HERO Games

Image: www.herogames.com

I’ve played quite a few role-playing games (of the rolling dice sort) over the years. I started out with D&D and then played quite a bit of World of Darkness in college. But of all the systems I’ve ever played, HERO Games is my favorite.

I was introduced to HERO Games when my husband and I made our first friends after moving to North Carolina. They were a geeky couple like we were and they were looking for some gamers to join them in a weekly game. I jumped at the chance because it had been years since I had been in a regular game. The system they played in was HERO Games.

It took a little while to get used to the new system, but I quickly fell in love. Character creation can take a while because it is a system that is very character orientated. But there is a computer program,HERO Designer, that speeds up the process a great deal.

You can play any sort of game you want in HERO from fantasy games to superhero ones to anything in between. There is combat like in other role-playing games, but the stories tend to be more character driven. I’ve played in games that there was little to no combat but it’s still very fun.

When you create your character, you decide on a variety of things like strength, intelligence and other things you would find in other games. You can put points into how attractive your character as well, which is a neat little quirk of the system. But the most interesting thing, to me, is that you get to give your character advantages and disadvantages.

The disadvantages can make the games very interesting, especially if your GM uses them. I think the most unique disadvantage I’ve seen was in one of my friend's characters. Her character was completely blind, which is a huge disadvantage. It made things difficult for the whole party sometimes, but it made things interesting as well.

For anyone who might be looking for a new role-playing system to play in, I would greatly recommend HERO Games. It will probably always be my favorite system because of the story and character driven elements to it.