[HeroQuest] - Unfettered Space

[lightcastle]

This is my first post to Actual Play, so bear with me.

What I'm actually playing isn't really HeroQuest, although I am using those rules. Instead, the world is vaguely Firefly-esque, with a bunch of Traveller, Star*Drive, and Star Frontiers thrown in.

I've been wanting to run a sci fi game for a while, and while I may complain constantly about things in the HeroQuest system that I don't get or struggle with, it remains the most fun as a new system I've encountered in years. (I've heard excellent things about Dogs in the Vineyard, I must say - and half the stuff at the Forge seems intriguing to me.)

I shopped around for players for some time, trying to get people interested in a different system and approach. Given how little time anyone has for gaming these days, it has been a trial. I finally ended up with 4. One is in his mid-30s, and has been a gamer since he was in his teens. Two others are in their early 20s (they are a couple) and both have gamed for a long time. I have played with all 3 of those in the past, usually as a player. The last is in her early 20s, and has never played a game more than one session in her life.

I am still struggling with the "unlearning curve" of heroquest for the experienced players. They're trying, god bless them, but I can see them straining for a skill list or three. No one has successfully completed char gen, and I finally just threw them into a first session to hopefully get them to grok it a bit by doing.

Just some background: They are the crew of the ship ARUNDHATI - an all-purpose Free Trader. They ply the starways of the Confederation of United Worlds, a group of colonies that fought its way free of the Abilonian Empire 6 years ago. The Confederation has tried to become a more unified federal state, that's still being hammered out. There are still regions of space loyal to the empire  and to other empires of Old Space. (There is a gulf separating Old Space from the Frontier, making travel long and difficult.)

The crew:
Captain MacArthur Singh - A veteran of the Revolutionary war, he lost his leg in a battle and now has a prosthetic one. He cashiered out, got himself a ship and a crew, and has been running as a Free Trader ever since. He's crusty and prone to brooding. He's honorable and loyal to his crew.

Engineer Suzanne Hastings - A rich landowner's daughter, she was educated in the Empire. She came back as her family sided with the Revolution. A mechanical genius who wasn't going to inherit, she spent her time building engines for the various underground racing circuits and developed a reputation. After her father died, her sister pushed Suzanne out. She decided to pull out most of her trust fund and bought herself the basis of a great starship engine. She struck a deal with Singh, who had blown his own engines by then, and took the job of engineer. The Arundhati is his, but the engines are hers. She's insatiably curious and convinced she knows everything.

Pilot Kris Mahata - A hot-shot pilot with amazing ability, he made his name racing on the underground circuit and taking some other odd (not always legal) jobs. He heard that Hastings (who everyone knew designed some of the best racer engines around) had her own ship with her own engines and volunteered. He wasn't expecting a beat-up tramp ship running sketchy cargo on the Rim. But he IS driving a Hastings custom engine, and sometimes pushes it to its limits. Young, pretty, and cocky as all hell, what isn't well known is that he is in fact a product of a breeding program by The Abilonian Empire for superior pilots. Brought over towards the end of the war, his ship went down, he lost his parents, and he chose to defect rather than go back.

Doctor Phoebe Wade - A war widow and doctor, she was raised on a mining world that was one of the first colonies established out in the Frontier. While still technically human, she is tall, pale, and sensitive to bright light. It was she who saved Singh's life, but had to amputate his leg to do it. After the war, she drifted from job to job, using her superb ability to understand cultures and languages and her medical skill to get by. She joined with Singh years ago, left, and came back recently. (She is secretly addicted to stims.)

I gave them a shipping job running medicine to Basu, a world being hit by an outbreak of a lethal, but easily controlled disease. They obviously had a case that had been stolen off of someone else's shipment, and were told to beat the main shipment there (being run by an old rival of the Captain's). It would be good money, and the shipment would be very valuable as a first bulwark against the outbreak -- provided it arrived before the much larger main shipment. No money if they came in second.

They suspected it would probably just be going to the rich and powerful, and weren't too pleased, but took the job.
Halfway along the run, they got attacked by pirates, escaped, and then cornered by a planetary militia. In talks with the militia, they found out that Basu wasn't experiencing an outbreak. They checked the cargo and under testing discovered it was in fact illegal drugs. They suspect someone is trying to sneak some independent drug trade under the nose of the major crime boss in this region of space. Captain Singh contacted the rival they were supposed to beat, and after a bit of talking, they realized they had both been fed the same story, and both were carrying illegal drugs. They've agreed to rendezvous one jump shy of Basu, while they consider their options.

So now you know what is going on.

Some positives:

   I got the players active in creating the world. We had a session or two before this deciding what we wanted from the universe, what kinds of adventures, and what kinds of rules for the way the world worked (space travel, the politics, the feel, etc.) The result is a universe everyone already has a decent idea about and the players gradually glommed to the idea that they can make up things about the universe on the fly and I will go with them. I think they are grooving on that level of freedom.

I think forcing them to play has started to get them to understand how abilities work in HeroQuest and how they need to assign them. I do think they may need to do some tweaking in a session or two, but that's fine. Since we have a delay due to the couple going to South America (Venezuela) for a week, I may get the other two to sit down and try to finish up the number crunching.

They expressly wanted not just violence as problems and solutions, and seemed to absolutely love that what I gave them was a problem with no "right" answer. They are actively discussing what to do: Seal up the cargo, play dumb, and get their money. Try ditching the cargo and running out of the region. Admitting they know what is in the cargo and demanding higher payment. Trying to find a way to get the culprits arrested without destroying their reputation as reliable.

Negatives:
   They really want to roll for tasks. I can't seem to quite get the "conflict resolution" side of HQ into their heads. (This is mostly a problem for Mahat's player.)  I also got the feeling they were somewhat surprised by how little I made them roll.

   As I said, there is a bit of still "looking for the skill list" going on.

  I'm not sure what to do for relationship pulling here. By doing the ship thing, they have made themselves a "wandering party", which takes away one of the best things about the HQ system, its ability to tie you into a community and the relationships thereof. They all have some things in their background, and I will bring them in, but I'm not sure I can do too many at once without it seeming forced that all these people show up at once.

  I suppose those are minor complaints, and I did think it a good session. I guess the main question I'd ask of the group here concerns the relationships question. I like relationship bangs (as well as moral ones) but have found those easier to do in a non-party style group. How to do one where the group can pretty much just fly where they will?

LC

-What are you playing?  How long have you been playing/how long do you intend to play this game?  Is this your first time?
-Who's playing, how many people, any notable things about them(demographics, relationships, blood kin, etc.)?
-Group history- how long have you all played together, if at all?
-Logistics- Face to face, LARP, online chat, email, forum post game?  How long are the sessions?

The Game
-How did it go?
-Pro's/Con's - what caused them?  specific examples to highlight them?
   -System? Techniques? Drifts, house rules?
   -The People?  personality, communications, etc.?
-Compare and contrast- how does this compare to other sessions, other games, and/or other campaigns?

Wrap up
-How did people like/dislike it?
-Are you gonna play more?  What will you do differently?  What will you do the same?
-Questions
   -Any questions about the system/rules?
   -Any questions for advice on how to do X, or do it better?
   -Ask for comparisons- "Has anyone else encountered this?"

[contracycle]

I am still struggling with the "unlearning curve" of heroquest for the experienced players. They're trying, god bless them, but I can see them straining for a skill list or three. No one has successfully completed char gen, and I finally just threw them into a first session to hopefully get them to grok it a bit by doing.

Has the system changed since the HW 100-word paragraph approach?  That seemed an excellent nstarting point for character design, I'm surprised it could not be completed.

I'm not sure what to do for relationship pulling here. By doing the ship thing, they have made themselves a "wandering party", which takes away one of the best things about the HQ system, its ability to tie you into a community and the relationships thereof. They all have some things in their background, and I will bring them in, but I'm not sure I can do too many at once without it seeming forced that all these people show up at once.

I suspect this is potentially fatal, I'm afraid to say.  Yes, this wandering style, band of misfits unrelated to society, is definitely not what the game is designed for.  You could still get away with it if the characters are strongly connected to organisations and individuals as part of their backgrounds, but given the reported problem with character design I fear this wil not be in place either.
An emergency measure might be expressing the ship as a community, possibly as a wyter or similar.  This feeds into the problem you are having with Mahats player, who has a classically detached character.  If this player could learn to call on social abilities for solving problems, their interests may shift in focus too and the character thus become more engaged, but wandering as they are there is no society with which to engage.  Mahat probably needs an ability like "stunningly beautiful" that produces real mechanical effects to get started. 

And in that regard, you also mention that you are not making them roll for many things, but this may also be a problem in that HW is not meant to be hand-wavy over resolution, its meant to be generously interpretative IN resolution.  If you are not triggering the resolution system much, the opportunities to use the non-obvious or tangential abilities creatively drop off.  And the opportunities to use standard abilities in social problems (like using strength as an augment to rhetoric to represent intimidation) are non-existant unless the game is heavily PvP.  The reward system only operates to the extent that system operates.

I have to say that all in all I think trying to learn HQ, and getting to know a freshly developed world at the same time, is probably a bad idea.  You didn't mention much about the setting, but if by saying you have wanted to do SF for a while and used this as your opportunity, then the lack of detail in the setting may have encouraged the selection of such a socially detachedd group.  Even the work of applying the system to a world you are familiar worth can be very enlightening as to how you need to set up categories of abilities.  And writing keywords for cultures gives you some basis for linking abilities into actions.  I think the generality of the resolution system does need to be combined with the specificity of keywords and organisational boxes like the runic symbols.  When both the system and setting are vague, play will be vague.

[lightcastle]

Wow, I just noticed the cut and paste add on on my original post. How embarrassing. :)

Thanks for answering contracycle.

Has the system changed since the HW 100-word paragraph approach?  That seemed an excellent nstarting point for character design, I'm surprised it could not be completed.

Not really. But that is VERY hard for some people. They end up trying to write background instead of description. Since we were getting so hung up on the rules part, I pushed them into play so they could do things a bit more "as you go". 

Yes, this wandering style, band of misfits unrelated to society, is definitely not what the game is designed for.  You could still get away with it if the characters are strongly connected to organisations and individuals as part of their backgrounds, but given the reported problem with character design I fear this wil not be in place either.

This seems to be settling out, actually. I asked the players if they didn't mind me being fairly heavy-handed in bringing background stuff in, with the caveat that the choice to cut and run from those ties is entirely theirs. They all seem very for it. So Mac has his other war veteran ties. (Represented by his brilliantly-named ability of "we few, we happy few".) Dr Wade has her dead husband's family, her own family, and her dead husband's combat troop (who she was supposed to be with as the medic when he died.) Hastings has her family, and that's about it. (She likes her engines more than people. She has also told me to go right ahead and put that into conflict, such as choosing the crew vs the engines.) Mahat understood that all of his are negative - he has no one he'd go to bat for, only people he is avoiding. He's thinking about whether he wants to change that, or if he wants that problem to be an in-game issue, where he learns to trust people.

An emergency measure might be expressing the ship as a community, possibly as a wyter or similar.  This feeds into the problem you are having with Mahats player, who has a classically detached character.  If this player could learn to call on social abilities for solving problems, their interests may shift in focus too and the character thus become more engaged, but wandering as they are there is no society with which to engage.  Mahat probably needs an ability like "stunningly beautiful" that produces real mechanical effects to get started.

I'm not sure what you mean by expressing the ship as a wyter. Do you mean mechanically? The ship definitely is their community, that got established very well in play, probably due to the players being so involved in the world design. They knew their roles on the ship, and so we see a Father-Daughter dynamic between Mac and Wade, flirtation without any real chance of anything happening between Mahat and Wade, and mutual professional respect between the two hard-driving perfectionists, Wade and Hastings. Hastings and Mahat have a not-so-secret project to build the perfect Racing Sled out of stuff they scavenge from other deals - she'll design it and he'll fly it in a completely illegal and very high stakes asteroid slalom race. Mac and Mahat are playing their relationship as one of respect. Mahat respects Mac as Captain, and Mac respects Mahat's abilities as a pilot. Mac and Hastings are similar, with Mac seeming to regard both of them as the "tempermental genius artist" type. As long as they keep his ship running, it's fine. 

And Mahat does, in fact, have "Roguishly handsome and he knows it."

And in that regard, you also mention that you are not making them roll for many things, but this may also be a problem in that HW is not meant to be hand-wavy over resolution, its meant to be generously interpretative IN resolution.  If you are not triggering the resolution system much, the opportunities to use the non-obvious or tangential abilities creatively drop off.  And the opportunities to use standard abilities in social problems (like using strength as an augment to rhetoric to represent intimidation) are non-existant unless the game is heavily PvP.  The reward system only operates to the extent that system operates.

That's a very good point. But I am a firm believer in only rolling when the variety of outcomes is interesting. I do think that the mechanics themselves will help remind the players how interesting creative use of abilities are.

I have to say that all in all I think trying to learn HQ, and getting to know a freshly developed world at the same time, is probably a bad idea.  You didn't mention much about the setting, but if by saying you have wanted to do SF for a while and used this as your opportunity, then the lack of detail in the setting may have encouraged the selection of such a socially detached group.

On this I will completely disagree. The very fact of them getting to develop the world themselves has meant that the universe has lots of excellently fleshed out details. The choice to do "wandering traders on a ship a-la Firefly" was probably far more central to them making people with weak ties to former friends and family. (And not without reason.)

[soviet]

I suspect this is potentially fatal, I'm afraid to say.  Yes, this wandering style, band of misfits unrelated to society, is definitely not what the game is designed for.  You could still get away with it if the characters are strongly connected to organisations and individuals as part of their backgrounds, but given the reported problem with character design I fear this wil not be in place either.

I don't think this is necessarily true. The HeroQuest system gives you the tools to focus on whatever you and your group feel like - in Glorantha this is most often society and religion, true, but that doesn't mean that the system itself is particularly tied to these things. In a sci-fi 'free trader' style game you might focus on things like trade, technology, species/culture, and issues of 'frontier morality', for example.

In any event, relationships do not have to be with specific people or societies, nor does that person or society have to be present in the scene for it to make a difference to a contest; distance is relative when you take into account FTL travel and comm systems, anyway. One cool trick to use in a 'planet of the week' style game is to encourage players to keep a few relationship slots unfilled using the 'as you go' method so that they can reveal new allies and friends as and when they need them (cf. the Joss Whedon 'making it up as you go along' method).

Lightcastle: It sounds to me like there is plenty of interesting stuff going on in your game and your players are having fun; there are a lot of good threads on conflict resolution in the HQ forum archives if you haven't already read through them. I think HQ works really well for sci-fi, and I've been playing a Star Wars game with it for some time now, so if you have any other difficulties then ask away!

soviet

[Ian Cooper]

One way to solve community problems in a game such as this is to make sure that there are non-player crew, preferably with conflicts among them. Plenty of stories revolve around tensions between young charismatic first-mate and old crusty captain, with the characters forced to choose sides. You can get all the community conflict you need from within the wandering community - just don't isolate it to be the players themselves.

[contracycle]

Soviet, I don't disagree in principle, I just think its a bad choice for a first outing with the system.  I think its quite hard to simultaneously figure out how keywords are used and invent them for a setting at the same time.  But if the settig is more developed than I thought, it will be easier not elast becuase you can simply seize on things that are given capital letters.

Lightcastle, you have it seems solved some of the issues I was worried about.  I did mean expressing the ship mechanically; but I have concerns about your statement that you only choose to roll when the range of outcomes is going to be interesting.  I think this is a habitual holdover - this system uses fortune in the middle rather than the end, so you are less rolling to determine outcomes than to determine hopw outcomes are achieved.  You might say, the purpose of rolling is to see which attributes and keywords the players introduce into the resolution, HOW they solve, or fail to solve, the problem.  All the interesting results of the system arise from this process.  There would still be room to do a kind of collective entity here within your setting, a "happy ship" value or similar that represents the degree of cooperation and intuition among crewmembers, with low values representing vessels with internal problems or bad morale and similar.  The relationships that exist between the characters can then feed into this, or may affect it when they are activated.