"Everyone should write a Heartbreaker"

[Jared A. Sorensen]

Speaking of "issues," I hate spiders in real life.

Anyone else do the spider thing?  Or the bug thing, perhaps influenced by Alan Dean Foster's magical singing thing or Heinlein or whatever?

Oy vey, me no like spiders. At first I thought it was, "Too many legs." But after some careful consideration, it's not the number of legs at all (I saw the spider-mokey in Spy Kids 2 and it didn't bother me). It's the face. Spider faces are friggin' scary as hell. Aragog, anyone? Am I right here?

I love insects though. If I ever get inspired enough to do so I totally wanna write my D&D w/ anthro. bugs (A Bug's Life style).

The title of this thread still bugs me (no pun intended). It's not like everyone SHOULD write a Heartbreaker...it's that everyone should SHARE Heartbreakers from their pasts...

[Jack Spencer Jr]

It's the face. Spider faces are friggin' scary as hell. Aragog, anyone? Am I right here?

Possibly but that's because Spiders don't have a face, not as we understand faces, anyway. They are totally alien and freaky. Fortunately a rolled up newspaper works wonders.

[Walt Freitag]

Funny, I seem to have missed out on the whole homebrewed-Hearbreaker phenomenon. Furthermore, none of my gaming friends, to my knowledge, wrote heartbreakers either.

What I'm more familiar with -- that is, what I did and what many people I gamed with did in the very early 80s -- was sort of the opposite: writing a set of "house rules" for D&D that radically changed most of the specific mechanics and at least a few of the fundamental heartbreaker assumptions, but still calling it D&D.

Because they openly acknowledged that "fixing D&D" was the goal, I wonder if these efforts were actually able to break conventions more easily than the true hearbreakers did, especially in terms of codifying drift. In building house-rule variant rulesets, there was little temptation to change things just for the sake of changing them. Individual changes tended to be made for specific purposes. For example, I remember that while the systems for acquiring and casting spells were usually overhauled, the magic spell lists themselves were rarely touched, while that seems to be the first thing hearbreakers seek to modify.

- Walt

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Walt,

The phenomenon you describe has been very common in my experience as well. I've mainly encountered Heartbreakers through published sources, not through socializing and actual play.

I found the D&D-in-name-only groups pretty frustrating when I was starting to get serious about designing my own stuff. I used to make almost a hobby of deconstructing claims like "we play D&D" and "D&D can be used for any setting," by asking key questions about reward systems, magic systems, and combat resolution. By the time the person had revealed major system-divergence in each of these categories, he or she tended to re-think the claims, or to refuse to talk to me any more.

Best,
Ron

[jrients]

Ahem, the four armed guys are, IIRC, Orlens, from Gamma World (And probebly even Metamorphosis Alpha). And most heartbreakers of he Fantasy and Sci-Fi generes have had them since.

Orlens also had 4 legs and 2 heads, as I recall.

Also, Orlen females were hot chicks with blue skin and green 80's hair.