The Business: Oh Look, More Fantasy Heartbreaker Cope From Conventional Play

Meanwhile, here's the latest cope from the Cargo Cult of Conventional Play.

Fuck this.

50 years of this hobby's commercialization and people keep making the same basic bitch fucking retarded mistakes.

Pathfinder was lightning in a bottle, in that it forked off a dying iteration of (then) Current Edition at a moment of maximum outrage and the party that did it was uniquely positioned to do so.

This guy? Nope.

He's pushing a new version of the Fantasy Heartbreaker and it's going to meet the same fate as every other such delusional product.

That's a bit of a touchy subject.

The short answer is that "Fantasy Heartbreaker" is a derogatory term used to refer to fantasy games that look like they were designed by someone with little exposure to TTRPGs except to D&D, so that the game looks like it's very close to that game except for a small list of fixes.

The website TVtropes describes them as "Dungeons and Dragons, but not".

The term itself has a lot of baggage nowadays, as it was coined and used in a gatekeeping way in a popular-but-controversial now closed game design forum. "Heartbreaker" literally meant that the game designer supposedly would pour love and passion into the game, to be heartbroken after what they thought would be an inevitable failure.

This guy's going to get fucked in the ass by Network Effects just like everyone else before him, and he's not a noob so he ought to know better than to even bother with this but Conventional Play Cargo Cultists tend to suffer from a form of Gell-Mann Amnesia about previous (failed) efforts- this would also explain other people (e.g. Matt Colville) who ought to know better shitting out their own Heartbreaker and thinking it's a viable competitor to The Only Game That Matters.

50. Years. No. Success.

The only competitor to Dungeons & Dragons is Dungeons & Dragons. Heartbreakers don't even get into the Farm League (where Palladium sits). But go ahead, run bare-assed naked screaming into machinegun fire, see where that gets you. You would have been better off making an indie videogame or boardgame with that idea instead.