fantasy heartbreakers: a theory

[Marco]

Marco:

What I mean by the confused reaction to D&D is the love/hate relationship for the game.  My main point was actually trying to compare how my own reaction and the reaction to many I knew at the time to AD&D to what happens with the creators of Heartbreakers.  I was offering my own reaction as part of an attempt to understand what was going on in creating these games; this is, after all, the topic of the thread.

-Wayne

Yes. I get that. And when you continue to say "what happens with the creators of Heartbreakers" you are continuing to speak for many people you don't know about things you have no information about. Many of them are presumably proud of their creations and built them for reasons unrealted to a "very confused emotional reaction."

It reads as though you either do not understand, or do not believe that a person could build a game you'd identify as a heartbreaker for any other reason than yours.

That's not cool.

The reason you attribute to anyone who does that, a "very confused emotional reaction" is something that I suspect most designers of anything would find insulting.

That's *really* not cool.

Also: I think I'm the only person who posts on The Forge with *any* regularity who sees this thread in that light. That doesn't make it any more correct, nor does it make it any more polite. These are real books, written by real people (in many cases, I expect while there might be a single name on the cover, there will be others who worked on it). Until they come and discuss what or why they did what they did, speaking for them, like that, is not a valid form of discourse.

-Marco

[Cadriel]

Marco:

I think you're overreacting a lot, and more than just here (the Incoherence thread is what springs to mind).  It sounds nasty to say it, but what is essentially at issue here is why people develop games that, while made in love and with all good intention, are frankly bad.  My own offering springs from something Ron said that struck a chord with me from my days as a devotee of AD&D, and a recollection of a very powerful love / hate relationship.  I feel fit to generalize from my own experience not because I want to feel superior, but because I was awash in the AD&D culture of the mid-to-late '90s, where my sentiment was shared quite openly among devotees of the game.  We all knew that AD&D had something very powerful that we wanted (moreso than any other games for a lot of people), but we had to struggle with a system that got in the way a lot.

You are harping on the phrase "very confused emotional reaction" too much.  I use it to describe the simultaneous love/hate relationship a lot of AD&D fans, myself included, had with the game.  You seem to be trying to make it into a massive attack by me on the creators of the Heartbreakers, but such is not the case.  It is extrapolation from my own part of a shared experience into the possible domain of others, in this case those who went beyond rules mods into making full-on roleplaying games that, for all the love and effort put into them, fail to do anything but recreate a variation on D&D.

You seem to object to the entire purpose of this thread, in which case I'm not the one you should be taking this up with.  But frankly, I think that the Heartbreaker as a phenomenon is a fairly interesting thing and bears some scrutiny.  That can't always involve having the authors come in and give personal commentary, but frankly:  their work is open for public consumption, and thereby for general critique.  Part of critiquing a work is attempting to get at the motivations behind its creation; read legitimate reviews of any art form and you'll find that.  If they wish to clarify their intentions, then that's fine and that's their wish.  But other people don't need to wait on their approval to make commentary.

-Wayne

[John Kim]

It reads as though you either do not understand, or do not believe that a person could build a game you'd identify as a heartbreaker for any other reason than yours.
...
Also: I think I'm the only person who posts on The Forge with *any* regularity who sees this thread in that light. That doesn't make it any more correct, nor does it make it any more polite. These are real books, written by real people (in many cases, I expect while there might be a single name on the cover, there will be others who worked on it). Until they come and discuss what or why they did what they did, speaking for them, like that, is not a valid form of discourse.

Well, Marco, I post regularly and I share similar sentiments.  I have frequently been disturbed by condescension towards what people call "heartbreakers".  Unfortunately, I'm still not familiar with any of the twelve games that Ron originally defined as "heartbreakers" in his two essays.  Thus, I feel I can't say a whole lot about the topic.  On the other hand, I sometimes get the impression that others talk about these games as well without having played them or even read them.  

It sounds nasty to say it, but what is essentially at issue here is why people develop games that, while made in love and with all good intention, are frankly bad.  
...
You seem to be trying to make it into a massive attack by me on the creators of the Heartbreakers, but such is not the case.  It is extrapolation from my own part of a shared experience into the possible domain of others, in this case those who went beyond rules mods into making full-on roleplaying games that, for all the love and effort put into them, fail to do anything but recreate a variation on D&D.  

OK, here's the thing.  D&D in its various incarnations are fun games.  Heck, even here on the Forge it has tended to top the list of "Games Most Enjoyed" in the profiling surveys (along with Call of Cthulhu and Sorcerer).  Ron's lament over the heartbreakers he reviews is that they don't go far enough from D&D -- because in his agenda he wants to see more variety in indie RPGs, which is a fine thing.  However, Ron does describe the "heartbreaker" games as being impressively GNS coherent and well-articulated, as well as filled with creativity.  

If you are looking for something which is entirely unlike D&D, then yes, they are probably not what you are looking for.  But that doesn't mean that they are bad.  Of course, as I said, I haven't read them so I am going mostly on what Ron has to say.  I'd be interested in seeing other people's reviews of them.

[Marco]

Marco:

I think you're overreacting a lot, and more than just here (the Incoherence thread is what springs to mind).  It sounds nasty to say it, but what is essentially at issue here is why people develop games that, while made in love and with all good intention, are frankly bad.  My own offering springs from something Ron said that struck a chord with me from my days as a devotee of AD&D, and a recollection of a very powerful love / hate relationship.  I feel fit to generalize from my own experience not because I want to feel superior, but because I was awash in the AD&D culture of the mid-to-late '90s, where my sentiment was shared quite openly among devotees of the game.  We all knew that AD&D had something very powerful that we wanted (moreso than any other games for a lot of people), but we had to struggle with a system that got in the way a lot.

You are harping on the phrase "very confused emotional reaction" too much.  I use it to describe the simultaneous love/hate relationship a lot of AD&D fans, myself included, had with the game.  You seem to be trying to make it into a massive attack by me on the creators of the Heartbreakers, but such is not the case.  It is extrapolation from my own part of a shared experience into the possible domain of others, in this case those who went beyond rules mods into making full-on roleplaying games that, for all the love and effort put into them, fail to do anything but recreate a variation on D&D.

You seem to object to the entire purpose of this thread, in which case I'm not the one you should be taking this up with.  But frankly, I think that the Heartbreaker as a phenomenon is a fairly interesting thing and bears some scrutiny.  That can't always involve having the authors come in and give personal commentary, but frankly:  their work is open for public consumption, and thereby for general critique.  Part of critiquing a work is attempting to get at the motivations behind its creation; read legitimate reviews of any art form and you'll find that.  If they wish to clarify their intentions, then that's fine and that's their wish.  But other people don't need to wait on their approval to make commentary.

-Wayne

I'm not askin' you to wait for their approval--I'm tellin' you that legitimate reviews of art don't do what you're doing: playing telepath.

Reviews of paintings discuss the emotion invoked in the viewer and make references to the technique and even go back to discuss knownrelevant events in the artist's life.

They don't say: "I came out of a bad relationship and wanted to paint an ugly picture of a girl. Picasso and all those like him had bad relationships with women."

You want to discuss their technique? Go for it. You want to discuss *your* reaction? Sure. That's all good and vaild.

You want to say it's "bad?" Fine. Say whatever you think.

If you happen to have some evidence that someone designed a game for those reasons or can say "During the 80-85 period, Joe Designer's AD&D games were marked with inter-party rivalry" -- hey, you're a critic.

But presently you don't do any of that. And it's pretty obvious. And it don't come off so good.

You don't gotta agree that I'm right--but hey, it's some information about how you're being read. And yes, I have told Ron I don't like the term. This is an example of why.

-Marco

[Marco]

Well, Marco, I post regularly and I share similar sentiments.  I have frequently been disturbed by condescension towards what people call "heartbreakers".  Unfortunately, I'm still not familiar with any of the twelve games that Ron originally defined as "heartbreakers" in his two essays.  Thus, I feel I can't say a whole lot about the topic.  On the other hand, I sometimes get the impression that others talk about these games as well without having played them or even read them.  

I'm glad to hear it. I've often admired your clarity of thought.

As for your comment about how they're not "bad"--I agree with that too. It's sparklin' clear to me that the people who built them wanted to capture the basic essence of D&D. It seems like they did. Doing what you set out to do is never poor workmanship.

-Marco

[xiombarg]

Woah, woah, woah, woah.

As the originator of this thread, the whole point of it is to speculate on what's going on with the authors of Fantasy Heartbreakers, using what information we have available. If the authors of any of these games are available to comment, then wonderful -- I'd be glad to add some hard data to my speculation. But, currently, as we have only the games themselves to work from, that's the data we're using.

Whether or not Fantasy Heartbreakers are bad or good is off-topic. I'm only interested in why people make them.

Also, in terms of the idea that "legitimate reviews of art don't do what you're doing: playing telepath"... Well, um, I see that in art reviews all the time, though I'd phrase it in a less pejorative way. Lacking access to the author directly, sometimes its all a reviewer CAN do.

However, this is all perilously off-topic. Marco and John, while I value your input, and find it interesting insomuch as you wish to contribute ideas as to why Fantasy Heartbreakers exist, claiming that such threads are offensive is off-topic. If you want to start a thread in, say, "Site Discussion" about the intent of such threads, I welcome you to do so, and would willingly participate in such a thread -- but it isn't on-topic for this one.

Now, whether such talk is offensive or not, Marco seems to assert that the real motivation behind a heartbreaker is to capture the "essence of D&D" with better mechanics. If this is so, why do several of them seem to rail against the assumptions of D&D even as they validate them, such as assuming characters will be greedy and then moving to counteract this?

Also, the idea that the authors want to improve on D&D is perilously close to asserting "A is A". We KNOW that's one of the author's motivations -- but why don't they, say, question more of D&D's assumptions? I assert it's because of lack of awareness that those assumptions CAN be questioned. (That doesn't mean the authors of the Heartbreakers are bad or wrong.)

[John Kim]

As the originator of this thread, the whole point of it is to speculate on what's going on with the authors of Fantasy Heartbreakers, using what information we have available. If the authors of any of these games are available to comment, then wonderful -- I'd be glad to add some hard data to my speculation. But, currently, as we have only the games themselves to work from, that's the data we're using.  

Fair enough.  However, the authors in question might have different motivations.  My request would be: people who speculate should bring up which of the heartbreakers they have read, which makes clear the data they are working from.  That is, someone who has read only Forge and Deathstalkers might come up with different ideas than someone who has read only Darkurthe Legends.  Unfortunately, as I said, I haven't read any of the 12 in question.  I have read Sovereign Stone -- does that count as a heartbreaker?  

Also, the idea that the authors want to improve on D&D is perilously close to asserting "A is A". We KNOW that's one of the author's motivations -- but why don't they, say, question more of D&D's assumptions? I assert it's because of lack of awareness that those assumptions CAN be questioned. (That doesn't mean the authors of the Heartbreakers are bad or wrong.)  

Hmm.  Even before your assertion, you assume that the author's simply failed to question the parts of D&D they imitated.  There is another possibility:  that the similarities to D&D are there because they were intended.  That is, the authors did consciously question whether to use a particular mechanic -- and they concluded that it was one of the parts of D&D which was good for their purposes.

[Marco]

Woah, woah, woah, woah.

As the originator of this thread, the whole point of it is to speculate on what's going on with the authors of Fantasy Heartbreakers, using what information we have available. If the authors of any of these games are available to comment, then wonderful -- I'd be glad to add some hard data to my speculation. But, currently, as we have only the games themselves to work from, that's the data we're using.

Whether or not Fantasy Heartbreakers are bad or good is off-topic. I'm only interested in why people make them.

Also, in terms of the idea that "legitimate reviews of art don't do what you're doing: playing telepath"... Well, um, I see that in art reviews all the time, though I'd phrase it in a less pejorative way. Lacking access to the author directly, sometimes its all a reviewer CAN do.

However, this is all perilously off-topic. Marco and John, while I value your input, and find it interesting insomuch as you wish to contribute ideas as to why Fantasy Heartbreakers exist, claiming that such threads are offensive is off-topic. If you want to start a thread in, say, "Site Discussion" about the intent of such threads, I welcome you to do so, and would willingly participate in such a thread -- but it isn't on-topic for this one.

Now, whether such talk is offensive or not, Marco seems to assert that the real motivation behind a heartbreaker is to capture the "essence of D&D" with better mechanics. If this is so, why do several of them seem to rail against the assumptions of D&D even as they validate them, such as assuming characters will be greedy and then moving to counteract this?

Also, the idea that the authors want to improve on D&D is perilously close to asserting "A is A". We KNOW that's one of the author's motivations -- but why don't they, say, question more of D&D's assumptions? I assert it's because of lack of awareness that those assumptions CAN be questioned. (That doesn't mean the authors of the Heartbreakers are bad or wrong.)

System Does Matter would seem to apply to mechanical rules as well as GNS mode of play (despite the fact that here, I almost always see it applied to GNS mode*). Therefore a proliferation of different rules along the same themes would be expected (although I'd have thought that would have generated a lot of excitement over, say, Runebearer early on, really). If one looks at it in that light, the answer is trivial**:

The designer observes players or characters are greedy. He doesn't like it. He puts in a rule to counteract it. If that rule doesn't work for you that's just more evidence that a given rule doesn't strike everyone the same way. I submit that Cadriel's statement that the games are, frankly, "bad" is evidence that the avenue of speculation is highly and un-fruitfully biased. John makes that point very clearly.

If I were to start a thread on why indie games get made and postulated that they were "the result of emotionally troubled people who couldn't cooperate with the majority of the gaming population and therefore had to create games that would only attract other like-minded players", would you see that as valid, insightful, and worthy criticism? I wouldn't. I'd be kinda offended.

-Marco
* if you say it *is* applied to mechanical rules via GNS mode discussions, we can discuss that in PM.

** This is an application of Occam's Razor.

[W. Don]

There is another possibility: that the similarities to D&D are there because they were intended. That is, the authors did consciously question whether to use a particular mechanic -- and they concluded that it was one of the parts of D&D which was good for their purposes.

This just occured to me: Would this be considered Drift? That is, the "desire to heal D&D" in the form of fantasy heartbreakers are examples of Drift but on a completely massive scale. What many of the authors of say D&D-based heartbreakers are doing is really just trying to drift D&D into a form that fits their needs (based on all the stuff that's already there).

[xiombarg]

If I were to start a thread on why indie games get made and postulated that they were "the result of emotionally troubled people who couldn't cooperate with the majority of the gaming population and therefore had to create games that would only attract other like-minded players", would you see that as valid, insightful, and worthy criticism? I wouldn't. I'd be kinda offended.

That's fine. Personally, for me, whether I was offended or not would depend on the context, and without such a thread in existance, there isn't much I can say. I think that someone making that assertion would be wrong, and I'd respond to them, but I wouldn't be particularly offended, per se.

Again, however, this is off-topic for this thread. Marco, please, if you want to discuss this, please take it to another thread. See the post by WDFlores for what I'm looking for here.

[xiombarg]

This just occured to me: Would this be considered Drift? That is, the "desire to heal D&D" in the form of fantasy heartbreakers are examples of Drift but on a completely massive scale. What many of the authors of say D&D-based heartbreakers are doing is really just trying to drift D&D into a form that fits their needs (based on all the stuff that's already there).

I think this is distinctly possible, depending on the Heartbreaker in question. In essence, once the "patch rules" that are the result of Drift get to the point where one can argue that one isn't playing D&D anymore, then the idea that one should create one's own game could easily come about. Lots of non-Heartbreaker indie games come about this way.

[Marco]

Roger that.

I stand by the System Does Matter assessment. I think seeing the development process as drift makes a lot of sense as well.

-Marco

[xiombarg]

Very well, then:

System Does Matter would seem to apply to mechanical rules as well as GNS mode of play (despite the fact that here, I almost always see it applied to GNS mode*). Therefore a proliferation of different rules along the same themes would be expected (although I'd have thought that would have generated a lot of excitement over, say, Runebearer early on, really). If one looks at it in that light, the answer is trivial**

Well, if you go back to my original post, I mention that my insight might be too trivial to be worthwhile to bring up. I'm a firm believer in Occam's Razor myself -- though I'm also a firm believer in brainstorming and tossing out ideas.

Yes, such a proliferation would be expected -- but I'm not sure that all Heartbreakers agree about what D&D -- or roleplaying -- is, and yet they are still grounded in the game thing, Old D&D.

Part of what I'm not getting is why all these theories have to be mutually exclusive, considering that each Heartbreaker is, in essence, a unique artifact, as it were. Contrast Deathstalkers with Neverworld.

Plus, part of the behavior that I'm trying to explain isn't just the creation of Heartbreakers per se, but the whole Heartbreaker tendency to label as "innovative" and "new" ideas that have been in the RPG industry since '77. (I assume it's not offensive to point out that many Heartbreakers claim innovation where they're just re-inventing the wheel.)

[M. J. Young]

I think I've got a couple things to add; but I want to begin with

Also, in terms of the idea that "legitimate reviews of art don't do what you're doing: playing telepath"... Well, um, I see that in art reviews all the time, though I'd phrase it in a less pejorative way. Lacking access to the author directly, sometimes its all a reviewer CAN do.

C. S. Lewis, close friend of J. R. R. Tolkein and several other well known authors of the day (Dorothy Sayers, Charles Williams, others), commented somewhere about this very phenomenon. He complained that he'd many times read critics speculating on what some book meant, or what inspired it, or how it related to real-world events. He said that his impression was that they were never right, although not having kept any kind of record of it all he could say with certainty was that they were almost always wrong.

So yes, it is common, even if it's pretty silly.

I'm finding this interesting, in part because there is a sense in which Multiverser might be construed as such a game, at least in a development sense. It's been compared by at least one critic to OAD&D, and knowing something of how it came into existence I can see that.

My own background was rather solidly in TSR games, and particularly OAD&D, along with three other incarnations (AD&D2, BD&D, BD&D2), Star Frontiers, Gamma World, and Metamorphis Alpha, that I recall. I had some small exposure to Traveler, GURPS, and a few other games.

E. R. Jones, by contrast, had played and run scores of games, and read hundreds.

What led him to create Multiverser was in essence the feeling that the games he had seen didn't let him do what he wanted. He had for years been cobbling bits of other games onto D&D, making it run a bit different here and there, adding sci-fi elements and alternate universes under different rules, expanding character abilities and options, and otherwise adjusting the game to accommodate his wishes--and finding that he was creating a monstrosity. He started stripping things back to basics, getting rid of mechanics that didn't do what he wanted and producing what were often vague and unformed notions of what would work better.

He brought it all to me, because I was particularly good at finding flaws in mechanics and building better ones.

There are two interesting factors in this.

One is that neither of us were ever unhappy with D&D for what it did. We were unhappy only that it didn't do other things. I liked playing sci-fi; I liked long campaigns in which characters kept going and growing and becoming new things over time. D&D didn't support that. But that was not an incoherence of the game--it was my own wish to play more than one game, impacting against the fact that running and playing these games is very time consuming and it's difficult to be involved in more than a couple for any length of time. He still ran a D&D game which was in its essence very close to the books (a lot of setting variables such as an altered monetary system, some added classes and races, tinkering with special abilities to increase the overall power of player characters, and a few other tweaks). We enjoyed the game for what it was, but wanted something that would do what it didn't.

The other interesting thing is that neither of us thought of ourselves as "fixing" D&D. We thought of our efforts as creating a new role playing game that would do everything gamers wanted (yeah, well, that's probably fairly common for isolated game developers--and the Internet was not really commonly available then). We tried to take lessons from what we had seen elsewhere and apply them here.

Examples of things we tried to use from elsewhere could be adduced:

[*]Attribute checks were something we'd seen in many games, but certainly in D&D. We created two levels of such checks, which was something he was already using in his D&D games.[*]Relative Success actually was an expansion of an idea from a Star Frontiers supplement, Zebulon's Guide to the Galaxy. That was the first place in which I was aware of a combat attack roll also being the basis for damage. It was too complex--requiring a comparison to a chart to determine damage. We stripped it such that the chart was not necessary, and the roll would determine how well you hit. Once we'd done that, it was a short step to applying the same idea of how well you did to all skills, and then to devise the other side of the coin, the relative failure rules, how badly you failed.[*]I've always suspected that the General Effects Roll was based on something from some other game, but Jones never told me where he got it. I think it was probably in a 3d6 version originally; I pressed for 3d10, partly because we were using d10's extensively for skill resolution already, and partly because I liked the one in a thousand ends.[/list:u]It's worth noting in this regard that most of this was not conscious. I realized as I was looking for a mechanic to make combat swifter that a single roll system for attack and damage would do so, and that it would support a lot of other aspects of the game system we wanted to support (that characters with greater skill would perform better in more than one way, e.g.), and that I'd seen something like it done once. We weren't trying to cobble together parts of other games; we were trying to develop working mechanics based on what we knew from years of play.

So we, at least, were not trying to heal D&D. We were trying to create a game that would take gaming to a new level, where D&D was unable to go.

So now you've heard from a designer.

Oh, I've seen Mark Kibbe's game (Forge: Out of Chaos), but I haven't played it. It does have the look of someone's home rules variation on D&D. Not that that's bad, but rather that I, at least, get the feeling he didn't question too many things. He seems to have been trying to make D&D do what it already did, but a bit differently. I didn't play it, so I can't say how successful he was.

--M. J. Young