Traveller
Favorite Species of Monkey: Proboscis
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Post by maxinstuff on Sept 2, 2014 5:30:04 GMT -8
Yeah I agree - you don't actually hack HERO - you build the stuffs you want.
It's the Lego of RPG's.
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Post by HourEleven on Sept 2, 2014 16:54:07 GMT -8
Interesting. I might be able to have a lot of fun with this.
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Post by guest01 on Sept 2, 2014 19:45:19 GMT -8
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