We've had a lot of discussion about heroes and how they're going to work. A lot of ideas have been thrown into the hat and so I decided I better compile the information we have so far and highlight the questions that, for the moment, remain unanswered. I'm going to start with hero “creation” from a white board point of view. Where do heroes get their stats? Now, as far as I can see, there are three viable approaches to creating heroes.
Procedural Generation: We generate pseudorandom heroes just as we do terrain. They get stats, a class, a gender, a portrait/model, starting equipments, etc. all from a generation engine.
Custom Heroes: A player is given a blank character. (I'm taking this to extremes to underline each approach. Obviously we could procedurally create the basic stats and then give the player an almost blank character.) The player then creates a character almost as they would in D20.
Set Heroes: We, the development team, create heroes that we feel fit within Worlds of Magic. We do our best to give them the perfect mix of balance and flavor.
Now each of these have strengths and weaknesses. I'll touch the highlights, you guys can feel free to weigh in with more details/examples/explanations/etc.
Procedural Generation Pros: You never know what you're going to get. Every once in a while you'll get a hero that you want to take screen shots of because of what the engine spit out. You'll save the game and stick it somewhere so you can show people that hero twenty years from now. (I have save games stored on a server that are OLD, lol).
Procedural Generation Cons: You never know what you're going to get. The generator will only generate “viable” characters (at least if I do my job right), but at the end of the day it's a generator. There will be times when the game creates heroes you just don't want. Again and again and again. (I mean anything is better than nothing, but you know what I'm saying.) Pseudorandom isn't always best.
Custom Heroes Pros: You can take a hero that's just alright and turn them into your perfect weapon as they level up. You can create parties of heroes that are real parties who depend on one another's skills to increase the power of the group exponentially.
Custom Heroes Cons: You can make mistakes. WoM is not a D20 role playing game. Your sorcerer is not a D20 character. As such you shouldn't need to understand D20 in order to get the most out of the game. When a player is looking at a level up GUI and has no idea what Cleave does there's a problem. We don't want players to have to understand D20 to fully experience the game.
Set Heroes Pros: A player will get to know the heroes. They will come to love and/or hate them. There will be a good mix so players can always be sure there's going to be something they want.
Set Heroes Cons: There are only so many heroes in the game. Once you know them all, you know them all. There'll be no more surprises, pleasant or otherwise.
All this also runs into another topic which is whether we should put a limit on the number of heroes you have or not. If we just followed the MoM example we would have hand crafted heroes and you could only get six at a time. Now, obviously this worked in MoM, but personally I would like to see more done with heroes in WoM.
Thoughts?