D&D General Fantasy heartbreaker mechanics…

[Lidgar]

I learned all my heartbreaking fantasy from this guy.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Yeah and just to be clear, I'm not necessarily talking tone, subject matter or other stuff (which is fairly mainstream in what I've seen of Arcane's work), where opinions will vary, but talking writing an adventure so you can read it through once or even just glance through it and actually run it. How you present the information, what information you have to include, and so on. Basic stuff that WotC often gets wrong.

I have run her adventures cold, more than once, and they went great.

I don't love 100% of her content choices and once there was some weirdness with a map where there was no way to move from one level to another, but the actual room content? Wonderfully explained and laid out.

 

[Aldarc]

Not really, amusingly.

A whole bunch of OSR stuff now is pretty shockingly advanced. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I'd go as far as to say the design of Worlds Without Number, for example, is more advanced than 5E, and indeed solves a number of age-old D&D problems (including having a proper stealth-kill mechanic which also isn't OP).

WWN gets a lot of bonus points from me for making a functional multiclass system and a functional necromancer for PCs.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

WWN gets a lot of bonus points from me for making a functional multiclass system and a functional necromancer for PCs.

Oh absolutely. Those two things alone are astonishing. The Legate rules are also a proper "epic levels" system too, effectively.

 

[Burt Baccara]

The definition of Fantasy heartbreaker is a game that doesn't acknowledge game design has advanced beyond 1981 D&D.

So the OSR.

What if it incorporated other pre-1982 rule sets like Traveller, Runquest, etc.?

 

[Burt Baccara]

Not really. It's really any knock off of any D&D system where a good idea is buried beneath bad mechanics. Just ask the guy who coined the term in the first place:

The basic notion is that nearly all of the listed games have one great idea buried in them somewhere.... That's why they break my heart, because the nuggets are so buried and bemired within all the painful material I listed above. - Ron Edwards, 2002

By that definition, to get certified as a heartbreaker, the only test is if it breaks Ron's heart? No one else can define an RPG as a heartbreaker.

Edit: This is a joke, of course.