Brian Stanfield

I'm right there with ya, buddy! There are too many other real problems to aggravate me lately, I don't need to go looking for more! I try never to outright disagree or flatly criticize someone's post in these forums because I much prefer the creative collaborative work that comes with at least partial agreement and concessions made to the spirit of the discussion. Sometimes I derail the discussion, as above, and take it in a direction that I mistook, but it's not done intentionally. I genuinely like the people I interact with here and prefer to foster those friendships rather than bull my way through a china shop in order to be "right" at all costs. Plus, it keeps me sane if I let the small stuff go.

No need to apologize at all.  I was just trying to clarify what I actually meant not criticize.  In the last few months I've found my points being buried in the general spirited discussions and lost.  So I decided to clarify.  I have also stopped following threads when they depart from the subject or get too spirited, which has done wonders for my personal calm and blood pressure 😁
 
But I do agree with many points brought up by yourself and others.

No worries mate. Still, you make a good point. PHB has a higher number of creatures in the book but they are mainly animals (and skeletons and zombies). FHC has a smaller selection but they are more interesting, more fantastical. There are also 6 examples characters that can be used as antagonists. I supposed they could also be used as pregens as well but they are not really balanced against one another. Because "pick a pregen" makes jumping into the game much quicker.
I went back through character creation of FHC again and tried to have the mindset of someone who buys a game and wants to play a fantasy character (as opposed to "I've been playing HERO for 30 years) and man, it's bad. Character creation starts at page 17, racial, cultural and profession templates are an afterthought at page 202. During character creation you plough through the powers system (p.51) with little guidance on how to use it within the context of what it means in fantasy but then you have typical advantages and limitations packages for various types of magic at page 212 and then sample spells at page 241. Everytime I look at this book, I like it a bit less (which sadden me really).
I cannot access Fantasy HERO 1E at the moment but if my recollection serves, it was a better book for fantasy (and I am a 6E supporter).

Well I went with the Necromancy idea.  They were called into a conference with the various kingdoms who were taking the brunt of the fighting.  They said that these warriors would not pick up the dead from the battles.  As they snuck around behind enemy lines they found dead soldiers laid out in large groups.  They kept going and it was cool because they didn't understand.  Then they got to the enemies lands and seen very poor people and seen the ritual of the necromancer and they kind of pooped themselves when they realized all the solders that would be summoned.
 
Thanks for the help I appreciate it, my group did as well.

At this stage, I believe we have an orthogonal conversion as we do not seem to be debating the same things. I even had to go back and reread what prompted this exchange  . You seem to have understood that my position was that the PHB was playable out of the box and FHC was not. This is not quite what I said (or at least meant) and my statement was that "...it makes FHC less play-ready than say, The Dark Eye, RuneQuest or Dungeons & Dragons even considering only their core/players books". My statement is not about which game is playable out of the box nor is it about which game is complete, it is about how quickly you can play a game after you bought the book. 
 
Bill, Bob and Boris walk into a game store. They want to try a new fantasy roleplaying. Bill, will be the GM, Bob, wants to play a magician and Boris will be a burly fighter. The plan is to read and understand the rules and while Bob and Boris are creating their characters (they want to create their own), Bill will put a few critters and enemies together (he might create them of pick from a list if available) in a generic dungeon/prison/castle/maze/whatever and they will let their imagination flow. There are only 4 books in the game store and they are all games they have never heard of; PHB 5E, FHC, TDE and RQG. Which book will enable them to do it the quickest? Which option would be the slowest?
 
As explained above, my position is that FHC would be the slowest to lift and could also be the most difficult for Bob to get into.
 
That's all I am saying. No problem if you disagree (I believe you do) as you seem to imply that you cannot play a game with just the PHB. I'd like to understand what you believe is missing in the PHB tat would prevent Bill, Bob and Boris to whip a quick game?  

After reading this I was just going to ignore the thread.
 
 
And then I read this.
 
Also not to be argumentative, but simply wanting to clarify a simple concept.
 
Neither of the above posts even touch on "playable out of the box", they talk about game construction from full rule books.  These are completely different topics.
 
It is almost like talking about the pro's and cons of a bass boat and getting buried with comments about the benefits of owning a helicopter.
 
Basic concepts.
Building an RPG character is not playing an RPG.
Building an adventure and NPC/Creatures is not playing an RPG.
They are preparatory tasks that need to be performed prior to being able to actually play.
This is not a good thing or a bad thing, it just is.
 
D&D 5ed has had two (that I know of) introduction sets that provide everything needed to run a game for the DM and players.  Characters, Adventure, etc.  Plus guidance for the DM to run it.
FFG's Star Wars RPG has one introduction set for each of their three SW theme games (EotE, AoR and FaD).  They contain everything needed to play a game of Star Wars.
Chaosium has a Call of Cthulhu 7th intro box that has pre-generated PC's and an adventure plus guidance for new players and GM's.
Catalyst has a Shadowrun beginner box set that allows new people to play Shadowrun.
Pathfinder has one too
 
All of these are "playable out of the box" with little or no prep. 
Are these "sets" complete rule-sets? No, but they are "playable out of the box".
 
D&D's core three (PHB, MM, DMG) are not "playable out of the box".
PF's main rulebook is not "playable out of the box".
Star Wars RPG core books are not "playable out of the box".
Champions Complete and Hero System 6th are not "playable out of the box".
Call of Cthulhu, Pulp Cthulhu and Down Darker Trails are not "playable out of the box".
 
They are all complete core rule sets designed to allow players to BUILD games.  Some are more flexible than others, but they all perform the task well. 
 
Most games that are "playable out of the box" are designed to allow new players to actually PLAY a game and see if they like it.  Some are designed to play out multiple sessions and some even give the players a taste of limited character advancement.   But all of them have the purpose of "if you liked this and had fun, buy the full game and make your own adventures and characters".
 
There have been a few games that combined the complete core rules with the intro-set to present an actual full RPG that was "playable out of the box".  These are rare though. 
 
There is a difference between "complete rule set" and "playable out of the box".  One is not better than the other, they have different purposes.
 
In my opinion, the Hero System (any version) would have a greater benefit from a "intro playable out of the box" game than most others.  Most other RPG's are more structured and provide completed items (NPC's, Creatures, Equipment, etc.) that allow easier entry.  Hero requires the Players to literally build everything before play, which is a steep entry.  But most of the attempts I have seen founder when too much content is jammed in.  Such as character creation and a such.  But once again that is an opinion.
 
But "playable out of the box" means I open the box and play.  Not, I open the box, figure out how to generate a character and then figure out how to build an adventure and then try to play. 
Some people do not like Intro Boxes that are "playable out of the box" because they do not have all the rules.  But there are a lot of players out there that started playing with those intro boxes.
 

Can't be _that_ weird.
 
It's how the one in my truck works.  
 

Am I? Maybe I am since I am comparing the "Complete" FH game with only a "Players Handbook".
If you buy one of these two books to create characters right away, drop the party in a generic dungeons or locale populated by a few critters, you can do it more easily and rapidly with the PHB than with FHC. Chances are with FHC your evening will be spent creating characters, even worse if a player wants to create a spell caster.
Assuming the same level of familiarity with the systems, I would also say that the jump is easier and quicker with only the core  book of RuneQuest or The Dark Eye (or Dungeon Fantasy but the basic game is a full boxset so it might be a bit unfair).
 
In FHC, character creation is looser, there are more decisions to be made and it is less pick and play than the others (mind you RQG and TDE have quite a few steps in character creation but it's much more directed). Bottom line, it will take more time and effort.
For the other games, you can easily select a priest/spell-user and choose from a selection of spells. Your options to do so in FHC is very limited with only a few spells given as a example, or unlimited with the ability to build anything. Bottom line, you will be limited or it will take more time and effort.
 
It may come down with what we believe we need to buy a book, read it and jump straight in. It may also depends how much prep time you expect to put it before you play. Personally, I believe the PHB has everything you need to play from day one. 
 
And there I believe the DMG is not needed to jump right in. Will you need it down the road? Maybe. Will you need it on day one? No. The same could be said for the Monster Manual. You want to play right away? You have 30 odd critters to play with. Sure, you will want more later.
At first I thought you where conveniently moving the goalpost but actually I believe we are now confusing how quickly you can play after you bought a book, with how complete a game is.
 
When I compare their playability out of the box, I talk about the former. It implies an ability to use the book quickly and enough material provided. FHC is not as quick to jump in (character creation) and not as complete (not enough spells).
You mention "a lot of ways" but do not give any example of the many ways FHC is better suited than PHB when it comes to jumping into the game quickly. Would you mind giving a few?
 

In some ways you’re comparing apples to mangos. The Players Handbook isn’t playable out of the box either. It’s devoted to just introducing character creation and basic gameplay. Even with the Dungeon Master’s Guide and the Monster Manual, you still don’t have a game to play “right out of the box.”
 
On the other hand, if you allow FHC to include the HS Grimoire and the HS Bestiary, then you’ve got an equivalent trilogy to D&D . . . but still no adventure to play, just like (D&D). Of course the production value is not nearly the same, but for less than half the cost you have a complete game to play. 
 
So in a lot of ways when it comes to reading one book and jumping into a game, D&D is less well equipped to do that than FHC. What D&D does so well, though, is make their books make people want to play, and they’ve set up the support network to play it. Any beginner can go find a gameshop on Wednesday night anywhere in the country and find a D&D Encounters game. That’s really the biggest difference, and that’s the benefit of having Hasbro prop your business up until it can get traction. 

In some ways you’re comparing apples to mangos. The Players Handbook isn’t playable out of the box either. It’s devoted to just introducing character creation and basic gameplay. Even with the Dungeon Master’s Guide and the Monster Manual, you still don’t have a game to play “right out of the box.”
 
On the other hand, if you allow FHC to include the HS Grimoire and the HS Bestiary, then you’ve got an equivalent trilogy to D&D . . . but still no adventure to play, just like (D&D). Of course the production value is not nearly the same, but for less than half the cost you have a complete game to play. 
 
So in a lot of ways when it comes to reading one book and jumping into a game, D&D is less well equipped to do that than FHC. What D&D does so well, though, is make their books make people want to play, and they’ve set up the support network to play it. Any beginner can go find a gameshop on Wednesday night anywhere in the country and find a D&D Encounters game. That’s really the biggest difference, and that’s the benefit of having Hasbro prop your business up until it can get traction. 

Used books in the hundreds don't exist.
 
I mean, they _do_, but what you're seeing there are "book pirates."
 
No; I'm serious.  These guys run bots and crawlers and interesting algorithms; most of them have no actual stock-- seriously-- _none_.   Their bots key on searches for books, then perform their own searches, find the books, and return a pre-generated add / website entry to include a pic from where they found (if applicable) and a copy of text (usually a vague bit of descriptive text.  The better ones will have this text end on a complete sentence instead of after X amount of characters.   ).
 
The price is (P)x1.M, where M is the percentage of markup programmed into the bot.  If you order the book, the bot orders the book from where it found it, etc, etc, etc.
 
The guy "Operating" the site (I say that in quotes because most of these are fire-and-forget) not only never touches the book, he won't even know you ever ordered anything.  He just gets his money and keeps sipping margaritas.    I've been collecting books since you had to track down specialists to find them from all over the world.  I watched the pirates grow until they became their own problem     
 
 
Seriously; they have become their own problem!  There are so many of them now that it's possible to find two hundred listings for the same single book-- single as in "only one copy exists and only one person owns it."  The bots are getting their info from other bots, who got it from other bots, who got it from other bots, and on and on.  It's at the point were you can spend three hundred bucks on a book, that money ends up going to eighty different people, and the only extant copy of the book in the whole chain sells for ten bucks to the first bot and ships to you!  
 
 
There are signs, but honestly, there are so many people trying to stop this practice that you can find entire websites dedicated to how you can get a better idea of what's a pirate site and what isn't.  (A good hint is an RPG book with a dying audience going for hundreds of dollars.  )
 

Another option for Sewer City is ghouls. They could be an offshoot of humanity, mutated by exposure to something down there. They have an entire culture in Call of Cthulhu mythology you could draw from.

I’m going to put in a quick vote for HERO System Basic Rulebook, like I always do. It’s what the “Complete” games are based on, but is genre neutral. Maybe this is more problematic for you and/or your group, but I’m using it now for a 6e version of Pulp HERO, which never got translated into 6e. It’s working great so far because all the rules are presented in a little over 100 pages so it condenses things down for newbies. But it does require a lot more prep time for the GM, especially if you create their first characters for them (which I recommend) so they can focus on learning the rules before they have to create anything themselves. But I can honestly say the first 10 pages of an introduction gives new players a great overview which is more useful than the “HERO in Two Pages” document. 

Thanks, but I missed Monster Hunters International Employee Handbook and Role-playing game in the original post. I know that was a hardcover. I own it (now, friend had one and didn't want a fortune for it)and the others in my original post but just wanted to see if there were others that were produced other than what I knew of. Thanks everyone!

I’m going to put in a quick vote for HERO System Basic Rulebook, like I always do. It’s what the “Complete” games are based on, but is genre neutral. Maybe this is more problematic for you and/or your group, but I’m using it now for a 6e version of Pulp HERO, which never got translated into 6e. It’s working great so far because all the rules are presented in a little over 100 pages so it condenses things down for newbies. But it does require a lot more prep time for the GM, especially if you create their first characters for them (which I recommend) so they can focus on learning the rules before they have to create anything themselves. But I can honestly say the first 10 pages of an introduction gives new players a great overview which is more useful than the “HERO in Two Pages” document. 

Woo-hoo! 
 
Okay, folks, Jason has AC issues 1 & 2 now.  I'm just scanning them; I'm not doing any of the clean up or restoration, nor do I know who is.  I am scanning in 1200 DPI and sending them as PNG (my current set up doesn't do vector files.     ) to make sure they get the best head start I can give them.  I would love to do it from start to finish, but there is a serious time problem. 
 
 
On the plus side, I have been given carte blanche to make better copies of anything currently available in the HERO Store!   It's going to take a lot of time, as I'm working without my good system, and with way less time than I had when I was working my old job, but I'm excited!
 
I mean, I can't be the only one tired of looking at that weirdly-cleaned up Enemies book or that partially-counterfeit 1e rules book with the 2e character sheets, can I? 
 
There is nothing on the near horizon (save perhaps my personal 2e PDF, which is ahhh "vahra anahs....", but the one in the store is pretty good as-is (though mine prints better ;).  For the moment, scanning AC is my priority, so don't look for anything any time soon unless it's something I have already done and remembered to submit. 
 
I just got excited and wanted to share. 
 
 
 
 
 
 

I don’t believe that Book of the Empress was a hardcover. I’ve never seen it at least. I was sure that is was hardcover until I went and looked on my shelf and saw the paper copy sitting there. Also, you probably won’t be able to find a hardcover of MHI at a reasonable price. Although it does exist, it’s rare. 
 
Good luck with your quest. It took me at least a couple of years to find all the hardcovers at reasonable prices. I think maybe Champions will be the hardest one to find. You can still get 6e2 right here through the store, so don’t fall for any of those “collectors’” prices. I used to search eBay pretty regularly for a couple of years and I eventually found all the others. It can be done, just be patient and don’t feel like you have to overpay to get a copy of something. It’ll show up eventually. 
 
By the way, for what it’s worth, you can get a lot of the books through the store here along with PDF copies in the same bundle. The series of blue paperbacks (Skills, Equipment, etc.) are available as POD and they’re much more useful for actual gameplay and are worth adding to your collection. All of these paper copies come with PDFs pretty much anywhere you get them, which is pretty useful. 

GM update: The game finished! We completed the module by PBEM! This was an amazing group. The experiment was: Take a Top Secret module and play it with Champions rules, set in the era (in this case 1981).
 
Success! Thank you to everyone who participated! Highly recommended concept!

Yup! That's the best part, I think. I don't ever mean to ruffle anyone's feathers, and you'll never hear me telling anyone they're having wrong-bad-fun. I think we'd all do better if we remember that there are no "official" ways to apply the rules, and that all our brainstorming is dependent upon our own personal campaign settings, game baselines and stuff like that. We're just here to draw from hundreds of years of experience in all the members, and to offer some new ways of looking at things. Otherwise, we could just all go sit and read the rules ourselves and we wouldn't need these discussions.

I've got to get to bed,
so if you will accept it at least short term, I'll summarize:
 
It's an intellectual distaste.
 
I have no problems with separate worlds / separate universes / no; not a multiverse; it's just a whole different book now, and these two authors don't both write about the same universe--
 
None whatsoever.
 
It's not really enjoyable for me when two distinctly different writers tell stories in the same world or with the same characters (might be part of why I never got into comic books; I don't know).  It's somewhat bothersome when one guy steps in and just changes how the physics work.  And of course, there are my own notions of building and progression.
 
Supers isn't my bag, but I'm not exactly _opposed_ to it.  I can enjoy it, but I'd rather enjoy something  else, given the chance. 
 
Fantasy is a longing for an age that never ever was.  Sci-fi is a wondering about what may someday be.
 
Having to accept that it makes some sort of sense that what might someday be is built on a history of what never was makes me throw up just a little bit in the back of my mouth.
 
And in the case of HERO-- there wasn't even any _reason_ to do it.  None whatsoever.  None.  It wasn't relevant to _anything_ that had gone before, and nothing in the product line up depended on it happening.  You in no way had to even accept the existence of other genres to play any sort of game you wanted, as they didn't step on each other's toes unless you wanted them to.
 
In effect, Steve put an expiration date on the very birth certificate of every official setting-- every official game (all five or so?  Lucha, Narosia, CC, FHC, MHI.  Wait-- PS 238-- all six) that will ever be published.  Why would my team of barbarians and wizards and dwarves clerics be motivated to adventure and improve the world?  It's going to die and be replaced by pollutants, smog, cars, chain smoking, television advertisements, and people working two jobs just to pay their bills, wondering what the hell "savings" are.   Which will suddenly give rise to superheroes, that will make everything that awesome Palladin ever did look like cold soup.  Of course, that's going to die out too, and for no good reason, and after a bajillion years of magical realms and creatures and magical superheroes and super science all of a sudden we're going to fall back on hard science, real, people-busting-their-brains to make this a reality science--- without the aid of the super geniuses that just stopped existing all of a sudden-- and build these incredible machines that just a few years earlier were taken completely for granted yet have suddenly and instantly disappeared from our collective conscious along with superheroes, and then go off to have adventures among the stars....
 
 
Seriously.  It's cringe-inducing.  It's like when a six-year-old suddenly wishes all of his favorite book characters lived in the houses on his block.  It's just.....
 
It's bad, Dude.  It's just really, really bad.  I always feel like I should help him make excuses for how that accidentally got into the rules.....
 
 
 

Wow! That whole process was almost as complicated as making a Champions character by hand . . . 

Yes, of course....helping someone troubleshoot a bad installation of Java (not HD) means that pen and paper (and keeping track of all of the HERO System rules surrounding character generation) is easier.  Couldn't be clearer.

If I recall correctly, I had the same problem on my Mac. I think I deleted every bit of the installed HD files, restarted and reinstalled and it ran fine. 

Just in case you would thinks have not been moving forward ... 
 

You're most welcome. You'll find that the forums are a great resource! You've got centuries of cumulatively applied experience to draw from. You'll also find that if you ask one question, you'll get 18 answers! The real problem will be narrowing down the choices that work for you.