Apologies for crosspostings...

Hey folks - I spent the weekend working up a version of HeroQuest for Ants.

I must be nuts.

Anyway, if you've ever wanted to run a game in which a puny solitary working group of ants faces life's great existential questions and being eaten by woodpeckers, then this could be for you. It's long, so rather than post here I'lm offering a link to my site. http://www.tayridge.com/downloads/AntQuest.pdf
All comments welcome!

cheers

Guy

I'm looking for the existentialism. I'm seeing that the ants are likely to run into the futility of their existences. I get that, totally. They can even determine some of the great mysteries of the universe, and still their culture will only ignore them, or panic, which'll get them killed for saying anything.

No hope at all for the PCs? No chance to change the ways of the colony? No heroquests? :-)

Given that the players already know what the mysteries are, I'm not sure there's really enough to sustain interest here. How intelligent are the players supposed to play the ants? Sometimes they seem only ant intelligent, but then at other times it seems that you're supposed to play them like little humans.

Mike

I haven't read Empire of the Ants, which might answer this, but I'm also wondering how anthromorphized the ants are. I'm not too worried about player vs. character knowledge/motivation in general, but when you're playing something like ants, a little guidance in the text might be appropriate.

guys - thanks for taking the time to read AQ and offer your comments. its been a hell of a week - i wish i'd been around to reply sooner.

mike - nope, no heroquests - well, not in the sense of journeying to an 'otherside', anyway. on the other hand, for an ant the outlined series of scenarios is pretty epic :)

i think there could be a chance for the PCs to change things in the colony in future adventures - my choices about what i put forward were based on the storyline in the book. i'm not sure that it wouldn't be fun to play simply because we humans understand the challenges - the fun would be in playing out how ants would deal with and understand them. whether it was fun would pretty much depend on what the group was generally interested in and willing to play with, though. someone over on rpg.net - an actual entomologist! - has suggested some more 'anty' adventures: tracking down sources of fungal infection, coping with an outbreak of a sheep borne parasite, and some others. as these don't involve plot elements that your average player is knowledgeable about, they might sustain interest more.

both of you ask how intelligent and anthropomorphised are ants supposed to be... good point. there should be something in the text to give an example. in brief, the ants are not supposed to be little humans. they seem to have basic personalities, perhaps not on a human scale, but certainly relative to each other different subcastes behave in different ways - workers are industrious, nurses are placid, warriors are gung-ho, hunters are wily, etc. as for intelligence, an individual ant isn't going to be capable of great acts of problem solving. i was thinking that the formation of the working group was a good way of explaining the role of a pc party, and that interplayer dialogue modelled absolute communication which explained the greater problem solving power of the heroes....

would more text in the book be useful in clearing up these issues, and do you think my explanations cover them?

this probably seems a little muddled, but i seem to be suffering froma  cold :(

cheers...

nuanarpoq wrote:
Someone over on rpg.net - an actual entomologist! - has suggested some more 'anty' adventures: tracking down sources of fungal infection, coping with an outbreak of a sheep borne parasite, and some others. as these don't involve plot elements that your average player is knowledgeable about, they might sustain interest more.

Ah, the idea is anty simulationism. The fun is exploring being an ant. I get it.

Well, sorta. I think you're going to have to provide a lot more stuff that's easy for the GM to put into place and describe in Anty terms so that the players can play around with it. I'm not so much concerned with Player vs Character knowledge here as having stuff for the players to play off of in a functional way. Things that they can extrapolate their character's behavior from.

Think of this modularly. That is, general descriptions of anty existence are a good start. But then move past that and start to get into "plug-in" encounters and stuff. Like what's a beer can like to an ant? Is the beer good for them? Or is the alcohol poisonous? Are they attracted to it anyhow naturally (do they have to make a roll to resist)? The players have to decide if it's something that the ants would return to base to report about as a food source or danger, or to continue on.

That sort of thing. You need tons of this stuff.

Mike