The Culture: The Search For Good Hobby Game Manuals: Heroes Unlimited (Part Four)

(Following from yesterday's post.)

Character Advancement. Both games are Class/Level systems. Leveling up is part of both games.

from Imgflip Meme Generator

AD&D1e: DMG pg. 84-86 explains what Experience Points are, how players earn them for their mans, how to weight awards and when to do so, and that when a player's man reaches the threshold to level up it is only to indicate eligibility to do so. That man still has to depart from active campaign activity and go into mandatory downtime to undergo Training, itself determined by how well the player played that man's role in the party (i.e. ROLE-PLAYING, defined RIGHT THERE clearly, concretely, and conclusively) via grading of performance by the Referee in a time measured in weeks and a price tag measured in thousands of Gold Pieces.

In just those few scant pages two entire procedures are laid down, explained in detail, and the reader walked through them- including variations thereof for Name Level characters and Bards. Contra decades of complaints, this is competent technical writing and game design; a reader--a user--knows exactly what to do, how to do it, and why it works that way.

HU2e: Page 26 is where you'll find what passes for the same thing, and all Palladium products are like this. Literal "just use whatever" is recommended, along with a list of sample awards that don't even try to account for difficulty, or incentivize core gameplay behavior, or provide a clear rubric for grading performance (including on what grounds to do so). A reader--a user--gets NO INSTRUCTION AT ALL about what to do, or how, or why on the presumption that the reader is already familiar with this from other games (i.e. has played some verion of D&D).

That is wholesale abdication of responsiblity as a designer, and thus forcing the technical writing to omit a core objective to the manual. Not even The World of Synnibarr is that bad, and that game is one of the worst ever published. "Just make it up!" is not fit for purpose. It opens the door to "Level up Because Reasons", which quickly becomes "Because Plot" and turns it into a storygame.

That's the third major failure, both in the writing and in design.

We'll see if it gets any better tomorrow.