Interview with Rob Daviau

[Jormi_Boced]

Not a lot of Heroscape info in it, and it sounds like he isn't doing a whole lot with Heroscape anymore besides playtesting, but he has been involved with the game at some level since the start. In case you didn't know, the character Morsbane is from an old D&D character he used to play

Check it out, it is a good read.

http://fortressameritrash.blogspot.c...-volume-1.html

[Mycophycophyta]

It just redirects me back here.

[Jormi_Boced]

Sorry, I messed up. It is fixed now.

[markwars]

What an interesting read. Thanks for posting the link.

[netherspirit]

Originally Posted by markwars

What an interesting read. Thanks for posting the link.

Ditto, that was a good read. Thanks Jormi.

[RichardD]

Originally Posted by Jormi_Boced

Not a lot of Heroscape info in it, and it sounds like he isn't doing a whole lot with Heroscape anymore besides playtesting,

What the article says (as to what Rob is doing at the moment) is "In the past month I've played... <snip> some games I'm working on here, Heroscape (testing new scenarios), <snip>".

Now why would he be testing NEW scenarios? What are they required for? Well, there are three occasions that we see new scenarios: online at the Hasbro website, in a Master Set, or in a wave X.5 terrain expansion.

The real question is which of the three it is; if the interview was a few weeks' ago, it *might* have been SOTM scenarios being tested, but frankly I would have expected the design work to finish about 3-4 months before publication at the latest, to allow the necessary work to be done to get the rulebook ready for printing.

[Jormi_Boced]

I am guessing it is Swarm of the Marro, and with it they will probably put a couple new ones online. There was also Marvel Heroscape, which probably had new scenarios as well.

[Revdyer]

And, of course, as of today, we know of at least one new scenario on the official site.
And thanks for the post, Jormi.

[Elstree]

Thanks, Jormi, that was great.

Not a lot of Heroscape in there, but plenty about another one of my favorite games: Betrayal at House on the Hill. The first time I played this was at a convention in Boston with Rob's friend Bill Sabram (designer of the great Buffy the Vampire Slayer game). Rob was sitting at our table playing a different game. Whenever we needed a rules clarification, Bill would just lean over and ask Rob, "Hey, how does this card work?" Rob would often answer, "I don't know, that's a change WotC made. Here's how it originally went..." and we'd play it Rob's way.

We had a great game, which ended very cinematically with all the heroes sheltering in the chapel fighting off the demons. That's the great thing about "Betrayal": It's like the game mechanics are designed to make you, the player, act out the genre's cliches without directly telling you that's what you need to do. I'm constantly in awe of how closely it plays out as a horror movie. In about 1 in 3 games the story will flop, but when it works (which is most of the time) it's really amazing.

We also got to play "Buffy" with Bill Sabram that same weekend, which was fun. He said he hadn't played it since it came out and was just amazingly enthusiastic about playing it. He had a lot to say about how that game was made. Fun fact: Season 4 hadn't finished when they were designing the game, and even the Buffy writers hadn't decided how it would end. Bill and the crew had to make something up for the game. It ended up being reasonably close to how that season actually end.

In both cases (Betrayal, Buffy) it was cool to get the backstory on the development of the game. When you buy a game in the store it seems like such a static thing...when you hear a designer talk about the different versions the game went through, rules that were considered and discarded, changes to the layout of the board, decisions about what the pieces should look like, etc., the game becomes a much more dynamic, living, breathing thing.

[Jormi_Boced]

I am a pretty big fan of Betrayal too. It isn't full of deep strategy, but it just oozes theme.

[CupidsArt]

Thanks for the link, Great Read.