First of all, I didn't realise Hero Wars had 'secondary' skills. I'd expect that which skills are most important will vary depending on the campaign, and also from character to character within that campaign. The problem here is over-specialisation. The longest running characters in my game consist of one combat character, several spies and a magic specialist. Each has become somewhat specialised in their field, but I do realise that it is possible that they may become over-specialised and I have considered ways to mitigate any such tendency.
One factor that I think is often overlooked is the way in which HPs are awarded. The advancement system makes it very expensive to advance a single ability by more than one point every time you spend your HPs. Therefore players tend to increase as many abilities as they have HPs by one point each. That just leaves the choice of which abilities to increase.
Generaly the characters will have perhaps 2 or 3 abilities they pretty much always want to increase, so the first 2 or 3 points they get will go on those abilities. After that, if they get more than just 2 or 3 points, the extra points tend to get allocated among a diverse array of abilites - either ones they want to keep within spitting distance of their highest abilities, onest that they just want at a certain level, or abilities that are likely to be particularly usefull in the near future.
What this means is that if you give the players more HPs to spend, their best abilities do not tend to increase proportionately faster. Instead, the extra points tend to get spread across a wider range of abilities. In other words, giving more HPs leads to more rounded characters, not more powerful characters per se.
This works better in my game than it might in many others, because I draw a distinction between points for character advancement (Character Points, or CPs), and HPs which can be used for bumps or advancement. Nowadays I tend to give out 5 CPs per session, and that seems to be working out quite well. If you run your game more often than I do and want a slower rate of advancement, you might consider only giving HPs out every other session or so, but giving out twice as many. Your hero's best abilities should not advance twice as fast.
Simon Hibbs
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