Darren Watts

I'll hop back in to the general topic in a bit, but I wanted to address this point- since Galactic Champions takes place after the "Terran Empire" and "Galactic Federation" Star Hero settings, we don't think an entire book devoted to the setting is necessary. A, the galaxy hasn't changed so much that we'd have a hundred pages worth of stuff, and B, if the book is popular we hope a beneficial side effect for the company would be to drive the comparatively weaker sales of Star Hero's supplements. After all, not only are we money-grubbing scum, but Terran Empire is a really frickin' good book and not enough people know it. The setting info in GalChamps will cover all of the high points of the various Star Hero timelines, concentrating on stuff relevant to the superheroes of the 31st Century (like the Mandaarian Flight and the Xenovore War) and include quick summaries of the important alien races. But people wanting more detail on, say, the Thorgons after they meet a Thorgon baddie will be directed to TE. dw

Hey all! I've started working on my next supplement, "Galactic Champions," which is a bit of a hybrid book- a setting (the 31st Century, when superheroing returns to the Hero Universe), an enemies book (there'll be 30-40 assorted villains and rivals, as well as the new Champions themselves and a handful of allies), and a subgenre book (the setting itself will also be an example of what 5th Ed. calls "Very-High Powered," (say, 400+200) with notes on running it a step below and above on the scale.) It's the last part I'd like to open a discussion about here. I'll be writing a chapter of advice on playing and GM-ing extremely-powerful, galaxy-spanning superheroes, and while I think I have a few good ideas I'd like to solicit some advice from Herodom Assembled. If you've had experience running extended campaigns at this sort of power level, what advice would you have for GMs (primarily) and players? Any pitfalls to avoid in plotting? How do you make sure your players are sufficiently realized and individualized at this scale? How do you keep your stories fresh and not just "Cosmic Alien X has come to conquer the Earth again, ho-hum?" How do you keep normal-level npcs from being overshadowed? Et cetera. Let's chat- thanks! dw

One of the unofficial mottoes of the Defenders of Justice was, "Real men use Stun for End!" (The other, of course, was "Bulletproof, don't touch that!") dw

I'm appearing at RPG.Net's sponsored "Game Day" at Endgame in Oakland Saturday November 8th, and am looking for somebody to help out by running a demo or two (with luck, I may be able to play or co-run something) and hoisting the odd box. Benefits include free lunch and the opportunity to hob-nob with industry stars like Peter Adkison (who will no doubt be flogging GenCon SoCal), Chris Pramas (Green Ronin's head brain-in-a-jar), Aldo Ghiozzi (creator of Battle Cattle) and possibly a few more. Please let me know ASAP. Many thanks! dw

Actually, the DOJ was my campaign, not Steve's. Many if not all of the WWII-era characters listed (say, hmm, the last eleven) should appear in Golden Age Champions when I actually get around to writing that next year sometime. Mara was my PC in that game, and Amy and Barry were her DNPCs, while the assorted Atlantean bad guys regularly menaced the entire team. Some of their story continues in the forthcoming UNTIL book I should be finishing next week, as a couple of the DOJ-ers play parts in the creation of that august organization. A sizable chunk of the others will no doubt appear in Pulp Hero when that book comes out as well. The Black Masks and Ryanna are from my home setting, while the Raven and crew are Steve's creations, and the Empire Club does indeed date back to Aaron and Mike. dw

Not speaking in my "official voice," because Hero isn't declaring any sort of official policy here, but I've always sort of assumed that "Hunted by the Champions" was a placeholder for "Hunted by (Your Heroes Here)" as soon as you introduced that specific bad guy into your campaign. Yeah, for beginning heroes the Champions seem to have a lot of enemies, but if that bothers you do what Mono suggests and parcel the baddies out to other teams- the Sentinels, Justice Squadron, Nova, UNITY, etc., etc. If you look at the CU from the point of view of a fake comic publishing line, rather than an actual universe (an interesting alternative lens to use some times if you haven't tried it), you could think of the Champions as similar to the Teen Titans for DC in the early '80s: a young, somewhat inexperienced team that has a really good writer/artist team working on it and is currently more popular (and therefore appearing much more often) than the more powerful, older teams like the Justice League. A third option is to accept the Champions as written as beginning heroes, but start adding more experience (after all, they've been together for a couple of years now, and they've clearly been keeping pretty busy with all these hunteds.) That's what the old gang did with the 4th-ed Champions Universe book, and though I recall several debates about the "improvements" to the old team, it's still certainly a valid idea. dw

FWIW, there was a Lady Liberty in the Force of July in the old Outsiders series by DC in the early '80s. We only stress over name duplication if there's some likelihood of confusion or if the other character is so well known it would interfere with the ability to enjoy the new one. There won't be a Catwoman in the Champs Universe, but there have been enough different Nighthawks in various media that we're not worried about confusing ours with the Marvel one. dw

Originally posted by Monolith > SoB costs about 50% more than any comparable d20 pdf product. I can go to RPG.net and purchase 64 page pdfs from $5.00 to $8.00 right now, and we are talking about comparable quality products from people like Monte Cook. It is not hard to image only the die-hards buying SoB when you consider that a printed 64 page book would only cost $14.95 in most retail outlets; and if you purchased it online you would get a 10-25% discount on top of that. Well, as I say above, we're looking into that. Monte has an entire business devoted to PDFs and much larger sales numbers, which help him spread costs. >I have not seen SoB yet, only the preview, but it would seem like the HERO Plus products would be the perfect opportunity to tinker with layout of the book and look at including some color artwork. One of the biggest gripes people seem to have with HERO books is the lack of color and presentation. It would seem that pdf product are the easiest way to give the fans the color they want without having to worry about DOJ paying the high printing costs for color. As for color art, it's something we'd like to put into future products if there are any. Let me know when you've actually seen the book whether you like the layout- I think it's quite different from our standard. > Three weeks ago I posted something in the Company section about how DOJ should look at exploring the free advertising available to them through the internet. I mentioned posting updates and new releases to http://www.gamingreport.com and that you should look at doing this at some of the other popular online gamer hangouts. There should have been a “press release†posted about SoB so that even the non-HERO System players would be made aware of the product. All your competitors are doing this. DOJ is just falling farther behind by not taking advantage of it as well. Fair cop. We haven't had much time or money available for marketing this book. And we used to be on Gaming Report in particular regularly- I don't know why they stopped posting our stuff, but I'll look into it. #4: Retail Sales: I know you would be losing some of the retail sales dollars, but the HERO Plus line should be selling on RPG.net as well as in your online store. There are more visitors to RPG.net in a single day than the Hero Games online store sees in a month. SAS, M&M, HU, DNW, and all the other superhero game system fans would have a much better chance of buying it from RPG.net because it is in the public eye. Those fans do not know it is available, and so will never have a chance to buy it to use in their non-HERO System games. I'm not sure what you mean by RPGNet's store, which AFAIK is for hard books only and we are available there. (If I'm mistaken, let me know.) As for RPGNow, SoB is available for sale there. >...HERO Plus products should not be given to the playtest populous...By giving HERO Plus products to the playtesters you are removing a large percentage (I would guess some 200-300 playtesters) of potential pdf buyers from the possible purchase equation... Well, I talked about this above. Not playtesting publicly IMO leads to an inferior product. But if playtesting publicly leads to an unprofitable product, then we'll have to reconsider our plan. >Those are the thoughts off the top of my head... And I thank you for it. >But I will be buying it when my life evens out some. Well, drop me another line once you've looked at it. I'll be glad to discuss it further. dw

Re: Errr... Huh? Gotcha. So it sounds like in general you, like most of the repliers so far, weren't part of the "Hero Plus sounds really exciting" crowd to begin with. If PDFs just ain't your thing, then probably there isn't a PDF-based publishing line we could do to satisfy you, no matter how high-quality the art or writing. And that's fine- like we said, we assumed going in that PDF sales in total would be somewhere around 10-15% of our book line. So, where is that 10-15% hiding out? Cause sales so far are pointing at numbers well short of that. Let's hear from some of the people who *wanted* PDF material. Or did we mis-estimate how many of you there really are out there? dw

I can't imagine we wouldn't have maps. But we'd probably have to ditch the fancy cover and the bulk of the interior illustration. dw

We can't pay them at 3x as many downloads because 3x as many downloads at half the price still adds up to less than we paid for the art. The writer in this case (Allen) is being paid a royalty percentage of cover price, but the artists were paid a flat fee. At the rate sales are currently going, it will take many months to earn back even enough to pay that fee (with the company making no money on the deal for our time editing and laying it out, let alone any admin costs for selling and advertising it) and it seems pretty unlikely sales will stay steady for that period of time and not fall off eventually. Halving the price would certainly bring in more sales- it might even bring in enough more sales to increase our overall numbers (though I'm not sure of that), and we're certainly not averse to that. But my point is sales would need to do a lot more than double their current rate before we'd do another book at all. We're not trying to mislead you here. We're genuinely interested in making material like this available to Hero fans and we're trying to work out how to do that. Unfortunately, our landlords and creditors keep on insisting we give them money for stuff. We won't pretend we don't want to make money on these products, but we're not out to rip you guys off. dw

Is this actually the case? I'd hate to think people who are fans enough of our product to want to playtest for us were choosing then not to help us stick around as a company. That puts us in the position of having to choose between playtesting publicly (and therefore having better product) and making a living financially. I certainly understand and sympathize with not having enough money to support your hobby to the extent you'd like to. But if you're really saying you would have bought the product if you hadn't had the opportunity to playtest it, well, that means we'd need to reevaluate how we do things. dw

Okay, several people seem to think it's the price. Fair enough, we're willing to look at the pricing model. Would you be more interested in a book of similar size and general quality, but with considerably less art, for $8 or $9? At that price, we're more competitive with the small D20 publishers who currently dominate the PDF sites. On the other hand, quality artists and writers don't work at those prices. There's a reason those books are as cheap as they are. We really can't afford to put out any book for $6, and even if we did sell twice or even three times as many for half the price we're still not coming close to paying the artists and writer involved. dw

Originally posted by keithcurtis > How do sales from the website store compare to retail outlets? Traditionally, much fewer, perhaps by a factor of ten. Fortunately, most of the costs are much lower, too. > Could it be that there is no "shelf space" so to speak? Do any other game companies sell pdf products on disk at brick and mortar stores? If so, how do they sell? All of that is factored into our sales predictions. We expect a PDF-only product to move much fewer units than a hard book. However, SoB so far is selling even fewer than we had conservatively guessed. >I have rarely bought electronic documents (though I do subscribe to Digital Hero and Pyramid). Mostly for the reasons listed by others. So, what, if anything, can we do to change that? If there's nothing we can offer to make our most die-hard fans try the line, we probably shouldn't be dedicating any resources to it. We've had fans tell us they want these products- were you all kidding? ;)dw

Re: PDF Got the message. However, to be clear, you should be aware that it's pretty unlikely that SoB will ever come out in print, especially if nobody buys it as a PDF. "Hero Plus" is a PDF, E-book only line, designed for us to be able to provide products that can't justify hard-copy production. Modules historically have not sold well enough for a company like Hero to be able to afford to make them. dw

So, we've had "Shades of Black" up for a bit more than a week now, and to be honest, despite rave reviews from those who do have it, sales so far have been pretty disappointing. As the first release in what we hope will become a new line for us, that's a matter of some concern. So, let's open up the discussion. Why haven't you bought this product? Not interested in modules? Not interested in this particular module, but might be in others? Not interested in PDFs at all? Plan to get it but don't have any cash? Let us know the scoop!

Re: Oh My... Geez, I tried to make the Champs and CKC miscues up to you by naming the street the warehouse in Chapter 5 after you, and now I've got to come up with something else! Let's see, how about a duchy in the Turakian Age or something? dw

Re: Re: San Angelo Fan Curses! He's stolen our sinister marketing plan, the fiend! We'll have to go back to our first plan, where we lie and tell everybody color art is *really expensive*, when actually it's free! In fact, if you put color art in a book, printers pay you! No one must ever know... wait, did I just use my outdoors voice? dw

Good pie!?! Give with the details, man! dw

You mean, the opportunity to meet both me and William Shatner at the same show isn't special enough for you? dw

Battlegrounds actually came off press late last night, should be shipping to most distros tomorrow, and will be on store shelves in a week to ten days across the country and around the world.

To get back to the original post, the Secret Crisis really did happen in my Golden Age campaign, allowing the players to spend a few sessions playing characters from throughout history (it was actually a sequel to an earlier story, where the heroes traveled forwards in time and met their descendants in the Silver Age, who went on to become the Fabulous Five and the Sentinels in current continuity.) Among the characters who appeared in that story as time-lost "superheroes" were Godzilla, Steve Austin, Dr. Who, the Lensmen, Kwai Chang Caine, Sherlock Holmes, the Lone Ranger, several Phantoms and the various superpowered members of KISS. dw

RR Donnelly, in Ohio. dw

I'd have him come by early, at least. We're bringing a lot of copies, but last year Champions went by in a flash... dw

You're a "many other"! Okay, Geoff Speare will be there too, if you like that sort of thing, I suppose. dw