The challenge of designing one's own Heartbreaker intrigues me. I've put a little thought toward it and here it is.

First of all, it's tough to consciously make a Heartbreaker. It's hard to force youself to stay within the box, you see. It's doubly hard to know where to inject the "good" parts that is part of what makes a Heartbreaker a Heartbreaker. The only way to do it really is to be honest about it. You need to think of the assumptions of what an RPG is, must be then build from there.

You may have noticed I have been saying just Heartbreakers and not Fantasy Heartbreakers. This is to allow for the various types of Heartbreakers that are no-doubt out there but we have really been paying attention. At least I haven't.

I can see this as a self-discovery exercise. Kind of like being asked to draw a picture by the therapist and you draw a pile of bloody skulls on fire and you look at the picture and wonder, what the hell is wrong with me I'm drawn bloody skulls on fire.

By making a Heartbreaker, an honest one, honest for yourself, you can see what assumptions you still retain or key upon and you can see where you need innovation by where you put in in your heartbreaker.

So who's up for it? I suggest not making a contest out of this. It's not Iron Chef but learning about yourself here.

Hi there,

I enthusiastically endorse this exercise. Not that that really ought to mean anything, but it strikes me as a great thing. Credit where it's due: Mike Holmes was the first to suggest it.

Best,
Ron

Of course /what/ really is a Heartbreaker? I mean if D&D itself were from the now generation, rather than being first would it be a Heartbreaker?

What makes Riddle of Steel /not/ a heartbreaker? What makes Arrowflight /not a Heartbreaker/?

What specifically makes one game a Heartbreaker that covers fantasy, but another game covering the same genre not one?

Just a quick question:

Could a fantasy game with:

1. A setting laid out EXACTLY as you described in Heartbreakers, Part II
2. A magic system that was somewhat the bastard love-child of Ars Magica and Palladium Fantasy Roleplaying (similar "professions" to Palladium, but magical skills instead of spell lists), all designed to fit with:
3. Basic game mechanics lifted directly from Cyberpunk 2020 (with modified Lifepath tables and no guns)

possibly be considered a Heartbreaker?

What started as an attempt to "fix" Palladium (I realized even then the futility of trying to fix something as obviously "broken" as D&D) ended up spiralling out of control. Eventually, I had to stop calling it Palladium and instead opted to call it Legend Fantasy Roleplaying, for want of a better name.

Funny thing: in actual play, the game was kinda fun, though this may be because it only lasted two sessions, during which there was almost no use of the actual mechanics at all.

From what I've gathered so far, a Fantasy Heartbreaker consists of 2 parts. The first part is that "Fantasy" is constrained to mean D&D style Fantasy and mechanical concepts that are based on the premises of D&D style Fantasy. Note: mechanical concepts does not mean slavishly copying the exact mechanic but rather refers to mechanics that accomplish the same general thing.

The premises of D&D Style Fantasy as I see it are these.

1) The individual player characters form some sort of troop or party for mutual benefit whose primary goal is to seek adventure. Often this is outside the framework of general society, but when the characters are given actual roles in society the roles are usually just excuses to adventure.

2) The individual characters will typically have specialized roles to fulfill within the party. Whether these are functional roles like D&D's "close combat guy", "range combat guy", "sneaky guy", "healer guy", "magic guy" or takes some other form the key to effective party formation is primarily achieving an appropriate mix of specialties.

3) These individual characters must improve dramatically over time. Character improvement is a staple of most RPGs but in these it is extreme. Characters usually start incredibly weak and wind up (if they survive) amazingly powerful. This seeking of power may be a test to see if the player is good enough to get his character to survive and thus earn the privilige of being mighty, but many of these games actually instruct the GM to "play fair" and avoid killing off characters too often. Such instructions turn the "leveling up" (however that is presented mechanically) from being a purely Gamist construct to being what I consider Exploration of System, where the purpose for leveling up is simply the experience of leveling up itself.

4) The primary occupation of this party within the game is some variation on "monster bashing". Whether the party are freebooter adventurers seeking plunder, freedom fighters opposing evil, soldiers engaged in a war against an enemy is simply different setting justificatiosn for seeking out and pitting the parties specialties against a series of challenges, usually in the form of an enemy to defeat (where the enemy could be a trap or puzzle). Most rules of the game will focus on providing many toggles, dials, and switches for players to manipulate (such as selecting the right weapon to use) to help their characters overcome the challenge. It is the facing of these individual challenges that are the core purpose of the parties activities. Almost all other rules will fall into 2 categories. a) rules that allow the GM to assess the condition of the party in so far as it will effect their ability to confront the challenges (falling damage, fatigue, encomberance, etc. are all simply ways of measuring a disadvantage the character is suffering from). and b) rules that serve as either filler to space out challenges, or hooks to lead to challenges (tracking, various intrigue and diplomacy rules, etc).

These to me (and one could probably add a few lesser ones to the list) are what define a D&D style fantasy. The specific mechanics really don't matter. It doesn't matter whether character generation uses classes, or professions, or skill packages or whatever as long as the characters wind up with specific specialties (where being a generalist is also a form of specialty). It doesn't matter whether character strength is measured in overall levels or indivdidual skill levels as long as the character's abilities increase from weany to demi-god. It doesn't matter if the combat mechanics are wholly abstract, or strive for a wargame-like sim as long as there are plenty of choices for players to make regarding how their characters will confront the challenge.


The Heartbreaker part comes in for me in two ways.
1) the game never strays outside the boundaries of what defines D&D fantasy...but THINKS it does.
TROS is not a heartbreaker because it does just that. First there is a much lower emphasis on player specialties (it is quite easy to play TROS with characters all cast on the same skill template) and lower emphasis on party play (it is also quite easy to play TROS where the PC rarely cross paths or are even enemies of each other). In area three TROS is still fairly strongly about "leveling up" in the sense of seeking the riddle and becoming the ulimate swordsman, although the range from start to finish is not as dramatic as most D&D style games. But primarily the difference comes in item 4. The primary occupation of the PCs centers around their SAs. The individual challenges they face then are not the PURPOSE of the game, but rather a way to highlight those SAs and how the character is effected by the challenge at the SA level.
Arrowflight I would say is not a Heartbreaker for a different reason, the second part of the above. Arrowflight is very very specific about what kind of game it is and proceeds more or less with eyes wide open.

2) One of the red flags that indicate that one may be looking at a heartbreaker are claims of "innovation" for certain concepts or mechanics where "innovation" really means "different from how D&D does it". Many heart breakers will crow loudly about how their game is innovative because it uses skill levels instead of character levels and professions instead of classes. Of course, OTHER games have already been doing this for decades so the mechanic isn't really innovative at all. That the designers THINK it is can only be because their exposure to the full range of RPGs on the market is limited. They are basing their innovations and using as a starting point and a point for comparison the single primary game they know D&D. And compared to D&D the mechanics can certainly be different. But as noted above the 4 primary components of D&D style gaming are stilll present.

Thought on designing a heart-breaker: Make a game that fans of the most widely played, most financially successful, most recognized RPG might enjoy playing instead.

Figure out what *you* really love about D&D style play and what *you* might like to tweak. If you don't really and deeply respect the form, I can't see any reason to try to emulate it.

-Marco

Sidhain wrote: Of course /what/ really is a Heartbreaker?
...
What specifically makes one game a Heartbreaker that covers fantasy, but another game covering the same genre not one?

It seems to me that by definition, the readers of this forum can't make a Heartbreaker per se.

As I read it, what saddened Ron was his impression that the writers simply didn't even know of the existance of ways of role-playing other than the D&D model of adventuring (mainly in dungeons) to gain experience and become more powerful.

Something designed by a Forge member would be something which is deliberately aimed at this goal -- like Robin Law's Rune RPG. This might be an "old-style" RPG, but there is nothing heartbreaking about it.

I think that in that interpretation, "a game created by a player with limited knowledge, etc., etc.", you're right. We can't create that kind of Heartbreaker. But we can create a different kind of Heartbreaker, the kind that's a reaction to a game, "correcting the flaws" we see in it while recognizably retaining its "signature"; what Fang would call its Genre Expectations.

And I think this is the important kind of Heartbreaker, no less. It's the reaction that makes them valuable, not the ignorance of other styles that is among the earmarks of "classical" Heartbreakers.

John Kim wrote: It seems to me that by definition, the readers of this forum can't make a Heartbreaker per se.
...
Something designed by a Forge member would be something which is deliberately aimed at this goal -- like Robin Law's Rune RPG. This might be an "old-style" RPG, but there is nothing heartbreaking about it.

Second.

I, too, have been trying to write a Heartbreaker tonight. So much harder than it looks. Wow. I found myself wanting to use dice-pools and explicit metagame mechanics, and heavily Colorful mechanics that are completely ...out of season?

A quick preview of mine:

Character have five basic stats, Feel / Taste / Smell / Hear / View (I chose those rather inelegant words so that they all have a different first letter; it makes for better abbreviation.)

Feel is the physical stat.
Taste is social.
Smell has to do with nature,
and Hear with intelligence and perception.
View has to do with the magical world.

Each stat has three sub-stats, having to do with "introverted", "extroverted" or "passive" applications of the ability.

There are five core races, each associated with a stat.

Dwarves are the race of Feel.
Spice elves are the race of Taste. They're elves in a D&D way - smaller than humans, pretty rather than majestic.
Toothkin (dog-people, catfolk, lycanthropes, anything combining human and animal features) are the race of Smell.
Humans are the race of Hear.
Finally, ivory elves are the race of View. They are elves like Tolkien meant them, tall and beautiful like moonlight on obsidian, eternal and ethereal at once.

There are other races, mostly other elvish bloodlines that appeared in the aftermath of the War of Lily Leaves.

Lest I be thought elitist or something for having made the statement, let it be known that I personally had a system that I developed for years that my friends dubbed Holmes' Universal Roll-Playing Entertainment System (or HURPES for short). Call it a "Generic Heartbreaker" for most of it's existence. Went through more changes and additions than...Traveller.

All of which is to say that I have passed that step myself the hard way. And I can now look back on that era and learn from my mistakes. But what I'm finding is that no matter what you write, you'll be getting something from it for your next effort.

And that's the point. One of the things that you can almost palpably feel when reading a Heartbreaker is the effort that went into it. Which is what makes them so heartbreaking. Basically, no painter makes a masterpiece on his first attempt. Nor should he try to do so. Doing so is largely a waste of time. Make a bad game, and do it in short order. Get it out of the way. Then maybe the next one will be better. Or maybe the next. Had I known that this was the way to do things I would have had my first reasonable game out fifteen years ago. As opposed to last year.

Perfectionism is a motherfucker.

Mike

The first game I wrote would it have been a Fantasy Hearbreaker?

Inspired by my reading of Operation Chaos, I wrote a Modern Day FRPG--it had 7 attributes Might Agility Mana Endurance Willpower and Speed--its task resolution was a roll against attributes (3-18 range roll under on 1d20) the premise was a world like our own where magic existed, and werecritters and all that jazz, but were secrative (unlike OC where it replaces technology) and magic was "Spells per day" coupled with /player/ required reciting the spell (they weren't meant to be "real" or anything mostly nonsense style magic akin to Illusionist/Magicians) it did have "classes" but that was it and they weren't archetypes, but rather power sources-- Two magic using type (Magicians, and Sorcerers) and 2 shapehifters (Theriomorphs and Doppelganger) and two psychic classes, (Psion, and Psychic)

Like Mr. Holmes, mine was a Generic Heartbreaker. It was titled, arrogantly enought, "GameMaster's Choice" It was based heavily on the Shadowrun rules and consisted of two "books," each about 20 pages. The first had nothing but mind-numbing mechanics. IIRC, to figure the monetary cost of a weapon, you had to use a formula with a ton of variables in such fun combinations of "y to the xth power"

The second had my fantasy world, which tried to turn the D&D races on their ear. Elves were lying, duplicitous slavers; Lizardmen were philosophers; and Halflings had a navy of flying magical ships that had conquered half the world. I loved writing it, but it was such a waste. All I ever ran in the world in those days were dungeon crawls. God, how I hate dungeon crawls.

Looking back on it, there was nowhere to go but up.

four willows weeping wrote: Character have five basic stats, Feel / Taste / Smell / Hear / View (I chose those rather inelegant words so that they all have a different first letter; it makes for better abbreviation.)

He then wrote: They are elves like Tolkien meant them, tall and beautiful like moonlight on obsidian, eternal and ethereal at once.

Not the elven height debate! Next we'll be debating pointed ears!

Mike

Yeah, no kidding. "Tolkien says" is almost as thread-ending as the H-guy's name.

Are we done with this thread topic? Or do we need to get back to it?

Best,
Ron

Ron Edwards wrote: "Tolkien says" is almost as thread-ending as the H-guy's name.

Hi M. J.,

"I don't care how tall elves really are; they're unreal."

I am relieved to hear you say that. I am tempted to send that sentence out as a mass-emailing, or perhaps write a self-help book with it as the title of the first chapter.

And although I'm not going to do either of those things, I am not being sarcastic in the slightest.

Anyway! Folks, back to thread topic please, myself included.

Best,
Ron