Looking For Input On Potential New Fantasy Product

[Lucius]

Lord Liaden: Believe it or not, my inspiration was first edition Chivalry and Sorcery.

 

tomd1969:

 

I think the product under discussion should offer maximum simplicity and freedom. Leave it to the individuals who may run the game to add complexity and close off options.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

Leave the palindromedary to me

 

[Markdoc]

Lord Liaden: Believe it or not, my inspiration was first edition Chivalry and Sorcery.

 

tomd1969:

 

I think the product under discussion should offer maximum simplicity and freedom. Leave it to the individuals who may run the game to add complexity and close off options.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

Leave the palindromedary to me

This is a very Hero-centric approach, though. Our D20 GM likes Hero system. When she plays, she likes the ability to tweak her character, and the flexibility the system offers her. She would never buy or run Hero system though: when she is GM'ing, she wants everything down in black and white. I've met a fair number of GM's like that: they want to pick the product up and use it, pretty much as is, and they are reluctant to make major changes, even if some aspects make them uncomfortable.

 

cheers, Mark

[Pegasus40218]

Pegasus, those are all really good ideas but (mostly) they do not tackle the specific topic of what should go into a Fantasy Hero Complete product. The card concept is very clever, but Hero has and will continue to be stymied with a limited print budget. Fancy things like boxed sets, trading cards and similar are probably way beyond the scope of Hero Games' ability to produce. Maybe some day in the future, enough interest in Hero will be around to warrant the extras. I just don't see it happening soon.

 

Hurm, then again there is the idea of crowd funding. If Hero had an interest in going that way, Kickstarter would be one avenue for resources. Assuming that such a product could actually get the greenlight, the next question is how big are the cards? Hero character sheets have a lot of data. Just trying to pack that onto a collectible playing card would be challenging itself. Adding fancy art would diminish the already precious real estate. Perhaps a half-sheet sized card, double sided? I bet I could fit a character sheet onto that. It wouldn't have the maneuvers and other "fluff" but it could very well hold all the stats, background info and an image.

 

Well it's an interesting topic diversion if nothing else.

What I envisioned for the cards would be a card size comparable to any other trade-able card games out there, with one noteable difference: the cards wouldn't all have a common "backer" side. One side of the card would be a character illustration, the other would have a basic (stripped down) stat block. Again, the cards "map" to full character sheets, so it wouldn't be necessary to pack everything onto the card -- just enough of the stats and powers to pique a players interest and convince them to seek out the full character sheets and give the game a try.

[Sketchpad]

To some extent, I agree with Markdoc. I love that I can make anything in Hero, but, when dealing with a genre, myself and others I've gamed with like the idea of jumping right into the action. I don't mind having something like pre-built templates, but I'd really like to see a good set of bestiaries built around the genre rather than generic ones. There's something cool about having the rules to build everything (which I don't mind), but it's just as cool to have a campaign world plotted out for you to use right away.

 

Also, another suggestion (and this might be just me), but cater your design around the genre. I'd rather pay for a nice looking book that's well designed and illustrated than something that looks like a text book. I realize it's not everyone's quibble, but I like a well made book.

[Lucius]

Lord Liaden: Believe it or not, my inspiration was first edition Chivalry and Sorcery.

 

tomd1969:

 

I think the product under discussion should offer maximum simplicity and freedom. Leave it to the individuals who may run the game to add complexity and close off options.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

Leave the palindromedary to me

So....you're telling me people want things that are more complicated, but allow fewer options?

 

Lucius Alexander

 

I think I understand palindromedaries better than people. And I don't claim to understand palindromedaries.

[Christougher]

Makes me wonder if I should offer up the fantasy campaign setting I've been working on. It's called Abcedeus, and it's about four elemental gods who created their own world, each with a chosen race and distinct style of magic. The dwarves of the earth, the elves from the water, the faery in the skies and the fiery demons. And then they created the Humans...

 

While it has a lot of classic fantasy elements, there is a unique feel to them, minus a few bits clearly stolen from other sources. The magic systems start with the idea of different limitations, but still have room to apply additional ones, and have a few predefined spell lists.

 

Chris

 

[Lord Liaden]

That's a generous offer, Christougher, and a good concept; but Hero Games in the DoJ era has preferred to work with settings they own outright, so they don't have to worry about losing the rights to using something in the future. (The Champions deal with Cryptic Studios seems to have been a very defined exception.)

 

For my part, I believe what they already own and have published is diverse enough, and well enough defined, that they won't lack for setting material, magic systems, creatures, NPCs etc. when they're ready to start rolling them out.

[Lord Liaden]

Lord Liaden: Believe it or not, my inspiration was first edition Chivalry and Sorcery.

 

tomd1969:

 

I think the product under discussion should offer maximum simplicity and freedom. Leave it to the individuals who may run the game to add complexity and close off options.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

Leave the palindromedary to me

Strange as it sounds, Lucius, that's been my experience more often than not. I've run into no shortage of players who lap up details about world history, weapon stats, spell lists and mechanics, creature abilities, but want it all precisely defined so they understand exactly what they can do.

[Sketchpad]

You know, I was thinking about this today. Has anyone taken a look at FantasyCraft and some of its supplements? There's something neat about the basic design of the book and the way they convey information. The only thing I think I'd change is to have more of a setting behind it rather than having some frameworks at the end of the book.

[Pegasus40218]

Since a lot of this thread refers to whether something similar to "Champions Complete" should be done for Fantasy Hero, I finally broke down and bought "Champions Complete" so I'll have a better frame of reference to work from. I'll provide additional feedback when I'm done reading it.

[heatmonkey]

Chasing rules through five tomes of books is exactly why I ported my campaign to Chaosium's Basic Role-playing. So maybe instead of either reproducing the rules or referencing them, there is a way to collate the essential rules into a functional set of flowcharts, charts and lists with a reference back to their sources. I like the idea of it being a stand-alone. As Fantasy Hero 1E player, I know there is a way to do it.

[CptPatriot]

My problem with playing/running a Fantasy Hero game has always been that there is no frame of reference to playing the game. The GMs and I always end up using D&D equipment charts to save time in creating entire equipment sheets.

 

I believe any Fantasy book should use CC or 6E1 & 6E2 as rule references with Fantasy specific stuff to allow players to jump into making/playing a game quickly.

Many people have experience with D&D before coming to Hero and are familiar with either "Vancian" magic from D&D 3.x and Pathfinder or Event based magic, in the case of D&D 4th Ed. (reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_(...#Spell_systems[/url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_(gaming)#Spell_systems]). If there was a Fantasy Magic Companion with ready made magic systems they could pick one and get started. Once they have a taste for how flexible the Hero System is, they'll expand on the systems provided for truly custom magic.

[JazzIsBlues]

A couple of thoughts:

 

First, regarding a title, how about keeping it consistent with CC and go with "Fantasy Complete"? Though I suppose there could be some awkwardly spun connotations to that.

 

One of the issues that always comes up with new revisions and new versions of books is, "I'm experienced with the previous version why would I want to change?" This is also the reason why I go to conventions and I see people running games from old systems like AD&D 1st Edition and such. There is also an inverse concern with putting people in a position of having to buy books they don't want because the information they need is in a particular volume. eg. I don't run supers games so CC doesn't really do me that much good from a flavor and style standpoint, but it has core rules in it that I need if I'm to run games in other genre(s). If the goal is for the fantasy book to stand on its own there will out of necessity be duplication between the two. If the goal is to minimize that duplication then it needs to be noted to potential buyers of the subsequent books that they will also need CC and the attendant cost that goes with it.

 

Just my 2 krupplenicks worth, your mileage may of course vary.

 

JiB

 

[Ryhope Wood]

I like and agree with what a lot of other people are saying. The key to growing the HERO player base is to lure GMs over from Pathfinder or D&D 4E with the prospect that they can easily tweak the system to their liking but run something out of the box. Asking a D&D GM to basically create everything from scratch is not going to appeal to any of them including me! M&M 2E and 3E offered a way in for D&D GMs - although most 3E support has been driven by the fans.

 

Another challenge for the d20 player is benchmarking abilities and also handling characteristics for low level characters.

[Pegasus40218]

Well...I FINALLY finished reading Champions Complete. So, here are my current thoughts on the idea of a Fantasy Hero Complete: It will be extremely difficult to pull off and have a completely satisfied base of players. I suspect that there will be too much demand for custom guidelines for too many varieties of fantasy to provide the level of detail desired in a single book. One player / GM may want guidelines for running a sword & sorcery / Conan-esque type game (stat limits, CV limits, templates, etc). Another player or GM is going to want guidelines on how to set up and run low-fantasy. Another player / GM is going to want a magic-rare epic fantasy (similar to the Tolkien's Middle Earth). The next guy is going to want D&D/Pathfinder equivalent high-fantasy, and so-on. Pretty soon, you'll have nothing but a book of templates and guidelines...and I'm not sure what sort of value a book like that would have.

 

I guess the question I have is this: what is the goal of this book? What needs is it intended to address? What I suspect was being considered is largely re-printing Champions Complete, but changing/adding a few sections such that they fit the fantasy genre a little better. While you might get a few new players to pick up such a book, my personal opinion is that what is needed is more of a GM's guide for fantasy. As someone who's been gaming for 30 years, I can say that in my limited experience with HERO, it's not a big problem for the players to work with the materials available. My challenge has been how to set reasonable limits on characters that can still be fun to play without winding up with radically unbalanced characters -- and learning to recognize what abilities / combinations of abilities will result in an unbalanced character. Fantasy Hero makes a number of suggestions about imposing limits, but doesn't explain them in sufficient detail or provide concrete examples with an explanation of what effects the limits imposed would have on a game.

 

Anyway, I know what I would be looking for in an additional Fantasy Hero supplement, and I can't honestly say that something akin to Champions Complete would be it. I think time and money spent developing/expanding multiple campaign settings would be better. In my own case, I may have found a supplement that details a setting and mechanics that are very close to the type of game I'd like to run: "The Last Dominon: Echoes of Glory". I've skimmed through it, and it looks very promising (though it references additional books and materials that I have not been able to locate -- and the publisher's website seems to no longer exist).

[Heimdallsgothi]

This is the issue I've always run into when trying to run a Hero Game. If you do not have someone to teach it to you, then it can be very challenging to learn on your own. The game is not build for the 12-14 year old GM's first starting out.

 

While it is certainly possible to use Hero to model Conan, Middle Earth, and Even pathfinder, there are no real guidelines on how to do so. There are several vague discussions on active point caps etc, stat limits etc. But nothing on 1-3 level D&D has a 30pt cap, 4-7th level D&D has a 45 pt cap, Conan has a 40pt hard cap on sorcery skills etc.

 

Even something as easy as a sword (as built in HS6E Fantasy hero is difficult to figure out just how they made it on your own (Ive come pretty close, but intuitive its not)

 

For a new GM, they aren't going to simply leave D&D and Pathfinder for Hero. The sheer volume of work necessary to create a setting when you can buy entire multi year campaigns twice a year for pathfinder.

 

I ran a rise of the runelords campaign for almost 2 years, My current campaign is a Savage Worlds game, using the Pathfinder Kingmaker adventure path, we are in our 6th month. In converting kingmaker to savage worlds it took me about 3 hours to get the general guidelines down, another 5 hours over the next few weeks to convert the remaing creatures and encounters. We have about another year to go.

 

If I tried to convert that adventure path to hero, on my own, with no play experience...

 

Id would take me less time to buy the books at minimum wage.

 

Fantasy Hero already exist. Its a great book as it stands, but even in that book they discuss lots of various fantasy genre types, but very little in game mechanics on how to emulate a specific genre type.

[Theros]

When this will be published?

[Lord Liaden]

Maybe we should try looking at this from another direction.

 

Many posters to this thread have said they prefer Game X to HERO for fantasy, at least as far as what's currently in print goes. What is it about Game X that makes it preferable? If there are consistent responses, they might be worth porting into a core Fantasy Hero book, even if we think the "ideal" FH should be something else. What the company needs most right now is something that as many people as possible will buy.

[Theros]

Fantasy Hero Complete...Hero System is flexible. I really propose to create spells so that caster can boost the basic power of spells. There should be clear and easy method to do it on fly, at the middle of combat or so. That is important thing.

[Theros]

This might be too late...but...horror theme to fantasy setting works. Something like Warmachine and Witcher style.

[Markdoc]

Maybe we should try looking at this from another direction.

 

Many posters to this thread have said they prefer Game X to HERO for fantasy, at least as far as what's currently in print goes. What is it about Game X that makes it preferable? If there are consistent responses, they might be worth porting into a core Fantasy Hero book, even if we think the "ideal" FH should be something else. What the company needs most right now is something that as many people as possible will buy.

What they want is off-the-shelf content. Stuff that a busy GM can simply buy and run with.

Sadly, that's exactly what Hero isn't. And of course, that's why I choose Hero for all of my games

 

The only way I can see to square that particular circle is to give new GMs (or at least, GMs new to Hero) a tight nailed-down fantasy setting keyed off all the tropes most people are familiar with these days, and then, at the end, a series of short suggestion on how to customise/change that and convert content from other popular settings.

 

cheers, Mark

[Jhaierr]

Jason, I am curious to hear if there has been any more discussion about this product? It's definitely something I would get if it were presented as Fantasy Hero Complete.

[Doc Democracy]

Too much to read already, so instead I skimmed.

 

It seems to me, most people are comparing to D&D.  I think that is the wrong comparator, simply because it was very rare for any D&D edition to have all you needed to play.

 

My favourite fantasy purchase ever has to be second edition Runequest.  The boxed version with the softcover blue book.  It came with what became a classic adventure (Apple Lane) and a couple of pamphlet supplements providing cool treasures and off the shelf encounters.

 

I think the adventure was good because it highlighted the advantages of the system over the opposition.  The main book ran through character creation but embedded that within a strong setting narrative.  It also contained lots of monsters and treasures a map and the details of how magic works in that world.

 

I think the favourite Hero purchase ever has been Justice INC, the boxed version around the time of champions II and III.  Again, nothing spectacular presentation-wise but dripping in character.  In fact the provision of a character sheet that looked like something from the pulps was worth it. 

 

I think most systems fail around the area of character sheets.  I have said it before but I see the character sheet as the player user interface for a system.  it is the thing that all players see.  Only the GM is likely to read the background and other stuff, it is the character sheet that has to do the heavy lifting of selling the system to the players.  As far as I can see, most gaming companies put all their creative and design effort into the book and the character sheet is left as a last minute, if was can be bothered, thing.

 

I think I would have very setting specific character sheets that only had necessary numbers and other sheets specifically for building characters. 

 

Beyond that a few setting specific easy to use stuff in the bundle with the book and a number of others to purchase online for $2 or so.

 

If I was a new GM I would want five or six kinds of starting character to dish out, at least two kinds of magic, ten or twenty spells for each, a couple of dozen stock monsters, an off the shelf adventure that ran me through the vagaries of the system - to get me to use the rules at least once.  I might then invest small amounts downloading additional magic systems, additional characters, additional treasures, etc etc etc.

 

Anything that I can use of the shelf makes things easier.

 

Anything that makes my game cool for the players is even better....

 

 

Doc

[Chris Goodwin]

If I was a new GM I would want five or six kinds of starting character to dish out, at least two kinds of magic, ten or twenty spells for each, a couple of dozen stock monsters, an off the shelf adventure that ran me through the vagaries of the system - to get me to use the rules at least once.  I might then invest small amounts downloading additional magic systems, additional characters, additional treasures, etc etc etc.

 

This is more or less what Fantasy Hero 1e was, and IMO what FHC should be.  Given the likely page counts, you could easily get all of the non-rules information from FH1 (actually probably more!) into a CC-sized book with the CC rules trimmed down for fantasy.  

 

I'll just quote myself:  

 

 

Fantasy Hero first edition is 160 pages, of less dense type than CC (CC is roughly 1200 words per page, FH1 is roughly 1000, not counting art and tables). The rules portion of FH1 takes up 94 pages, leaving 66 pages for the Campaigning (about 8 pages on how to run FH) and Sourcebook (remainder used for premade packages, spells, monsters, items, &c) sections; the rules portion of CC is 160 pages, with 80 for the remainder.

 

I would suggest putting the full CC rules text into FHC. FH1 contains 9 premade magic items (mainly "artifact and relic" type), 28 monsters (8 animals, 12 "manlike" (human, demi-human, and humanoid), 4 each classic fantasy monsters and undead), 3 racial templates (dwarf, elf, halfling), 4 "class" templates (warrior, wizard, rogue, priest) plus one additional created as an example of how to create them (viking), 30 premade spells of various types, conversion notes (to and from RuneQuest and MERP) and one sample adventure of about 15 pages, including writeups for NPCs and three sample PCs. Some of the magic item and monster pages (about 5 in total) are taken by specific rules for creating them, which would be moved into the main rule section.

 

The remainder comes to roughly 60,000 words, or 50 pages at CC density. We've got an additional 30 to play with, giving a total of about 96,000 words. FH1 was not really a lot of material to play with, but it was a very good place to start. My group brought in material from other HERO System books, and did a couple of wholesale conversions. Given the large amount of supplemental material available, I'd say an FHC (especially with a companion volume) could definitely be viable.

 

 

I think that a potential problem could be that the target audience for this book overlaps with the target audience for CC, and people who have bought CC already have all the rules they'd need.  I don't know of a solution other than to slice off the rules portion of FHC and package the remainder (as a PDF, maybe) as "Fantasy Hero Incomplete".  Edit:  Or, optionally, cross-package the PDF as optional SKUs.  (CC with FHC in PDF, FHC with CC in PDF.)  

[Hugh Neilson]

I don't think there is a good solution to the "reprint the rules" conundrum.  Maybe we have to accept that the price of a game "playable out of the box" is reprinting the rules in each such game.  Offering the non-rules parts as a .pdf works fine for someone looking for just that part, but it's not an "on the store shelf" product. 

 

How many d20 games don't include a considerable portion of repeat rules text?  Is there a lot of resistance to that, or do we just hear "the rules are reminiscent of X" or "if you are already familiar with Game X, then learning this game will be pretty easy",  If the goal is a product the buyer can take home, read and start playing immediately, then each game needs to have the rules.  That's not to say we can't tweak some things to be a better fit with the genre and make the rules look a bit different in the process (rename some skills and powers, for example, and even emphasize different rules as "core" and "optional"), but a "complete game" needs to be, well, a complete game.