7th Edition thoughts

[zslane]

Limited resources is a major problem, I totally get that. However, Hero Games is no stranger to Kickstarter.

 

I wonder if it wouldn't be possible to put together a successful KS campaign that aims to publish an entirely new line of, say, space opera products built around a detailed setting and a new, streamlined approach to the core rules presentation. The KS campaign would aim to deliver an entire year's worth of supplemental material, maybe a book every other month. But the key component, in my view, is the new presentation of the core rules, and it would be the new presentation, rather than rules changes, that would define the so-called "7th edition".

 

If a KS campaign can't garner enough support, then maybe there just isn't a large enough potential customer base out there for a playable-out-of-the-box style of product suitable for newcomers. It might put to rest the question of whether or not it is even worth trying to appeal to that demographic after all.

[Christopher R Taylor]

My writing schedule is pretty crammed up and full but maybe its worth looking at next year working up a proposal and some examples for the Hero guys to consider for a kickstarter project.  A fresh, simple, fun and easily approachable presentation of Hero rules like Champions for Dummies (but not using that copyrighted title and layout) could be pretty effective in bringing in new players.  I know that I'll definitely be using that approach and stripped down, super simple character sheets for any new players I try to teach the system.

[Spence]

One point. I am not advocating a completely new book. Just adding two chapters to the existing book and a reorganizing of chapter order.

 

CC is very well written as is. It just needs an easy entry point.

[ghost-angel]

The major differences between Out Of The Box And Play games like D&D, Edge Of The Empire, and all that is that the baseline assumptions of How The Game Universe Works are also built into Character Creation. This is especially true of Class & Level Based systems like D&D and Pathfinder - you aren't actually making a character's abilities, you're choosing from a list. Even the tree-based system of the new Star Wars (which is just Class Based, thankfully) has a default assumption of power levels, underlying assumptions and such.

 

Hero has none of that - and very much on purpose. You could easily create Setting Books that remove all the choices and pre-determine the underlying assumptions (in Hero they would be Point Totals, CV Levels, Skill/AP/DC Caps, etc...) and then allow a more cookie cutter Choose From The List with a section of How To Build More attached at the back end of Character Creation; but that is creating a Setting Specific thing.

 

If you do that with even Fantasy Hero Complete you still undermine the basic assumption of Hero: It's a Toolkit to Create Your Own World, ground up. And while both Champions and Fantasy Complete will have examples with some basic assumptions put in place and assumed; the overall focus of the book is not "Read & Play" but "Build & Play".

 

That's why I'm a Hero Gamer. That's the attraction to the rules.

[Christopher R Taylor]

The way people are describing this "out of the box" thing, D&D fails at as well.  You have to buy monster and adventure books for D&D, you can't just pick up a Player's Handbook and go to town.  That's the same thing for Fantasy Hero: buy adventures and monsters.  The only real difference is that D&D is focusing on looking pretty, has a huge historical player base that can help people learn, and has a ton of support material.  With more support material, Hero would be in the same place, at least as people are defining "out of the box" here.

 

As for a new book, I think a fun, easy and cheap downloadable pdf to help new players get into the game is a great idea for reaching people.  It would be a tool for GMs to offer players and help introduce them to role playing, Champions, and Hero in general.

[CaptnStrawberry]

I believe Wizards of the Coast offers free .pdfs on their site with basic versions of the core rules and monster lists.  You obviously get more options and art with the hardbacks, but between the freebies and the starter box they are providing multiple points of entry.

[ghost-angel]

Out Of The Box means that when you read the Character Creation chapter you come out the other end with a fully playable Character that already fits the assumed Campaign Default. You can not do that with Hero. There are already a number of built in decisions that must be made (least of which being: How many points do we get?) before you can even start to create a character.

[zslane]

It seems to me that the DIY camp wants only DIY books and, because they see no value in detailed settings where a foundational base of starting material is built for you (with subsequent material if you want it), they don't think Hero Games should bother with it either. If Hero Games is itself in agreement with this point of view, then the non-DIY market that has historically avoided the Hero System will likely continue to avoid the system.

 

The burden, then, of providing a distinctly non-DIY-oriented product line may fall on the shoulders of a passionate third party who licenses the Hero System. I'm not sure there is anyone within the existing ranks of qualified Hero experts who want to undertake such a project though. And so we'll probably never see anything more accessible and "playable out-of-the-box" for this system than the X Complete books.

[ghost-angel]

I think it would behoove any Setting Books to include a Setting Specific Chapter on Character Creation; as long as the Setting is actually doing itself a favor and creating expectations and standards.

[Christopher R Taylor]

Out Of The Box means that when you read the Character Creation chapter you come out the other end with a fully playable Character that already fits the assumed Campaign Default. You can not do that with Hero.

 

 

You do with any of the source books, but there's more freedom and personalization than some games.  D&D you check off boxes, Hero you make your own.

[Beast]

zlane

what the various age books?(Tuala Mourn,Valadorian ,Atlantean

they may be 5th ed but all are still very usable books
those are setting books

plus you have grimoire, gear and beastiary books to fill out plenty of stuff and in 6th ed/CC
Hero is not putting out a 10th what they use to do

So anything they put out has to be a sure thing or 3rd party(somebody else taking a risk)

[Christopher R Taylor]

Give me time, I'm only one man

[NuSoardGraphite]

There are RPGs that make great starter systems and RPGs that are more for the advanced/experiened player. HERO has almost always existed in the latter category. 1st-3rd editions were easier to get into, but were still vastly more complex than the starter RPGs of yesteryear (1st ed AD&D, star frontiers, palladium rpg etc) and i personally dont see much of a problem with this.

 

Table top RPGs has always been a trend-heavy industry. while there are standards like D&D and later White Wolf games, the industry as a whole tends to shift along trend lines. Hero's day will come when a trend toward generic/universal systems comes to the fore. or Champions could see a resurgance if superhero roleplaying becomes popular again.

 

For anyone new to RPGs in general, i always recommend they begin with D&D because of its ease of entry. it holds the players hands for quite some time and this helps players get their feet underneath them. but the imaginative player will quickly outgrow D&D (not everyone does and thats ok) and that's when i will steer people toward more complex systems, depending on what they want and the genres they enjoy.

 

The rpg industry has always been this way and while the overall numbers are down due to the prevalence of electronic media, i dont see why this dynamic needs to change. hero has always been kind of niche. i dont ever really see that changing.

[Chris Goodwin]

The major differences between Out Of The Box And Play games like D&D, Edge Of The Empire, and all that is that the baseline assumptions of How The Game Universe Works are also built into Character Creation. This is especially true of Class & Level Based systems like D&D and Pathfinder - you aren't actually making a character's abilities, you're choosing from a list. Even the tree-based system of the new Star Wars (which is just Class Based, thankfully) has a default assumption of power levels, underlying assumptions and such.

 

Hero has none of that - and very much on purpose. You could easily create Setting Books that remove all the choices and pre-determine the underlying assumptions (in Hero they would be Point Totals, CV Levels, Skill/AP/DC Caps, etc...) and then allow a more cookie cutter Choose From The List with a section of How To Build More attached at the back end of Character Creation; but that is creating a Setting Specific thing.

 

If you do that with even Fantasy Hero Complete you still undermine the basic assumption of Hero: It's a Toolkit to Create Your Own World, ground up. And while both Champions and Fantasy Complete will have examples with some basic assumptions put in place and assumed; the overall focus of the book is not "Read & Play" but "Build & Play".

 

That's why I'm a Hero Gamer. That's the attraction to the rules.

 

And how is this working out for Hero Games the company, or for the Hero Games community? 

 

Providing Read & Play in no way undermines or detracts from the amount of Build & Play that's out there.  We gotta get more people playing, and Build & Play is a barrier to entry.  We know this.  Why are we still pushing it? 

 

Hero Kids is an idea I've had for a long time, and I'm glad someone picked it up and ran with it.  I've wanted to see this idea done in HERO System, but I'm glad someone is doing it at all. 

 

Bottom line: if we want more people playing, we -- the community, the company, all of us -- need to make it easier. 

[zslane]

The various 5th edition Age books were an attempt to provide fantasy settings for the Hero System. However, in my estimation they were not successful. I measure success by the number of subsequent supplements that come out in support of a setting. Any outside observer would think that either the Valdorian Age was a marketplace failure, or that Hero Games actually thought one book somehow constituted a product line. Regardless of which is the case, the end result was pretty anemic.

 

From my point of view, a setting should be the foundation for an entire product line, ala Dragonlance, not simply a single book after which buyers are expected to do all the world building to fill in the vast content gaps left in the wake of the first (and in Hero Games' case, only) book. And it's not as if Hero Games doesn't (or didn't) know how to do this. I have an entire bookshelf filled with books that provide content for the default Champions universe during the 4th edition era.

 

I have to believe that both fantasy and science fiction (or more likely, space opera) are popular enough genres that building entire product lines around rich, detailed, unique settings would be quite successful if done well. And if presented in a new, easier-to-use Read & Play style, we might find a whole lot of new blood joining our ranks who would never have bothered with the Hero System before.

 

Note that I do not advocate reducing the mechanics of the game or simplifying them per se; only simplifying the way in which powers are presented, and offering lots of pre-built stuff custom-made for each setting. Most players only need to know how Mind Control works mechanically, and that each die of Dalgarion Mind Control costs 8 character points. They don't need to know why it costs 8pts/die, mostly because nobody is expected to modify the definition of Dalgarion Mind Control...and they shouldn't have to or even want to...that's the value of a well-conceived and well-written setting after all.

[Christopher R Taylor]

D&D didn't bother with a comprehensive world setting and maps.  They just gave people monsters, spells, characters, and adventures.  Gms built all the other stuff up.  I'm not saying the world settings and such are not useful or that people reject them, just that its not the path needed to reach players.

[schir1964]

This discussion has taken an interesting turn.

 

Based on what's already been said I'll offer my view on this.

 

Those that know me on these boards know that I've been huge advocate of core rules being as complete and as flexible as possible with the idea of pushing the separation of SFX from mechanics as far as the system can feasibly handle it. Even to the point of separating the Physical/Energy distinctions from the mechanics (whether that is a good thing or not is not the point here). The goal of pushing things this direction was to have a set of core rules that could build any Story in any Genre while retaining a balance of relative effectivness in game (how they manage to do that so well with the existing rules so far is still a mystery to me).

 

Anyway, that goal I think has been met or is very close to having achieved that goal. 

 

So I think those rules could, and probably should, be used to create three Universe settings: super heroes, fantasy, and science fiction/space opera.

 

By using these rules to create settings of each type (much as described by others in presentation) could be the gateway needed to grow the numbers who choose to play a Hero game and down the road maybe GM a Hero game. A number of these GMs will want to customize the setting or build their own specific setting which of course would require the core rules to tweak things as needed.

 

I agree that building these settings would entail some specific Universe definitions of how things should be built for that specific setting. A set of guidelines for any GM or Writer who wants to expand, not alter, a specific settings universe. Perhaps these settings will not appeal to many existing GMs who love building their own specific settings, but I think there might be as many or even more who would buy these settings to augment and inspire their own campaigns if not use them outright.

 

Just An Opinion

 

- Christopher Mullins

[schir1964]

How to bring specific Settings books from concept to a tangible reality?

 

Well, one person could do it (Christopher Taylor), but with just one person the amount of time to produce what is needed may be too long of a wait.

 

Another avenue is to have a group of close knit individuals work on it as personal project. Which lends to idea that each setting should have an agreed upon guidelines which govern how new material is generated for the specific setting. However, committees tend to bog down over minutia and suffer from attrition. Or changes to the guidelines are made in the middle of the process creating inconsitencies in the generated materials.

 

A kickstarter, which I don't have detail knowledge of how it works, might alleviate some of the issues mentioned above, but I wouldn't know.

 

Whether these settings are offically santioned by the Herogames company, unoffical books that can be purchased through Herogames, or free PDFs offered by the community (how that would work I'm not sure) will have an impact on the quality and amount of material produced.

 

- Christopher Mullins

[NuSoardGraphite]

I agree that Hero Games has dropped the ball when it comes to their settings (except for champions of course). when you look at successful and popular rpg franchises like d&d, exalted, rifts etc, one thing is clear...these company continually produce supplemental material for both their game systems and their campaign settings. white wolf and palladium specifically are very prolific in producing material that greatly expands upon their setting material and usually with a ton of game information included (new spells, weapons, npcs, monsters etc) and this is something that HERO is terrible about doing.

 

Some of the supplemental material produced for the Turakian Age setting made the attempt to rectify this shortcoming, but again, as usual for Hero, they didnt go far enough. there were even fewer supplements for Terran Empire, which held a lot of potential that ended up being mostly wasted.

 

I'm not one for adventure scenarios. i would much rather see a setting book that gives great detail on an area of the setting that was only briefly touched upon in the main book. and the setting book to be presented in such a way that potential adventure scenarios absolutely leap out at tbhe GM and players reading the books. both white wolf games and palladium games excel at this form of presentation. hero authors really need to learn to take a few pointers from products like these and understand how ton present a setting to the audience in such a way that you keep them coming back for more. i have yet to read a hero based setting book that gave me that feeling. i get it in spades when i read Exalted or Rifts or Battlelords of the 23rd Century.

[Christopher R Taylor]

My theory behind building up source material for Fantasy Hero at least is to build up the infrastructure - spells, treasures, monsters, etc - that allow a GM to run games in a setting more than the descriptive material.  Jolrhos is a campaign world I've been running games in since the late 80s and I'm putting stuff out set in that world, but its never going to have a huge worldbook filled with what NPC lives in what building and where all the mail riders run.  That stuff is interesting to a worldbuilder, but utterly irrelevant to players and GMs.  What you want along those lines you can just wing or make up on the fly.

What gamers need is hard functional material that they can build around.  A skeleton, if you will, that their campaign over time fleshes out.  Where exactly the dungeon is placed doesn't matter nearly as much as what's in it.  Publishing beautiful maps and so on is nice enough, but a pretty low priority for me, because my intention is to give GMs and players the tools they need to start playing, to get the rubber on the road as it were.  The rest is something that a game can fill in as they go.

 

So adventures, sourcebooks, and basic sketches of the world are the focus.  I'll have a "Player's Handbook" of my world eventually with the house rules, templates, etc in it, but its going to be after I get the rest out, because for me as a GM looking for stuff to buy and play, its a lower priority.

[zslane]

A setting book needs to describe all the important elements that make the game world different from the real world. If a fantasy setting isn't very different from the historical Middle Ages or Tolkien's Middle Earth or TSR's Forgotten Realms, then why are we buying books about it? The races, cultures, politics, technology, etc. should need to be explained and detailed to make a product line worth doing in the first place.

 

That doesn't mean wasting paragraphs on who delivers the mail in some irrelevent little village. But it does mean devoting a chapter to the Imperial family, its major players, how they came to power, how they maintain their power, and who is seeking to dethrone them. A chapter describing how magic works (because presumably it is not simply Yet Another Bland Spell Point system), how magic affects the different cultures of the game world. Chapters describing each major kingdom and their cultural norms, their attitudes towards other races, other kingdoms, other magical traditions. Their deities and religious practices. Their major industries, such as they are. Who controls the sea lanes and what is the degree of piracy that threatens maritime life? Do dragons control the air? What are the major beasties and what are typical encounters in different regions of the game world? Are there powerful magic relics to be unearthed? Where did they come from and how do they impact regional legends and folktales? Etc.

 

There is an awful lot that can, and should, constitute a fantasy setting. Just because any one GM doesn't need all of it at once doesn't mean it doesn't need to be written down. When you take on the role of game book writer, you can't think like a GM; you have to consider all the GMs out there and their different needs. The main setting book may only provide a "skeleton" of these topics, but it still has to provide all the bones. I wonder if expectations of what constitutes an RPG setting has been dragged perilously low somehow over the years...

[Beast]

Or expectations set too high
in all my yrs of gaming nobody has EVER run straight from the setting book(s)
there has always been stuff done on the fly or just their own spin

There is an awful lot that can, and should, constitute a fantasy setting. Just because any one GM doesn't need all of it at once doesn't mean it doesn't need to be written down. When you take on the role of game book writer, you can't think like a GM; you have to consider all the GMs out there and their different needs. The main setting book may only provide a "skeleton" of these topics, but it still has to provide all the bones. I wonder if expectations of what constitutes an RPG setting has been dragged perilously low somehow over the years...

[Christopher R Taylor]

That doesn't mean wasting paragraphs on who delivers the mail in some irrelevent little village. But it does mean devoting a chapter to the Imperial family, its major players, how they came to power, how they maintain their power, and who is seeking to dethrone them. A chapter describing how magic works (because presumably it is not simply Yet Another Bland Spell Point system), how magic affects the different cultures of the game world. Chapters describing each major kingdom and their cultural norms, their attitudes towards other races, other kingdoms, other magical traditions. Their deities and religious practices. Their major industries, such as they are. Who controls the sea lanes and what is the degree of piracy that threatens maritime life? Do dragons control the air? What are the major beasties and what are typical encounters in different regions of the game world? Are there powerful magic relics to be unearthed? Where did they come from and how do they impact regional legends and folktales? Etc.

 

 

I'm not opposed to most of that, but much of it is frankly irrelevant to the game, or at least 99% of games, and hence not going to sell.  I don't mind putting things out like the royal family and the sea lanes, what houses control what areas and what their manors are like etc, but in terms of release priority that's way down the list.  What needs to be put out is stuff that lets players fire up a game and go.  That means skeleton: monsters, spells, templates, races, adventures, that kind of thing.

 

Its not that the depth and worldbuilding background stuff doesn't matter, its that it is specialty material for particular kinds of games.  At least, that's how I see it: try to capture as many players and buyers' interest as possible, then when you have it you can release other stuff.

 

Look back (if you're old enough to remember) how D&D worked.  They put out all the very basics and then adventures.  World settings like Grayhawk weren't established until years later, and major world expansions are mostly just "here's how it works differently in this setting" rather than detailed maps and such.  Its cool to have a worldbook with what's in each part of each country and how they all work together but let's be honest: almost none of that makes any difference to players.  They want to get in there and get the adventuring done, and don't care if the Marbled Twitter is rare in this part of the country.

[zslane]

Silly wabbit, that stuff isn't for players. It is for GMs who don't want to imagine/write/build all that stuff themselves. At least the more involved chapters are. A good overview in the first chapter may be sufficient for players to know what kinds of characters are available, but the GM will need quite a bit more beyond that to get a campaign started.

 

And like I said, it doesn't need to be fleshed out in whole in the main book. But the skeleton of it needs to be there. You can't expect GMs and players to make sense of the Imperial Inquistor package deal if they have no clue what that is or how it fits into the game world. The whole point of providing an entire world in broad strokes is to give context to everything else that is painted in detail (monsters, spells, artifacts, races, package deals, etc.) The notion that these things can exist in a vacuum is what makes improvised RPG campaigns a mishmash mess with little or no immersive quality.

 

Unfortunately, I have neither the time nor the talent to show what I envision by actually writing the dang thing (lead by example, as they say). Without doing so, however, there's no way to really test whether or not my approach would prove worthwhile.

[Christopher R Taylor]

I think we're actually seeing eye to eye because I do have some shreds of that concept in my rough pre-draft of the Player's Handbook (will have another name eventually, that's just what I refer to it as for familiarity's sake).  What knights are in what orders, and how they interact, for instance.  Its player-focused, but Gms can build things around.