converted for a conversion

[Lorenzo Rubbo-Ferraro]

So, I finally own a copy of Heroquest, and each page I turn I can hear the resounding sound of six inch nails driving deep into the coffin that holds the decrepit body of my system that I've have been labouring on for five long years. When I read the chapter on relationships I swear I had a fleeting vision of a tombstone on a misty hill with the words "R.I.P. My Game Design".

Anyhow, it has not all been in vein, there are still some redeeming features of my old design that I would like to see in HQ. I figure just making a few tweaks to HQ might be easier then re-inventing the wheel (though it will probably be another five years doing so). I joined the rules list a few months back and visited occasionally – I'll have to visit more now that I have finally surrendered – others, it seems, have the same ideas on some rules twists.

Some examples of what I want to keep from ye old design (and they may have been suggested before) are:

Debilitating abilities: Instead of having penalties of –X% to appropriate abilities, why not just add a debilitating ability that is used as a penalty against appropriate abilities e.g. Poisoned 5w5, Embarrassed 10w2, or Broken Arm 10w3.

Hero Points from Contests Why not reward a hero for his prowess, his victories over his adversaries? The hero gains HP equivalent to the mastery that his opposition used in the contest. This means defeating weaker opponents or challenges is not so glorious (and possibly dishonourable for a hero) and the gain is little, but acts of great bravery (the bread and butter of heroes) are riskier, you may find yourself on the losing end of a total victory, but the reward is higher; more Hero Points, fame and glory.

Any pointers to sites/articles that focus on good homebrews would be appreciated.

I'm still not a hundred percent on how things work, it will need more reading and take some playing to really get it – I'm looking forward to extended contests and AP, very slick. Indeed, once again I'll probably find what rules I thought were great about my game are in HQ somewhere or perhaps suggested by someone on the rules list.

Cheers,
Official screaming fanboy and Issaries sales rep,
Lorenzo.

[Peter Nordstrand]

Hi L,

Debilitating abilities: Instead of having penalties of –X% to appropriate abilities, why not just add a debilitating ability that is used as a penalty against appropriate abilities e.g. Poisoned 5w5, Embarrassed 10w2, or Broken Arm 10w3.

Sounds workable to me. All you need is a system to decide the rating of the aquired flaw. Let us know what you come up with. Also, this affects the "healing" rules.

Hero Points from Contests

Also, see this old thread about handing out Hero Points: http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=6623

All the best,

[Bankuei]

Hi Lorenzo,

An option if you want to make greater conflict= greater reward:

1) Fast improvement(really fast)
Increase an ability as if it was augmented by the ability it defeated in a contest.  Do this for each contest the ability "wins" in.

2) Slower improvement
Same as above, but only count one contest per session, and that being the highest rated contest.

3) Slower still
As above, but they only get the improvement bonus if a hero point is spent.  This means only around 3 abilities will rise a session, or so.

You may also come to find that with the augment rules, raw numbers alone don't necessarily mean the world...  Try playing it without rules mods for awhile and see what you think before you overhaul the reward system...  Things might turn out to be a little different than what you expect :)

Chris

[Mike Holmes]

So, I finally own a copy of Heroquest, and each page I turn I can hear the resounding sound of six inch nails driving deep into the coffin that holds the decrepit body of my system that I've have been labouring on for five long years. When I read the chapter on relationships I swear I had a fleeting vision of a tombstone on a misty hill with the words "R.I.P. My Game Design".

Dude, this had my crying with laughter. In part because I know just what you mean.

Debilitating abilities: Instead of having penalties of –X% to appropriate abilities, why not just add a debilitating ability that is used as a penalty against appropriate abilities e.g. Poisoned 5w5, Embarrassed 10w2, or Broken Arm 10w3.

Oh, sure, easy to say, but how do you execute it? Check out my way called "Currency Based Resolution" in the files section of the rules group: http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/HeroQuest-rules/files/
If it's not what you're looking for, it might give you ideas. In any case, there are several pitfals to watch out for with doing this.

Hero Points from Contests Why not reward a hero for his prowess, his victories over his adversaries?

Two reasons why this might not be a good idea. First, it's nigh Gamism producing. You're going to have people gunning for others for player empowerment. This will mess with other parts of HQ like you can't imagine. Second, it's incestuous. That is, you're getting HP that you can use to win more contests. If you get any more than one, that means that you can be using one HP to gain more than HP, which can spiral out of control quickly.

If you do decide to do this, I'd make it based on the difference in masteries between the sides or somthing. That's still not good either, however. I'd just stay away from this idea.

Mike

[Eero Tuovinen]

Interestingly, I'm doing the ability penalties in exactly that way. The size of the negative ability is equal to what the percentage penalty would come to, so you get bigger penalties if you're more skilled. For variety's sake the narrator might decide to meter the penalty off the winner's ability instead at times.

There's no design reason to it, though; as you might be aware, my current HQ campaign is based off what I remember from reading the book half a year ago, so I just did that part the way I do it in my modded D&D. Seems to work fine thus far, though.

Actually, now I'm left thinking if there's any reason to go back to those percentage penalties. Seems clumsy to me, but would perhaps make the penalties matter more to players...

[Mike Holmes]

Interestingly, I'm doing the ability penalties in exactly that way. The size of the negative ability is equal to what the percentage penalty would come to, so you get bigger penalties if you're more skilled. For variety's sake the narrator might decide to meter the penalty off the winner's ability instead at times.

Um...I qucikly came up with this idea when first looking at this problem, and then discarded it immediatly thereafter. What are you doing differently than the below?

Let's assume two characters with 5W TNs are rolling.

Defeat Level--Resulting Ability Level
Marginal -- 1
Minor -- 2
Major -- 12
Complete -- 5W

Now, if these are ability levels, then the marginal and minor are meaningless. They're below the default 6. The Major...well isn't very Major, is it? And the Complete level is supposed to mean that you're dying or something? So what sense does any ability level make there, particularly? Normally you don't get any penalty you just can't do anything until the situation is altered.

So how are you making any of this functional? This is precisely one of those pitfals that I warned Lorenzo about originally. I'd be fascinated to find a fix that makes this work.

Mike

[Eero Tuovinen]

Um...I qucikly came up with this idea when first looking at this problem, and then discarded it immediatly thereafter. What are you doing differently than the below?

Nothing, really. Call it freewheeling attitude combined with not having the rules with me here (I'm making it all up as I go as far as these details are concerned). Now that you mention it, your objections are perfectly reasonable... luckily penalties don't have much impact on play in Heroquest, we'd probably have come to trouble already otherwise.

I'll have to consider changing to percentage penalties. Would mean redesigning the character sheet, perhaps... what a bother.

Now, if these are ability levels, then the marginal and minor are meaningless. They're below the default 6. The Major...well isn't very Major, is it? And the Complete level is supposed to mean that you're dying or something? So what sense does any ability level make there, particularly? Normally you don't get any penalty you just can't do anything until the situation is altered.

Well, my take here has been as follows:

Defeat Level -- Result
Marginal -- Negative ability at 6
Minor -- Negative ability at 6+10%
Major -- Negative ability at 50%
Complete -- Negative ability at 100%

Also, as I mentioned, the narrator (an informal system has developed here: I narrate, unless the player wants to) may decide whose ability rating the penalty is calculated from. So, in cases of extreme difference in ability, the weaker side is likely getting a pretty big negative ability from the champ.

These negative abilities are then used as augments (negative or positive), mainly. They however can be utilized as active abilities in an important way: a player may opt to use the negative ability as the main ability, even if it's not his ability. In this case the doubt, wound, enemy or whatever becomes the main force to oppose the character, and the external enemy is just an augment on that.

The result of this is that the penalties for the most part do not have a big role, but they do come to play now and again, especially in inventive attacks against the character. It's somewhat more secure to let the negative ability be the main attacker, as it takes the fall (weakens or even disappears) if the target wins. The game is a wuxia drama, so the rules work for us...

As for death, I'm handling that as an additional potential of complete defeat - the winning side may narrate the death, or circumstances leading up to such, in addition to the negative ability, if they wish. This is a general rule for all results, actually - the better the result, the more "sideperks" you can get apart from the literal conflict goal. Some times these are listed before the roll, some times when the player is considering whether to burn a hero point, and some times they're negotiated afterwards.

But, as I said, mostly this is about me playing the rules very loosely. I don't care about temporary modifiers in any games that much, after all. All kinds of crazy stuff happens in the game when we get rolling. For example, I've taken to a habit of opening a betting office for HPs during extented conflicts lately, setting odds and getting the players to bet on the outcomes... hmm, I probably should write about that part of our games, instead of describing in-world events.

...

Yeah, I can see how the way I'm playing may cause problems down the road. Makes more sense from the metaphysical viewpoint, though. The penalties are almost cut to a tenth part of what they should be by the book, except when the penalty should feature as the main ability of a contest. One way to fix this could be to just redefine the percentages, to make the penalties much bigger...

Then again, I'm not too worried. The Well of Souls scenario we're playing will likely reach it's climax in the next session, and we've held up until now. Last session ended with one PC getting a complete defeat against another, too.

[Lorenzo Rubbo-Ferraro]

hi all,

Thanks for the input. Regarding debilitating abilities - actually shouldn't that be a disability in HQ? - I initially thought it could be based on the margin of the failure as Eero has done but then thought of basing it on the opponent or obstacles 'strength', similar to the idea of gaining HP's from a contest, likewise the disability would be measured by how able the opposition is to injure you.

Mike, your RP's in the currency article are what I'm talking about, although I haven't grasped it totally yet, the two ideas I brought up work together, that is gaining HP's for victories or receiving disabilities for losses. From your article:

There are two effects of winning a contest. First, the winner of the conflict gains his goal to some extent. Second, the RP total of the loser in a contest becomes a Flaw for the loser, or points in a new Ability for the winner, or some combination of the two.

I'm still in the system design mindset and probably should drop it and just play Heroquest 'straight', at least until I get a good grasp of it. As Chris said:

Try playing it without rules mods for awhile and see what you think before you overhaul the reward system... Things might turn out to be a little different than what you expect :)

Good advice Chris. It also means I can focus on my own setting, inventing the keywords etc.

Cheers,
Lorenzo.

[Mike Holmes]

Eero,

Just winging it works for me if that's what the group is all about. I just like solid mechanisms to rely on for my games.

Anyhow, the "Percent plus 6" was the second system that I thought of. :-)

You've noted the problem with that, however, I think. There's just very little difference at some points. The obvious example is two characters at 17 going at each other (we won't even look at the trivial case of novices going at each other at 13). This makes the results 6, 8, 9, 13. The first three are just not varied enough. In fact, to make it match the original system, where the penalties are -1, -2 or more (depending on what it's applied to), -9 or more (again depending), means that the matching abilities should be about 10, 20, 10W4, respectively (all give or take 5), to have augments that are similar to the original system.

So, if defeat levels are to retain any substantive variation, you really need something else.

Also, the way that I make "complete defeat" understandable in this context is that it's not about gaining a penalty at all, but that it's transformative in some substantial way. This is a hard concept. But generally, what complete defeat has to mean is that the character is altered in some basic "pre-ability" way such that certain contests are no longer meaningful (and perhaps new ones are). When you look at a character, or, indeed anything enumerated with HQ abilities, it has certain built in things it can address, and others it can't.

For example, no matter how hard one flaps one's arms, you don't get a Fly 6 ability rating. Humans simply cannot fly unless altered somehow. They're simply not allowed to attempt flying contests. Whereas a character with wings can attempt flying contests. Now, with a large enough penalty, if the ability is lowered below 0 the rule is that it's no longer usable - you don't even get to roll. But that doesn't mean that the ability can't come back at some point. If the character were to recieve a "complete defeat" result, however, then it would be suitable to have it's wings cut off from it. Because what that does is to make the character into something more like a normal human, now incapable of having flight contests. They will not grow back (at least not using the healing rules that say that the penalty reduces after a period).

This is what complete defeat should always represent, IMO. An alteration of the character into something else such that the set of contests in which they can engage is altered. Death, for example, means that the character cannot engage in any contest ever again, with the possible exception of afterlife contests (which is an interesting thought). But take some of the other examples like the social ones. It's not just that certain relationships are "damaged," they are eliminated entirel, taken off the page so that they can't be used in contest again, not even at default level. The character loses an argument to a complete failure? Then the character has become one who believes the other side of the argument, and cannot engage in contests to change this, or to support the other side. Because he doesn't anymore.

Now, how permenant is permenant? Well, practically speaking it's just a contest against the appropriate level of difficulty. Even death can be reversed, theoretically. But not via recuperation, the "healing" contest has to be something magical or superscience or something. Similarly, if you want your wings back, you'll need a spell of regeneration or something that can accomplish this. If you want those relationships back, maybe they can do some great act, and then roll against the difficulty somehow to get them back.

That's my view of "complete defeat." It's "worse" than a penalty, it completely eliminates your ability to operate in some arena until fixed. Which matches the 100% penalty well.

Lorenzo, if an ability can be used against you frequently, the text calls these abilities flaws. Why not just call them flaws or disabilities? Because any ability rating can be used positively or negatively. The classic example that I give is using the "Nasty Leg Wound 5W" to get a +3 to your Seduce Barmaid ability as you regale her with the story of how you bravely got the wound. Or just appealing to her sympathy or whatever.

Yes, penalties, as written, are not ever beneficial this way, and you could create a new class of ability called the disability to simulate that. But I think that's no fun. Rather, I think that showing players that losing is fun by giving them abilities that seem problematic, but which they can use to their advantage, is good policy. Then again, that's with the caveat that this is intended to support the way I play HQ, so it might not apply to everyone. But, generally, I don't want players to think that losing contests is mechanically bad.

Mike, your RP's in the currency article are what I'm talking about, although I haven't grasped it totally yet, the two ideas I brought up work together, that is gaining HP's for victories or receiving disabilities for losses.

No, see what you have is the opposite of what I want. That is, when I talk about "winning" a contest, I'm not talking about rewarding the player, but rather the character. And penalizing the opposition isn't the player "winning" either, in fact, from my analysis, he's possibly empowering the opponent (see Universalis, where a character being wounded makes it harder to eliminate).

No, I want players to mechanically feel as though losing is just as fun as winning. Because otherwise you start to get gamism behaviors like acting unheroically because it's tactically sound to do so. Only by saying that losing is as fun as winning can you encourage players to have their characters do rechless, heroic things - more generally the system doesn't stop the player from having the character do the thing that's most interesting to him in terms of story.

Now, again, that's my bias showing. But if you push HQ towards gamism, I can give you a whole slew of problems that are going to occur with the player's understanding of how the system works. Starting with silliness like ranged combat seeming odd to them, and not understanding how magic works, to...well I can go on and on and on. So all I'm saying is that if you want to play a more gamism inducing version of the game, that you've been warned. Every group that I see drifting the rules in this direction becomes hopelessly mired in trying to figure out how to make the rest of the system match, and then they end up changing the rest of the system. By the time they're done, they might as well be playing another game entirely (it's called Runequest).

Mike

[Lorenzo Rubbo-Ferraro]

Mike. You are my guru :-)

[soviet]

Lorenzo, if an ability can be used against you frequently, the text calls these abilities flaws. Why not just call them flaws or disabilities? Because any ability rating can be used positively or negatively. The classic example that I give is using the "Nasty Leg Wound 5W" to get a +3 to your Seduce Barmaid ability as you regale her with the story of how you bravely got the wound. Or just appealing to her sympathy or whatever.

This is an area I've been toying with as well. The 'assigning an ability' route is the more flavourful way imo but it means that the actual mechanical effect is pretty negligible, unless you assign abilities with astronomical ratings (Kicked in the Nuts 12W6... ouch!).

How about assigning both a penalty and an ability? You could use the standard penalty as normal but tag it with an ability name and a rating equal to the 'healing' difficulty. So you would get Nasty Leg Wound 5W (-50%) or Shunned by the Literati 17 (-10%).

This gives you the best of both worlds afaics - a relevant game effect but also a characterful ability that can be used by creative players. You also have the 'healing' difficulty written right there on the character sheet for easy reference. Bonus!  

soviet

[Mike Holmes]

Well, I think that would work, but seems to be quite a bit of extra stuff to come up with, and it's sorta redundant. I have Broken Leg 5W, and -50%? One of the advantages to the idea of creating flaw abilities in the target is so that you can drop the penalty system as additional to the normal system. You make the system more elegant by one whole subsystem.

For the effort, I'd probably go with my "Currency Based Resolution" thing. It doesn't produce your ball-bashing effect, but it does make substantial ability levels. The problem with making abilities that are 12W6 in level are that if that's the above leg break, then, as I've said, the barmaids are all in serious trouble. That is, if a player can find a way to use such a high level ability, they'll be overly powerful when they do.

I think that the trade off of somewhat lower penalties is not a big deal, and has some big advantages. For instance, you can drop the old healing system, and just use the ability level itself for the resistance to remove an impariment. With the combo system, or one that produces large penalties, you end up having to use the old system for figuring out the resistances to penalty removal.

Hmm. How about this? Call them "shock" abilities. When you take a new flaw on, there's an initial period of adjustment to it during which you have a matching "shock" flaw. So, if I get "Broken Arm 5W", I also get Broken Arm Shock 5W. So the penalty is doubled in the short run. The shock stat is probably only good for penalizing, and goes away when, say, the leg is treated. At any point the character can use the Broken Arm 5W to seduce the barmaid, but the shock would still count against him if it was still around. This way you can still get pretty big penalties like a -6 total for the broken arm. Reducing the shock penalty would go against first aid or the like, and wouldn't be too difficult given that it's only at the same level as the other impediment.

Hmmm. That might have some legs.

Mike. You are my guru :-)

Hey, somebody has to think about these things way too much. Might as well be me. ;-)

Mike

[soviet]

Well, I think that would work, but seems to be quite a bit of extra stuff to come up with, and it's sorta redundant. I have Broken Leg 5W, and -50%? One of the advantages to the idea of creating flaw abilities in the target is so that you can drop the penalty system as additional to the normal system. You make the system more elegant by one whole subsystem.

I agree in theory, I just think that there are real difficulties in setting the ability rating and making it big enough to matter. It seems like the Broken Leg 5W (-50%) method gives you the best of both worlds, but this is all theory for me right now. I'm running my first HQ game next week and I intend to use this 'combo' method. I'll let you know how it works out!

soviet

[Mike Holmes]

Cool, I look forward to seeing what happens. Practical tests are the best.

Mike