Hero News

From: SteveL1979@aol.com
To: champ-l@sysabend.org
Date: Wed, 22 May 2002 19:28:17 EDT
Subject: Re: News on character building software for 5th Ed.

Since everyone chose the day I was out of the office to make big announcements, :) this is coming a bit late -- I'd've posted earlier otherwise. But here's further information to supplement the link previously provided by Derek. You can also visit the new "Hero Designer" forum on the message boards to discuss things and express opinions.

<<<Earlier this week we signed a deal with professional software developer Dan Simon, the man responsible for our cool new chat rooms, to write a new character creation program for us. We're tentatively calling this new program Hero Designer. Dan's already hard at work, and we're confident he's going to do a tremendous job. The deadline for delivery of an alpha-testable program is October 1, 2002, but there's a good chance he'll finish before then. When we're ready for playtesters, we'll let you know — we're hoping a lot of you'll be willing to contribute your time and insight to make this the best HERO System character creation software ever!

Those of you who have done a lot of work with Hero Creator/Creation Workshop need not fear -- among the many standards and guidelines we established for Dan's work, the first and foremost was this: "Hero Designer must be able to easily import and convert characters from Hero Creator/Creation Workshop." We know a lot of you have written up hundreds of characters using HC/CW, and we have no intention of invalidating all that work.

Several of you have asked about prior management's promise that "when a 5th Edition upgrade for Hero Creator is created, customers who bought Hero Creator will get a copy of the upgrade for free." We cannot honor that promise, for several reasons:

  1. We didn't make that promise and cannot be bound by it. Honoring it could expose us to all sorts of spurious "promises by prior management" that could cause numerous problems for the company.
  2. This is not an "upgrade," nor is it Hero Creator. This is Hero Designer, an all-new program, created by an all-new designer.
  3. As a small and struggling game company, we can't afford to lose tens of thousands of dollars' worth of potential revenue by giving away thousands of free copies of Hero Designer, which we're paying a substantial amount of money to create from scratch.

We're sorry the situation has worked out this way, but so it must be. Believe me, we'd love to give all Hero gamers some free software, and game books, and other goodies. But we simply can't afford to do that (at least not more than we already do via the Free Stuff and FAQ pages on the website). As the die-hard fans who've witnessed Hero's struggles over the years to remain a viable company and publish books, we hope you'll understand and agree with our stance on this matter.>>>>

I'll try to answer further questions as I may, but I'm spending most of my time these days editing/developing CHAMPIONS, so it may take a while.

If you have technical questions or suggestions for the program, please post 'em in the "Hero Designer" forum. Dan Simon monitors that forum, but he's not on this list, and I'm not likely to have the time to forward a lot of messages to him. ;)

Steve Long
HERO System Line Developer

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