TheophilusCarter
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In your humble opinion, what game / edition does "zero-to-hero" best? Feel free to interpret "zero-to-hero" and "best" however you like.
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Exalted!In your humble opinion, what game / edition does "zero-to-hero" best? Feel free to interpret "zero-to-hero" and "best" however you like.
Care to elaborate?Rolemaster though Rolemaster Standard System certainly undermines that which is why it's my favorite Rolemaster.
Amusingly enough, Exalted does that quite well, albeit in its own way.Exalted!
I prefer B/X to BECMI/RC. I have still never seen level 9 in a campaign, so I don't know why anyone really needs levels beyond 14.
Well, you get your cultural and hobby ranks and first level ranks in any version of Rolemaster, so your wizard might actually be able to use a bow or a sword but they'll never be great at it. But in RMSS, with training packages and talents a fighter can pretty easily be at +100 offensive bonus or better while the mage is still struggling to cast first level spells. In the longer term, the fighter has already plateaued and won't advance very much by tenth level.Care to elaborate?
Thanks. So in your experience, do you get LFQW in Rolemaster?Well, you get your cultural and hobby ranks and first level ranks in any version of Rolemaster, so your wizard might actually be able to use a bow or a sword but they'll never be great at it. But in RMSS, with training packages and talents a fighter can pretty easily be at +100 offensive bonus or better while the mage is still struggling to cast first level spells. In the longer term, the fighter has already plateaued and won't advance very much by tenth level.
Don'tyou start as a superhero?MSH (FASERIP).
It literally is zero-to-hero.
No, really the full caster classes are always weaker in combat. That's not to say that a flying mage casting firebolt isn't a dangerous foe but it's nowhere on the level of anything that happens in D&D. Magic in Rolemaster is generally weaker but more ubiquitous. Fireball has a 10' radius and has the Fireball Attack Table and Lightning Bolts are certainly devastating but they're also 8th and 10th level spells. One of the nice things about Rolemaster is that it's designed with long term play balance in mind. RMSS gives fighters a bit of an edge at first level but it's largely vanished by third level and certainly not a big deal by fifth. Semi-users are a bit weak until maybe fifth to seventh level but that's what you get for being able to do many things.I'm still thinking about it. And currently, I think if I wanted a zero-to-hero game, I'd go for either Exalted, Warhammer, Mythras or Savage Worlds. Depends on what kind of setting and what meaning of "hero" I want.
Exalted is above. Nothing to add there.
Warhammer...well, you definitely start at zero. At higher level, though, you are a big damn hero with several careers behind your back and you chop through the rank and file like Ulric's Fury is riding on your shoulder.
Probably a bad idea if you think a hero should be able to solo a Greater Deamon.
Mythras: start as a soft city-dweller. End up as a hero with mystic abilities, trained in esoteric techniques. The rest depends on the setting...but you can really vary it simply by choosing the kind of magic systems that are available in the setting, how long the casting takes, and whether any bonuses apply to combat.
Savage World: Start at a novice level. Restrict players to a D8 in Fighting, at most. They'll learn caution, and quickly.
Then gradually start introducing new "optional rules" from the more pulpy core books, when they go up a "rank". More skill means the rules affect you differently, and that's that!
At the tall end of this, you can tangle with anything the setting has to offer. Of course, the tall end just might include superpowers, under this setup!
Or it might not. Depends on what kind of "hero" you want, again.
Thanks. So in your experience, do you get LFQW in Rolemaster?
Maybe chargen is the "zero" ... ;)Don'tyou start as a superhero?
If I'm remembering the system in the core book, most of the New Mutants can kick your character around quite easily.I don’t like “zero to hero” supers games. I like “hero stays hero”. I always felt advancement in supers games wasn’t the point and unnecessary.
Don'tyou start as a superhero?
But do you do these with the same character?Yep. But you know, you can use MSH to do anything, street-level, enhanced, low-powered, high-powerd, cosmic. etc.
But do you do these with the same character?
Yea, I'd agree that getting to hero level in RQ is quite a slog, but boy do you sure start off as a zero if you don't use the previous experience system in the back...RuneQuest 2 was definitely old school Zero-to-Hero without using Levels.
You started off as an awkward youth, and given how deadly the combat system was, your character could easily be maimed or die as an awkward youth.
You could choose to have some additional skill training during character generation, but unless you rolled a Noble on the Social Class table then it was likely you were beginning play in financial debt to various Guilds or Associations (which made for a good story hook).
The way to advance was to get your skills up to a certain ability range to gain entrance to the more heroic streams within various socieo-religious factions, so that you could in turn gain more social authority and magical power, with the aim to becoming champions within these factions, called Runemasters.
The only problem was that it was extremely challenging to get up to that heroic level of play, as your character could get easily disabled or killed along the way. Even if you had a heroic character, they still could die by a simple knife blade from a basic threat.
....
So yeah, RQ2 was originally conceived as Zero-to-Hero, but we never got far out of the mud with our characters
I don’t like “zero to hero” supers games. I like “hero stays hero”. I always felt advancement in supers games wasn’t the point and unnecessary.
As a GM - I have a strong sense about how powerful I want my campaigns to get to. *USUALLY* I start around "enhanced" to "low-powered" - but I make sure all my players have concepts that can scale to higher-tiers of play.
For example one of my players in my group is an enhanced gadget-guy, think Blackpanther with a dash of Midnighter, while one of the other player's is the literal lieutenant of Lucifer, trapped in a mortal body, and capable of manifesting himself in various stages, including his True Form which is Thor-level in power. And my other three players are all of similar levels but expressed differently. But when he's in mortal form - he's very much a "normal" guy with a few enhanced attributes... but his enemies are literally legion. Angels and Demons oh my.
They all have very different strengths and weaknesses and deal with a lot of different things despite very different power levels but their respective effects definitely scale up to doing things on the same tier.
Originally intended as zero--to-hero, but in practice most characters usually got powerful by sheer luck or dice fudging heh hehI've never thought of RQ as zero to hero, but I guess it could be.
Originally intended as zero--to-hero, but in practice most characters only got powerful by sheer luck or dice fudging heh heh
"Nothing is immune to my axe splitting its skull. Nor should it be." - ConanYeah, I think of it more as above average normal to moderately powerful hero. The growth is gradual and you rarely get to the point of immunity from an axe to the head.
So, I would split out these two things. RQ can do a zero and it can do a hero, but gaming from one to the other seems tricky at best. Like you say, the game is a bit too dangerous, certainly at lower levels. D&D in its earlier guises (and It has come back around to this way of working somewhat) mitigated this with the exponential XP tables, where it was easy to mostly catch up to the rest of the group if your PC died. I don’t think RQ has any mechanism like that?RuneQuest 2 was definitely old school Zero-to-Hero without using Levels.
You started off as an awkward youth, and given how deadly the combat system was, your character could easily be maimed or die as an awkward youth.
I would definitely echo this experience. We have played a lot of level 1 to 3 PCs in D&D over the years... And it can become a tiresome to slog through to ‘the good stuff’ where you have more options and a bit more overall resilience. These days we rarely start at 1st level unless we are playing a campaign module that is built for it or we are trying out a new game and so want the ‘on ramp’ experience.After a while, I burned out on the zero-to-hero approach, though. Way too many games got started but never lasted long enough to get to "hero"
I mean, that speaks to the nice adaptability of FASERIP in gameplay, but "zero to hero" is generally "starts as a nobody and advances into a badass hero"...MSH doesn't really do that so much, as written.
I could make the exact same argument for ICONS, but the point of ICONS isn't really "starts as a nobody and advances into a badass hero" (though it would succeed at that better than MSH would, for better or for worse, because you're generally playing with much smaller numbers in play,making advancements go much faster).
In your humble opinion, what game / edition does "zero-to-hero" best? Feel free to interpret "zero-to-hero" and "best" however you like.
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....what?