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Tasha

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Re: Narosia and most other Hero Fantasy Settings

 

My biggest concern (I'm not going to call it a complaint) is that there has been no follow-up. Perhaps there is just not the market for Hero supplements. Even D3 games released a follow up adventure for Kamarathin but that was all.  One of the issues with these Kickstarted settings is that they seemed purposefully designed to defy the conventions of d20 based fantasy games. From an artistic point of view, that's great. From a practical view, now a group of players not only has to learn new rules, they have to learn new conventions as well. I think that is the ultimate issue there. Some percentage of the d20 fanbase is looking for something new and innovative. The rest are comfortable with the established tropes and conventions of the genre they play in.

 

That's why I picked Turakian Age as a good place to start a new product line. It already exists and it caters pretty exclusively to the same genre conventions that most d20 games do. It just needs a little spit and polish and a little updating to bring it into the 6E fold. 

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That's why I picked Turakian Age as a good place to start a new product line. It already exists and it caters pretty exclusively to the same genre conventions that most d20 games do. It just needs a little spit and polish and a little updating to bring it into the 6E fold. 

 

And there are other products that fit nicely into TA which are available

  • Book of Dragons - 5e
  • Enchanted Items - All the magic items a GM could ever want - 5e
  • Fantasy Hero Backgrounds - Very good starter adventures + a campaign can be created out of them in TA - 5e
  • Both Fantasy Grimoire - Huge number of spells between the both of them - 5e
  • Monsters, Minions and Mauraders - 5e
  • Nobles, Knights and Necromancers - 5e
  • Bestiary - 6e

The conversion to 6e is minor IMO.  Basically publish a new set of characters in most cases.  The biggest changes would be the Enchanted Items and Grimoire and would require a new version of the book.

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Vampire: the Masquerade (and the World of Darkness it inhabited) was new and innovative and broke with most of the comfortable, established gaming tropes and mechanics of the time. And yet it became a break-away success that put White Wolf Games on the top of the RPG mountain for years. Some of the WoD product lines are still being published to this day.

 

I honestly believe that if you come up with something brilliant, the (gaming) masses will buy into it. The challenge, then, is to come up with something truly brilliant, not merely really good. Really good may successfully fund on KS, but it won't generate enough of a following to make a whole product line viable. I mean, if the goal is to merely produce a single book, then KS is a decent enough vehicle for that, but is setting the bar that low really the goal?

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All true. The gamble then becomes, using Hero, do you go for something really good or do you try to innovate? We've had at least three fantasy settings that tried to innovate. Kamarathin, at least, was an awesome fantasy setting that should have, by all rights, been a smash hit. It wasn't. Certainly not enough to ascend to the lofty goal of top of the RPG mountain. It takes way more than innovation. It takes advertising and presentation. With those two things, even a mediocre product will sell better than a really good product without them.

 

World of Darkness happened to hit at a time when the RPG market was swinging away from TSR products. Shadowrun, World of Darkness and a couple of others really broke the level-based, dungeon crawl mode that AD&D 2nd Edition had established as the norm. Many of those games tapped into the emerging cultural zeitgeist. We were coming out of the 80's and hitting stride with the 90's. There was a resurgence in the monster market and that crept its way into the role playing market. We were also coming off a relative period of optimism to find out that things were not so hunky dory and there was a cultural backlash against authority figures and social norms. So much of where we are now, culturally speaking, was germinated during those years. Well to be fair, it probably really began in the 60's, but the late 70's and 80's temporarily derailed that movement. Those attitudes were reflected in our media, including role playing games. Counter-culture and social defiance was embodied in many of the published products of the day. Hell, Shadowrun was all about "sticking it to the Man." 

 

I think that World of Darkness, if released for the first time today, would not do as well. The werewolf, vampire, ghost, UFO, and government conspiracy archetypes have played themselves down. We are ready for something else. Of course that is a chicken/egg argument as White Wolf was center stage in that portion of the RPG market. These days, the counter-culture of the 90's is practically the social norm. So we have to look to something else for innovation. We could go science fiction, but everything from Cyberpunk to Transhumanism to sweeping Space Operas are already done to death. Pulp? Not seeing it. Westerns? Nope. Maybe we can do a game based on stealing cars and driving real fast. That seems to be a trend. Oh wait, there's a video game or ten that already taps into that. There is probably an innovative idea or two, but I am hard pressed to find it/them. With that lack of some sort of innovative epiphany, I'll have to settle for "merely really good." Yeah, I can live with that.

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In the end all you can do is make something you think is cool and hope the (gaming) masses do too. Ultimately that's why the World of Darkness succeeded. Anne Rice's work was hot and the gaming community was ready to play in that world, not just read about it. What would be the equivalent of that right now?

 

Whatever it is, I doubt it is traditional Gygaxian/Tolkeinian fantasy. I predict that the GURPS project will do okay financially for SJG, but it won't resonate much beyond the GURPS faithful and will be forgotten a year or two from now. There's just nothing innovative going on there; even the structure of the product line is old school. If nostalgia is becoming a genre, then surely there is a more exciting way to tap into that than what SJG is doing.

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Vampire: the Masquerade (and the World of Darkness it inhabited) was new and innovative and broke with most of the comfortable, established gaming tropes and mechanics of the time. And yet it became a break-away success that put White Wolf Games on the top of the RPG mountain for years. Some of the WoD product lines are still being published to this day.

 

I honestly believe that if you come up with something brilliant, the (gaming) masses will buy into it. The challenge, then, is to come up with something truly brilliant, not merely really good. Really good may successfully fund on KS, but it won't generate enough of a following to make a whole product line viable. I mean, if the goal is to merely produce a single book, then KS is a decent enough vehicle for that, but is setting the bar that low really the goal?

Vampire tapped into the success that Anne Rice was having with her Vampire Novels. The game played more like a discussion and less like a count the squares/hexes wargame that it's predecessors did. So the game ended up appealing to Women in numbers that the Wargaming style RPGs never achieved. It also was at a time when many established players were sick of D&D and all of it's copies. The very different mechanics appealed to that player base. On top of that people knew what Vampires and Werewolves were like in general terms. The setting being Modern America also made the game more accessible to players. The revival versions of VtM and WtA did very well as kickstartered products. Though you are right older games tend to appeal to older players. There's a lot of older players full of nostalgia for those older games. Dunno, if you can bring those people to another system unless they played it and want to try again. Newer gamers aren't really very interested in learning systems that aren't Pathfinder or D&D.

 

The real question that the whole industry is wondering is "How do you get NEW players into the hobby"

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Vampire tapped into the success that Anne Rice was having with her Vampire Novels. The game played more like a discussion and less like a count the squares/hexes wargame that it's predecessors did. So the game ended up appealing to Women in numbers that the Wargaming style RPGs never achieved. It also was at a time when many established players were sick of D&D and all of it's copies. The very different mechanics appealed to that player base. On top of that people knew what Vampires and Werewolves were like in general terms. The setting being Modern America also made the game more accessible to players. The revival versions of VtM and WtA did very well as kickstartered products. Though you are right older games tend to appeal to older players. There's a lot of older players full of nostalgia for those older games. Dunno, if you can bring those people to another system unless they played it and want to try again. Newer gamers aren't really very interested in learning systems that aren't Pathfinder or D&D.

 

The real question that the whole industry is wondering is "How do you get NEW players into the hobby"

Well i think its anecdote time! This past week at open house for my kids in Elementary School, at the used book sale, a young kid asked me if I played role-playing games. of course i said yes. Then he proceeded to show me a Pathfinder beginner boxed set and said that this was his first foray into role-playing. And it would be an honor for me to buy it. At 50 cents who could say no?

 

So to answer Tasha's question, your standard Fantasy is so entrenched in the gaming world that that is the key to gather new players. With Hero though, the trick is to show how you can develop the game with the rules to go from Standard Fantasy to totally unique Fantasy or anywhere in between.

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Great story Ninja-Bear! I personally love the Pathfinder Beginner Box and wish I could have bought it for $0.50. That it was sold to you in such earnestness is pretty awesome.

 

As to the other, let's try to reel them in first. Then we can start pulling back the curtain.

It's a great boxed set Full of very useful stuff.

 

Yeah, I think for a beginner's product us Grognards should be willing to give up the whole toolkit. I do believe that there should be a "wizard" document that shows all of the fiddly writeups to show how the whole system is used to build spells etc. We are dealing with a culture that doesn't have the time to spend doing the prep work that a Hero System game requires. Expecting that GM's build everything as beginners is very offputting. IMHO the secret sauce would be to have everything written up in a simple straight forward way. Then have the Players/GMs buy the elements for their characters. Keep the math down to just addition. 

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Beginner's boxed sets are a terrific gateway product to get new players into the hobby. I agree that by necessity they should be somewhat rules light and offer a lot of proverbial hand-holding, especially for the GM. However, I vehemently disagree with anyone who says such a product is better if it is devoid of a compelling and unique setting. A rich campaign world is not mutually exclusive with a beginner's boxed set presentation (and yes, a "beginner's set" is purely a matter of presentation).

 

Furthermore, I believe that if newbies see that the beginner set is tied to a game world/product line full of more advanced supplements and expansion material, they will be more inclined to opt-in to that product line since they can see a future with the game beyond the training wheels phase. But if you just give them a boxed set and then say, "Okay, after this you're ready for the full 6e rules and Fantasy Hero, have at it!" then I consider that a strategic failure.

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Even better, we still have the Big Books, so we're not giving up anything!

 

From past threads people seem really resistant to Hero Products that don't have detailed writeups of each spell,Ability, power etc. Like they are afraid that if they have one product that doesn't show what's under the hood something "bad" will happen.

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It's a great boxed set Full of very useful stuff.

 

Yeah, I think for a beginner's product us Grognards should be willing to give up the whole toolkit. I do believe that there should be a "wizard" document that shows all of the fiddly writeups to show how the whole system is used to build spells etc. We are dealing with a culture that doesn't have the time to spend doing the prep work that a Hero System game requires. Expecting that GM's build everything as beginners is very offputting. IMHO the secret sauce would be to have everything written up in a simple straight forward way. Then have the Players/GMs buy the elements for their characters. Keep the math down to just addition. 

 

 

From past threads people seem really resistant to Hero Products that don't have detailed writeups of each spell,Ability, power etc. Like they are afraid that if they have one product that doesn't show what's under the hood something "bad" will happen.

 

I was thinking much along the lines you seem to be. What I wanted to do is pre-load characters with full on, pay with points, builds but hide that from the perspective new player. The first product would be all about learning the back end mechanics like Skill and Combat rolls. How to read Normal damage and how to read Killing Damage. I wouldn't use a lot of the optional rules like Hit Locations, Stunning, etc. It would be all about getting a new group of players involved with a (hopefully) compelling campaign setting, combined with an adventure supplement that shows a GM how to balance Hero games versus the more attrition oriented level-based game.

 

As the potential group of new players become accustomed to the basics, newer concepts are layered in. On one hand, that would mean adding in a few of the more advanced combat options. On the other, it would to show them how to craft a power build using a relatively narrow selection of powers, adders, and power modifiers. On the back end and behind the scenes, I would build their first "award" using the basic point allotment. On the front end, I would demonstrate how each of these elements work together to form the collective whole. I'll try to whip up a full-on example of what I am talking about on my day off tomorrow or Tuesday.

 

I still think that having access to a full (or even the basic) rules set would go a long way, but I can also see where hiding the nuts and bolts might narrow the focus down into a guided tutorial of the system.

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Beginner's boxed sets are a terrific gateway product to get new players into the hobby. I agree that by necessity they should be somewhat rules light and offer a lot of proverbial hand-holding, especially for the GM. However, I vehemently disagree with anyone who says such a product is better if it is devoid of a compelling and unique setting. A rich campaign world is not mutually exclusive with a beginner's boxed set presentation (and yes, a "beginner's set" is purely a matter of presentation).

 

Furthermore, I believe that if newbies see that the beginner set is tied to a game world/product line full of more advanced supplements and expansion material, they will be more inclined to opt-in to that product line since they can see a future with the game beyond the training wheels phase. But if you just give them a boxed set and then say, "Okay, after this you're ready for the full 6e rules and Fantasy Hero, have at it!" then I consider that a strategic failure.

 

A rich campaign world is absolutely needed. I vehemently disagree that it should deviate too much from the established tropes and conventions of the d20 crowd. That's been tried and failed on too many other occasions. There is a middle ground though and I imagine that it might be its own alchemy to find that balance. As Ninja-Bear pointed out, part of the learning process is to demonstrate how to take the concepts being taught and apply them to more unique settings. That is absolutely part of the "Plan." 

 

I agree about the product line. That has been, in my not so humble opinion, the primary reason why all of these other products failed. It reminds me of a truism that I heard while working in a prison; the inmates spend so much time thinking and planning on how to escape that they often fail to plan on what they are going to do once they get out. Everybody who has published a setting for Hero up to this point did not plan on expanding that setting in a way that is meaningful to the players. The closest were the official settings, with a Bestiary, a Grimoire (or two), and some gear. Those were great, but they were not gateways for the imagination. They were utilitarian tools. Awesome, in their own way, but without flavor. It's like eating a hamburger with no seasoning or condiments. It will nourish you, but kind of tastes bland. There has to be something that attracts the players to want to play with your games. That means adventures and splat books that narrow in on specific areas of the world.

 

Yes, I've heard that adventures and splat books do not provide enough return to warrant the cost to create them. I believe that might well be true, but without them, you may as well not build the setting anyhow. 

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Even better, we still have the Big Books, so we're not giving up anything!

 

Exactly. Contrary to giving up anything, a product like this should be designed and intended to drive up the sales of the Big Books (or Fantasy Hero Complete) and the other mechanical books like the Grimoire, Bestiary, etc. 

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A rich campaign world is absolutely needed. I vehemently disagree that it should deviate too much from the established tropes and conventions of the d20 crowd. That's been tried and failed on too many other occasions.

Um, sure, okay. But do we really know that they failed because they deviated "too much" from established Gygaxian tropes? Unless that can be firmly established, past failures are not really cause to avoid inspired deviation, especially in ways that offer superior texture and flavor.

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Um, sure, okay. But do we really know that they failed because they deviated "too much" from established Gygaxian tropes? Unless that can be firmly established, past failures are not really cause to avoid inspired deviation, especially in ways that offer superior texture and flavor.

I not sure how much but I'm sure the miniature market does bear on this too. A fair amount of people who game use minis. You can find several different brands that make standard races but even to try to find say ninja takes some work.

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With Western Shores, Felines are a great race to show new Gms how to build a custom race for their own games. I think they are great because they are a non-standard race but a concept that has been around in other media.

 

Is that game world detailed better than it was in 4e Fantasy Hero?

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Um, sure, okay. But do we really know that they failed because they deviated "too much" from established Gygaxian tropes? Unless that can be firmly established, past failures are not really cause to avoid inspired deviation, especially in ways that offer superior texture and flavor.

You may be right. The reason these settings didn't catch on could be any other reason besides their content. Could be the lack of continued support, lack of advertising, or even just because they were written for Hero (a depressing and sobering thought).

 

What I do know is that the d20 convention does sell. I cannot be 100% certain that any given percentage of those sells can be diverted to Hero, but it seems a logical place to start. The whole concept is risk incarnate. Anyone pursuing this kind of venture cannot let committee rule. I would choose to follow a proven market trend, were I to commit to this kind of project. That may not be what you or someone else might do, but that would be that other person's choice.

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With Western Shores, Felines are a great race to show new Gms how to build a custom race for their own games. I think they are great because they are a non-standard race but a concept that has been around in other media.

My next question would be; "Who owns the intellectual property rights to Western Shores?" If that person or entity is unwilling to license it out, then we could not use it.

 

The amount of official development could still be pretty bare boned and provide ample foundation for more details.

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Part of problem was shrinking shelf space and the disappearance of the gaming and books stores.

If you wanted to launch the next big thing in gaming where would you go?

And these days you setting would have to tie into  another media to get attention.

 

BTW how is the superhero movie explosion helping super hero gaming?

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