> >When it comes to combat orientated Heortling gods, I tend to be more
> >sympathetic with you. Could Vingkot have been left for a later
> >supplement, I wonder? However, most of the others assuredly don't
> >overlap. Skovara is not at all like Kev, for example.
>
> A good example. Why do we need either at all? Everyone could do
> Divination before, why have a goddess who just does the same? Likewise
> Roitina - everyone can create rituals, why have such a specialist?
> Skovara and Donadar are just covering the same ground, taking up page
> counts.
Because it makes the game more interesting, and more enjoyable - and this is supposed to be a game, and therefore fun.
> >I'm confused. What do you want, exactly? A playable system that does
> >not require a dozen books? HW is already that: many of us were
> >happily playing with only the initial pair of rule books (plus a
> >seldom used Anaxial's Roster) for ages before Thunder Rebels and
> >Storm Tribe came out.
>
> An excellent point! There, in the original books, we had a very
> credible pantheon of only 19 gods (plus, admittedly, a number of
> subcults of Orlanth & Ernalda, but still within that couple of dozen).
> So why now do we have 33 different slices of Orlanth alone?
Because it makes the game more playable. It's cool, it's fun, it's all the things that a good game should be.
You don't find that the case?
Fine - I can appreciate that. Not everyone wants the same things in a game. You can have (if I'm interpreting you correctly) a perfectly fun game just with the main rule book and maybe one or two others. Great; just buy those two books and don't touch the others. I'll tell you now: don't buy my Sorcerer Knights book, when and if it eventually comes out, because you aren't going to like it. That's cool; not everyone has the same tastes. Hopefully other people will like it, and will find it makes their games more enjoyable in the way that I find with Thunder Rebels and Storm Tribe (they might not, of course, but it's what I'm hoping for).
Perhaps a more instructive question would be whether or not the gaming market likes lots of different deities and variant powers for PCs or whether it's such a narrow taste as to doom Hero Wars to oblivion. Do most gamers find such quantity of information makes games unplayable, or do they find it enhances their experience? I'd suggest that the success of all the splatbooks for White Wolf, rules expansions for d20 and god-knows-what for other systems indicates that the latter is very much the case, and Issaries would be fools to ignore it. There may, of course, be other reasons why Hero Wars fails to take the gaming world by storm, but I really don't think this is likely to be one of them.
And those who don't want the extra detail don't have to buy the extra books.
> D&D became famous for it's multitude
> of monsters & magic items, now HW/HQ is doing the same with lists of
> Affinities & Feats.
And hopefully, like D&D, it will be really successful as a result :-)
-- Trotsky Gamer and Skeptic ------------------------------------------------------ Trotsky's RPG website: http://www.ttrotsky.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/
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