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Looking For Input On Potential New Fantasy Product


Jason S.Walters

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Re: Looking For Input On Potential New Fantasy Product

 

Okay, besides talking to my own group, I got a chance to talk to the owner of my Friendly Local Game Store (Saltire Games, if you're in Indianapolis, and if you're in Indianapolis and play Hero please contact me!)

 

He is in complete disagreement with me about this not being the right time. He pointed out that the next edition of D&D is still a whiles off and said that there is a definite market for fantasy "alternatives" right now. Delaying might mean going head to head with the D&D juggernaut. He made a convincing case and it could well be that a new Hero Games fantasy product and Narosia could enhance interest in one another.

 

He is in complete agreement that fantasy gamers are not going to buy Champions Complete and if we want people who are not already Hero gamers to buy this, it needs to be one book that allows you to start play.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

They're not going to buy a palindromedary either

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Re: Looking For Input On Potential New Fantasy Product

 

More examples of things that could be left out to save page count and simplify the game:

 

Martial Arts. Now that Trip is a standard manuever, there is literally nothing Martial Arts do that can't be done without them (if more expensively.)

 

Which isn't to say there can't be martial artists, who have multiple Combat Skill Levels and interesting talents.

 

Talent: Grappler. This character has +10 STR when Grabbing or escaping a Grab. Does not enhance damage. Character could be a monk trained in martial arts, a classical wrestler, or just an experienced barroom brawler. Both hands must be free.

 

The build (doesn't have to be in the book)

Grappler: (Total: 15 Active Cost, 5 Real Cost) +10 STR, Reduced Endurance (0 END; +1/2) (15 Active Points); Limited Power Only to Grab and hold or to escape from Grabs (-1 1/2), Required Hands Two-Handed (-1/2) (Real Cost: 5)

 

 

Lucius Alexander

 

The palindromedary thinks that makes the point and if I want to make more talents I should stick them elsewhere.

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Re: Looking For Input On Potential New Fantasy Product

 

Nope. They all have multiple books' date=' because they all have the rules in 'em. and a cornucopia of spells. Spells take up a LOT of space. The original book that Old Man linked too might have had it all, but even in the box I remember multiple texts. My memory may be faulty, however.[/quote']

 

Both Pathfinder and BECMI edition D&D are rules complete, but both did need a Monster Manual.

 

BECMI was also originally published in 5 different box editions, the Compendium was only something that was released just before the game stopped being published.

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Re: Looking For Input On Potential New Fantasy Product

 

I personally 100% in favor of the powered by hero idea. You could use material from existing books to make it targeting. EGYPTIANS or HELENS can capture an audience immediately and have the advantage of not being completely saturated in the market already.

Have the spells the use the talent format. What they and cost.

I forgot who said it at first but people should be able to pull the book of the shelf and play same day. As a note hero sidekick and hero system basic are complete games in their own and show that dropping some rules or skills that are not needed does not hurt.

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Re: Looking For Input On Potential New Fantasy Product

 

I like these ideas *a lot*. Again, it's spot on. This is one reason why I say I don't like arbitrary page counts and other bean counting before a product is designed.

 

A "small town and surrounding area" will almost certainly require a map. That mean new illustrations. Surely that can be worked into the budget? BTW, I love the cover on Champions Complete. Please don't change the high quality cover!

 

There's a real world reason why Jason is pushing his page count number. When printing a book there are certain page counts that you just have to print so things can be bound properly. (I think that Pagecounts have to be in multiple of 16 or so, I think it depends on the binding being used) It's because a book is actually a series of minibooks that are all glued together in the cardstock binding.

 

I am sure that there are also Printer's cost breakpoints based on Page count as well. So the 240 something page count that Jason mentioned might be really inexpensive and perhaps quicker to get printed, than a book with a longer page count.

 

"Small Town and Surrounding Area" might be something that already exists in one of the 5e books. It may just take some kind of detailing. Perhaps someone would be willing to do a freebie adventure/ campaign town similar to the Old School D&D module "The Village of Hommlet"(which also was reprinted in the "Temple of Elemental Evil" module. The module had a nice town and detailed who lived where. There was an adventure that started in the town and ended in the small ruined fort just outside of town.

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Re: Looking For Input On Potential New Fantasy Product

 

There's a real world reason why Jason is pushing his page count number. When printing a book there are certain page counts that you just have to print so things can be bound properly. (I think that Pagecounts have to be in multiple of 16 or so, I think it depends on the binding being used) It's because a book is actually a series of minibooks that are all glued together in the cardstock binding.

 

I am sure that there are also Printer's cost breakpoints based on Page count as well. So the 240 something page count that Jason mentioned might be really inexpensive and perhaps quicker to get printed, than a book with a longer page count.

 

"Small Town and Surrounding Area" might be something that already exists in one of the 5e books. It may just take some kind of detailing. Perhaps someone would be willing to do a freebie adventure/ campaign town similar to the Old School D&D module "The Village of Hommlet"(which also was reprinted in the "Temple of Elemental Evil" module. The module had a nice town and detailed who lived where. There was an adventure that started in the town and ended in the small ruined fort just outside of town.

 

Or we could reuse The Affairs of Wizards from 1st edition Fantasy Hero - characters may need to be redone but the maps and illustrations would be usable.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

The Affairs of Palindromedaries

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Re: Looking For Input On Potential New Fantasy Product

 

This brings up a question I have always had. Does hero even own the rights to old products?

 

If so some old stuff could be used as a library of resources.

 

Yes, in most cases we do. And if we decide to include a "micro-setting," we might decide to mine some pre-5th Edition stuff for inspiration.

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Re: Looking For Input On Potential New Fantasy Product

 

I don't want to get excited about this until the investors say "Yea."

 

Add to me to the "Dungeon Hero" (as Tasha has been calling it) crowd. Everything wrapped up in one book. I'm getting Champions Complete soon (now that the holidays are over) but I would so buy into a similar Fantasy Hero product. Truth is, I'm only going for the PDF of CC. I'd love to have an actual dead tree copy of said, similar FH product.

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Re: Looking For Input On Potential New Fantasy Product

 

Yes' date=' in most cases we do. And if we decide to include a "micro-setting," we might decide to mine some pre-5th Edition stuff for inspiration.[/quote']

You know I do not think they would make enough money to be worth your time but if you ever sell a bulk package of that stuff I would pay for those PDFs.

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Re: Looking For Input On Potential New Fantasy Product

 

If you have the rights to Bob Pennignton's old 5E adventure, The Tomb of Rakoss the Undying, that used to be offered for free on the Hero website, that would make a cool little package to update for 6E. Good introductory "dungeon crawl" adventure, nice color map, Hero Designer files for a few creatures.

 

The Internet Archive of the old website still has the adventure, too: http://web.archive.org/web/20061211085440/http://www.herogames.com/FreeStuff/mods.htm

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Re: Looking For Input On Potential New Fantasy Product

 

There's a real world reason why Jason is pushing his page count number. When printing a book there are certain page counts that you just have to print so things can be bound properly. (I think that Pagecounts have to be in multiple of 16 or so, I think it depends on the binding being used) It's because a book is actually a series of minibooks that are all glued together in the cardstock binding.

 

I am sure that there are also Printer's cost breakpoints based on Page count as well. So the 240 something page count that Jason mentioned might be really inexpensive and perhaps quicker to get printed, than a book with a longer page count.

 

"Small Town and Surrounding Area" might be something that already exists in one of the 5e books. It may just take some kind of detailing. Perhaps someone would be willing to do a freebie adventure/ campaign town similar to the Old School D&D module "The Village of Hommlet"(which also was reprinted in the "Temple of Elemental Evil" module. The module had a nice town and detailed who lived where. There was an adventure that started in the town and ended in the small ruined fort just outside of town.

 

Or we could reuse The Affairs of Wizards from 1st edition Fantasy Hero - characters may need to be redone but the maps and illustrations would be usable.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

The Affairs of Palindromedaries

 

Don't forget the stuff in the second edition of FH. There's several short scenarios, and even a mix and match list for ideas. Total pages (in the 4e Hero style) was 16. A short Bestiary took up about 6 pages of compressed stats, with the full writeups put into the Fantasy Hero Companion. The Western Shores Campaign covered a lot of stuff in 21 pages. Another 16 pages were devoted to sample characters. The bulk of the Sourcebook section were spell colleges, but those could be pruned down to a "core" spell list (like in Tuala Morn, for example), with the full writeups either in the Bits and Mortar PDF, or in a "companion" work.

 

JoeG

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Re: Looking For Input On Potential New Fantasy Product

 

"Small Town and Surrounding Area" might be something that already exists in one of the 5e books. It may just take some kind of detailing. Perhaps someone would be willing to do a freebie adventure/ campaign town similar to the Old School D&D module "The Village of Hommlet"(which also was reprinted in the "Temple of Elemental Evil" module. The module had a nice town and detailed who lived where. There was an adventure that started in the town and ended in the small ruined fort just outside of town.

 

Just to keep beating that dead horse...

 

When I say included game world this is all I'm really saying. A place with starting scenario or two that can easily be expanded for use as a base of operations for future scenarios and generic enough to drop right into the game world of your choice whether that is Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk or Glorantha.

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Re: Looking For Input On Potential New Fantasy Product

 

Everybody:

 

First of all I want to thank all of you for contributing to this thread. It's been extremely enlightening (in fact, I've been taking notes). You will be gratified to know that the investors have been reading your comments and have commented favorably to me on several of them.

 

As many of you have already guessed, we are leaning in the direction of an all-inclusive project like Champions Complete. To be honest, it wouldn't really be a product aimed at those of you who have been playing the game for decades. Rather, like CC the purpose of the project would be to a) encourage new people to try out the system who have never played it before, B) create an accessible book that could be used by new or inexperienced players in a gaming group, c) develop something the brick-and-mortar retailers would like to put on their shelves, and d) create something that will sell steadily over the long-term.

 

So here's the next step: give me three reasons why playing Fantasy Hero is superior to playing D&D, Pathfinder, and their ilk. Please try to be brief and concise. I will be compiling together all of your answers and taking them into account when and if this project gets the green light.

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Re: Looking For Input On Potential New Fantasy Product

 

If I'm going to play D&D or any of its derivatives, I have to start with their assumptions. If I'm a DM, when I create a world I either have to take D&D's assumptions into account or I have to throw them out and start over, and they don't give me the tools to come up with alternatives.

 

In Fantasy Hero, I can build a world or a character with my own assumptions in mind. I have the tools to decide. As a GM, in an afternoon I can have a magic system and some basic race and profession templates worked out. If I'm a player I can create a character according to my vision, and the only gatekeeper is the GM.

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Re: Looking For Input On Potential New Fantasy Product

 

give me three reasons why playing Fantasy Hero is superior to playing D&D' date=' Pathfinder, and their ilk. Please try to be brief and concise. I will be compiling together all of your answers and taking them into account when and if this project gets the green light.[/quote']

 

 

  1. Flexibility
  2. Customization
  3. Modularity

 

In a way, they are all the same thing -- the Fantasy Hero System lets you build exactly what you want, the way you want it, instead of making do with the closest thing you can find on a list of things that someone else built.

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Re: Looking For Input On Potential New Fantasy Product

 

So here's the next step: give me three reasons why playing Fantasy Hero is superior to playing D&D' date=' Pathfinder, and their ilk. Please try to be brief and concise. I will be compiling together all of your answers and taking them into account when and if this project gets the green light.[/quote']

  1. Hero's combat risk is manageable within a certain scale. In other words, there is very little "level" inflation when it comes to stats. A character I build today might have more goodies, and therefore more power, in a year but the newly built character would still stand a very reasonable chance of competing. Try taking a 1st level fighter against a 10th level one in D&D or its related games. This has the secondary benefit of making any pre-written adventure easily tailored. You could change the PD/ED, DC, CV or whatnot of the creatures within to fall within the range of your game. This is my #1 note for that reason.
  2. I can custom build opponents, spells, items, or species abilities to fit within that scale. It's true that you can build abilities for other systems, but Hero is explicitly designed to do that.
  3. I can prefab certain packages to make selection as easy as the Race+Class selection process in D&D. In fact, I can make mine more modular and add things like cultural identity packages into the mix. Or I can give the players a certain number of points and the campaign guidelines (Max stats, skills, CV, DC, etc) and let them at it. This makes the whole character creation process more robust and flexible.

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Re: Looking For Input On Potential New Fantasy Product

 

So here's the next step: give me three reasons why playing Fantasy Hero is superior to playing D&D' date=' Pathfinder, and their ilk.[/quote']

 

 

  1. I can design a setting to work the way I want it to, or a character that doesn't fit into a standard archetype.
  2. If a published (HERO) setting is close to what I want, I can tweak it.
  3. If I see something cool in another system, I can adapt it without worrying too much about game balance.

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Re: Looking For Input On Potential New Fantasy Product

 

Everybody:

Give me three reasons why playing Fantasy Hero is superior to playing D&D, Pathfinder, and their ilk. Please try to be brief and concise. I will be compiling together all of your answers and taking them into account when and if this project gets the green light.

 

For GM's:

 

*Full Creative Control: you can shape the mechanics to fit your imagination / creative vision.

*Scalability Across Power Levels: toggling on or off a few basic settings and adjusting the point level allows for robust gaming from high power to low and everything in between.

*One System To Rule Them All: if you run games in multiple genres, it's handy to not have to master multiple game systems to do it.

 

 

For players:

 

*Classless Characters: unless the GM chooses to impose some restrictions, you don't have to attempt to fit your concept to predefined narrow concepts.

*No Levels, No Grind: you don't have to go to the next kingdom or dungeon over to remain challenged when you "level up". Gradual vs. stair-stepped progression.

*All Resolutions Use 3d6 Roll Under, Outcomes Use xd6 Roll High: What do I roll for that again? 3d6, same as everything else. How much damage / effect do I do? Roll xd6. No weird dice sub-systems to remember*. YAHTZEE!

 

 

 

 

*Glossing over counting Body, of course

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Re: Looking For Input On Potential New Fantasy Product

 

The problem with the customisable nature of the Hero system is that is the flip side of the volume/labour intensive criticisms that the preferred "Dungeon Hero" concept is addressing. Dungeon Hero is going to be compact enough to include a mini-setting or whatever because it leaves this stuff out.

But the problem is not insoluble.

 

First, some anecdotal comments: a long time ago, I bought Justice Inc, and Fantasy Hero in no small part because it added rules to the system.

 

The dirty little secret here is that I used to be a munchkin. I absolutely loved the "Psionics" appendix of the AD&D Players Handbook and carted my copy of Gamma World to gaming sessions in hopes of being able to incorporate material from it into the campaign. I didn't care that it would be a bit of a mishmash. I wasn't that sophisticated a consumer yet. Sixteen-year-olds just aren't. Expedition to the Barrier Peaks suggests that I wasn't alone in that.

 

Now, the overall reception of this material suggests that these particular products weren't always the way to go. Splatbooks have flourished, catering to the munchkin in all of us, especially since the brilliant invention of prestige classes and class/feat optimisation progressions, but they have hewn closer to the overarching concept of the setting. Radically new material has flourished best in alternate settings such as Dark Sun and Planescape, and these have been criticised for diluting the AD&D core market. It is really this dilution concern that has, in my view, kept the AD&D mental universe so close to its proprietary origins. Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms work together because supplementary products work together. There are always class/races, a Vancian magic system, clerics who can't use edged weapons.

 

And yet despite its suffocating feel, D&D has kept a powerful grip on the popular imagination. Why? Well, consider the Drow. They were introduced, purely serendipitously, as enemies in the "Descent into the Deeps" setting and caught the imagination of the RPG audience for reasons that aren't easy to replicate, but are presumably not completely opaque to analysis.

 

the progression in this case is clearly enough. The Drow were glamourous, but they were also rule-breaking as player races. That might have been it for them. After all, ogre magi would have been gamebreaking had they been allowed as PCs in the mid-80s, IIRC, but of course there was no demand for them as PCs, and TSR did not publish material to allow them to be played as PCs. For the Drow, on the other hand, there was such a demand, and TSR complied by breaking the game. You want Drow? Here's Unearthed Arcana, complete with playable Drow. And paladins and cavaliers and duerro, now that we're into gamebreaking.

 

And no-one cared about balance issues. They cared about the the cool characters. We know what happened from there: Drzzt, paperback sales, and the whole feat progression table thing to bring the game system back into line. And every one of those innovations led to more sales.

 

If there is a "problem" with Hero, it is that it doesn't work in this way, and hasn't since the Big Blue Book. It's rules first, setting next.

 

That's how it used to be. Now it isn't. Now it is setting and entangled rule set first. Oh, it doesn't have to be that way. After all, it has multiple rules-heavy tomes, available as PDFs at least, from which you can reverse engineer everything in the proposed FHC. There, a munchkin will find everything needed to design a Drzzt-like super character who could easily outshine a plain vanilla character build. So why not embrace that?

 

I am arguing for munchkinism and unbalanced builds as a selling point. It is deeply cynical, but these things are proven selling points, and more-or-less baked into the concept of the product. You are going to be able to build more powerful and more flexible characters out of the various 6e PDFs and APHB, possibly even out of Champions Complete. That's just the way it is.

 

So my challenge is this: imagine that you have five pages at the back of Fantasy Hero Complete, similar to the old Psionics Appendix. You're aiming to strike Drzzt/Illithid/Drow-like gold. You are going to present an optional player race/design concept/setting/template that makes some people say, "I want to play that," and other people say, "I want to match that." It's not unprecedented. Steve Long's Migdalor and Ulronai warrior mages are moves in that direction, and there's not much that can beat the power of the oblique references to the Thane in Terran Empire in the whole 5e publishing catalogue, to my mind.

 

My suggestion, just to get the ball rolling, is a "modern day superteam," not necessarily from an overt four-colours setting, brought back in time by the mysterious rulers of a hidden city at the edge of the mini-setting. Call it something cool, like "The City of Silence," and make it Arcadia, from the CU setting, if the players want to use a CU-linked setting.

 

Suggested members:

 

-A qi-using martial artist, selling HSMA;

-a gun (or crossbow) saint, selling Dark Champions;

-A speedster, perhaps "realistically" the gun-saint, using the Speed Zone rules from Ultimate Speedster (hey, we're going full munchkin here);

-An Empyrean-like writeup, for setting rather than rules-based tie-ins;

-A Captain Comet-type mentalist, probably the best straight up introduction to the super hero concept. In my experience, nothing gets the teenagers like the thought of being "born a hundred thousand years ahead of their time," or whatever the line is, and science fiction has a host of powerful mentalist, superherolike characters who are not deemed to break genre because, you know, it's plausible that we'll evolve into supergeniuses who can levitate, turn invisible and brain blast people with their minds, and the teenagers eat this stuff up.

-A super-mage who uses a radically more powerful/flexible magic system than the one incorporated in FHC.

-A cat person. Because, you know.

-Wolverine.

 

Naturally, some, perhaps most GMs are going to be appalled. So what? The Psionics Appendix didn't hurt sales of the old PHB. It was clearly optional. In the same way that the Drow were.

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Re: Looking For Input On Potential New Fantasy Product

 

So here's the next step: give me three reasons why playing Fantasy Hero is superior to playing D&D' date=' Pathfinder, and their ilk. Please try to be brief and concise. I will be compiling together all of your answers and taking them into account when and if this project gets the green light.[/b']

 

  • I can create a character just the way I want that character to be. I don't have to rely on random dice rolls to determine if I have a character that I want to play. If I want a character who is as complex as Vlad Taltos (see Stephen Brust's books) he can be created using Hero - without any trouble. Try creating him in D&D or Pathfinder?! Ick.
  • Fantasy Hero Game System lets me create a campaign world that simulates any fantasy setting I can imagine. If I want to simulate a world from any fantasy novel or series it is possible without bending the rules.
  • Non-combat skills are just as important as combat skills (maybe more important) and this encourages role playing.

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Re: Looking For Input On Potential New Fantasy Product

 

1 For or group the selling point is classless system. Fiction is full of characters who are warriors and wizards or something of both.

2 Our group was disenchanted by dungeons and dragons in particular by the inability in earlier editions by the inability to simulate even is own fiction. In hero I can make it simulate any setting.

3 Maneuvers, in hero making a decision in combat matters and everyone is allowed to have those options.

 

THE BAD: Hero combat takes longer than any other game i play and that has been the biggest detractor when introducing new players. The optional rules we used for supporting up pay helped but that is not the nature of the system.

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Re: Looking For Input On Potential New Fantasy Product

 

So here's the next step: give me three reasons why playing Fantasy Hero is superior to playing D&D' date=' Pathfinder, and their ilk. Please try to be brief and concise. I will be compiling together all of your answers and taking them into account when and if this project gets the green light.[/quote']

 

 

I'm going to go beyond the parameters you set here for a moment and mention something else. I think Hero Games has gotten a bit too insular and needs to reach beyond its immediate fans here on these boards and the same core group of industry insiders.

 

I'd really like to see you personally, and maybe a few of the investors too, head out to some game stores and spend some time on a 'listening tour' to see what other ideas there are about Hero that might truly the target this new product at gamers who haven't tried Hero yet. There's a great resource I'm sure at the Mages Realm in Sacramento, and just beyond that in the Bay Area. Trying to truly understand what new people are interested in for a DnD replacement system I think is key.

 

I'm seeing a lot of nostalgia on this thread, and I wonder if that's truly the best for a new product. A DnD clone Western Shores style setting might not be the best way to introduce new players who are looking for a DnD alternative. On that RPG.net thread I linked to above, there was a lot of interest in a sword-and-sorcery style, freer form game, different than DnD. I think verifying the interest in that or some other setting would be a big step into getting new people to give Hero a look.

 

 

* * *

 

OK, soap box mode deactivated. What I like about Hero is:

 

1. Flexibility

 

2. Universality

 

For example, Tuala Morn and Kazei 5 are two totally different concepts, yet both use the Hero System very effectively, and I am super pleased to have them in my library. Unlike some other folks, I don't care for world build much. It's a lot of work! What I like is picking up a game book and having that stuff done for me. Hero can delivery a solid, new experience without having to learn a completely new system. Although most game books do "tweak" the system in novel ways, that's OK because it's not a complete re-write, so the learning is reduced.

 

OK, good luck to you guys.

 

 

P.S. Please don't forget about using Kickstarter to inject some additional funds if needed!

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