Grazers & Gencon UK HW demos, P&BR

From: danny bourne <d.bourne_at_dial.pipex.com>
Date: Mon, 6 Sep 1999 21:33:24 +0100

For the what was supposed to be definitive Grazer stuff Simon Bray & Martin Hawley are good people to ask (or Sonia Birch, now she's got the adventures along with the Grazepack she bought at auction years ago). Of course it's probably not definitive any more, but the history shouldn't change.

Gencon UK HW demos

I'll say what I saw and let people make up their own minds, so if anybody finds anything in this offensive for any reason, then please don't get mad at me.

But firstly good news, I saw the P&BR reprint there (thanks Rick) and it's way fine. There was a huge demand at Gencon for it (40+) copies from the three traders I talked to so I hope that's a good indicator of it's putative success.

Myself, Lawrence Whitaker, Simon Bray and Martin Hawley demo'd HW 5 times at Gencon UK and the response was quite interesting from the ones I saw (I don't know what happened in Martin's one which is a pity for reasons that'll be obvious below).

Due to an inadvertant double booking we had twice the number of people for a setting than we should have so we ran HW with 2 GMs concurrently. However we only had one set of rules, so Loz ran with the 4.9 playtest version
(using return to apple lane) we'd been given, and I ran the old one from
Convulsion (with the black spear adventure). My players all loved the system, there was a good mix of criticals and fumbles in the roleplaying
(with appropriate cheers and boos), but were less keen on the combat
system, although still positive.

Loz's group didn't like it at all. Interestingly enough two of his players had played the earlier playtest version and thought the 4.9 version was inferior to the earlier version. Hopefully they'll be able to give a fuller report on it, but not one of the players enjoyed the combat system. Now I don't know whether that was due to the make up of the players, the adventure or whatever, but I feel rather uneasy about that. I managed to catch a snippet from the demo that Martin ran at the very end where, the two or three that I heard speak said that they liked the system... apart from the combat system.

I think it would be interesting to hear from those that played (if any of them are on the list) to say whether I've reported this correctly and, if so, why the general response was down on the way combat works.

I'll add more info later

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