Post originally by Robert Donoghue at 2004-03-30 11:50:53
Converted from Phorums BB System

Hero Wars was definately part of the mental soup that led to Fate, though it was less of an influence than it rightly should have been. Honestly, I picked up Hero Wars when it came out and it was pretty painful to read. Clearly, full of great ideas, but reading it was such a slog that it never got the loving from me it probably deserved. (I understand Heroquest is hugely improved in the regard, and I keep _almost_ buying it, but at $40, I haven't made the jump)

In fairness, the Dynamic vs Static Challenges was one of the smaller areas of overlap, except that I think it's allw ays to address common issues. The two Binary switches (Is this an opposed action, is this an action to resolve in one roll?) show up in a lot of different games, albeit called different things.

If there's one area that the overlap is strongest it's character generation. One of the core elements of Fate is the idea of makign sure chargen creates a character that is tied strongly to th egame and setting, a goal I think it shares with Hero*. I think there's a lot of synergy between the two systems, at least conceptually, and I think you could pretty easily cannibalize elements from either one for the other.

That said, Hero* is the _kind_ of game (mechanically - we wont' even pretend to touch it on depth of setting) that I hope Fate makes peopel think of, because it's really a game with a lot of elements that I admire, and which has a quality of thinking behind its rules that we strive for.

Not that it's the only influence, of course. We rip off lots of other cool thigns too.