-During GenCon Southern California, Cerberus Too got the chance to meet the HERO Games crew, sans Steves S. Long, who had decided to stay at the East Coast. No problem, though, as there were plenty of fun people to hang out with, and after putting some not-so-subtle pressure on this star journalist (well, I kind of decided to insert the ‘star’ description myself, but at least it boosts the EGO), Darren and the other members of the gang even convinced this astounding critic (another hand-picked descriptor there) to accompany them to the Lucha Libre event next door. With one restaurant review skipped and a few hours of insane Mexican fun added, work was started on transcribing the interview with Darren Watts, co-owner of HERO Games and all-round nice guy.
-We’ve done several interviews with Steven Long in the past, but we never really discussed the HERO System Fifth Edition in detail. Can you tell us something about how the game and the company came to be?
Darren: In the very beginning, the company [HERO Games – ed.] was started by George MacDonald and Steve Peterson. They each had half of the game. George was in college and during the boring lectures was working on the [rules] systems which already existed back then, making an add-on system on how to buy super powers. He tried to make them fair, creating the mechanics to make them work in those particular rules sets. Darren brought his ideas to Peterson, who told him he was on to something.
Steve added a mechanic to the system, coming up with rules that governed how the skills and characteristics worked. He threw out all of the dice except the d6. Then Ray Greag joined as a sales man. Together, they took the game to one of the Bay Area conventions – it might have been Pacificon – where they commandeered one of the demo tables, staying there for 24 hour shifts. Peterson and his friends had printed a hundred copies of the game, thinking it might sell ten, but they sold all of them. The team realized they would need an office and the game grew fast in 1981 and 1982.
Eventually, the Champions guys partnered up with ICE [Iron Crown Enterprises, which published RoleMaster and Middle Earth Role Playing – ed.] to provide a structure through which games could be sold. While doing so, they realised a superhero game by definition is a great generic game since superheroes have to be able to do everything. If you have a good superhero game, you have a good generic game and after a while, the Champions team caught on to that. They did Fantasy Hero first and that did really well, so they also did Star Hero and other stuff. By the late eighties, a terrific fan base had built up that understood the concept. Of course, superheroes are great, but it was also possible to play robots, elves and more, so Champions attracted a fan base that was excited by the engine because it allowed them to build so much. It encouraged players to do something with it because it was able to do anything.
That’s when I got involved. I was a teenager at the time and I knew I could just use the system and be assured it would work. I didn’t have to go the other way around: I didn’t have to deal with classes or other game concepts which constrained me.
In the nineties, Peterson and the others all still had day jobs and the company was licensing others – first ICE and then CyberGames – to handle the distribution. The game had suffered, though, since no-one was working on it full-time. By 2000 there had been a period in which they only released one book a year, but there were still thousands of fans and we were amazed that there was still so much interest. We started wondering what it would be like to give these people some books, so I offered CyberGames to buy it.
By now the game had been in decline for ten years and I knew several people who had taken a shot at a fifth edition. Steve Mendoza, Steve Peterson and Steve Long had all written up a proposal. I’d known Steve Long for years. We had visited game shows together. Of all the possible partners, he was the one who was at the same wave length as to the direction the game should take, so I told Steve I wanted him to write the fifth edition rules. He said he didn’t only want to write the rules, he wanted to buy in and be a partner. Now others started to take the project seriously, since Steve was already known by others active within the gaming industry.
That must be really special. If someone not only wants to write the rules, but also wants to become an integral part of the company, that must show he is very motivated.
On a level that I think is different than if we had written the game ourselves, we felt very motivated to take over and take care of the thing others created and hopefully improve on it. We were all fan boys at the time and we wanted to become the keepers of the rules system. There had been many ideas, but the basic idea hadn’t changed in years. We definitely feel that we’re the stewards… the guardians of this great engine you can add stuff to. I worked for Steve Jackson and Steven has worked for everybody, but this is the game we always loved.
-What about other generic systems? Isn’t there any other engine which manages to pull off something which closely resembles what you can do with HERO? I’m thinking of GURPS, Silhouette 1.1, Fuzion and other generic systems…
Out of all of them, GURPS is closest to us. GURPS learned a lot from 1st edition Champions and we stole from them for the 3rd edition. There are a few things we disagree on.
-A lot of people seem to think HERO is too complex a system. I don’t agree. What do you think of such a comment?
I would say it is as complex as it needs to be, but you can play with less if you don’t want to use certain rules. One of the great things about HERO is that it scales down. You can keep it very simple or complex, but you can also use everything in-between. Just because you can do it doesn’t mean you should. It is important to us you can, but that doesn’t mean we recommend it.
GURPS still believes that there are set things that should happen and you can’t change those. In GURPS, you still buy a lightning bolt as a specific power. If you shoot a lightning bolt, you have to be grounded. HERO believes that you can shoot a lightning bolt and whatever happens is a special effect. GURPS never lets go of the real world effect. HERO says that if you want to make a lightning bolt like this, fine by us. If you want to do it our way, we have some examples of that. All of the rules are rules about game effects. If you want a lightning bolt to behave in a non-scientific way, that’s fine by us.
GURPS philosophically believes it is its job to enforce reality. The system is still very powerful, though. If you want to change the system and bend GURPS to match your view, fine by us.
-I think it works better if you can add stuff to the bare-bones descriptions. Let’s say you want to create a realistic write-up of something. You start adding stuff and then you notice you forgot something, or maybe you need to change a special effect. That way, you are forced to think about how something behaves realistically. Otherwise, it’s easy to forget about something and end up with a rules description that isn’t necessarily as close to real-world physics as you would like it to be.
We do what is appropriate for the genre. If you buy Dark Champions items, those are all built to match reality. The Dark Champions book doesn’t tell you how Batman’s body armor works.
Especially in a truly generic game, there’s a level of complexity you can’t get away from. Using our rules, no arguments can arise. If it isn’t written down, it doesn’t do that. There’s no debate. You say ‘I want to change this’ and then you sit with the judge and it’s done. We have written it down. If you don’t like our write-up, just go on…
A truly generic game should be able to cover both extremes. If you want to play an RPG where Superman can pick up a house and fly away with it you should be able to do that, but you should also be able to ask yourself: “Oh, my God, what are the exact effects of using superpowers on a building?” In most generic games, you can’t do that.
We are very committed to being truly generic.
-Talking about Superman and generic games, wouldn’t you love to pick up a license to a publish something based on well-known comics, movies or books? There hasn’t been a Marvel or DC Heroes RPG in years and there never was a decent Image or Dark Horse one…
We’ve talked about it. Steve certainly has more experience than anyone in the business in doing license games, since he has done Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings, but we don’t think it’s worth doing because the economy scales don’t work at that level. If someone comes up to us with a free license and artwork, we will do it in a minute, but with all of the stuff currently involved in doing a license, it’s difficult. On the other hand, we’re doing a lot of smaller licenses - the kind of thing we can manage because we’re friends with other companies, for example. Those are the kind of licenses we can do really easily, but I don’t think you’ll ever see a Warner Brothers license.
When the last Marvel game came out, I was actually one of the people Marvel talked to from the beginning. They had no idea of how licence RPG’s work. They had an idea of the studio they would use, but they had no idea of what Origins is, they had no idea of what GenCon is and they had no idea of how the industry works. They thought the game would sell because they are Marvel. They looked at what D&D was doing, so all licensing deals were based on D&D sales figures, but they only sold 20 000 copies of their game. If you release a new superhero game, you should be happy with that, but they wouldn’t believe us when we told them 20 000 is a good number. “Marvel is a better name than D&D so we should sell more of it.”
Publishing a Marvel game involves having at least one person whose job is to be on the phone and talk to lawyers all day long. As for Dark Horse: they don’t even have the gaming rights to most of their jobs. We would need to talk to the artists, because the comics are creator-owned. Obviously, you can’t go to Dark Horse and say you want to do an Aliens and Predator game either, because you would have to negotiate with the movie studio.
We make it pretty easy for our fans to create their own versions of these things. If you want to play Spider-Man you can do it yourself. Just don’t talk to us about it! There are even powers described in UNTIL Powerbase that closely match Spider-Man’s, but we can’t just tell you that because of licensing issues.
-So what can we expect coming our way from Hero Games in the near future?
Our last big book coming out this year is The Ultimate Mentalist. We’re approaching the end of our Ultimate line as to what you need to have. The Ultimate Weapon and The Ultimate Mentalist are the last core Ultimate books.
The next book in 2007 will be Pos-Apocalyptic Hero, which will cover the entire range of the genre and include a bunch of superheroes. Me personally I’m getting to do the zombies and a setting in which the Catholic Church was right about the Antichrist… and what are you gonna do about it?
The next thing up is the Lucha Libre game. We think that is the kind of game that will definitely be aimed at new players. It will use a simplified version of the rules. I doubt it will be a full color product, but it will certainly appeal to people who haven’t considered Hero before. The psychic rules will be included in the book and if this works we think it will be a good model as to how to print a book concentrating on a certain set of rules. We will be able to show what kind of rules you can use to create a specific game. We want to show that Hero is really good even at its most basic level. This is going to be our first outing on that subject, trying to prove it is possible.
-Talking about new fans… I asked Steve this before, but how are you attracting new fans right now? You are still releasing books with black and white interior art, while a lot of companies are doing full-color books these days.
Part of how we do it is that we have a good reputation for putting stuff out. Actually, even people who don’t have the system often know about our reputation. That helps.
-You have released dozens of supplements so far. I’ve been wondering for a long time how you handle all of the research that has to be needed to do that…
We have no social lives. That’s pretty much how it works. If Steve gets a girlfriend, we’re screwed. One of our secrets weapons is that I’m a pretty fast writer, while Steve is a very fast writer.
-Still, you need sources to base your research on. How and where do you find the information needed to write so many supplements?
For Pulp Hero, we raided not only our own libraries, but we raided others as well, including an amazing research library not only full of wonderful materials but also movies. Where possible, we base our books on the original source material. When not, we try to get as close to the source as possible. We also use the internet. For Star Hero, of example, we spent a lot of time on jet propulsion sites, trying to get a feel of what scientists are writing about now so we could make sure the supplement wouldn’t just rely on the SF we knew about.
-Steve told me he is a very big fan of pulp stories. He wanted Pulp Hero to do really well. How has the book been received so far?
Pulp itself did very well, but the supplements weren’t as popular. I don’t think there will be a lot more books because people who love Pulp want to do most of the work themselves. It’s one of those genres that appeal to people who want to do a lot of stuff themselves. Let’s give them some bad guys, some monsters and leave it at that.
-Are you advertising your products in any way or mostly relying on word of mouth and positive reviews?
Sometimes yes. For example, we advertise Pulp Hero in pulp magazines. We have a pulp fiction line coming out. Never before have we printed stories by major writers, like Robin D. Laws. That’s going to be advertised through specific channels. But we really don’t do a lot of print advertising. We did try at first. We advertised HERO Fifth Edition everywhere: in Dragon, in Knights of the Dinner Table… We spent zillions of dollars. It doesn’t always work well enough that way, so we try to make our website look as interesting as possible. We tell the people to just go and look at the site, as there we have control over the message we want to convey.
-Steve already told me there won’t me too many adventure books since they’re not popular enough. I think that’s a pity…
Well, we have quite a lot of adventures available as PDF’s…
-I know, but in my country [Belgium – ed.] people aren’t that used to pay with a credit card yet. A lot of people don’t even have one. And PayPal isn’t that well-known yet, either…
You can buy the PDF’s using checks as well. Apart from that, that’s a tough one to get around. Adventure books don’t sell well enough to justify the print costs. We’ve done a couple of them, like the Battleground books and the Viper thing and we tried a bunch of tricks to make them more interesting. The Battleground adventures, for example, were set in locations that included great maps. If there’s a way to make adventure books more appealing to the general audience, we’ll release more of them. PDF is definitely a growing market and for now we’re releasing them that way.
-Thanks for the interview, Darren!
No problem. Now, we have an extra ticket for the Lucha Libre event today. Do you wanna come with us? It’ll change your life…
Dirk Vandereyken
