Calico JesseAdvanced Dungeons and Dragons was the first RPG Heartbreaker.
Fight me.
Digital Mark λ ☕️ 🕹 👽@deinol As I understand the Forge people, they meant it as a slander against games that were too complex to learn in one session or required "math" (anything more than 1-digit addition), and wouldn't make a lot of money or displace D&D.
But AD&D made a stupendous amount of money, funnelled all of it to Gary instead of Dave until the lawsuit, displaced Basic D&D by about 25-50% until they pretty much killed Basic for AD&D 2E. Remained too hard for Forgeites to learn.
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@deinol Most of the "heartbreaker" games were massively more successful than the Forge games.
Palladium, Arduin, WHFRP are still in print & cool after almost 50 years.
The one I almost agreed with them on was Imagine RPG, what a mess! But it's also still in print, has supplements & fans.
Dangerous Journeys got TSR'd which is both sad & karmic justice, but it still had more books & income (but not profit after lawsuit).
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I don’t think any of those were considered Heartbreakers. The Heartbreakers were games where the designer clearly hasn’t played anything except AD&D and didn’t learn any of the lessons from the variety of games in the 80s that you mentioned.
@deinol The Forge forums and people I met, def considered Palladium & Arduin Grimoire heartbreakers, to the extent they were aware they existed. Imagine got roasted a LOT (and again, I don't disagree on it… but it survived and the Forge is dead).
Arguably the Forge lives on in PbtA and FitD games.
Certainly Burning Wheel is still around.
E.T.Smith@E_T_Smith Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.
Wilhelm Fitzpatrick@deinol Burning Wheel is more a fellow-traveller than an outgrowth of the Forge, since Luke was well into his journey already when he encountered the Forge. I think it did however give him the confidence to fully embrace his own vision in BW Revised, so in that way BW becomes a study in heartbreak averted 😏
@mdhughes @deinol That's rather a fundamental misunderstanding of the original intent behind the term. It wasn't the math, it was the misdirected creativity that made the original FHBs as tragic as they were compelling. Go read the original essay: https://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/9/
@E_T_Smith @deinol
> It fascinates me how far some of these go, especially in combination with the bizarre math necessary to derive the secondary attributes. <
I played semi-regularly with several Forgeites in Seattle, math-phobia was *endemic* among them. Hand-holding them thru even middle-complexity systems was like teaching kindergarten.
"Part Four: Business and marketing" is exactly what I said: The idea these wouldn't compete! Well, many did, they're still here & thriving.
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I must admit it had been a long time since I looked at the article, so it distilled into my head as “passionate project with good ideas but a disorganized mess and also some mediocre ideas“.
@deinol “passionate project with good ideas but a disorganized mess and also some mediocre ideas.“
Many FHBs weren't bad from a design perspective, some were even comparable to professional games. I feel the main flaw Edwards was trying highlight in the essay was one of marketing -- independent designers who didn't know any other model of publication but AD&D, so that's what they emulated (at great expense) ... which was a ludicrous thing to do at a time when AD&D was dominant.
@deinol Admittedly, FHBs as Edwards presented them were the result of pre-internet circumstances that faded out some time ago (cheap digital publishing and the dawn of the OGL in particular being the major sea changes). So the venacular meaning of "Fantasy Heartbreaker" has degraded in actual use over the years -- I've heard kids using it to broadly mean "something that's like D&D, but isn't," including Shadowdark and Pathfinder.
mhd@E_T_Smith @deinol I never quite got that part of the essay. He said that you couldn't sell house ruled D&Ds in the 90s. Sure. But that sounds like you could in any previous age. What was true of Hahlmabrea or Darkurthe was also true of What Price Glory or High Fantasy in the 70s (Arduin was probably as good as it got). And heck, I'd argue that it didn't change in the age he was writing in, either.
Even if his other point would be used, focusing on a fictional "One Neat Thing" and thus turning the heartbreaker into a TRVE KVLT Forge game. Which IMHO is quite bonkers anyways, as that's clearly not what the heartbreaker authors would want. It's like telling a post punk band to get rid of the guitars because that sounds like all the other post punk bands and focus instead on that short MiniMoog sting shortly before the chorus.
I wish we would find a better word for "D&D-ish game", but right now "FHB" has some usefulness. (Personally I consider removing it from this origin a feature, not a bug, but that's at least partially spite-based)
@mhd @deinol Sure, anyone could always sell their house-ruled version of D&D at vanity scale for the fun of it, but the issue was people chasing D&D-scale mass-market success, and going broke pursuing it. Before the GNS foolishness took it over, the Forge's focus was on the practicalities of independent publishing - what printers to order with, which word processor to use, etc. The first games to come out of that weren't "Forge-like" at all. That's the perspective the essay is coming from. 1/2
@mhd @deinol I can understand folks feeling Edwards and his most rapid fans lost sight of the original intent and got annoyingly judgey and "One True Way." But in the Forge's early original context "hey, maybe don't take on a second mortgage to chase your conviction that the world is waiting to throw money at you for hit-locations, spell points, and five distinct varieties of elfs," isn't an unreasonable reality check (even as awkwardly as Edwards presented it). 2/2
@E_T_Smith @deinol To be fair, I don't get that focus on the business side of it from my own reading. The way I see it, most heartbreaker authors were some guys who published a slightly polished version of their home game's house rules. Which were D&D-ish games.
Not having interviewed the game's creators, that's a guess, of course. But so is thinking that they went deep into depth (second mortage), or even had the intention of rivaling the output of TSR (Edwards insistence that they were in the "lines" business).
People often are proud of their creation. So they want to publish it. Sure, I guess they all would've liked that this became the next big thing and they could live from writing and selling RPGs, a dream that a lot of gamers once had (before being paid for playing games became an option). But it's pretty weird to me to suggest that they should forget the games they actually played, and rewrite them in some gaming-gimmick focused format (e.g. just picking the spell creation rules, throwing some Alan Moore on it, then publish an expansion called "Dark Urges of Dark Urthe").
Never mind that the business & marketing paragraph was quite small at the end, preceded by a lot of shitting on their design sensibilities in ways that made my eyes roll so hard, I still haven't recovered from it years afterwards ("social contract time bomb").