HERO System basics

Authors: The Bunneh and Narf the Mouse and HTML from Bluesguy from the Hero Games Forums

This is a two page writeup on how Hero System works. Its not intended to give you anything more than an overview. You won't be able to play the game from this but it gives a good overview of how the system works.

Having played DnD 4e for more than two years now, I and my gaming group are suffering from the same issues as when I played AD&D from 1983-1988.

This article is special to me because it comes from our newest blogger the TeenageDM. A 13 year old woman. Enjoy!!!
--djkester

Know your players

One of the essentials to being a good DM rests on the relationship between the DM and his/her players. For instance if you are starting with a brand new group of players, it is important to learn how they wish the game to be played. If the players want the amount of role-play to be kept at a minimum then the DM must change his/her style to accommodate the player's wishes. I learned this tip before I started DMing by watching other DMs. They would ask the players questions about how they wanted the story to be played out. Such as: How difficult should the encounters be? And, How much role-playing should we do?

After another short dry spell, my gaming group finally came together this past Sunday to finish off our party's trek through Maldora, a world of my own creation and one of the smaller adventures in my ongoing storyline. After the session, J brought some issues to my attention, which is what he normally does after a session.

I’m getting ready to go on a couple week hiatus of gaming due to scheduling conflicts and Father’s Day, which will give me time to plan the next leg of our party’s journey. They’re getting ready to leave Maldora, a creepy “hell on earth” type of world with abhorrent and undead monsters, devils and demons, and some other really strange things.

On several occasions I’ve found myself in situations where it would be fun to play Dungeons & Dragons, but I just don’t have the usual resources at hand. What comes out of that is a “game” of cooperative storytelling, with some kind of conflict resolution element.

In my last post about the importance of entertaining the players, I talked briefly about the importance of involving the players in an interactive story and making the players’ choices matter. This article discusses interactive stories particularly the importance of choices and consequences.

The subject of PC death has come up a lot lately. In one of last gaming sessions before the break, our wizard died after using an area attack and rolling a critical on himself (the Gravehounds snacking on him probably didn’t help much either). Then last night, our warden was killed by Boneshard Skeleton.

We have had some recent comment spam being added to the site. In case its not obvious to everyone this isn't cool with us. While we dislike adding any kind of additional hoops to jump through to add comments we will be looking into ways we can limit or eliminate this spam.

Thanks for all the folks who use our site and we appreciate your involvement.

A few weeks back I ran a 4e DnD game at our local gaming convention. Talk about jumping head first into something, right? I volunteered only a week or so after having decided to take on DMing in the first place due to the fact that no one else was volunteering and I wanted to make sure 4e was offered.

I recently was reviewing the list of player motivations published in the Dungeon Master's Guide on page 8. A DM had asked us to let him know how we thought we were motivated. In reading them over I couldn’t actually clarify which motivations I identified with most.

This week's edition is a set of "indicator" icons for use marking locations of monster's and traps on maps you create. This is the set of icons used in The Game Trail: Heroic Level 4 Encounter.

Always a fan of 4th edition, I tend to disagree with a lot of the system's criticisms. I find the system more open to creativity, more balanced, and more strategic. I do however find myself agreeing with a few of my peers when they complain about the length of encounters.

Based on a recent player-to-player confrontation in which I found myself embroiled, I've been thinking about why I play D&D, and the role I assume as a player. You've probably read about some of the RPG-player archetypes, such as Storyteller, Actor, Power-Gamer, Watcher, etc. You might have an idea of where you fit in. As a Storyteller, I found myself in conflict with an Actor.

New Equipment from the Dungeoneer's Survival Guide