Sci-fi heroes

[Jaif]

I've been thinking about adapting heroquest to "hard" sci-fi.  One issue is that heroquest is designed to support advancement of characters from average humans straight up to god-head by the end of a campaign.  However, to maintain versimili-whatsit <g> in my campaign I would want people's stats to advance that high.  It's fine in fantasy to have your strength grow off the charts, but having a person in real life literally hit someone harder than a truck doing 60mph is a bit jarring.

What I was thinking of doing was this: use d100, and scale accordingly. If you start with a "17" normally, you start with an "85", etc.  However, advancement points are at the same rate as before, so effectively you advance 5 times more slowly.

Am I missing anything?

-Jeff

P.S. I had other ideas for how to handle science, but no time to type. :-)

[newsalor]

Why don't you just give out less heropoints? Maybe that's not an ideal solution, but moving on to D100 seems a bit radical.

Remember that you are the one who defines what's difficult and what's not. I think that it would be easier to just keep the things you don't what you sci-fi characters doing very difficult. Who says that throwing a car has to have a difficulty of 10W2 or something?

From experience I can say that the rate of advancement is not as fast as it may seem. When it's at its fastest pace, players seem to raise their best abilities at the rate of one point per session. Then again, not every session will involve that ability and at least my players loath to pay the double cost.

[Wulf]

If you want to keep character's ability scores down to a low(-ish) level, charge by the Mastery. You can multiply the cost of improvement by the already-existing masteries (so an ability of 17 costs 1 HP to raise to 18, while an ability of 17W2 costs 3) - however, that can get SERIOUSLY expensive for higher-cost improvements (raising an unconcentrated Affinitty from 10W2 to 11W2 would be 18 HP!). So maybe just adding 1 HP extra per existing mastery.

This will either have the effect of the player raising the character's less expensive abilities up to the level of the higher ones (so the character gets a larger number of higher abilities), or making the player complain you charge too much for character improvement...

Wulf

[Jaif]

I don't want to choke down on advancement points or make advancement more expensive, because both of these choke down on the perceived rate of advancement as far as the players are concerned.   In other words, I'd rather give them a lot of little advancements versus fewer major ones.

However, your idea about redoing the scale is intriguing.  There no reason that XW4 has to mean godlike.  I'll think about that.

Btw, what makes using a d100 radical?  It's not like I'm listening to rock music or somethin'....

-Jeff :-)

[Mike Holmes]

I think that altering the scale is the easier way to go, myself.

That said, I don't think you need to alter anything. I actually can't see a player in a sci-fi game actually raising their strength so high as to be able to hit like a mack truck.

If a player in my game started doing that, I'd ask, "Hmm, he's getting pretty strong. In fact, right now he's about the strongest guy he's ever met. More strength would start getting unrealisitic. Why are you doing this? Especially when Strength is so useless in this genre?"

I mean, just say no. Or make him come up with a better explanation. Maybe he's taking some sort of advanced steriods. Or maybe he's getting some sort of cybernetic enhancement. Or nano-enhancers. Or...whatever. Any expenditure has to make sense, or they can't take it (which almost gets me off on my in-game/metagame rant - a really high strength ability doesn't neccessarily mean that the character is strong at all).

Anyhow, given that sci-fi often means that superhuman things (as compared to today) are available, I'd think that you'd want to keep the option to go big open.

Just how "hard" is "hard"? If you want really hard, then what about HQ is attractive to you at all?

Mike

[Jaif]

"Hard" = 2300AD (Traveller 2300 in the old days)

Why HQ?  One way to go about sci-fi is to hit it with lots of rules and details.  I've been there, done that, and had fun.  The problem is that I don't have oodles of time anymore to be a rules-heavy GM.

Then I started thinking about running HQ, but I couldn't get into the world.  Too much, too different.

But then I thought that I had a world (er, universe) that I looked, but needed a system, and on the other hand I have this system that looks intriguing, but a world that I'm not partial too.  So I continued thinking about it, and I started seeing answers to potential problems, and then, well, I came here to get some advice cause I thought it was an interesting idea.  I'm not sure if much will come of it, but I'm thinking about it..

-Jeff

[Mike Holmes]

Well, the thing is that HQ is, by it's designers admission, meant to model the story dynamics of the setting, not the physics at all. Now, you can certainly tell a story in a hard sci-fi setting, nothing prevents that. But if you're already worrying about how the game models development and strength and such, then it sounds to me like you want a system that deals with things in a "harder" way than HQ.

My point is, if all you want is a lighter system, then why not use Tri-Stat, or GURPS Lite (with the Traveller material), or Action!, or something like that? Games in which the problems of comparative strength and "realistic" development are addressed.

Or, rather, if you're going to use HQ, then what I'd suggest is adjusting you're ideas about how it works over to the story-based paradigm. In which case, there is no problem with the system as it exists, no need to adjust it at all. I'd posit that there are some real advantages to the scale that HQ presents as is for such a game. I mean, for a sci-fi game, I want a system that scales from humans to starships with ease, and can allow comparative contests between them if need be.

Now, I'll be the first to admit that I think that a space game run this way is going to end up feeling a tad more space opera than you might want. But if you want to emulate at all shows like Farscape, Firefly, the X-Files, Star Trek, Star Wars, Dune... well almost any TV or movie sci-fi, and most books as well - then I can only suggest approaching them with HQ using the system as designed.

Note that some of the cost suggestions above were developed by people who don't like how "unrealisitc" the development system is for the base setting, Glorantha. My point being that the problem is not the setting at all, but the attitude taken towards how the system is intended to work. Some people prefer to have a system that makes more in-world sense. And, sure, you can adjust the system to make it work that way. But, again, why not just use a system that's already designed to do that, if that's your goal?

Or, again, why not give the other paradigm a try, instead? The paradigm that HQ supports without modification. Just something to think about.

Mike

[soru]

My point is, if all you want is a lighter system, then why not use Tri-Stat, or GURPS Lite (with the Traveller material), or Action!, or something like that? Games in which the problems of comparative strength and "realistic" development are addressed.

As far as I know, none of those systems actually deal with the problem mentioned, which is that HQ, like most fantasy games, is pretty much based on starting as a young adult and growing rapidly into power, as opposed to the 'traveller' assumption that the pcs are already grizzled veterans and hardly develop in power at all. A 25 year old is usually a lot more competent than a 20 year old, but you can't really say the same about a 40 year old and a 35 year old.

Again, the best example is Firefly, HQ would work perfectly for the half-season that was actually filmed, but if there had been 5 series, it seems a good bet that at the end of the last series the characters would still have been threatened by a fight with a bunch of random thugs with shotguns, instead of somehow becoming able to mow down hordes of front rank military special forces without breaking a sweat.

The HQ power curve is more Kimball Kinnison or Luke Skywalker than Han Solo or Superman (who both appear on screen for the first time  pretty much as powerful as they ever get).

It's not really a rules issue - its the work of a few minutes to change the HQ advancement rules appropriately, once you know what you want. But, if your players want the power fantasy, then that's incompatible with your desire to tell that kind of story, and quick tricks like multipying the numbers involved by 5 are unlikely to fool anyone.

soru

[GB Steve]

We played Dune using HQ and it worked rather well. The background has lots of ready made relationships and HQ deals quite well with the political side of things.

The only difficult thing was missile fire, but we got round to using cinematic interpretations of what 0 AP meant for a sniper.

[Mike Holmes]

As far as I know, none of those systems actually deal with the problem mentioned, which is that HQ, like most fantasy games, is pretty much based on starting as a young adult and growing rapidly into power, as opposed to the 'traveller' assumption that the pcs are already grizzled veterans and hardly develop in power at all. A 25 year old is usually a lot more competent than a 20 year old, but you can't really say the same about a 40 year old and a 35 year old.

Again, the best example is Firefly, HQ would work perfectly for the half-season that was actually filmed, but if there had been 5 series, it seems a good bet that at the end of the last series the characters would still have been threatened by a fight with a bunch of random thugs with shotguns, instead of somehow becoming able to mow down hordes of front rank military special forces without breaking a sweat.  

I'm not precisely sure what you're talking about, but, I think the systems mentioned do, in fact "deal" with the problem in a way that would satisfy Jeff. That is, even if you throw a lot of points at a character in, say, GURPs, they don't ever become capable of mowing down even mooks with shotguns, much less special forces. When the shotgun does 4d6 damage, and you'll never have more than about 15 hits, you have to respect that guy with the shotgun. In fact, in GURPS Traveller, that guy might have a plasma rifle capable of cutting you in half with one swipe with one good roll. Tri-Stat depends entirely on what level of power you put the PCs at - but they can always be subject to shotgun fire if you like. Same with Action! And there are a dozen more games I could mention. Heck, FUDGE can be that lethal, if that's what's sought.

The HQ power curve is more Kimball Kinnison or Luke Skywalker than Han Solo or Superman (who both appear on screen for the first time  pretty much as powerful as they ever get).

HQ is one of the only systems that I've seen that can handle both Luke Skywalker and Han Solo. Luke is a starting character who fails a lot, instead spending his HP on becoming more powerful. Han starts with some Advanced Experience, and the player spends all of his HP on looking cool all of the time.

The point I keep making is that all you have to do as narrator is just make sure that all of the HP expenditures make sense. No stacking for the sake of stacking. So if the character is a normal human, he has to just stay within reasonable parameters for a normal human. HP spent will be on new relationships, new abilities, or slight increases of current ones. In any case, normal human is still up to about 20W2 for most abilities. Going from starting at 7W, that's 33 HP that one can spend on one ability and still not have he character look at abnormal.

I give out way more HP than the book suggests. But if you follow the book's rule of only awarding after each complete adventure, characters will take forever to get to the point where they can even threaten to break the bounds of believability.

Mike

[Shreyas Sampat]

Another way of looking at it is that Abilities don't model anything in game-world reality at all. They're measuring, as Mike put it, their story dynamics. Just because a character has a 10W3 Strength Ability doesn't mean that he has to be fifteen times as strong as normal men - it can simply mean that he tends to solve problems by being strong and tends to succeed at it; it's a schtick rather than a physical quality.

[soru]

Another way of looking at it is that Abilities don't model anything in game-world reality at all.

I don't think that viewpoint changes anything significant.

Take the Sharpe books, 20+ novels, in the first Sharpe can reliably be expected to take out a random picket guard, but put up against a named French officer will have a long duel scene that could in theory go either way.

And in the 22nd book, the same. He is not suddenly taking on regiments single handed. Which, using the default HQ advancement rules, he could (because a Gloranthan hero of that level of development probably could do that, in game-world reality).

Remember, this is all what happens in the story, not any biometrics of exactly how accurate Sharpe is with his gun.

Some aspects of his character sheet do change over the course of the books, he increases his military rank and relationship:Wellington abilties, but not above what a starting character might plausibly have had. And he certainly spends a lot of hero points on surviving, and building up relationships with women who inevitably proceed to tragically die on him.

There's two ways to get that effect (if you want it, obviously) with the HQ rules.

One is to say that in 1805 Sharpe has Rifle 7W1 and in 1815 he has 7W3, but in 1805 he is fighting french officers with Pistol 2W1 and in 1815 2W3. This more or less works, but you do find that AP bids, the length of a combat, the importance of equipment and augments, all change subtly for no particularly obvious reason, either in-game or out. And you are charging the player for an ability increase that is not really an increase, merely running to stay in place, which may be an issue, especially if someone doesn't make every session.

The other is to say that his fighting skills stay largely the same, maybe even declining in the later books when he is getting on a bit. Whether this needs a rule or just a guideline is down to taste.

Of these two ways of doing things, the second is not only simpler, it is more interesting. It makes it much easier for Sharpe to solve some problem with his newly acquired relationship:Wellington, rather than using the 'tough as nails' ability he has spent 20 books increasing.

soru

[Mike Holmes]

The other is to say that his fighting skills stay largely the same, maybe even declining in the later books when he is getting on a bit. Whether this needs a rule or just a guideline is down to taste.

Which I've said several times, and which you keep ignoring. If something seems to be going out of the bounds of the genre expectations just say no. Actually, if everyone is on the same sheet of music regarding the expectations, what I've seen is that no player will take anything that's out of bounds in the first place. So there's no problem to begin with.

Mike

[soru]

Which I've said several times, and which you keep ignoring.

Sorry, usual thing of only responding to things I disagree with. I am fully with you that some or most groups won't need explicit rules in this area, merely some guidance.

soru

[grbosch]

As I've mentioned in another thread, I'm also doing a SF-game conversion based on HQ.

Why an HQ-conversion instead of Traveller or GURPS?  My players LOVE the HQ conflict resolution system and have still not mastered GURPS despite my having used it for non-Gloranthan games for a few years now.  We've also been bopping around Glorantha for awhile, and everyone is ready for some SF-gaming.  Also, I think the system is rather adaptable, if you bear the differences in genre aside.

As to player advancement.  I tend to agree with both the idea of re-defining the scale, and with the idea of scaling-up advancement costs.  Especially in a hard-tech SF game, I think there has to be a level of diminishing returns to many abilities.  At a certain point you just need to spend a lot more time to become a better physicist, when you are already a great physicist.

I think that one of the most important things in using HQ in this genre is to realize how much more important things like equipment are in SF.  I'm toying with the idea of having ability ratings for most weapons and significant pieces of equipment.  Advances in those ratings would reflect significant upgrades in the equipment (better engines, new software, a higher-grade gun-sight, etc...).  I'm also considering the idea that things like gun combat or using computers should be based on the equipment's ability rating, with the player's skill as an augment.  I think this is justified by the advantages that superior technology gives in hard-tech SF.  I also think this addresses the idea that some of the others have raised about the different pace of character development one sees in SF than in heroic fantasy.

I also think it is important to bear in mind that much of player rewards and advancement in SF games takes the form of better stuff instead of higher skills.  This was particularly true of classic traveller, of course, but I think it fits well with the genre.  Rewards in this sort of game will often be the cool new weapon, or the newer ship, or whatever...  This is going to mean a much more detailed wealth system than in HQ.  Conan didn't keep track of small change, but then Conan didn't have to worry about ticket prices, docking fees, engine upgrades, or ammo.

Gerald