Third Time's the Charm

HeroQuest has had a bit of a rocky history. The name goes back to 1979 when it was first mentioned as an upcoming product in the original RuneQuest rules. That product never came out, and ten years later the name was taken by Milton Bradley for the board game they published in cooperation with Games Workshop. Another decade passed and a set of RPG rules was created that the designers finally felt was worthy of the HeroQuest name. Unfortunately, Hasbro still held the rights to the name having bought out Milton Bradley, so they called it Hero Wars instead. Finally, when the second edition came out a few years later, Hasbro had let the rights to the name lapse, so it was snatched up and the first HeroQuest RPG was published (although it was actually the second edition of the game).

HeroQuest and I have also had a rocky history. I have never read the Hero Wars book, although I do own some of the supplements for it. I have read the second edition. I read it about five years ago, before I had any experience with narrative style RPGs. I read the whole book, but really didn't "get" the system. The only reason it didn't get sold off prior to my marriage was because of the information in it about Glorantha.

In brief, Glorantha is a fantasy world that is distinctly different from most other such worlds in gaming. It is a world where magic is commonplace and where mythology accurately portrays the world around you. It's a setting that I've always had an interest in, and is the reason I became interested in HeroQuest in the first place.

Two years ago I decided to give the book a second look. Largely this was because I was starting to become more acquainted with narrative style games and remembered enough of what I'd read to recognize that HeroQuest fell into this category. Before starting in for a second read, I checked online for any errata that was out there, and I discovered that a new edition of HeroQuest had just come out. I decided not to re-read the second edition and ordered a copy of the third edition instead.

Once I had a copy of the third edition I started reading it, but only got a few pages in before giving up. This new third edition was still something I didn't quite "get" and the fact that the rules had been stripped out of the Gloranthan setting and made into a generic rules set meant that I had less interest in it.

Finally, about a month ago I decided to give the book one more try. This time I made it all the way through, and have come out rather impressed by the game. I attribute my success in making my way through the book to my better understanding of narrative games in general, specifically Fate and Burning Wheel, and to my increased familiarity with the author's "voice."

The author is Robin D. Laws, and my increased familiarity with him is due to a combination of following him on Twitter and reading Hamlet's Hit Points. There were only a few points in HeroQuest where being familiar with his voice was really helpful, but it did make it easier to get through those concepts. I wish I could give some specific examples of this, but I didn't think to take notes at the time, and can't find the specific points now.

As for Hamlet's Hit Points, you can definitely see some of the concepts from that book in the chapter on Playing Stories. He uses some different terminology, but the concepts are the same.

Mechanically, characters in HeroQuest consist solely of abilities that are defined by the player and GM. There are no fixed attributes or skill lists in the game. This was one of the concepts I used to have difficulty with, but having played Fate I now recognize them as being similar to aspects from that game. The main differences in HeroQuest are that characters consist solely of these player defined abilities, and they are given numerical ratings.

Each ability is assigned a rating from 1 to 20, but 20 is not the highest level an ability can have. Instead, when you raise an ability to 21 it wraps around and becomes a level 1 ability with one level of Mastery (the game uses a special character to show levels of Mastery, but I can't duplicate that shorthand with the character sets I have available in this blog).

Every roll in the game is an opposed roll. The GM sets a difficulty from 1 to 20 (possibly with levels of Mastery), then the player rolls against his ability while the GM rolls against the difficulty. Equal to or under the number being rolled against is a success, over it is a failure, a natural 1 is a critical success, and a natural 20 is a fumble. The two results are compared against each other which results in a range from complete victory (critical vs. fumble) to complete defeat (fumble vs. critical). Ties are resolved with the lowest roll winning a marginal victory.

Two things can alter this result, levels of Mastery and Hero Points. If one side of a contest has a greater level of Mastery than the other, then that side can shift his result a number of times equal to the difference in his levels of mastery. So if that side rolled a failure, but has one more mastery level than the other side, then they can shift the result to a success. Hero Points work the same way, with each point spent shifting the result one level. In both cases, if one side is already at critical success, then they can use additional shifts to lower the result of the opposing side.

Unfortunately, Hero Points are the one system that I really dislike in HeroQuest. The reason I dislike them is that they use one of my most hated game mechanics: combining experience points with some other form of expendable resource. I despise this mechanic, and could write a separate piece as to why (something I thought I'd already done, but as I can't find it in the archives here, I will probably write one shortly). For now I'll simply say that I don't find it to be an interesting choice as to whether or not to use experience for temporary gain within play or to hold on to it to improve the character permanently later.

I dislike this mechanic so much, that it would normally be a deal breaker for me as to whether or not I'd be willing to play a particular game that includes it, but I'm liking the rest of the system enough that I still want to run it anyway.

That's all there is to the basics of the game. The rest of the rules help clarify edge cases and special circumstances. The book finishes with a chapter on applying all of this to a game set in Glorantha, but is aimed towards those already familiar with the setting. It appears to be more of a stopgap measure until they can get further books published (there are a couple out now, but I have not yet read them).

One of the most interesting aspects of the game is character creation. Since a character consists solely of abilities, it is possible to just create a character by listing the abilities you want and then assigning points to them, but that's not the only way you can do it. The most interesting way of doing it is to write a description of your character that fills 100 words or less.

For example, if I were to create a character for a Star Wars game using HeroQuest, I might write the following:

Han Solo is a smuggler who made the Kessel run in twelve parsecs. He is always accompanied by his co-pilot, Chewbacca. He is an excellent pilot of their ship, the Millenium Falcon, which he keeps flying by jury-rigging repairs. He claims to be in it for the money, but he also has a heart of gold. He tends to shoot first when threatened, and is a crack shot with his Blastech-44. He’s also an Imperial Academy graduate, and a competent starship gunner. He owes money to Jabba the Hutt. He tends to dress like a scruffy-looking nerf herder.

Out of this I can get the following abilities:

smuggler

made the Kessel run in twelve parsecs

Chewbacca (a sidekick)

pilot

Millenium Falcon (tech)

jury-rigging

in it for the money

heart of gold

shoot first when threatened

crack shot

Blastech-44 (tech)

Imperial Academy graduate

starship gunner

Jabba the Hutt (enemy)

scruffy-looking nerf herder

Some of these abilities are obvious, like pilot or crack shot, but others may require some defining on the part of the player or GM, either before or during play.

Next I assign a value of 17 to one ability, 13 to the rest, and then assign 20 more points wherever I want to.

One of the great things about this system is that it's hard to think of a fictional character that I couldn't recreate using it, which also means that it's hard to think of a fictional genre that can't be run with a little creativity.

The simplicity of the system might make long term campaigns problematical, but certainly for short runs or one shots this should work pretty well. I'm looking forward to giving it a try.

Awesome Miniatures Gaming Room

Aside from a little bit of Dystopian Wars, I'm pretty much out of miniatures gaming at the moment, but I just had to share a link to this guy's gaming setup.

Goodreads

I've been using Goodreads for a while now, and it's one of the reasons that my posting on the blog has lessened. Book reviews I would have posted here in the past I've been posting to Goodreads instead. So, I've decided to experiment some with cross-posting some of the reviews I do. We'll see how it works out.

I don't always put as much care into my Goodreads reviews as I put into my blogging, so I may end up not liking the result, but given how little I've been blogging lately, I figure something is better than nothing.

One problem that I've already noticed is that it's double-posting the update to Facebook, but I think that's a problem I can live with if I have to.

Review: Smallville Role Playing Game

Smallville Role Playing Game by Josh Roby

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


A big departure from previous games using the Cortex system, this game has some very interesting concepts that center the story around the relationships between the characters rather than the powers and abilities of the characters. This better reflects the nature of the show and opens up some interesting possibilities for gameplay.

Unfortunately, the book is in dire need of an index. The lack of an index is only partly mitigated by a decent table of contents. The book could also use a good glossary. We ran a character generation session and had a hard time determining the difference between different terms, requiring much page flipping.

Overall though, I'm looking forward to giving this game a try, something I didn't expect to be saying of a game based on Smallville.



View all my reviews

Why I Hesitate to Get Into Licensed Games

Apparently it's the "in" thing to bash licensed games at the moment, and I don't mean to jump on that bandwagon, but I first drafted this post back in November of last year and let it cool for a while before posting. I still have some concerns about licensed games that I haven't really seen mentioned elsewhere yet, so I thought I'd share them. Of course, I don't spend a lot of time reading RPG forums and such, so it may have been covered elsewhere and I just haven't seen it.

This is not a comment on the quality of licensed games. Some of the best games out there are based on licensed properties. The Dresden Files RPG is hot. The Smallville and Leverage RPGs have gotten some excellent reviews. Unlike the days of TSR's Adventures of Indiana Jones RPG, games using licensed properties today tend to actually be pretty good.

The problem is the nature of licensing. Specifically, the fact that licenses eventually end. This has always been the case, but in the past the end of a license was not something that had a very big impact on the consumer. In most cases, if a license was profitable it was kept, and if it wasn't then it was dropped. From the consumer's perspective, if a license was lost it was identical to what would happen if a line was ended for any other reason: new stuff stopped coming out and old stuff disappeared from the retail shelves.

With the increasing role of the internet and ebooks, things have changed. When a license ends, all support for that product usually ends, as the licensee is often legally obligated to end that support. When WotC dropped the Star Wars license, they took down most of their online content, and there was a lot of that content. Whole chapters that were cut from the printed books were posted online. Some or all of this is now available elsewhere, but finding it can be tricky, and hosting it is potentially dangerous should Lucasfilm ever decide to play hardball (WotC ended up keeping the forums for the game on their site, and after some random searching I was able to find links on them to fan created compilations of content formerly hosted by WotC).

Now, WotC is one of the few companies that doesn't make PDF copies of its books available, so that wasn't an issue with the Star Wars RPG, but the more recent demise of the Conan RPG from Mongoose, and the Battlestar Galactica and Serenity RPGs from Margaret Weiss Games, points out that when a license is gone, it's usually gone for everything, including PDFs.

When most non-licensed RPGs go out of print, even if the publisher decides not to re-print the game, it's usually still available for purchase as a PDF. That's not the case for licensed games. I wouldn't have even known that any of these games were going away if not for being bombarded with reminders that the PDF products would soon be unavailable.

This makes a game ending due to a lost license a distinct event compared to a game ending for any other reason. If a company decides to stop printing new product, they still usually leave PDF versions for sale (and sometimes even publish new product solely in PDF format). When a company goes out of business, the rights to the games they published usually revert to someone who can still sell the PDF versions.

While less visible than before, the games are still out there, unlike licensed games which virtually disappear after the license ends.

While no RPG is ever truly dead as long as there are copies of the rules out there and people willing to play them, games that remain easily available as PDFs are certainly more healthy than those that don't have them available. To me, this potentially makes getting into a licensed game a riskier proposition.

For example, Leverage has been sold as an extremely hackable game by one of its designers, Rob Donoghue of Fate fame, but I'm extremely leery of getting into a system that I expect to be commercially available for only a couple of years before becoming completely unavailable. This is partly because historically, it's often been several years after I get a new game before I'm actually able to play it. While that has changed thanks to our Magpie Gaming Night group, it's still something that's very much in the back of my head.

So what's the solution? I could say "don't do licensed games" but I think that's both unrealistic and unfair. A lot of people like licensed games, including me. There are properties that I want to use in gaming, and I don't always want to have to hack my own system to do so. Licensed games also often make for the most interesting sourcebooks for the properties they are based on. The Star Wars expanded universe arguably got its real start from the original Star Wars RPG.

I think that a better solution has been presented by Green Ronin in how they are doing the DC Adventures RPG. They've published a complete licensed game, but also published the exact same game system without the DC intellectual property as Mutants & Masterminds 3rd Edition. So, when the DC license inevitably goes away, people will still be able to get into the game (assuming that the game hasn't moved on to 4th edition, but that's a whole different set of issues).

Margaret Weiss Productions started with a similar process, creating the Cortex system as a standalone set of rules (if only in house at first), then adapting it to their licensed properties, but that's no longer really the case. Their two most recent games, Smallville and Leverage, have hacked the core rules so much that they are, in my opinion, barely recognizable as being related to the Cortex system, and were those games to go away tomorrow, it would take considerable work to run them using only the Cortex core rulebook.

To summarize, my concern with licensed games is that when I come back to a system in a couple of years I want to be able to get a new player into the game. There's often no easy way to do that with a licensed game that has lost the license.