Too many Keywords? (was Heroquest 7th Sea)

[mneme]

Some really good stuff there (as well as a major spoiler for The Vicompte de Bragelonne).

I don't think this is ever make clear (as you've indicated it hasn't) in the HQ text, but it's a really cool way to drift the system.

[Barna]

Mike, I find one of your many ideas specially interesting. Namely, the idea that a difficulty of "Relatively equal resistance" means that the character needs to risk his skin. Many times I fear that as their relative power & prowess increases, a lot of actions loose their risky nature and become less heroic since the character won't even sweat about it. The obvious answer is "well, increase the difficulty accordingly", but when failure does not have the narrative importance and meaning you suggest it has in HQ, the players can feel cheated that their increased skills do not make a difference in how they affect the world.

As much as I think that PC's shoudl grow and be able to tackle larger tasks more easily, your recent definition of how failure works in HQ will help me in two ways. First, I think that my 7th Sea game will benefit from more risky situations; that is, situations in which the risk to the players and their characters is real, when they must make a real sacrifice (whether it's HP, damage, relationship trauma, whatever). Second, failure in this high-risk tasks will no longer be thought of as just a miss, but rather an interesting way. Failure should be another option, which is something I know realize I tend to forget in heroic gaming.

[Mike Holmes]

Sounds right. With the caveat that "skin" in this context simply means anything that the player cares about (which is probably something that the character cares about, but the test is for player concern, not character concern). That is, life doesn't always have to be on the line, but that there are tons of other things you can risk. Like you mention with relationships, etc.

Mike

[Barna]

Exactly. That´s another point I need to emphasize in my campaigns: risking things other than one´s own skin, such as friends, prestige, relatives, etc. I beleive that HQ will help me in a way since it already puts relationships & personality traits right there on the character sheet as integral parts of your character.

Mhhh, prestige. Now that I think about it, I´ve never had one of my PC´s be forced to take the blame for some depicable act in order to protect someone else...interesting.

[Barna]

In any case, I think what Barna has above will work - I've seen such work well elswhere. In fact, you might want to consider allowing two trademarks, Barna. Also, I wouldn't make an exception to the normal rules for the memberships - that is, like anything else they should start at 13.

I have just decided to follow this suggestion and give starting characters 2 Trademarks. So basically they will be getting 1 Homeland keyword, 1 Occupation keyword and 2 Trademarks. I´m still noe sure on your suggestion to start their keywords at 15M, but I´m thinking about it. Problem is, it would automatically put them at Journeyman status in a lot of skills, which I´m not sure I wanna do. On the other hand, one of the many problems with R&K was the low granularity level. With skills going from 1 to 6, steps were quite big, unlike in HQ.

I´m basing myself on the Star Wars HQ keywords (god I love that thing), but I added Sorcery, Swordsman School & Membership, with the last one being a whole "package" similar to any other keyword (skills, personality traits, etc.) except for two fixed relationship abilities (the social view of the group and your ties & obligations to them). I am also allowing a "lite" version of membership in the form of relationship abilities, but in order to start with full membership you have to get the Trademark. Of course one can acquire such a keyword later in the campaign through advancement, but that´s another matter entirely.

Also, since sorcery is rare in 7th Sea (and can be quite powerful at high levels) I´ve decided that 1 trademark only buys half-blood sorcery (the weaker version from R&K) while full-bloded sorvery will cost the character both his Trademarks. I guess I´ll have to wait till my book arrives to see how HQ handles sorcery and the like.

[Mike Holmes]

Yeah, Journeyman level - very competent in the entire breadth of their profession. Not masters of everything. Just very competent at everything. Sounds right to me. Plays right, too.

Now, if you prefer the idea of, say, "younger" characters, then crank it back to, oh, 10W, or even 5W. But I think you're being tentative. What's the worst that could happen? The characters will look too cool?

The HQ system that probably matches sorcery closest is the Wizardry Adept keyword. In fact, glorantha sorcerers in HQ get this sort of keyword. It's membership in a school, essentially. In HQ, you could have two such keywords and be a member of two schools. But what you have may work out - just have "basic" grimoires for the "Primary School" and advanced ones for the "Secondary School."

In fact, that's so cool an idea, I think I'm going to steal it. :-)

So what you'll have is characters some of whom are very much into magic, or some who dabble in a magic school, and in a sword school. Or characters who are very into sword schools. In fact, you could do the same thing with the sword schools, and have additional maneuvers and such that are only learnt by those who make it to the secondary level of the sword school.

Mike

[Barna]

I really agree on what the starting PC level on 7th Sea is supposed to be (that is, higher than the original R&K rules suggest). However, I'm not sure what way to go. My characters started the campaign using the standard rules plus a few freebies I gave them. To put things clearly, they were decently capable, but not as heroic as 7th Sea portrays the average starting hero. Now, I could do two things with this conversion:

1) Follow the "mastery level" path and covert their current stats to their HQ analogue basing myself on the Apprentice-Journeyman-Master triad. For example, if my castillian swordsman PC has 4 in Fencing (Journeyman in the R&K system), I could translate this level to something around the 5W mark. That would make things easy for me and roughly keep the supposed mastery level of the PC's in each skill. However, since the probability curbe in HQ differs from the one in 7th Sea, things may start to get wonkt and my characters may start failing consistently doing stuff that used to be piece of cake for them.

2) Do a "statistic conversion". While I do intend to emphasize the dramatic possibilities of failure in my HQ game, I do not want to strain the suspension of disbelied by changing their supposed odds by too much. So, even if my castillian swordsman is a journeyman in 7th Sea, I might give him something more akin to 5W2 in my conversion to represent what this level really means probability-wise. The only problem would be that it would break the current mastery levels of my PC's.

A third option would be to translate scores to the upper region of each mastery level. For a rough translation, my 1-6 R&K scale could translate to:

1 --> 13 (Newbie)
2 --> 17-20 (Apprentice)
3 --> 1M-4M (Proffesional)
4 --> 15M-20M (Journeyman)
5 --> 15M2-20M2 (Master)
6 --> 15M3-20M3 (Grandmaster)

On another note, has anyone ever done some retrofitting when converting from one system to the other? Due to some of the quirks in R&K 7th Sea, some of my characters did not put points in several skills they used a LOT. For example, the castillian swordsman never spent more than one point in Leaping (just a Newbie) even though he is leaping along the rooftops in almost every adventure. When converting his character, I was thinking of giving him a good Leaping ability. Same goes with a few of the other character's abilities. Do you think this could harm the suspension of disbelief?

[soviet]

My suggestion would be to convert the 7th Sea setting to HQ without trying to convert the 7th Sea rules or the way that the original characters were expressed in them. Figure out what your starting ratings will be, write up any keywords you might need, and then just let your players 're-imagine' their characters abilities etc. from scratch. No reasonable player is going to completely ignore what went before, like a high Leaping ability or whatever, and most of that stuff will carry over through the keywords anyway.

HQ is a great enabler in this respect, and I strongly suspect that the characters your players end up with using this system will be much closer to their original visions than the ones they engineered through the prism of the old 7th Sea rules.

Mark

[Jane]

Without knowing anything about the Seventh Sea setting, I'd point out that successful conversions of existing characters to HQ in my experience have started with one simple step. For each PC, ask the other players (not just the PC's player, the rest of the group as well) what they remember as being important about them. Now make sure that those things get brought out in the new character sheet - as keywords, as extra skills, as the skill that gets extra points applied to it.

If several PCs have the same thing as being important to them (fighting ability being the obvious and easiest example), get group agreement as to who's best at it, who's second, and how they compare to an external standard. Make sure the numbers you end up with in HQ reflect this, too.

Do not look at the numbers on the original character sheet while you do this!

After that, all the rest should be unimportant details of implementation, and if you get them "wrong", no-one's actually going to be too worried.

[Barna]

I´ve already sent my players a short writeup introducing the system, though I haven´t yet told them about extended contests. When all of them read the rules and get a grip on the general mechanics, I intent to present the conversions I´ve made for review & comment. Every now and then my vision differs from the players´ vision when it comes to their perceptions of a character.

I made these initial conversions using a mix of the method you suggest AND the old character sheets. Basically, I made them from the ground up by conjuring my "mental image" of each character and then I checked with the old character sheets to see if I had gone overboard of forgotten an important skill or talent.