Large scale games.

[TheLHF]

Angry Argrath over on RPG.net mentioned that you could use HeroQuest to run anything you can write up a 100 word description for. Gods, kingdoms, cities or sailing ships all are possibilities. This kind of blew my mind and made me think of all the awesome things that HQ could do.

Has anyone tried this before? How has it worked and did you need to make any rule changes? For the people who know that math behind the system better, any reason why this wouldn't work, if you kept all the rules the same, just changed the narration?

--Victor

[Der_Renegat]

Hi Victor,

a large scale is absolutely no problem in HQ as long as we are talking about masteries. Dont forget that masteries cancel each other out. So a guy with 10M6 vs. 10M7 would result in 10 vs 10M.

I see several other problems:
What do masteries beyond the human scale actually mean in gameplay ?

Maybe some high mastery abilities result in wuxia like „special effects“. Think Hero oder Tiger and Dragon or Chinese Ghost Story.
„Flying“
„walking on water“
„absolute precision“
„tiny pebbles become deadly objects“

Even more complicated the more godlike it gets.

Whats also difficult in my opinion is that you need a little time to learn how to use your characters abilities. Thats why i think its not a good idea to start with too many abilities. Especially magical abilities like spells. I think this can be easily overwhelming.

just a few thoughts

best

Christian

[Vaxalon]

I don't think that large scale necessarily has to be reflected in masteries, and I don't think you have to limit the number of magical abilities, if the thing is magical.

The only problem, as I see it, is that we don't have a lot of experience in roleplaying a kingdom.

[Der_Renegat]

I don't think that large scale necessarily has to be reflected in masteries, and I don't think you have to limit the number of magical abilities, if the thing is magical.

The only problem, as I see it, is that we don't have a lot of experience in roleplaying a kingdom.

Exactly.
I had the realms of demigods, gods and super/epic -heroes in mind while you are talking about a more mundane "scale".

Talking about gods, the only books i know are Dan Simmon´s Ilium/Olympos, but these greek gods are a bizarre combination of nanotechnology and myth.

I think wuxia is a great example as already mentioned. Also everything superhero and maybe a bit of Tolkien.

[droog]

If I may, I think there is a small miscommunication here. Christian, TheLHF is inquiring about using HQ  to play kingdoms, cities or other large collective entities, not powerful individuals.

I see no reason why this wouldn't work in mechanical terms. It's as Fred said, though: it's difficult to roleplay a kingdom. You might be better to look at how the leader/follower rules can be used.

[Der_Renegat]

If I may, I think there is a small miscommunication here. Christian, TheLHF is inquiring about using HQ  to play kingdoms, cities or other large collective entities, not powerful individuals.

Really ?

:-)

Well, he said

Gods, kingdoms, cities or sailing ships

[Lamorak33]

Hi

I think that Greg Stafford ran a game at Tentacles 2005 that was a game where each participant played a Dara Happan League, which is a Geo-Political entity from the Central Lunar empire. Thus the game was played by pitting organisations against each other, and individuals were not specified. This was done using the Heroquest rules I understand. IIRC Ian Cooper and Charles Corrigan were in that game, so if they are lurking they might be able to share their experience?

Regards
Rob

[TheLHF]

If I may, I think there is a small miscommunication here. Christian, TheLHF is inquiring about using HQ  to play kingdoms, cities or other large collective entities, not powerful individuals.

Really ?

:-)

Well, he said

Gods, kingdoms, cities or sailing ships

I think it would have made more sense if I had said "religions", not "Gods". I did mean large power groups or organizations.

I think how I would do a city-state (for example) would be write up a "character sheet" for it and every ability or group of abilities would be linked to a character or group of characters. So when you used an ability you would have to tie that character or group of characters.

--Victor

[Shreyas Sampat]

For the people who know that math behind the system better, any reason why this wouldn't work, if you kept all the rules the same, just changed the narration?

Victor, man, did you read your own question? It contains its answer.

If you're not doing something strange to the numbers, then you're not going to run into rules snafus.

[Mike Holmes]

Fred's right, the scale can be left out of the calculation, and brought back in when needed. Keep everything on the human scale to start. So, for instance, let's say that I have an army, and you have an army, and we're going to fight. The way to work this is that we each roll our Tactics ability, augmented by community support for the size of the army. If you don't have a player character, then assume there's a general with some human level of ability, and use that rating.

Thus an army might have:
Experienced Leaders 10W2
Good Logistics 15W
Well Equipped 17
Physical Training 5W

You can even ignore the size if you want, and don't have the leader roll for community support before the battle. Or just use

Large 3W

Can you use this in parallel with human characters? Sure. How large is a Large army? Lets say 1000 men for argument's sake. That's a -2997 on the heroes roll to win due to multiple opponent penalties. Oh, you could actually I'd say that no more than 10 of them could attack him at a time, and make it a -30 only  - but they you'd have to roll 100 times or something. :-)

I'm being a little facetious here. But the point is that, yes, there's no reason you can't use precisely the same mechanics for any group as you do for a character.

(Note that if you want to get all simmie about it, you can use the multiple opponent penalty for armies - simply do it in terms of multiples. That is, the penalty isn't for each additional person, but each multiple. So if you're up against 10 extra opponents - 11 total - that's ten times as many people for -30. If you have an army that's 100 men, and up against an army of 1100, that's an additional ten times as many men for the same -30. Or, more fun IMO, just have a size ability, despite the fact that it seems to have relatively less impact than you think it should have. That's more heroic.)

Mike

[Vaxalon]

And then casualties could impose penalties on your numbers-related trait.  I like "Hundreds of soldiers" or somesuch.

[Mike Holmes]

Or even on the base ability, if you're not using a size ability at all. The only problem with this is figuring actual casualties if you're actually doing the multiples thing, or otherwise have to have accurate counts. This is why I prefer to simply do things with a size stat, so that you don't have to figure actual casualties.

For the real grognards out there, what you do is to make it an extended contest, with every man lending AP. So, if I have 100 guys each lending 19 AP, that's 1900 AP (plus whatever my leader had). Every 19 AP lost means one man gone. :-)

It's actually startling the number of ways you can model large-scale stuff in HQ.

Mike

[TheLHF]

Mike,

That's pretty much what I wanted to know. My grasp of the system is good, but my grasp of the math behind it isn't so good. I wanted to make sure I wasn't running into any problems I couldn't see.

I really like that second way you mentioned. That would be awesome in smaller groups where the players have a connection with every solider in the group.

--Victor