Hero Wars in S-F setting

[Blake Hutchins]

Hey all,

I've been bitten by the idea that Hero Wars might work very, very well as a substitute rules set for White Wolf's Trinity setting, in which the players take the role of psionic heroes.

Thoughts?

Blake

[Bankuei]

Personally, I place the Hero Wars rules as working great for ANY setting.  There's only a couple of games I give that award to, and I could easily see it.  I can imagine action points serving as a great indication of how a massive space battle is going, or if you wanted to see the outcome of a centuries long war between galatic empires :smile:   You might just want to make sure to rein the players in with tech levels to preserve the setting idea.  

Bankuei

[Ron Edwards]

Hey Blake,

The terminology sounds funny, but I think that psionics would work best using Hero Wars sorcery rules. The trouble is that those rules are mighty sketchy in the current books, as most people are probably playing and running theist/animist games in Dragon Pass.

As it stands, the sorcery rules are not much more complex than "point and shoot" one's spells. The new edition may revise those sorcery rules, and give a wider range of options or flexibility (I am speculating; I have no insider knowledge about this).

Best,
Ron

[Blake Hutchins]

Hi Ron,

Yes, I agree, particularly since the different churches et. al. translate beautifully to schools and subdivisions within the Trinity psionic orders.  Grimoires could represent training programs, or even classified psi dissertations/philosophical works.  With some skills added to the mix that provide enhancements to the use of a psi power, we're in business.

Thanks,

Blake

[Ian Freeman]

It would probably work, but for me the HW system gets a bit of a conceptual hiccup when firearms or other weapons where missing (or not aiming quite as well) does not typically impact your relative position of advantage (ie. action points)

[Blake Hutchins]

Hi Ian,

I've thought a bit about that.  In cases where the firefight is a significant enough scene to warrant extended rolls, I'd be inclined to give guns enhancements so as to make them more deadly.  Hence, if you lose an exchange with guns, you lose big.  If the enemy is made up of mooks, I'd drop 'em like Trollkin.

In short, sharp, Godfather-style "assassination" scenes, I'd be inclined to run the scene as a simple test rather than an extended one.

Finally, I note that in real life, both in military and civilian conflicts, stats indicate an awful lot of shots get fired without anyone being hit.  Could be an extended scene featuring firearms isn't too far off the mark.

I'd be happy to hear other thoughts on this topic.

Best,

Blake

[Blake Hutchins]

Oh, and I did miss your point, didn't I?  Apologies.

Since HW operates on a sort of cinematic approach, I choose to ignore the "realistic" change in position of missing a shot in favor of viewing AP changes an alteration in a character's plot immunity (with thanks to Jared for the term).

Best,

Blake

[Ayrizale]

Cool Thread.  I'm new to HW (just bought it a couple of weeks ago), and I'm still working on getting a feel for the rules.  I will probably want to run one or two short games to get a better feel for the rules, but I was thinking a little farther ahead.

I was about to post something similar myself.  I was wondering if others had tried HW in a setting other than Glorantha, and specifically in a SF setting.  Personally I was thinking about workng up a Babylon 5 game using the HW system, so if anyone has actually done this, I would love to hear more about it.

Thanks,

Lael

[GB Steve]

I've been bitten by the idea that Hero Wars might work very, very well as a substitute rules set for White Wolf's Trinity setting, in which the players take the role of psionic heroes.

We played a Dune campaign a while back. It was set in pre-Atreides times. The GM is a wannabe move director and so tends to over direct at times towards grand set pieces. He is on the whole fine as long as the players are going were he wants. I'm firmly in the 'give the players what they want even if the don't ask' camp.

We tend towards narrative gaming with dice rolls only really being used at key moments for some GMs and hardly at all in my games if I can get away with it.

The first time we played Dune with GURPS which worked fine. There's a good conversion somewhere on the web (try Google for more info).

The second time we played we used Hero Wars. This did not work so well.

Firstly Hero Wars does not deal with missile weapons in any kind of satisfactory way, these are usually quite prevalent in SF. I guess it would be worth going to the HW Yahoo group to try remedy this but one of our players is an Issaries Initiate so we imagined he might have a solution.

The other thing about SF combat is that it tends to be deadly. Shields aside, you just don't want to get hit by an SF weapon. The AP system does not realy do a good job of representing this.

Finally, and this might have worled for Dune but it needed more work, the Hero Wars game is not just about doing things for the individual. A key element is the way the PC represents a society and his ups and downs reflect, enhance and lower the fortunes of that society. It is not really the classic interpretation of the hero as the "person who does" but rather as the "person who stands for".

I have used HW for Glorantha and is does seem to need a light touch.

Cheers,
GB Steve

[contracycle]

I concede the ranged weapons combat issue is shaky, especially because of the signal failure in the text to discuss the issue in any depth.  OTOH, having thought about it somewhat, I have no real problems with the principle, and in fact I think it demonstrates a couple of ways the system can be extended.

The issues above are both resolved by one observation: as a rule, the only missiles that hit are those that finish someone off.  ALL other (purely missile) exchanges are near or wide misses.  

Scenario A: Two combatants behind cover fire wild bursts at one another for fleeting seconds.  These are very low bid exchanges; sooner or later someone will run out of AP and hence pop out at the wrong moment.  Or, loss of AP could be modelled by one combatant driving their opponent out into the open, or with a very high bid, charging the others cover.

Scenario B: Its high noon and Dirty Bob faces Fingers McGraw under slouch hats.  This is gonna be one exchange with huge bids on both sides, probably everything.

Scenario C: a sniper ambushes Our Heroes in the open, substantially away from cover.  Having no means of returning fire effectively, they scatter - the exchange is between their movement abilities and the snipers combat abilities.  AP gains by Our Heroes represent getting closer to hard cover; AP losses represent becoming pinned down in the open, behind inadequate cover, or minor wounds through AP -> TN penalty trading mechanism.

Scenario D: Trooper A provides covering fire as Trooper B runs away from danger.  Successes can be represented by driving the pursuers back; no-one needs to actually get hit even if they lose AP's.  Alternatively, the fight remains between Trooper B and the pursuers, and trooper A has just loaned them AP's.

The lethality of modern projectile weapons can also be addressed within the existing rules; just declare Edge to be primarily a descriptor of accuracy in a missile-heavy environment.  Insist on large bids when badly exposed and correlate the minimum bid with the degree of cover the shooter has, for example.  GM's don't need to protect NPC's; you don't need to be fair to NPC followers, and so it would be quite plausible to have PC's gunning down masses of cannon fodder while the real villain is using all their AP's in a single pool in an extended contest.

The system can be extended by adding two binary conditions to handle the integration of fire and movement.  These are like range bands, which is where the concept originated.  The first band is the melee proper; anyone in that band can act in that melee.  This is distinct from physical distance; a rider and a foot soldier might be at different distances but in the same band (and in fact, they would be in different bands in relation to each other).  Clearly, missile and melee troops share this relationship too (as do magical troops from Glorantha).  Transition from band to band requires a movement contest, either extended or simple, against a resistance determined by terrain.  The rules already allow for new combatants to join a melee - their AP are simply added to their sides pool.
Thus, the binary condition is that you are either in, or not in, a melee band, and thus your AP either count or do not count.

A missile user can still intervene in another band - note again this is not a physical distance, so is flexible with the weapon.  Their missile fire can be seen as AP lending to friendly combatants in the band, or TN penalties to hostile forces.  More radically, although taken from the Dragon Pass board game, the missile fire could be used as a "physical agent" with an AP pool = the characters ability which is itself in the melee band (that is, is effective one band removed from the user).  The agent can then be at risk, to represent ammo attrition, frex.  The agent could either conduct battle on behalf of the shooter, or act as a follower for friendly forces; in both case, as a notional NPC called "rain of arrows" or "hail of bullets"

The rules already allow for people to be exposed to qualitatively different risks as the result of a contest, so there is no need to consider injury to the shooter; a total loss of AP for a remote shooter could be running out of ammo, getting ambushed, or being closed on.  By extension, if a melee weapon user should succesfully close on a shooter (shooter loses all AP in contest of missile weapons vs movement, AKA band change), a new contest begins if for no other reason than that the shooter has a new risk: death.  They are not carrying out the same qualitative action they were previously.  Equally, the melee wielder has started a new, combat, contest rather than a movement one.

I have only examined two bands, but conceivably a third or even a fourth could be added on the same principles.  I used three in a tabletop wargame model of the rules.  Operationally, such banding models use AND operators between the binary conditions for each band; all must be true for AP to be loaned or used as a follower.

[Mike Holmes]

Gareth, reminds me of Traveller range bands which had some similarities (played much Snapshot and such?).

I think what you have above is very cool for ranged combat. Ranged weapons can just be an edge against an melee opponent at range if you don't want too much complexity. Possibly a very big edge if you want a difficult, realistic  situation; less of an advantage in a cinematic game (think Jedi). As you put it, then the AP contenst mostly becomes closing range without getting hit. Once you have reached HTH range you may have a huge advantage over your opponent (represented in winning the contest; while losing at the last minute is getting gunned down by point blank fire).

Yep, not a problem in my view. Just takes a little vision on the GMs part in defining the conflict, and on the players parts in defining the nature of their successes:
"I dodge across the hallway under a hail of fire and arrive in the next room a bit closer to the enemy, but with a new smoldering hole in my hat."
and Failures:
"Pinned beneath heavy fire Finn cannot move, and the plasteel bulkhead he's hiding behind is rapidly ablating, losing serviceability as cover."

Nifty. Now I wanna try it.

Mike