While looking at the build your own hero PDF, it's says that you must buy three trait dice and three skills. Being the OL I will ignore it, but it is pretty demanding on that you must buy them. Just wanted to know your thoughts on it.

The official build-your-own hero rules are pretty restrictive and not very balanced. You can create a hero that can make 7 Guard attacks in one round or cancel the overlord's entire natural threat generation, and yet a lot of official heroes are over-budget if you try to recreate them under those rules.

If you ignore the restrictions (for example, if you buy less than 3 trait dice), they generally become even more unbalanced - they give everything in relative costs, not absolute costs, so there's no easy way to generalize to the amount of BP it "should" cost to get, say, a fourth trait die.

Overall, I think they're interesting for the insights they provide into the mind of the designer, but not worth actually using, except perhaps as rough guidelines.

I designed my own hero editor . It's a lot more flexible and, in my estimation, a lot more balanced.

Antistone said:

In more than just his estimation.

Dump the FFG one as fast as you can. It is a badly written hack job, not even internally consistent, roughly on a par with the rule book writing!

Antistones' editor is a fantastic piece of balancing work. Aim for heroes of around 360 pts when designing (the mean and median official hero value). It isn't perfect, and doesn't account for all synergy, so you can still get reasonably powerful heroes at 360ish pts, while avoiding any home made monsters like Astarra, or bombs like Red Scorpion.

well that the thing, i saw that it was pretty busted as well in making a guy with 6 armor with no items. But if you have to get the three trait dice and three skills you cant. I looked at what your talking about that would be messed up but still i only got up to four guards a turn.

discipleofsilas said:

You can make a hero with 12 wounds, 3 base armor, and the Defender ability, though, which is still pretty amazing defense-wise. Grab a chainmail, and you block the first 6 damage from monsters within 6 spaces. Upgrade to platemail and buy the ring of protection, and regular beastmen can't hurt you at all without some kind of bonus.

discipleofsilas said:

Nimble race, raise wounds and fatigue, lower speed, choose a conquest value of 3 (gain 2 BP), and you've got 16 BP. Reserve 9 for Guardian level 3, and you've got 7 BP left to buy traits and skills.

It's not the fact that you can buy traits and skills based on the way its worded is saying that you must buy three traits and three skills and in turn thats an atomatic 12 BP's you must spend. It's also weird that if it is that way that some races would give you less than need to buy the musts.

discipleofsilas said:

No, 12 BP is the maximum you can spend on them, if you want all your dice in one trait and all your skills in one category. If you buy 1 melee die, 1 ranged die, 1 magic die, 1 combat skill, 1 subterfuge skill, and 1 wizardry skill, that costs a total of 6 BP (1 each) and gives you 3 trait dice and 3 skills.

It's still convoluted, and means there are choices that appear legal at earlier steps but cause you to have no legal way to proceed at this step. It's confusing, and poor writing. But it's not quite that bad.

As a side note, notice the rules are conflicted about whether you can gain BP for lowering the same stat more than once. They say you gain BP for the number of traits lowered, not for the number of times they were lowered. The failure to specify any sort of minimum values and the range of costs they chose to write into that table also suggest they didn't want you to keep lowering for more BP. On the other hand, the given example of 2 stats raised and 4 lowered is impossible unless they consider lowering a stat twice to be the same as lowering two stats, so...arguments ensue.

Okay that make a huge difference, it would be nice if all game make would add at lease a second example of all the situations that way we don't have to have every one make a big deal out of every thing. such as if they add that if you get one in melee that 1BP, one in range that 1 BP and a second in range that 2 BP's, to = 4 BP's. but at least we have forums to have other have there take on the games and rune what you've been playing for 3 years.

If you're interested in seeing the potential of the Official Hero Maker, I made a post with a wide amount of heroes I created using that PDF. It's as Antistone and Corbon say: it's restrictive and can give you results that vary greatly in power. It's not like they are unusable, especially if thrown in a random they're not going to unbalance your game more than a very lucky or unlucky random pick of the original heroes (which aren't balanced).

BY THE WAY, if your players aren't against unofficial stuff (mine are, VERY unfortunately) stick with Antistone's editor. It's not just that it's far better balanced, it's MUCH MORE FUN!!! I'm really loving it, really. You can even edit it a bit (I did it, actually), but I suggest you don't overdo things on that side since the effect will result most times in further unbalance possibilities, which is never a good thing. I myself did only minor changes, adding a few abilitiess (and I'm not still really sure about balance of one of them), moving few abilities (which text was only 1 line or could be reduced to 1 line) to perks and allowing for each ability the maximum number of perks (as long as the total text doesn't extend to more than 5 lines), I added the availability of a sixth Power Dice (meaning 1 starting die is a Silver), moved max armor to 6, minimum fatigue 1 and minimum speed 2.

Antistone's stuff is great on its own even without any editing by the way. Play a bit with it and you'll love it...