The Hero System version 6 is the best mix of fantasy/real-life role-playing I've ever played. It is a universal principle that when you give someone more options, it become inherently more complex. When you make an RPG closer to real-life, it becomes more complex. The Hero System involves lots of options for character creation and combat, allows the character to specialize in anything, and gives tools for building characters based on back-story, strengths, fears, equipment, and even the people that character knows.

The Combat & Adventuring book is necessary to learn and run Hero System campaigns and adventures. It's also useful during character creation so you can see how your choices will affect your combat. This book contains a good foundation for having combat that uses super powers, guns, dinosaurs, robots, mental magicians, and everything else the Hero System can take.

At my age, I know how I learn. I learn well from reading, but I also learn from example. This book has way too few examples and formulas for combat scenarios. As I reviewed in the Character Creation book on this web site, a list of formulas with variables would be really helpful, rather than the English in-line wording that so often describes how something works. The Hero System is for intelligent folks because it involves a lot of math. Laying out the math in formulas would help so much in the heat of combat and might also make good annotations on a character sheet.

I purchased both the printed book and the PDF as a combo. The problems with the printed book are that it's black-and-white and soft cover. The soft cover means it doesn't stand up well in my collection; it kind of slouches. The B&W print isn't exciting to look at. Titles and captions in the black-and-white print are merely a bigger font, rather than using a stand-out color. The page numbers in the Index at the back of the printed book are hard to read as they were originally red and light blue; which get printed as a light-gray color. The colored page numbers have significance, too: blue is for handbook 1 and red is for handbook 2. Luckily they are prefixed with 6E1 and 6E2, otherwise I wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

Although I started Hero System with my teenage kids and their friends, they put no effort into learning this complex system. They never learned how to make a character or how to properly do combat. And no one showed me how to play; I learned it all from the books. Combat became bogged down because, not only did I have to control the NPC enemies' attacks, but also help the PCs make their attacks. After trying this system for a few years, they eventually got the fantasy hook and we transferred to D&D. D&D is easier for character creation and combat, the art is better, but the system makes little sense. Every racial and class feature, spell, and magic item has to be explained in loose English terms, rather than in game terms like the Hero System does. Armor class (AC), hit points (hp), and healing make even less sense in D&D, so I love how the Hero System tackles those issues. D&D combat involves one or two attack dice, the addition of small numbers (like +1 or +3), and comparing them as less than, greater than, or equal to some number. D&D won over our group because of simplicity.

Would I go back to Hero if they did? I don't know. It really took so much time building the enemies, vehicles, weapons, armor, and adventures behind the scenes. I would spend hours in the library, the restaurant, and at home preparing for a few hours of adventuring. And I would always figure the costs to make sure things were balanced which meant lots of math, and even more math when I would change a power by adding an advantage or limitation. I would sooner be a player than a GM again.

I purchased the Bestiary for the same reason I purchased other Hero System supplements--to save time preparing for play. Since the Hero system requires you build everything beforehand, any time-savers are appreciated. And because the Hero System rules are so complex, it helps me become a better builder when I see the pros build things like centaurs, giant frogs, and living chests (mimics). For instance, it was cool to see how the dracodemo has wings built as a small multi-power: they help it fly and they can attack with those wings, but not both at the same time.

Another reason I bought the Bestiary was because the Villains 3 book I purchased mentions it. There is a monster there able to summon a certain number of character-points worth of creatures from the sea and it mentions the Bestiary.

I believe this was one of the rare PDF-only purchases I made from the Hero System. Like any good PDF, it is searchable and does not seem to rely on OCR (optical character recognition) that comes from scanning pages.

As far as the organization of the book is concerned, it is pretty well organized, but it can be hard to find things, even though it's a PDF. For instance, while there is a Table of Contents, there is no index. Take the imp, for example. The two-page, small-text Table of Contents shows imp under demons and devils. While I understand why it's found there, where could I go to easily find imp alphabetically? If I search the PDF for imp, I'll find words like "chimpanzee", "improve", and "important." So let's say that I check the box that says "Whole words only", then I'll find it. Looking for bear has similar problems. I find it when used as a synonym for carry, and in words like werebear. In the Table of Contents, it is on page 2, under Chapter Six - Mundane Beasts, under Bears. So, yes, while I agree with the organization, search helps would make the book and PDF better.

The art is okay, but I didn't buy the book for the art. However, while I kind of expected a black-and-white printed version (as it was with the Hero System handbooks), the Bestiary PDF itself is black-and-white! There are drawings of dragons, apes, and demons, all of which look to have been drawn in a single color. But like I said, I didn't buy the book for the art.

The Hero System is the most flexible, balanced, real-life/fantasy role-playing system I've ever played. You can play in worlds that resemble super hero comic books, deep space adventures, high fantasy, country westerns, pulp fiction, and 1920's New York noire, all with one system. The rules are a bit of a tough swallow, but they are pretty consistent. I love the separation between special effect and game effect. I like how many examples there are in the books, even though they're relegated to the margins. I like the artwork as well.

I love how I get a printed book and a searchable PDF (because I bought the combo). I wish the print was color and hard-cover, even if that made it more expensive. I would have at least liked the option to choose color or black-and-white. The soft cover starts to fall apart after lots of commutes in a backpack. It doesn't stand up well on a shelf of Hero books because of this. The index at the back of the printed book is hard to read because the original color of page numbers are light blue and red, which fade to light gray in the black-and-white printed version.

The most difficult part of the Hero System is having to build everything--enemies, weapons, armor, bases, vehicles, animals, adventures, and campaigns before you can play. All of this (plus learning the rules) takes a great deal of time. And you'd better have an intelligent play group. Combat requires lots of addition, counting patterns, and subtraction; building characters involves calculating costs with multiplying and dividing fractions. While there is additional software you can purchase to help out, you still need your GM's approval. They need to approve costs associated with limitations, and the design of things like contacts, favors, and complications.

While the popular D&D system is easy to learn, people have a hard time describing the flavor of Armor Class (a combination of dexterity and armor) and hit points. The Hero System nails these issues in the bud, where each character has an offensive combat value, defensive combat value, physical defense, energy defense, resistant versions of the last two, stun, and body. All of these combine to make a combat system that makes more sense, but requires more math in the heat of combat. Critical hits and failures in D&D each have a 1 in 20 chance of occurring because you're using 1d20. In Hero, you roll your attack with 3d6. A 3 is an automatic, glorious hit and an 18 is a colossal fail. Each of these rolls has a 1 in 216 chance of occurring. Much more realistic.

Here is what I would improve if there were another version of the book. While there is a section of charts at the back, I would also add a section of formulas. Formulas for things like knockback and turn radius are hidden in paragraph form. I would love to see formulas with variables and I just substitute the variables. Knockback, for instance, includes formulas for going into and thru walls, which require other variables like wall BODY and PD, but it is written in English form, rather than in math form. There are other things that could be turned into formulas, like the rules for adjustment powers, multi-attack, and how damage from an attack gets applied to defenses. So, in-line formulas would be great as would an index of formulas.

Another thing I would improve are the headers and footers. When I flip through a book, I personally look at the lower corners to find the page I want. However, the page numbers in this book are in the upper corners. Also, although the header will say something like "244 - Powers", I would really like to know alphabetically where I am in relation to what I'm looking for. Page 244 gives no indication as to which Power it's talking about. It happens to be Leaping. Therefore, if I was looking for FTL, I know I'd have to flip more towards the beginning of the book, and if I was looking for Multiform, I'd have to flip more towards the ending. Even if the header just had "244 - Powers - L" I would know where I was.

All in all, it's a great system, but it's not for the mathematically faint of heart. I started a group with my teenagers and their friends. I had no one to show me the ropes and no GM to explain how things worked. I spent way more hours preparing for adventures than playing them because of all there was to design and build, along with reading and learning the rules because the teens wouldn't.