Hero Wars and Pendragon

[Ian O'Rourke]

Someone else may have already made the comparison but Hero Wars seems like a perfect match with Pendragon. It would allow for the characters to express relationships, emotions and squires much better!

You can have Devout as a stat, a squire as a companion, and so on. Magical swords. Christian miracles as theist magic.

I like Pendragon, but its systems a bit dry, this would allow for the blood, guts, romance and relationship links to be used in a better form.

[contracycle]

:) Yuo can do nearly anything with HeroWars.  I have yet to see a suggestion which I thought was impossible.  In fact, that might be a mor einteresting question: what kind of game would HW be totally unsuitable for, if any?

[Andrew Martin]

What kind of game would HW be totally unsuitable for, if any?

RuneQuest. :) :)
D&D :)

Gritty war movies, eg Saving Private Ryan, the recent Vietnam movie.
High tech, space or cyberpunk-ish settings.

BTW, great idea about using Hero Wars for Pendragon, Ian!

[Ron Edwards]

Hey,

I dunno, man. It seems to me that Pendragon has an inevitable sweep of internal causality that precludes the player author-power which is so central to Hero Wars. Furthermore, that internal causality is part of the point of Pendragon - not only are we celebrating the Malorian tradition and content, but also entering our characters into that same cadence of events and passions, as pawns thereof. We see Malory in action yet again, upon the characters and details we've inserted into the classic; the role-playing acts, if you will, much like embellishment upon the original work.

Granted, one could use Hero Wars for that setting and that set of themes (ie Premise, in process terms). I think the result would look very much like Phyllis Ann Karr's amazing novel, The Idylls of the Queen. I also think that's a crucial point - such play produces a new novel whose merits rely on its own judgment of Malory's classic.

But doing that wouldn't be "doing Pendragon." It would be a hell of a lot more like playing Prince Valiant, using Malory's setting instead of Foster's.

Best,
Ron

[Ian O'Rourke]

Mmmmm, you may be looking at it a lot deeper than I was Ron :)

Would the game be Pendragon exactly? No, and as a result it probably would not result in the exact interpretation of the legend as Pendragon advocates.

At the same time though, simulation roots aside (another difference) the game is about passions, relationships and heroism to some extent. I think Hero Wars advocates a lot of these elements to, but in a narrativist direction.

So by using Hero Wars, may be, I would get a narrativist game, in an authorian setting, but still allowing the characters to use passions and the like. Though in this case 'passions' would not be the ones listed in Pendragon but the relationship mechanics in Hero Wars - be it stats like Devout, Christian, Love for Wife, whatever. I also thought the companion rules are excellent for squires and other sorts - which have to be real but ignored characters in the Pendragon rules.

Just a thought anyway.

[Ron Edwards]

Ian,

Ah! I get it. You are talking about Narrativism, using a Malory setting (and hence making use of all that great Pendragon material). That would work excellently.

As Gareth points out, any time we're talking about solid adventure fantasy, with meaty themes and implications, then Hero Wars is solid gold for it.

Best,
Ron

[Jonas]

What kind of game would HW be totally unsuitable for, if any?

High tech, space or cyberpunk-ish settings.

I could see it working for a swashbuckling space opera that didn't sweat the scientific details. Like Star Wars.
Maybe even Star Trek, considering that they're obviously just improvising the technical gobbledigook as they go along. ;-)

[contracycle]

Hmm, dunno - I have run cyberpunk settings almost rule-less; I don't really see where HW would suffer.  I have not tried it, it has to be said, but I did consider a Blue Planet conversion.

[Ian O'Rourke]

I think the number of applications you can put the Hero Wars rules to is, is linked to how simulationist your are? As an example, if your not bothered about simulating 'the setting' (in terms of the guns, armour and spaceships) to any great degree of detail then the 'movie-based' rules of Hero Wars work in any setting.

But if you have a more simulationist push - and the difference between a sword, a blaster and a starships laser cannon concern you then  you get into bother working out edges for the weapons, and so on.

Basically, if you are trying to add simulationist detail, which is a worthwhile go if that's what you want, you may have more problems with Hero Wars outside of a swords and sorcery genre.

[Norbert Franz]

> As Gareth points out, any time we're talking about solid adventure
> fantasy, with meaty themes and implications, then Hero Wars is solid
> gold for it.

That's a really good and clever way of wording it, Ron. Thank you so much.

I have the same attitude about Hero Wars myself.

Interestingly, I asked Greg Stafford at a convention in 2000 whether he himself would ever consider using the Hero Wars dice mechanics for a new edition of Pendragon. This was only weeks after Hero Wars had been sent out to customers for the first time.
Greg's reply was that, A)  Since Pendragon is now handled by Green Knight Publishing and Hero Wars is Issaries' only RPG product line, it was not feasible, nor recommendable from a business point of view, and B)  that he, Greg himself, had at one point actually devised a short Arthurian adventure game for his own enjoyment with Hero Wars rules and the ideas of Masteries which that game introduced. He also said if I ever felt that I would have more fun converting Pendragon adventures over to HW, I should just go ahead and do what suits me and my players best.

I had always viewed Hero Wars as an extension of concepts that were introduced in Greg Stafford's own rules system in Pendragon (a PD character that reaches a "20" or more in a skill is said to have achieved the level of legendary mastery, however, the D20 mechanics in PD as such break down after a character reaches a "39"), and one of the assets of Hero Wars, and its potential strengths over Pendragon, is that its characters have a higher survival rate under normal circumstances.
Still, for the time being, Pendragon stands as it is and Hero Wars stands as it is.

Coming back to your comment, Ron. If Hero Wars is so adaptable to sword & sorcery, why am I always having problems finding players for my Hero Wars game, and when I want to run it at a con?
I showed it too countless players and mentioned all of its strengths, etc., but people tend to walk out on me and play D&D instead ... like, every time!
My answer so far is that, basically, Hero Wars is more suitable for long, well developed, fully thought-out campaigns with themes that only begin to shine through after about 4 to 5 adventures, and people who want to jump in at the opportunity of a short convention scenario, where you're under time pressure, just don't get it. Well, that happened to me.
(I also tended to make my Hero Wars player-characters either too weak or too strong for their opposition ... but I'm learning from my mistakes, I hope.)

[Ian O'Rourke]

Well some people do not like Hero Wars, it is as simple as that. Hero Wars appeals to a certain type of player - if you don't like relationships and emotions being represented as stats that can influence the game then you won't like Hero Wars. Some people are totally against this. If you don't like scene resolution, instead like each cut and thrust to be simulated to some degree, you won't like Hero Wars.

Since a lot of gamers don't like mechanics influencing emotions and relationships (as Love for Wife being a stat) and like combat to be gamist or simulationist, it puts the system at odds with the average gamer.

You also have the issue that a lot of misconceptions exist with respect to how the Hero Wars system actually works.

[Ian Cooper]

> Coming back to your comment, Ron. If Hero Wars is so adaptable to sword & sorcery, why am I always having problems finding players for my Hero Wars game, and when I want to run it at a con?
I showed it too countless players and mentioned all of its strengths, etc., but people tend to walk out on me and play D&D instead ... like, every time!

Potentially a lot of reasons. The two most important are probably firstly that the style of play of Hero Wars may not be what the D&D gamers are after and second people are resistant to the new.

My experience has always been that people can be very resistant (especially many ex-RQ players who regard its non-simulationist rules as 'broken') until they play a session and the 'light-bulb' goes off and they get it. Then they have a lot of fun. ROn's comments in the RPG.Net Games Day thread about people 'getting' Sorcerer sound similar. I suspect that much of this has to do with people's learned behaviour that RPGs should work in a certain way.

Keep trying.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Norbert,

You wrote,
"If Hero Wars is so adaptable to sword & sorcery, why am I always having problems finding players for my Hero Wars game, and when I want to run it at a con?"

I think your own answers and those in Ian's and Ian's responses are valid. Your comments about the four-five session insights completely parallel my own experiences, especially regarding last Saturday's Games Day. My demo was fun, but it was really only a rules-showcase to hint at the real potential.

I also suggest that "sword & sorcery," as well as mythic/epic material, are not what many players want at all. This is neither a good nor a bad thing, but it may not be Hero Wars that's at fault except insofar as it does X very well, and some people are perhaps not inclined to do X. I think this is mainly because they don't know X, at all. In my experience, only a small fraction of fantasy fans and role-players have any idea who Gilgamesh is, aside from a Deities and Demigods reference; similarly, ask what Conan or Robert E. Howard is like, and you'll get a very accurate description of Oliver Stone's and John Milius' version, which doesn't resemble the Howard stories in any way.

The game Greg's referring to is Prince Valiant, by the way, and I don't think there's a single game which I can recommend as highly.

Another related issue is one of role-playing tastes and demographics. It seems to me that you're going about things back-to-front - starting with "getting people for Hero Wars" and then considering "what they like." Wouldn't it be more effective to find the people who like this mode of play through dialogue (and many do!), and then to propose Hero Wars? That way, the proportion of people who aren't interested in X wouldn't even be an issue.

Best,
Ron