Terran Empire for Hero Designer

[Herolover]

I we going to see the Terran Empire book and the Spacer's Toolkit (when it comes out) as Hero Designer files?

[Steve Long]

We haven't decided yet. We need to take a look at the overall response to the sales of the Character Packs and decide if it's worth paying someone to do the data entry.

The Spacer's Toolkit is, in any event, an unlikely choice to sell a Character Pack for. Since the book is pretty much nothing but gadget and ship write-ups, we'd have to charge as much for the Character Pack as we would for the book. It's not like other books, such as CKC, where the image and descriptive text are as important as the character sheets -- with an equipment book, the equipment write-ups are the vast majority of the value. The same applies to The UNTIL Superpowers Database -- if we ever turned that into a Character Pack, it'd have to be at least a $25 product, if not more.

[Jhamin]

I get the impression from the playtest messageboards that as products are proofread, 2-3 copies of the herodesigner files are created by various readers. Is there any way that playtesting can be rolled into the data entry? Might that reduce the cost?

And I for one would be willing to pay a fair amount for character packs for products like these. In may ways, these are the products I am most interested in.

How much time will be saved in character creation if I already have all the various gear avalible as prefabs?

[TechnoViking]

Originally posted by Steve Long
The same applies to The UNTIL Superpowers Database -- if we ever turned that into a Character Pack, it'd have to be at least a $25 product, if not more. [/B]
One idea for USPDB for Hero Designer would be to divide it into chucks Hero could sell for $5 a piece.

[Derek Hiemforth]

Another thing to remember, sad as it is, is that once a product is made available electronically (in whatever form) it will be distributed to unscrupulous thieves around the world in about five minutes. It'll probably happen eventually anyway, but if the company provides it in electronic format, it happens that much sooner. If Hero chooses to make these available, I'd hope they didn't do so until several months after the book's release, so the wanton piracy didn't cut too much into the book's sales. :(

[Monolith]

Originally posted by Jhamin
I get the impression from the playtest messageboards that as products are proofread, 2-3 copies of the herodesigner files are created by various readers. Is there any way that playtesting can be rolled into the data entry? Might that reduce the cost?
I think the point Steve was making is, if you were to buy the Prefab packs there would be no reason for you to buy the printed book. USPD, for example, has little descriptive text. You are buying the book to get the powers listed, not to read the backgrounds, personalities, etc., that you would read in a normal Hero book. DOJ would need to sell the USPD Prefab for the same cost as the published book, just to make sure they did not lose money if people bought the Prefab instead of the printed book.


How much time will be saved in character creation if I already have all the various gear avalible as prefabs?
I think that question depends on how well you know the HERO System. The Prefabs would be more time saving in regards to typing and click powers you wanted to create. If you want to make a weather character, for example, you can load up the Weather Powers, Air Powers, Electricity Powers, and Ice Powers Prefabs and have several hundred premade powers ready to choose from. In many cases you would still need to decide if they are going to be put in a Multipower, Variable Power Pool, or an Elemental Control. In some cases you might still need to adjust for Active Points and such to make it a perfect fit.

There is a LOT of information in those Prefabs, and for some people seeing all those choices might actually slow them down in the beginning. Until you learned all the powers in a Prefab you would still need the book around because the Power Name in a Prefab might not actually tell you the extent of the chosen power. So when a person first started using Prefabs there would be a lot of selecting and deleting. I know there is for me. :)

One of the ways DOJ might get around an overly inflated cost for the Prefabs is to encode the purchase of the prefabs. So if you wanted to buy the Prefab you might need to include several words from several different pages of the book. In many cases that would insure that the purchaser has already bought the printed book. It is not fool-proof, but it would go a long way.

[BobGreenwade]

Originally posted by Steve Long
The Spacer's Toolkit is, in any event, an unlikely choice to sell a Character Pack for. Since the book is pretty much nothing but gadget and ship write-ups, we'd have to charge as much for the Character Pack as we would for the book. It's not like other books, such as CKC, where the image and descriptive text are as important as the character sheets -- with an equipment book, the equipment write-ups are the vast majority of the value. The same applies to The UNTIL Superpowers Database -- if we ever turned that into a Character Pack, it'd have to be at least a $25 product, if not more. Speaking for myself, having been a testreader for both the USPD and Spacer's Toolkit, that I would find only about half to two-thirds (maybe as much as three-fourths, for USPD) of the value in each to be the power and equipment write-ups.

The USPD also includes a few new character construction rules (new Adders, Advantages, and Limitations), and is liberally sprinkled with various informational tidbits (the physics of various forms of energy, perspectives for plants and animals, and the like) that would make it a wonderful value even if I already owned the Character Pack.

The Spacer's Toolkit is even better -- the color text is even better than the equipment write-ups (and the equipment write-ups are certainly nothing to be ashamed of). Here and there one can find tidbits on alien cultures in the Terran Empire setting and how they interact, indications of how various ATRI levels function in a variety of technological fields, and even (though probably unintentionally) a handful of potential plot seeds. If this book had been as setting-neutral as the USPD, I'd be lukewarm to it, but as it is I'm drooling after it, and it's right after Terran Empire on my list of books I don't yet have but want. And, in this case, I'd frankly be a lot less excited about a HD prefab pack than I would for a USPD pack (if I had HD, that is).

[tiger]

I know I'd buy the USPD in hero packs, save me the problem of working them up :)

I already have my copy reserved at me local store when it makes it in.

I have all the packs so far but for me they can't erase the use of the actual book. They're a great addition to the books though.

I hope that DOJ can keep coming out with them, but I also realize they may not be able to.