Oh well, even if he is a spineless coward he at least has some buddies to defend him by reporting the thread as a personal attack. Well done, mannydipresso!
Manny (formerly Eric J-D or something like that) has written a few good things and I've even had a nice PM chat with him a couple times. But for quite a while all I see out of him is, well, Vladimir-Posnerism (to coin a term).
And -E. says sensible and thoughtful things, which really are out of place on rpg.net.
Yeah, on the one hand Mr. -E
seems to miss the main textual thrust of the heartbreaker essays--I mean "uninformed derivatives of D&D with just one or two nuggets of gold", sure I've seen those. What was that one, Knights and Berserkers and Legerdemain?....pretty much defined the idea, if not by the system (which I really don't know at all) then the utter failure of the author to really explain why anyone should bother with it at all. Which he did to me (i.e., utterly fail to explain the reason for his game) in person at Origins lo these many years ago, BTW.
But it all falls down in the face of Palladium, and Bard's Atlantis, and Talislanta, and very likely Earthdawn. And that's just on the raw mechanical level; once you get to the bit that -E highlighted, the part about "social contract time bombs", the net becomes wider...and less accurate. This is one of the deep messages of the essays. The other message, or implication, really, whether RE realizes it or not, is that heartbreakers are heartbreakers largely because of failures of marketing, not design. And this leads right into his other agenda, which is the creation and maintenance of a market-as-community. I don't think this can be denied, it's only a matter of whether you put a positive spin on it or negative.