Which Hero System edition has the best library?

[Joe Walsh]

You can include things like metal miniatures, cardboard heroes, vinyl bookcovers, dice, and all the other sorts of licensed and branded stuff if you like.

 

[Christopher R Taylor]

Gotta go with 4th for original library.  It just has the best supplements and support.

[Chris Goodwin]

I had to answer third... Robot Warriors, Danger International, and Fantasy Hero from that era, for me, accounted for as much fun between them as I would say the rest of my lifetime gaming has.  

[zslane]

Went with the obvious choice: 4th edition, except for third-party library where 6th edition probably surpasses older editions, if for no other reason than it is the third parties that have been filling the vacuum left by the complete lack of publications coming from Hero Games itself in the last decade.

[Cantriped]

I answered 5th edition for the first and third questions, and 6th for the second.

I didn't have any experience with 4th since I started with a gifted 5th edition rulebook. Although I prefer 6th (or rather CC/FHC specifically) to 5th, the latter undeniably had a better library when you consider that almost every supplement published for 6th was heavily copy-pasted from 5th edition supplements (much of which without any editing whatsoever).

[Christopher R Taylor]

If it were up to me 6th would have the largest library by far.

[Ninja-Bear]

I'm not 100% sure but I believe that 4th edition has the greatest amount of first party books. Dark Champions has more books than I first thought.

[Joe Walsh]

5e wins for first-party volume, but it can be close...depending on how it's counted.

 

ICE published 57 books in the Hero Games line. You could argue for including a further 18 produced by ICE for Rolemaster that included Hero stats (the two 4e-era Campaign Classics with Hero stats, plus the 16 Shadow World products with Hero stats).  And if we're counting PDF-only products, we can include 11 more 4e-era books produced after the ICE era by Hero Games. That's a total of 86 books. (I'm not including the 14 4e-era Adventurer's Club issues since I don't consider magazine issues to be books..but if you want to include those, that's a total of 100 first-party publications).

 

For 5e, DOJ published a total of 109 books, 12 of which were PDF-only. There were also 47 issues of Digital Hero, if you want to include PDF magazine issues.

 

The closest they would get would be to compare the total number of physical publications produced by the first-party publisher with stats for Hero System. In that case, 4e would have 57 Hero System books + 18 Rolemaster books + 14 Adventurer's Clubs = 89 total physical first-party publications, while 5e would have 109 - 12 = 97 total first-party physical publications.

[Joe Walsh]

I had to answer third... Robot Warriors, Danger International, and Fantasy Hero from that era, for me, accounted for as much fun between them as I would say the rest of my lifetime gaming has.  

 

Third sure was awesome!  Lots of games, lots of great supplements, and every game got at least token support. None of the games were terribly complicated...even Champions was still pretty simple. Plus, 3e had the only Hero System product I'm aware of that had to be withdrawn from the market due to the controversy it brought about: Wings of the Valkyrie, a time-traveling adventure wherein the heroes had to decide whether to let Adolph Hitler live (and thereby bring about the Holocaust) or let him die...which would bring about an even worse future.

[Joe Walsh]

Gotta go with 4th for original library.  It just has the best supplements and support.

 

It sure does have many of my favorite supplements. I'd love it if they were all recreated using modern software, given a good editing pass (including incorporating all known errata) and made available via POD. I'd re-buy them all!

 

Edited to add: And I'd absolutely adore it if they got the late 4e-era, Hero Games-published PDFs into shape and made them available via POD. Not to mention getting Star Hero 4e completed and out there...

[Spence]

For best 1st party I am bucking the trend and went with 6th. The volume count may be less, but it includes many consolidated books.

 

I admit that I enjoyed the 4th ed "feel" better.

[Cantriped]

I would like to agree with you there Spence (because I prefer the 6th edition ruleset to 5th edition's), but the 6th edition supplements had this really bad habit of splitting up useful information across multiple books. For example, in Fantasy Hero​ 5th edition, there is a table for Climbing Modifiers in the section on Skills. In Fantasy Hero​ 6th edition, they omitted that table in favor of making reference to The Hero System Skills​ (which contains the exact same Climbing Modifiers table as the 5th edition version of ​Fantasy Hero).

[Spence]

True. But I am used to pubs being not so well laid out. I have them in hard copy and pdf plus all the 5th & 4th (now in off woot). So I guess I'm just used to it.

[Spence]

Man I am really hating the new phone problems. Apparently pdf autocorrect to off

[Cantriped]

That is because P is next to O, and D to F, so it would be a common typo on standard keyboards...

I usually turn off Autocorrect if I can because it's stupid (the function, not the decision to use it), and usually doesn't even help with my problem of transposing adjacent letters ("usually becomes usulaay" for example).

[Hyper-Man]

I would like to agree with you there Spence (because I prefer the 6th edition ruleset to 5th edition's), but the 6th edition supplements had this really bad habit of splitting up useful information across multiple books. For example, in Fantasy Hero​ 5th edition, there is a table for Climbing Modifiers in the section on Skills. In Fantasy Hero​ 6th edition, they omitted that table in favor of making reference to The Hero System Skills​ (which contains the exact same Climbing Modifiers table as the 5th edition version of ​Fantasy Hero).

 

This is one of those can't please them all kind of issues.  Some folks would complain if the Climbing Modifiers table had been left out of Hero System Skills.  And putting it both places is not a design philosophy that HERO could afford to do.  Climbing is arguably a multi-genre applicable Skill. Why put it in Fantasy Hero and not other genre books like the upcoming update to Danger International?  That is the path to madness...

 

Anyway.  6e is my favorite rule set but I am torn when it comes to which edition has the best library. I like them all.

 

HM

[Cantriped]

That is very much the case. Ideally though anything that is truely genre neutral and that likely to come up in play should have been in the Core Rulebooks instead of a supplement. I would have been much more accepting of FH referencing the core rules as opposed to a supplement.

[Hyper-Man]

Some might argue the same point for other material in the Advanced Player Guides. Everything can't go in the core rules.  Where that dividing line falls will always disappoint someone.

 

HM