The Complete line of books for Hero were a step in the right direction. Though while not too little way too late to save HG.

In any case the underlying issue of the complexity and crunchiness of the rules still remains and unfortunately still something major that will keep hurting their sales. As much as as some in the hobby don't like it the trend at least what I can see is towards rules light and less crunchy set of rules with fans. At least enough so that HG is on life support and SJGames would probably be too if they did not have other Ips such as Munchkin to fall back on.

It is like how the Dark Eye even othiugh it maybe played in North America will never really make an impact in the same market. Even before the D20 system spoiled Northern American gamers many were simply not interested in the Dark Eye rules. Many like Rifts found the background interesting like myself. Many also like myself were not interested in that core system. Gamers like non-gamers will always take the easy way out. They may say champion the Hero System to your face and sday the love it. One can bet behind close doors they will never play it and go with an easier system.

As long as an effort is made to try and fix the issues of the current edition of an rpg many will usually end up buying the rpg even if they have funky dice. Tale a loo at Star Wars from FGG. Even with the Funky dice it is a big hit for the company. While I find D6 Star Wars easier to run without requiring any proprietary dice. Their advice on handling Jedi is piss poor at best and essentially telling the GM to screw a player over if he uses the force. Instead of you know actually trying to fix the issue. From what I hear FGG actually tries to fix the issue.

In the end if a company rpg or otherwise will not give enough of the fabase what they want they will go somewhere. Brand loyalty or consumer loyalty to me is a myth. If they can get what they want elsewhere they will do so.

The Complete line of books for Hero were a step in the right direction. Though while not too little way too late to save HG.

In any case the underlying issue of the complexity and crunchiness of the rules still remains and unfortunately still something major that will keep hurting their sales. As much as as some in the hobby don't like it the trend at least what I can see is towards rules light and less crunchy set of rules with fans. At least enough so that HG is on life support and SJGames would probably be too if they did not have other Ips such as Munchkin to fall back on.

It is like how the Dark Eye even othiugh it maybe played in North America will never really make an impact in the same market. Even before the D20 system spoiled Northern American gamers many were simply not interested in the Dark Eye rules. Many like Rifts found the background interesting like myself. Many also like myself were not interested in that core system. Gamers like non-gamers will always take the easy way out. They may say champion the Hero System to your face and sday the love it. One can bet behind close doors they will never play it and go with an easier system.

As long as an effort is made to try and fix the issues of the current edition of an rpg many will usually end up buying the rpg even if they have funky dice. Tale a loo at Star Wars from FGG. Even with the Funky dice it is a big hit for the company. While I find D6 Star Wars easier to run without requiring any proprietary dice. Their advice on handling Jedi is piss poor at best and essentially telling the GM to screw a player over if he uses the force. Instead of you know actually trying to fix the issue. From what I hear FGG actually tries to fix the issue.

In the end if a company rpg or otherwise will not give enough of the fabase what they want they will go somewhere. Brand loyalty or consumer loyalty to me is a myth. If they can get what they want elsewhere they will do so.

Quote from: sureshot;1096545The Complete line of books for Hero were a step in the right direction. Though while not too little way too late to save HG.

In any case the underlying issue of the complexity and crunchiness of the rules still remains and unfortunately still something major that will keep hurting their sales. As much as as some in the hobby don't like it the trend at least what I can see is towards rules light and less crunchy set of rules with fans. At least enough so that HG is on life support and SJGames would probably be too if they did not have other Ips such as Munchkin to fall back on.

It is like how the Dark Eye even othiugh it maybe played in North America will never really make an impact in the same market. Even before the D20 system spoiled Northern American gamers many were simply not interested in the Dark Eye rules. Many like Rifts found the background interesting like myself. Many also like myself were not interested in that core system. Gamers like non-gamers will always take the easy way out. They may say champion the Hero System to your face and sday the love it. One can bet behind close doors they will never play it and go with an easier system.

As long as an effort is made to try and fix the issues of the current edition of an rpg many will usually end up buying the rpg even if they have funky dice. Tale a loo at Star Wars from FGG. Even with the Funky dice it is a big hit for the company. While I find D6 Star Wars easier to run without requiring any proprietary dice. Their advice on handling Jedi is piss poor at best and essentially telling the GM to screw a player over if he uses the force. Instead of you know actually trying to fix the issue. From what I hear FGG actually tries to fix the issue.

In the end if a company rpg or otherwise will not give enough of the fabase what they want they will go somewhere. Brand loyalty or consumer loyalty to me is a myth. If they can get what they want elsewhere they will do so.

One could say there is no reason to produce any game that is not some flavor of D&D. It is the largest seller, so clearly all the rest are failures, no?

Something went wrong with HERO, but scrapping it and coming out with a super light, vaguely resembles HERO game is not much of a solution.


I think a major problem for tool kit games like HERO and GURPS is how much do you need beyond the core books, and major supplements? They are very DIY, so once you have the major tools, you have less and less reason to buy anything. Each succeeding product after the core is a dwindling market, say 100% buy the core, but only 60% buy FH, then 50% of those buy a FH companion, 30% buy a FH setting. Repeat for each genre with some being less popular than others. Seriously how may copies of Luche Libre HERO do you think they sold?

In some ways they are sort of like the classic brick-like Volvo 240. A great, very practical car, but it barely changed over 20 years of production and the damn things are impossible to kill. Once they sold to the 2 million people that wanted one it was all downhill from there, because those who wanted one had one. There was little reason to buy another, because it would be just like the one they already had. HERO 6E is like the Volvo 850, a nice car trying to reach new markets, but the numbers of new buyers was small and the owners of 240s, not interested.  


HERO in particular also suffers from being a one game company. When that one game hits a slump for whatever reason, it is bad news because there is nothing else to fall back on. Most companies have a broader product base, with multiple RPGs and often some board and card games which can carry them over even during a larger decline in one of those markets.

Claims that complex doesn't sell has been around since the 90s when story games first raised their heads, yet we continue to see more complex games continue to be produced and have success, examples D&D 3E and PF. Still waiting to see if the allegedly more complex PF2 is a success or a bomb.

Easy is almost always the largest market. People are essentially lazy and like cheap, easy solutions. No reason games should be any different. Not that light games are bad, but they have a low entry point making them accessible to the largest number of people.

Toadmaster, you are of course correct, but I had a little bit of an ulterior motive in primarily pushing 5-6E. I am hoping that more will get involved with it. I think the BBB was the point at which (before it was touted as a universal system) it was developed enough to really see that it could be used universally.

As for the Complete series, they are a distillation of the 2 big 6E books, removing a lot of what some considered to be extraneous examples. While I love Steve Long's work, I think he is such a completist that he had to make sure that there were examples covering every question he thought might be asked. I have both, and while I think the 2 books are useful, I only need Champions Complete at the table. While it's true that the complex criticisms started far earlier than 5E, as you note, the stigma still holds. There was even someone that shot FRED with a gun to proved just how thick and weighty the edition was, and by association considered complex and not considered "complete". While I agree the character creation can be complex, at the table the system is very easy and I very rarely need to reference the rules.

Yes, I have heard that from many in the Hero community concerning modules. I have no doubt it is true, because by the point 5E came out, most people were crafting their own stuff and had what they needed in sourcebooks from 4E. Yes, and they have updated the sourcebooks for 6E as well.

Sadly, because of the necessary frontloaded effort, it is not likely it will attract casual gm's and players.

I also think that "Complete" systems have an economic disadvantage from the get go, because unless they have a widely recognized IP associated with them, they hamstring their ability to generate cash flow with supplements.

It also should be noted that a few independent creators are publishing things for the Hero Games Store at extremely reasonable prices. Including settings, sourcebooks and whole magic systems.

Quote from: Aglondir;1096465Is that in Gurps Powers? Or in Characters or Campaigns?

Characters. Powers is about how to manipulate the advantages, enhancements, and limitations, to handle different types of powers.

Quote from: shuddemell;1096589While I love Steve Long's work, I think he is such a completist that he had to make sure that there were examples covering every question he thought might be asked.


While I agree the character creation can be complex, at the table the system is very easy and I very rarely need to reference the rules.

The man certainly could have used a brutal editor who would have cut to the chase. Examples are good, but in 5E and I assume 6E they could be excessive at times.


In high school I used to build 3E HERO PCs from my head, only later using the books to double check point costs and make some fine adjustments.

Quote from: sureshot;1096545As long as an effort is made to try and fix the issues of the current edition of an rpg many will usually end up buying the rpg even if they have funky dice. Tale a loo at Star Wars from FGG. Even with the Funky dice it is a big hit for the company. While I find D6 Star Wars easier to run without requiring any proprietary dice. Their advice on handling Jedi is piss poor at best and essentially telling the GM to screw a player over if he uses the force. Instead of you know actually trying to fix the issue. From what I hear FGG actually tries to fix the issue.

In WEG's defense, D6 Star Wars was only ever based on the original trilogy, so their Force powers fall way short of what we saw in the prequels.

I do plan to pick up a copy of one of the FGG Star Wars games just to read it. Which one would you recommend?

Hero System as a tool for GM's who enjoy crafting the game is a very good description, in more ways than one.  Essentially, for good or ill, it is akin to a pre-industrial system, in that every part above the most basic has to be made by hand, every time.  It expects you to do that, and thus gives you the tools to do it.  But it also doesn't give you any serious short cuts.  This is also why the supplements don't sell as well.

As an example, let me contrast my typical D&D DiY with my typical Hero DiY work:  

D&D:  I'm only in trouble if the player really wants a character that the game just will not do.  I can get around that with an agreement about what is possible in the campaign world.  Then I go about assembling the various elements.  The equipment list is standard, except you also use X, Y, Z.  These classes are available. These races with these slight modifications.  And so on.  

Hero:  I need to do the characters myself based on what players describe, provide them components (e.g. spells, equipment, etc.) then let them build the characters, or let the players do everything.  If the latter, then I instead need to provide guidelines and maybe a few hard limits (depending on the players) to fit the campaign.  Then I need to do all the other stuff too.

There's some overlap in both that I'm glossing over for brevity, but the point I'm driving at is that with Hero someone has to take the individual pieces and make the character out of those.  Or they can use packages or templates or whatever equivalent the GM provides instead.  And I actually think if you want to introduce a bunch of new players to Hero, that's the best way to do it--make your own "templates" and only let them pick from them (or some additions that you craft for them by request, after they suggest a character concept).  It certainly worked well enough for me getting multiple Fantasy Hero groups started from nothing, with players that had mostly never played an RPG or had only brief exposure to D&D.  It works even better if you use a custom character sheet where the first page is built on the component level, with the details hidden in subsequent pages or house rule documents.  The standard Hero System sheet leaves the system guts hanging out all over the place.  (GURPS has the same problem, but it is masked by GURPS being more clever about how it names things to make it less obvious.  The guts are still hanging out, but they aren't bleeding on the player.)

Problem is, I got really tired of that work.  The supplements don't help, unless I conform to the campaign world view of the supplement.  If I'm doing that, then I lose a big chunk of what makes Hero appealing in the first place, fitting my vision of the campaign into the rules.  If I've got to rewrite the spells, powers, etc., and recalculate the costs from the raw bits, then all the supplements provide are examples.  

In 5E/6E, what Hero really needed was something highly useful to come out of whatever rule changes were necessary in order to make "templates" not only work, but be a truly integrated piece of the system.  That would have, however, required some serious changes to how effects, advantages, limitations, etc. are calculated.  I'm not sure it was even possible.  I played around with it for a couple of years in a home brew Fantasy Hero, trying to get my 200+ list of spells into a system where I could systematically change assumptions about a new campaign without using software tools to recalculate the entire book.  Someone on the 5E team took to heart the criticism that Hero needed a lot more examples.  They missed that it needed more than that.

In any case, shortly thereafter it occurred to me that universal systems, aren't.  And generic systems are, very.

It was pointed out to me some years back that you don't need to actually calculate the points. Just pick the effects, advantages, limitations you want and that the description.

For example

Ant-Lion, Giant
Insect, Wild Animal
ST: 13 HP: 13 Speed: 6.25
DX: 13 Will: 10 Move: 5
IQ: 3 Per: 10
HT: 12 FP: 12 SM: +1
3 hexes, 300 lbs.
Dodge: 9 Parry: -- DR: 1 (Flexible)
Pincers (15): 1d cut (Reach C)

Halkmenan Rebel
A lightly armed Rebel Warrior
ST: 10 HP: 10 Speed: 5.5
DX: 10 Will: 10 Move: 5
IQ: 10 Per: 10 SM: 0
HT: 12 FP: 12 DR 0
Dodge: 8 Parry: 9 Block: 9 Shield: 1
Spear (12): 1d+1 imp 2h 1d+3 imp; Reach 1/1,2
Large Knife (12): 1d cut or 1d-1 imp; Reach C,1/C
-1 parry
Punch (12): 1d-2 cr; Reach C.
Traits:
Skills:  Brawling-12; Spear-12; Shield-12; Large Knife-11, Stealth-10, Religious Ritual (Hamakhis)-10
• Spear, $500, 3 lbs.
• Large Knife, $40, 1 lb.
• Small Shield (DB 1), $40, 8 lbs.

Quote from: Lurkndog;1096659In WEG's defense, D6 Star Wars was only ever based on the original trilogy, so their Force powers fall way short of what we saw in the prequels.

I do plan to pick up a copy of one of the FGG Star Wars games just to read it. Which one would you recommend?

I am probanly not the best person to ask. The dice at first really turned me away from really giving the games a chance. From what I have been told Age of Rebellion is the best of the three.

Tenbones is the best to ask.

Agreed, an editor with an eye to conciseness and brevity would have been extremely helpful. And yes, he made examples for even corner cases. So while the 6E tomes are very useful for the GM, they are daunting and largely unnecessary for the player.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell;1096683Hero System as a tool for GM's who enjoy crafting the game is a very good description, in more ways than one.  Essentially, for good or ill, it is akin to a pre-industrial system, in that every part above the most basic has to be made by hand, every time.  It expects you to do that, and thus gives you the tools to do it.  But it also doesn't give you any serious short cuts.  This is also why the supplements don't sell as well....

While this is largely true, there are some systems built with Hero that actually are cohesive games in and of themselves and don't require you to build everything from scratch. Kamarathin, Narosia, Monster Hunters Inc., and Johlros are all examples of games built with the Hero Toolbox that avoid the trouble of building everything, and also put the guts back in the torso, so to speak. Problem is, that they still carry the stigma of the toolbox, rather than being used on their own merit. If they appeal to you... they are a way to avoid the issues you bring up. I particularly like a lot the material for Johlros. Though, largely the impression you convey here is the median opinion of Hero in the gaming community.

Quote from: Toadmaster;1096619The man certainly could have used a brutal editor who would have cut to the chase. Examples are good, but in 5E and I assume 6E they could be excessive at times.


In high school I used to build 3E HERO PCs from my head, only later using the books to double check point costs and make some fine adjustments.

Agreed, an editor with an eye to conciseness and brevity would have been extremely helpful. And yes, he made examples for even corner cases. So while the 6E tomes are very useful for the GM, they are daunting and largely unnecessary for the player.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell;1096683In 5E/6E, what Hero really needed was something highly useful to come out of whatever rule changes were necessary in order to make "templates" not only work, but be a truly integrated piece of the system.  That would have, however, required some serious changes to how effects, advantages, limitations, etc. are calculated.  I'm not sure it was even possible.  I played around with it for a couple of years in a home brew Fantasy Hero, trying to get my 200+ list of spells into a system where I could systematically change assumptions about a new campaign without using software tools to recalculate the entire book.  Someone on the 5E team took to heart the criticism that Hero needed a lot more examples.  They missed that it needed more than that.

In any case, shortly thereafter it occurred to me that universal systems, aren't.  And generic systems are, very.

This is something that I think many agreed with, but seemed to get no traction. There isn't a need to scrap and rebuild the system, it is a case of providing a stand alone game built on HERO, but not sold as a tool kit. Here is a list of spells, here is a list of equipment, here is a list of monsters. No need for detailed lists of how they were built, just how they work. That goes back to 2E Espionage, 3E with FH, JI and DI. These were only tool kits in that they were compatible with the tool box (Champions) so a GM could build additional stuff, but most of the inner workings were concealed so the players GM didn't have to think about it.

In play HERO is not actually that hard, I think simpler than GURPS and not a great deal more difficult than D&D. It is the building that can be overwhelming.


Again, I haven't actually read the Complete books, but it is my impression that they kind of missed the boat on making the game more approachable. Yes, they reduced the content from 6E, but it doesn't sound like they actually reduced the complexity a great deal.


To your last point, I agree. I think you can cover a lot of ground with a set of rules, but at some point you either make it kind of vanilla, or tend to get complicated (optional rules to cover every possible option).

From what I've seen Savage Worlds sort of takes the approach of 3E HERO where a particular setting adopts certain standards, and leaves it there. You might find a few inconsistencies between SW sci-fi setting and SW fantasy setting because they chose different options to fit the setting / genre. The players don't have to get all wrapped around the axle checking every possible combination of the core rules options. A GM can go back to the core rules and edit those choices, but that is a choice the are making to add more work for themselves.

Quote from: shuddemell;1096718While this is largely true, there are some systems built with Hero that actually are cohesive games in and of themselves and don't require you to build everything from scratch. Kamarathin, Narosia, Monster Hunters Inc., and Johlros are all examples of games built with the Hero Toolbox that avoid the trouble of building everything, and also put the guts back in the torso, so to speak. Problem is, that they still carry the stigma of the toolbox, rather than being used on their own merit. If they appeal to you... they are a way to avoid the issues you bring up. I particularly like a lot the material for Johlros. Though, largely the impression you convey here is the median opinion of Hero in the gaming community.

Exactly, and this was also the case during the 3E era. FH, DI and JI were much easier to get into than Champions, because you were just building your character, perhaps using some of the pre-made minor powers / talents and that was it. Not building your super suit, no EC or MP to worry about, no trying to figure out the most cost effective way to build a simple flashlight.


I've seen some who claim that HERO without the extensive powers section isn't HERO, but I don't agree with that having lived through a period where many HERO games didn't include a powers section.

Although I disagree that the whole focus needs to change, Sureshot has a point. There is a need to offer a variant of HERO that is significantly easier if they ever want to grow the player base significantly. That doesn't mean gut the core of the rules, but make a serious effort to rein in all the options so people can take things one bite at a time.

Having started with 1E Champions, it can be easy to gloss over how overwhelming the game has become. I don't know if I just picked up 5E today if I would have the patience to learn it.