HeartQuest in Indie-Netgaming

[Michael Hopcroft]

Paganini is running HeartQuest on the indie-Netgaming chat forum and has run at least one session in the Sendai Academy shoujo campaign. I'm sure he could use more players, and he tells me that the players he has so far have enjoyed themselves.

The only problem (from my perspective) is that he has discarded my rules in favor of his own. So while technically you can still call it HeartQuest, I'm a little skeptical about whether his players have gotten the truest picture of the game as it would be played in a regular campaign or at a convention.

[Paganini]

The only problem (from my perspective) is that he has discarded my rules in favor of his own. So while technically you can still call it HeartQuest, I'm a little skeptical about whether his players have gotten the truest picture of the game as it would be played in a regular campaign or at a convention.

This is a good topic for discussion, Michael, thanks for posting.

From my PoV, Heart Quest is not really a game by itself; it's more like a sourcebook that contains gaming material.

On a large-scale level, I think of RPGs as having two basic components: There is creative material (what we imagine during the game - In GNS terms, Setting, Situation, Character, etc.) and procedural material (what we actually do during a game session).

Heart Quest was originally writen for FUDGE, then ported to Active Exploits. These two systems are pretty dissimilar. This implies to me that the procedural component of Heart Quest is not particularly important; that the creative material is the real 'point.'

This impression was reinforced from my reading of the Heart Quest (Diceless) PDF. There is not very much procedural content at all. Mechanics are not explained, they are referenced by page number to the generic Active Exploits rules reference PDF.

So, I'll be honest. After reading the first 30 pages, I was thinking that Heart Quest was pretty weak stuff. There was a standard "What is Role-playing" blurb, a short definition of the Shojo genre, and a big list of attributes / skills / powers to plug into Active Exploits character creation.  

If that'd been all there was to it, I would have written HQ off as a fringe BESM wannabe.

But...

Out of 80 pages of HQ, only around the first 30 even have anything to do with actually playing an RPG (i.e., procedural content). After that, I can't remember the system even being mentioned. The rest of the book is pure creative material. We're talking real-world information about Japanese teen society and conventions. Explanations of Shojo themes and conflicts with examples. Pre-made settings with realized NPCs. It's like a GURPS sourcebook... even if you hate GURPS, you still want GURPS Cyberpunk (or GURPS Conan, or whatever) just for the sheer value of the research.

So, I took a look at Active Exploits and said: "This is not a system I want to run."

I took a look at Heart Quest and said: "Hey, it doesn't even matter. It's not about the system, it's about the content. Genre is the thing."

So I started thinking about a system that is good with character relationships (Shojo is all about relationships), that can be as easily used to explore how characters feel as it can to explore what they can do (Shojo is all about emotion). I said... "Hmmm. The Questing Beast. Hmmm."

So that's what we're doing. My players have started calling the game The Questing Heart.

:)

[Bob McNamee]

I have wondered if we shouldn't have tried to play it using the Fudge-based rules, since we brought dice into it already.

That said, The Questing Beast rules are great!

I didn't really have high expectations for the game, since I'm unfamiliar with the genre, but I think we are hitting the points pretty well. Its playing like a teenage soap opera. More than a few times I've been laughing out loud at the comlications in the characters lives.

I'm not sure how long I'd like to play it, but its been more fun than I really expected.

Edited in: Perhaps we should have tried playing it using the Active Exploit rules, even if the end result was to say that they are unwieldy for IRC based internet play.

[C. Edwards]

I'm on the fence. While I agree with Nathan that HQ:Diceless seems to be more sourcebook than rpg, I think perhaps we should have tried it with the Active Exploits rules set... even if it killed Nathan. ;)  I think the information supplied by using the rules set suggested in the book would have been helpful for the review. At least, as Bob says, to give some idea as to how well it works for irc play.

-Chris

[James V. West]

I also think playing with the intended rules would be a good thing. You never know until you've played it, right?

That being said, thanks for using TQB for an alternate set of rules!