Hero Wars reprint...

From: Roy Wiseman <RoySubs_at_hotmail.com>
Date: Mon, 10 Jul 2000 18:29:35 +0100


> > Nick Brooke wrote:
> >
> > At Tentacles, Greg said that sales of the Deluxe Box were FAR faster
> > than he had pessimistically anticipated in his business plan (Issaries
> > shifted more in the first month than he'd expected to in the first
> > quarter), and a second print-run (of another couple of thousand boxed
> > sets) is now intended. With any luck, some of the more irritating typos
> > can be addressed in this "revised printing".
>
> Kevin Rose wrote:
> He should also consult someone who knows how to edit games. Nothing like
> making new players wade through 73 pages of very dense game jargon in
> chapter 3 before you define most of it in chapter 4. You have to be
> pretty damn dedicated to make it to the part that tells you how the game
> works. It is fairly astonishing how horrible the structure of the actual
> rules are compared to the two early versions I saw.
>
> The first printing got the people who would buy anything on Glorantha.
> The next one needs to sell to people who want a cool game to play.

I could't agree more. Does *anyone* think that the layout is efficient, comprehensive, well presented, and fairly importantly, capable of attracting newbies without a long uphill struggle!? And if that French translation is so gorgeous, how about a full-size-manual printing using the colour art and some of the re-editing there.

Also when it comes to combat, a brief glance at hw-rules_at_egroups.com shows the immense number of problems players have found with AP interpretation, skirmishing before closing, ranks, edges, etc. (these are just some of the most recent and they are all quite basic situations and not advanced or tricky to interpret by any means annoyingly enough!). The sheer no. of problems with combat thrown up on that list, show that either a greater emphasis on combat situations has to be defined or a FAQ of common combat situations should be thrashed out and posted on the Glorantha site. I know that HW is partially about trying to reduce the emphasis on technical rules that RQ had to give more power to roleplaying elements, but combat seems to be over-simplified leaving considerable confusion for a large number of players.

Someone suggested to me recently that after a first reading he found the rules to be quite "wooly". I think that sums it up quite nicely... ;o)


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