Many fans are likely to ask “Why now for 6E?” or “Is 6E really necessary?”. We definitely think the time has come for 6E, and that having a Sixth Edition will make our products better and our fans’ gaming experiences better. We have two main reasons for this:
1. We can make the game better.
We have six years more experience at the job of writing and designing RPGs than we did when 5E came out, and six years more experience at layout, presentation, marketing, and the like. When I wrote the 5E manuscript I had explicit instructions about what I could and could not change, regardless of my own personal feelings on the matter, and I stuck to those instructions. When we published 5E we decided to stay that course rather than have me go back and rework things from the beginning to be more in tune with what I would have preferred to do. Now I have the opportunity to re-examine the HERO System from the ground up and make any changes I think are necessary, regardless of how “radical” they might be.
Beyond that, there’s the simple fact that we (and you) have six years more experience at thinking about and using the HERO System. We’ve published thousands of pages of new material for the HERO System, and that’s led to all sorts of ideas about improvements, additions, expansions, variants, and revisions that are worth including in the core rules. The time has come to make those improvements official.
2. To take advantage of the opportunities presented by the release of the CHAMPIONS ONLINE MMORPG.
As many of you have read by now in our new CHAMPIONS ONLINE MMORPG forum, Cryptic Studios has bought the Champions intellectual property and will release a massive multiplayer online roleplaying game based on it in 2009. That gives us access to a whole new customer base that’s never been exposed to our products before, and we want to publish books (primarily Champions books) that will appeal to them. That means reworking the books to attract their interest, such as by using art from the MMO and organizing the material to suit someone whose background is in MMOs rather than true RPGs (but without, I hasten to add, making the books less useful and appealing to our traditional RPG playing fans and customers). As long as we’re going to have to make changes along those lines, it’s the perfect opportunity to also make changes to the rules engine. (Though again, to make things perfectly clear, I am not changing the HERO System to work like an MMO, Cryptic Studios does not own the HERO System rules, and the CHAMPIONS ONLINE MMORPG does not use the HERO System rules for character creation, task or combat resolution, or anything else.) To put it another way, as long as we’ve got the hood open to change the oil we might as well replace the spark plugs if it looks like they need it.
Balls
Originally Posted by CourtFool
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