GURPS to HERO

[Figleaf23]

Hi,

I'm a long, long, long time GURPS player (since 1st Edition), but recent events make me interested in moving my gaming group over to the HERO system.

Are there any immediate dangers or pitfalls in playability or character balance I could expect in transferring an existing campaign from GURPS to Hero?

Thanks for any remarks.

[Randyman]

Originally Posted by Figleaf23

Hi,

I'm a long, long, long time GURPS player (since 1st Edition), but recent events make me interested in moving my gaming group over to the HERO system.

Are there any immediate dangers or pitfalls in playability or character balance I could expect in transferring an existing campaign from GURPS to Hero?

Thanks for any remarks.

Don't try to convert. Rebuild everything in HERO from concept. Despite similarities in the two systems, the differences are too great.

[Figleaf23]

Are they roughly equally capable/flexible?

I'm currently running a post-apoc campaign, and planning a heroic/mythic fantasy campaign with a lot of politics.

[PK]

Hero tends to make more cinematic assumptions than GURPS does; it's less "gritty." So if you play GURPS with most of the cinematic switches turned on, you'll be fine. If not, you may want to look into the optional rules for "darkening up" Hero.

Also, in Hero, END expenditures are the norm for everything, and it works considerably differently from GURPS' Fatigue rules. Not much you can do about this (I wouldn't change Hero's END rules; they're too fundamental to the system), just a heads up that it'll be something everyone will have to adapt to.

And I agree with Randyman -- as a general rule, it's always better to rebuild characters than to attempt a mathematics-based conversion, even if such conversion rules do exist (we published them in Roleplayer back in the day).

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Figleaf23

Are they roughly equally capable/flexible?

I'm currently running a post-apoc campaign, and planning a heroic/mythic fantasy campaign with a lot of politics.

Hero is better for superhuman action and combat but not so good for skill-based characters.

Hero's equivalent of Gurps "Powers" system comes much closer to being based off of universal principles and being inherently balanced. It can even be more balanced than some HERO writers have realized.

For example, in an earlier version of Fantasy HERO the magic of a certain world was described as "no spells with over 60 Active pts and no long range teleportation.". The writer had apparently not worked out how much Teleport you could buy with 60 pts because that's only a couple of miles at most.

HERO can do things like that. You can tell players how many pts in special abilities to buy and usually not stumble across any gross surprises. 60pts of offense will balance against 60pts of defense and so on. Bricks and energy projectors built on the same amount of pts will balance too.

On the other hand, human level characters based on learned skills in HERO can tend to look much the same. There are serious breakpoints (especially at lower pt levels) and you can find that all the characters hit those same breakpoints. It can be a good bit worse than the similar DX/IQ mixes of a group of Gurps characters.

HERO also has any fewer skills than Gurps. It probably has enough. It might even avoid having too many skills the way Gurps might but it is going to be a different level of resolution.

If "a lot of politics" actually meant "a lot of roleplayed PC/NPC interaction" it might not matter but if you had meant "a lot of Influence skill use similar to the way Gurps does things" you might be disappointed.

Besides a lot of Champions back in the day I have run and played Fantasy Hero and just played Space Hero and the FH worked a lot better. The SH might have worked better if the PCs had all been different Alien species with special powers but we were all humans who had been on the same spaceship and we ended up pretty cookie cutter.

[Brandy]

Originally Posted by Figleaf23

...with a lot of politics.

No version of hero that I ever played had any game mechanics that would support this. Not that you *need* game mechanics for this, but it is something that GURPS has that hero does not.

[Joe]

I would endorse what PK said above, and add the following:

Played straight out of the box, HERO defaults to comic-book action, whereas GURPS defaults to cinematic realism. Default HERO assumes that the characters will be getting in a lot of big fights, and that those fights will end with the losers unconscious but not permanently harmed. Default GURPS seems to assume that social and investigative encounters will be a bit more frequent than in HERO, and that the fights that do occur will involve significant risk of death or permanent injury.

If you're converting or rebuilding characters, you may find that GURPS characters with lots of combat abilities end up costing a lot in HERO, whereas GURPS characters with lots of wealth or status-related abilities will be very cheap in HERO. This is because HERO tries to balance point costs primarily on the basis of combat effectiveness, whereas GURPS tries to balance point costs on the basis of some broader, if also vaguer, measure of effectiveness 'in general'.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

If "a lot of politics" actually meant "a lot of roleplayed PC/NPC interaction" it might not matter but if you had meant "a lot of Influence skill use similar to the way Gurps does things" you might be disappointed.

Well, there are a reasonable number of Presence-based skills in Hero, and you can certainly roll against them, though their effects are less solidly defined than in GURPS. However, that may not be a problem.

[Joe]

Ah, also: if you're re-building characters, definitely be aware of the difference between default GURPS' emphasis on skills and default HERO's emphasis on powers.

The heart of the HERO system, in my view, is the system that balances the effectiveness of various power builds. It's a great, extremely flexible system for modelling a whole vast range of fictional abilities, and ensuring that they're balanced against each other in a combat situation. (It does other things too, but that's the best bit, in my view). So if you're switching to HERO, make sure you take advantage of the flexibility of the powers system. Depending on the genre you're playing, it might be advisable to model all the characters using 'powers' even if they don't have any supernatural powers in the normal sense of the word. There's little point switching to HERO if all your characters are just going to be collections of attributes and skills - GURPS is much more fine-grained and detailed for that sort of thing, especially with regard to human-level attributes. Really use the powers system!

Example: if you're playing reasonably high-powered fantasy, it's obvious that you're going to model a wizard's spells using the powers system. What's not so obvious is that, for best results, you should also model the warrior's attacks and defenses using the powers system. Sure, you could build that warrior with just good attributes, skills, talents, etc (i.e. high STR, OCV, DCV, appropriate Combat Skill Levels and WFs, maybe Weapon Master, etc) - and some people do it that way. But in my view, you're not really getting the best of the system if you do that; you might as well stick with GURPS, which is superb at that. But if you instead use the powers system to model those things, you'll be playing to HERO's strengths.

[PK]

Originally Posted by Joe

for best results, you should also model the warrior's attacks and defenses using the powers system.

This is an excellent point. The power system is one of Hero's greatest strengths, and that goes for all genres, not just supers and magic. And because it knows this, it expects you to use it; the concept of modeling realistic-but-potent abilities using powers is key to Hero. For example, the Presence-based skills are limited primarily because it's assumed that "I can talk anyone into anything" will be represented as limited Mind Control. If you want to play a knight commander who can lead his men into battle, there are no real social advantages for this because you're expected to take those forces as limited Summon. And so on.