Tony Vargas
Legend
In another thread, Manbearcat was commenting how people into story games had easily gotten into 4e, I was big into Hero in the 90s, and that made 4e easy to get into in spite of having all the longtime-D&Der preconcieved notions, for exactly the reason you mention - the way the game combined a few simple, clear keywords into a plethora of powers, that each could then represent a variety of things just by defining your own flavor text - was very much a strength of Hero's build system, as well.Right, its fine to subvert these, at times. There should be a Lightning power that immobilizes instead of pushing, or whatever. Obviously 4e conditions are also pretty general things, so you're going to have a good bit of overlap. I found it a bit confusing though that you could get such a huge variety of effects out of what were described as basically almost the same thing.