So, fun thing, The Hero was originally designed to straight-up be the protagonist of the story. The designated survivor, so to speak.
But that’s not much fun. The question is better. The possibility of a Big Death for everyone makes things so much more interesting from the jump.
So, let’s break down what this playbook is about.
From the jump, I worry about the name a little. I considered “The Local Hero” but keeping it as just “The Hero” keeps things snappy. More than that, it keeps things pleasantly evocative.
So, then, we have to ask the big question: Who is The Hero?
The Hero can play out a lot of ways, of course, but a thing which seems of interest to me not only as a personal statement upon the matter but also in keeping with the material inspiring Chorus, we’re going to define The Hero as a character built around protecting others, highlighting the “saving people” part of the idea of a hero, and making it something that’s not dependent on colossal epic supernatural powers (even as you’re going to be getting some of those along the way because you’ve got the magic weapon).
So they rescue, they protect. The Hero is a hero in a very certain kind of way, completely different from the highest-tier enemies (also called “heroes”, a thing I’ll have to mess with later) but instead inhabits the fantasy where “hero” is a social role: the hero of the town. What’s that mean? It means that when someone needs a barn raised, The Hero’s there to help raise it. When someone gets gravely injured, The Hero is there to give them first aid and will carry them bodily to the nearest sawbones. If that doctor says that a special herb from the top of the mountain is needed, The Hero leaves to get it without question and returns a little while later, herb in hand.
To this, we add a couple Defining Qualities (we’ll talk about Qualities later but suffice to say they give niche mechanical bonuses based on how they’re perceived by others) to make it so they’re both Powerful and Inspiring
They’re Powerful because a Hero always finds a way. We’re going to use this to let them do a reroll of either a die or a full-on roll at any point during a scene (”scene” here meaning certain things but generally: a battle or a single“unit” of noncombat as defined by the Narrator). Still figuring out the specifics there, but that gives The Hero an overall edge.
They’re Inspiring because they help others get back on their feet, so just... as thing they can do, they can restore a goodly chunk of Resolve/hit points to everyone in a zone with them once per scene.
So, then, from these basic noncombat mechanical things and the very specific fantasy (which I’ll have to work real hard to pass onto the reader once things are collected and completed), we have a character who’s capable of pushing through the worst to help people.
So, how do we drive that home even further?
By building their coolest stuff around a basic mechanic everyone gets which we also won’t be building anyone else’s stuff around: currently called “cover” (which may or may not need another name because there’s also “cover” as a thing people can get behind elsewhere; we’ll worry about that later), it’s a thing I personally thing should be available in any and every violence-based game:
If you’re in the same area as someone, you should be able to leap in and take the damage. No “if your armor is better, the hit fails”, just straight-up “my friend is going to take a hit: I’ll take it for them”.
And while others might get AN ability based around that or which serves a similar function, I’ve decided that The Hero’s mechanical identity is built around it. Sure, they also get a couple good combat moves, but all their coolest shit is built around a fantasy of being the person who saves people.
That’s easy to say. What’s that look like?
There are, at present and in this iteration of the game, planned to be 3 kinds of actions (I’ll have a longish ramble about how and why of this later, but I promised Playbooks so here I go!):
If you want to say that this echoes 5e, you would not be wrong. But the thing about 5e is that it’s nice to have things you can do every turn that makes what you do interesting even if you fail. Little is less fun to me than “I failed a roll, next”. We’ll talk more about the time this takes up later in that action economy thing; just pretend it works for now and let’s go.
So, then, the cover mechanic we’re building The Hero around is a free action, which means that a character can just DO that, provided they’re in the same zone as someone else. Yes, that does mean it’s possible to be reduced to 0 Resolve by having everyone’s backs in a wild and self-destructive way. But, hey, did you pick The Hero because you wanted to just let those people mow your friends down?
So, having made this decision, let’s get into the nitty-gritty of a lot of things here.
First: Given that this game is meant to be a shorter thing (measured as easily in weeks as months; ideally lasting about a season), there should be an upper limit on how many new abilities you can get, even if we’re putting brakes on a lot of them by saying you have to do a lot of damage to “power up” enough to use them.
So, how many abilities is enough?
Going with the base-12 we’re trying to build the system on, I went with 12. 12 unique abilities per playbook, each one to highlight the character’s whole THING while also giving some ability for the players to pick and choose which one(s) they want. Add to this a bunch of upgrade potential for them (I miss 3.5′s feat chains so this is how I’m simulating them) which I’ll probably balance back to 12 total upgrades per character (or so), this creates a lot of flexibility in builds without necessarily upping the dreaded overhead for the player (which is another way we’re trying to keep things simpler as far as‘how long will fights take?’).
So while I’m not going through allthe abilities we’re designing for The Hero (this thing is long enough already), let’s highlight a few and discuss the ways in which they highlight the character we’re going with.
Battle Medic - Combat - Attack as normal, give 1/2 to ally as Resolve, deal other 1/2 to enemy
This one’s obvious, I would think: a combat ability where they give up an opportunity to strike down their foes to help a friend shore up their resolve. This will also be one of the few active healing moves in the game (we’ll discuss this later). Upgrades will eventually see them getting bonuses to patch their friends up without having to even throw the punch at the enemies.
Human Wall - Utility - Act as COVER for one other character in zone
Okay, so we see why giving the same name to the mechanic by which you take a hit for someone as we give to the mechanic by which you hide behind something to avoid getting hit by a horrible large-scale enemy attack.
Not sure what a better name would be yet. Gonna start playing with “barrier”, but we’ll see.
At any rate, though, this is a thing for if The Hero and another character are unable to get to a zone containing a barrier that would protect them from, say, the fire breath of an ancient dragon or the spreading shockwave from the titan’s footsteps. This way, only one of them takes the hit.
The interesting stuff that happens when you fall by using cover is something we’ll touch on in “action economy” when we get there.
But now we’ll get to some of the meat of things to really drive home who The Hero is.
“I’ve got you.” - Free - Reduce damage to another character in zone by 1d6
Deflect - Free - When using ‘Cover’, reduce damage to you by 1d6
Heroic Rescue - Free - Move 1 zone, Cover an ally (1/scene)
These are three, fully 25%, of the abilities The Hero gets and what are they for? They’re different ways of looking out for people.
The first is for characters who have a decent self-heal (again, action economy; maybe that’ll be the next one?) or a lot of Resolve for whatever reason. It means that The Hero can swat away some incoming damage somehow.
Then we go a step beyond: The Hero can now protect themselves while looking out for their friends. This one is also upgradeable because, yeah. Eventually, they’re so good at taking hits for people, they can shrug off deadly blows and while it’s not a huge ol’ fuck-off fireball or whatever, there’s a lot to the fantasy of diving in to save your friend and then, with your back all smoking from the lighting bolt you just shrugged off, you give your friend a wink before turning back to the enemy.
The final one sees us upping the power of this ‘cover’ ability that we’re adding so much to, because now you can see a blow coming from a (figurative) mile away, haul ass to your friend’s side, and take it for them, with the additional passives your new abilities put on you when you Cover someone. This one is also planned to be upgradeable. Never the total teleporting savior we might want to imagine, but at the very least able to get to their friends in a pinch, provided they haven’t gone too very far afield.
So, okay, as a way to close this thing out, let’s go back to the three design goals of each playbook and see how we answer them with The Hero here.
The first: I feel like we’ve done that here. By making a character THIS dedicated to support (who is also capable of a few proper combat actions), I think The Hero is set to have a very particular kind of identity built around keeping close to people for the purpose of having their backs. In this way, we keep the fantasy of being the selfless allcaps HERO intact while also creating lots of rewards for it.
The tradeoff is that they don’t do a lot of damage, so a thing we’re absolutely going to have to keep in mind going forward is that while it’s obvious that some characters will have more Schism to deal with, there’ve got to be ways to turn that into something interesting all its own because even if The Hero has a lower overall Schism, should have some way to help others with theirs? Something to investigate.
Maybe change what their Defining Qualities do somehow? Change one to something about lowering Schism after the battle? We’re gonna have to work on that.
As for unique social opportunities? Well, that one’s a little hard to say outside of the fact that this kind of small-town hero is going to have a lot more going for them than anyone else. Might have to put that into some kind of extra defining thing? Well, clearly this is going to be a series we revisit no matter how many or few Playbooks we explicate in this way.
Interesting interactions, however, I think we’ve got because the person who smiles and shrugs because “that’s just what I do” when talking about saving others, to say nothing of talks about “Hey, you don’t need to do that for me” or the like could create some interesting space for that.
There’s definitely an arc in there about learning who actually needs your help that’s going to make things interesting earlier in the game as opposed to later on, because later on, it’s going to take a lot more to put anyone down.
But I’m gonna call this good. It’s a little up-in-the-air as far as the design goals go, but I feel like with this philosophy we have for The Hero, and their particular mechanical feel, we’ve at least got a good start.
It’ll be working mostly in contrast to others.
And, well, that’s a matter for another time.