Newbie Friendliness

From: Tim Ellis <tim_at_...>
Date: Mon, 10 Apr 2000 00:36:11 +0100


Andrew Dawson asked

>To restate my request: Please explain to me how Hero Wars can be
>considered more novice-friendly than other new games. (The handicap of
>a complex world has been noted, but I still don't see an excuse for
>ambiguity.)

One way it could be considered more friendly is that there is less to learn. If none of the feats are described beyond "Whatever you can come up with that is appropriate..." you don't need to learn big lists of spell description, or keep looking them up in a rulebook, or waiting while the GM does the same (particularly if he is also a newbie...)

"Sunset Leap" *is* pretty ambiguous, but so is something like "Fury of Osano-Wu" from L5R, or "Tenser's Transformation" from AD&D...

I think we are generally finding it more difficult to get our heads around this than a complete Roleplaying Newbie, because, as I am sure James Wallis (Hogshead Publishing, writer of Baron Munchausen) has argued, we *know* what a Roleplaying game looks like, it has a chapter on character creation, a chapter on combat, a chapter on "other skills" and many, many pages of skill descriptions and spells... Someone not expecting to find this may not even notice they are missing, and when they find an old second hand RQ book and think it will contain lots of useful information will wonder what it all means, and why we ever needed it....

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| Tim Ellis           EMail tim_at_...                      |
|                     Defend HeroWars 5w                                  |
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