Ian Cooper

I tend to recommend wagered for superheroes, because it tends to push folks towards describing risky actions for the fictional justification for their wager. YMMV.

Folks -

Just a quick note, to let you know the status

Editing - I am working with Susan O'Brien who is acting as development editor (I can't edit my own work, that's like editing your own homework). Back and forth involved, but 50% of the text is edited at this point

Art - All but two pieces are in.

Once editing completes, there are some conversations around graphic design, layout etc.

We'll push the SRD to v1, but its minor fixes and tweaks. We will do them in a batch at the end, to make it easy for folks who want to track what changed between the two

it's done when it's done, as always.

I appreciate your patience and interest.

Formal update: https://www.chaosium.com/blogquestworlds-update-steady-progress

At this point I assume it will be clean up, not major changes, yes.

Just a quick update. The Core Rules book is almost written. We are just working through the examples. We'll need to edit and proof-read etc. after that. I'd expect the SRD to be pretty close to 1.0 after the examples have flushed anything out. We may get some additional feedback from beta testers etc. There are unlikely to be significant changes at this point - there may be some optional ideas in the Core Rules that are not in the SRD.

So progress continues. Whilst the examples our underway, I am moving on with Worlds and Quests are book about genre packs, writing scenarios etc. The 'Advanced" GM's book if you like.

On 1/17/2021 at 8:56 PM, Martigan said:

 

 

A rule to illustrate that the characters don't have unlimited inner resources like mana, willpower etc. is not a bad idea at all. I think all Heroquests game masters have made their own rules in this regard. An official rule would be welcome in Questworlds.

 

In QuestWorlds, the credibility test and penalties serve this function.

One of the most important parts of an extraordinary powers framework in QW is the description of the 'rules' for these powers. But I recommend against simulating these 'rules' with new mechanics in the game engine. All abilities work the same way in play, but an in-universe description of how those powers work should provide enough to rule as to whether such a use is credible in many situations, and the GM should make a ruling in others.

Let's say you have a magic system were magic use is tiring. Glorantha btw is one such place. Can I go on casting magic all day without a rest? If it comes up in play as part of a story, we would ask 'is that credible?' If it is not, we have a couple of options. If this is a single contest describing your efforts, to heal all the plague victims coming into the hospital, it's just a higher resistance - it's unlikely you could do this all day. If we have a series of contests in close succession it might be a situational modifier from the GM to preserve suspension of disbelief: you're too tired to keep doing that without cost, take a penalty. Or, in QW I might give you a consequence on a victory where you used a lot of magic, a penalty that applies to future use of magic until you rest. (In QW we let you apply a consequence on a victory and vice-versa).

Always ask: what story am I trying to tell? If this was a movie or a book, is this the moment that the protagonist's exhaustion from magic usage would come up? If you think that is something that should come up in this story, then apply it as above.

But vanilla QW is not a resource management game. We don't track arrows, bullets etc any more than the pulp genres the game emulates do. QW emulates genres where the hero brandishing their revolver never seems to run out of bullets, until the writer decides in this scene, the framing will be that you are out of ammo. It's the rule of Indiana Jones's hat. He may seem to have lost it a lot, but its always back on his head in the next scene.

If you want to add gritty resource mechanics, it's a toolkit and you should feel free to do that. That's the reason for an SRD, so you can drift the vanilla game for you. But the vanilla game is not designed around that.

PS The Community rules have been simplified in QW, for exactly these reasons, they were an outlier

As much as possible I recommend using the credibility test as the mechanism to enforce genre over new mechanics.

On 8/30/2020 at 6:29 PM, aumshantih said:

Namaste all:

However, I really strongly dislike the base dice mechanic of opposed d20, and the tallying up of abilities and augments and bonuses and penalties, to me at least, crosses the point of "too much math for too little fun."

You might want to check out the latest iteration. The SRD has been developed in the open: https://github.com/ChaosiumInc/QuestWorlds/tree/master/docs

A quick summary.

TN is given by ability + modifiers. A modifier is one augment, a stretch, or situation. Usually GM just hands you a + 5 or a +10

GM determines resistance

Roll D20 under or equal to your TN, GM under resistance

Under or equal: one success

TN exactly: two successes

Fail: No successes

A mastery or story point adds a success.

Most successes wins, high roll if number of successes tie.

Degree of victory is difference between successes. if that is zero it's a partial victory, you get the prize but there are complications, or a partial defeat, you lose the prize but gain something else.

We think it's simpler, but compatible

On 10/16/2020 at 11:09 PM, norith said:

I'm trying to get a sense of how Heroquest Glorantha feels and how the rules are interpreted by GMs.

I can find lots of Runequest actual play videos and podcasts but none for Heroquest. Does anyone have any suggestions?

It's on my ToDo list. Not sure when it will happen though.

On 11/12/2020 at 7:18 AM, jrutila said:

I took the player types from Robin's Laws of Good Gamemastering and wrote a blog post on how these player types fit to QuestWorlds.

https://worldsofqw.wordpress.com/2020/11/09/different-player-types-in-questworlds/

A Butt-Kicker needn't be combat alone I think, they just want to roll dice to overcome the opposition a lot. It's doable, in the pulp style, in QuestWorlds. Imagine playing a Brick type superhero for example. The power gamer tens to be who support least, because system mastery does not give you so many dials to tweak.

On 11/15/2020 at 4:08 PM, yamsur said:

 

Hi,

I have a question for the Chaosium team: can we create universes in French by translating all or part of the QuestWorlds SRD rules ?

I have the same question of principle for BRP ?

 

"Salut,

j'ai une question pour l'équipe de Chaosium : peut-on créer des univers en Francais en traduisant tout ou partie des règles de QuestWorlds SRD ?

J'ai la même question de principe pour BRP ?"

There is no language restriction on the SRD.

PS The issue with Leviathan is that it lacked that thread. It hints at it, but it really needed that to be more than just a hex crawl

So here is what happened.

We could not figure out how to write an adventure for Traveller. It was our first RPG. What did you actually do?

I think the designers didn't really know either, because all the early adventures, Shadows/Annic Nova, the Kinunir and Research Station Gamma are essentially dungeons. Here is this place described on graph paper, go explore it.

Traveller moved away with two key supplements.

The first was Twilight's Peak. Twilight's Peak was fairly revolutionary in that it essentially pitched Traveller as a hex-crawl game with a mystery, and a dungeon at the end of it. So it became a little clearer, that you played Traveller more like a D&D Wilderness sandbox (today we would call that a West Marches game), or for this board, like Griffin Mountain.

But Twilight's Peak also leads from CoC, a mystery that you follow and the layers peel back. And CoC gave us that, the idea that a good Traveller campaign had some kind of mystery that the players would uncover layer-by-layer. You can see the design not only in the Ancients for Traveller, but also in the broach in The Traveller Adventure. So the players are not just exploring the wilderness, there is a common thread pulling them.

The second was 76 Patrons. 76 Patrons is a revolutionary piece of adventure design that gets too little credit. Now, Traveller is really an early story game, very light on procedures despite the gearheading in world building. And 76 Patrons was one of the first supplements to introduce 'Story Now' way before the indie crowd named it. You create a situation, that demands attention - " a young woman is being kidnapped in front of you" - and asks "what do you do?" of the players. But the book doesn't give a plot beyond that, the GM improvises from that, and the possible outcomes in the text. The text suggests rolling for the real story, I would suggest pick whichever one seems closest to the player's response.

That idea, that you could run without prep and improvise was fairly revolutionary. But Traveller prep was low, fling together an profile, or just pull some numbers out of 1001 characters and you are good.

It took a long time for me to understand the improvisational style that Traveller was encouraging with 76 Patrons and 1001 characters. Now I get it, but back then, we played dungeons.

Why the jump to M2? Well, HQ has always had that jump to M2 there. It is useful because it represents the same thing as the old 'complete victory" or "complete defeat". It essentially says: try another way, if you want to defeat that.

Could we just keep going up in 5s? Also Maths. Once you get past +M, it gets into quite marginal differences quite fast

10M vs 10 85% odds of success

15M vs 10 90% chance of success

20M vs 10 97% chance of success

5M2 vs 10 98% chance of success

10M2 vs 10 98% chance of success

So M2 is really the break point for "you can't"

But we will discuss the odds, and if folks want to use the extra increments for a resistance, of course they can

On 12/15/2020 at 8:40 PM, craigm said:

Adding to this: perhaps some guidelines for where you'd want to have a 3, 6, 9, ... M, M2 vs 5, 10, 15, M, M^2…  might help as well. When I compared this against the published rules for HeroQuest I wondered why the bump as so large.

(And I wasn't sure where to put the discussion about it.)

Sure. Maths.

This Any Dice programme is an update of the old HeroQuest one, but the math is not *significantly* different.  One of the things you will be able to see is that in opposed D20 systems 3/6/9 doesn't really move the needle very much. it's about a 6/9/18 % improvement. If we move to 5/10/15 that equates to about a 10/20/30 % improvement.

Given you get one augment for an augment to be meaningful it needs to be 5 or 10. You won't notice the impact of 3.

Skipping the big jump makes it easier both in terms of math, and avoiding the large change in probabilities in one move.

So I would move on from 3/6/9, it was well intentioned, because it recognized the way numbers work in opposed D20, but it was too conservative.

That also means moving numbers back to 10 and 15 to make the same progression of advancement to reach a mastery. It does mean that a -10 penalty means you can't succeed with an ability, you need to try something else, whereas before it required a bigger penalty to do that. But again, that makes penalties more impactful.

Thanks @Corvantir my design goal is to really extract the game we know and love, and as played at tables, into the SRD. By focusing on 'just the rules' it's possible to see them more clearly than within a text that is providing support and guidance too, and make them a more harmonious whole.

We'll add back in the examples, advice etc in the Core Rules book.

I'm pretty hopeful that existing games won't find it too hard to adjust.

OK, tweaked like this:

"A **group scored contest** continues until one side has no active participants. If you **defeat** your opponent you can pair with a new opponent. The new opponent might be unengaged, but might also be engaged in an existing pairing. When you pair with a new opponent, you begin a new **contest**. If your opponent is already engaged in a **contest**, you participate in the existing **resolution** points tally. Alternatively, if you are unopposed, you may choose to **assist**. Of course, you may be later engaged by an opponent who becomes free yourself"

and there will be a note in the Core Rules

5.2 A Helping Hand
In a group scored contest, when you join a contest in progress you use the existing tally of resolution points. This may seem strange, if you are fresh into the contest, but it reflects the fact that resolution points govern the overall outcome of that contest, and you link your fate to your companion when you join. Tactically it can be better to first assist to clear resolution points, and then join as a new participant.

I think this is a lot more intuitive and really stops some of the edge cases that popped up with that rule

I'll note that area effect is a credibility test in the core rules too

Thanks, this is a helpful test case

I think one of the interesting points here is the somewhat vexed issue of someone joining in a contest with someone who is already engaged begins a new 'first to five'. Otherwise it would be fairly easy to treat 'area effect' as a credibility test for 'attack multiple opponents on my turn'.

Given multi-targetting is pretty much a credibility issue, the problem then becomes new contestant is new 'first to five'. An area effect attack that does not help reduce someone to zero, doesn't really have any impact.

Now in a big melee it probably would not make much difference to have new contestants simply wear away the same resolution point total, the issue comes down more to 'many-against-one'. Superior numbers tell quite fast in this kind of contest, because you can chip away. However, that may be fair, and provided the defender gets an exchange with every attacker i.e. not just one, this may not matter.

I may change this in the new version. It's always been a bit of problem to explain in play 'no helping your friend by joining the fight is pretty useless.

I'll ponder

On 12/10/2020 at 8:51 PM, Hteph said:

So I wish the frakking in house board could be the center piece for this very interesting topic!

I only have time to track so many boards. The problem with this board is that we only reach the existing fans here. And whilst I **love** the existing fans, the next version really needs to get us up to FATE and PbTA numbers and that means new folks, who often find boards like this less friendly than FB. Also many of the Chaosium spaces are oriented towards BRP, and that has probably played out for **new** eyeballs, so I tend to spend more time on FB and Twitter to spread the word.

I'll try to drop in, but it is easier to have on continuous conversation there.

On 12/4/2020 at 3:36 PM, el_octogono said:

Hi! I'm giving the QuestWorlds SRD a closer reading. I have some concerns right now:

- Why use the term Rank and give it a numeric value when the rules suggest learning the modifiers instead? I don't know if the Rank Values (-5 to +5) have a use in some other part of the rules. I find it a bit confusing.

- One of the main struggles I have with the system is the disconnection of the success level of the die roll with the Outcome of the conflict. Having rolled a Success and end up being defeated is quite strange and a really bad presentation for new players. (I had some arguing with some players about this). Why not change the terms to something like Ability Performance and give it names like Outstanding, Good, Regular, Bad?  I think it's clearer if a highly skilled character rolls a Bad Performance against a low skilled one that rolled a Good one and still wins the contest. Fail and Fumble are pretty "definitive" terms in my mind.

Thanks!

So we may have a fix for this. There is a pending change that you can see here:

https://github.com/ChaosiumInc/QuestWorlds/tree/improved-masteries/docs

We now choose to count the number of successes and compare them. So success => one success; fail => no successes. A critical, mastery, or story point are a bump, which counts as an extra success. They are  all cumulative.

So if rolling against 7m. I get one success for my M. Then I roll against a TN of 7. One a 1-7 I get one additional success. On a 7 I get a critical, one additional success and a bump i.e. two successes. On an 8-10 I fail and I get 0 additional successes.

So my range is 1-3 successes, assuming no story points spent.

I them compare against the resistance's successes to get the difference

0 = high roll wins; rank 1 victory

1+ = wins; rank 2+ victory

But yes, we agree that was a problem we have been trying to solve for a while, and moving from bumping the result up, then comparing for the outcome, to *how many* successes did you get is better. It also works nicely with our preference to narrate PC successes on a defeat as "you were successful in using your abilities, but your opponent was more successful"

If you are interested in the ongoing design process, FB is a better place

I'm minded to drop the older rules in the Appendix btw. I think that they have become confusing for folks, and a pain to maintain

Rinse and repeat for clerics. Write down what the feel is, figure out how to mirror that, rely on the credibility test over new rules

On 5/24/2020 at 4:04 PM, Mark(at) said:

How would someone represent D&D style magic - with a large number of possible spells - in QuestWorlds?

Would spells/abilities be grouped by a style of magic, or just a list of keywords?

What do magic items look like ? 

I am just exploring this right now in the Core Rules Book, so great timing.

My line is: ask what the 'feel' is over what the mechanics do. Try to emulate that 'feel' over the exact mechanics. So write down, how D&D magic feels:

Fire and Forget

More powerful spells for more powerful wizards

Spellbooks are a valuable commodity because not everyone knows all spells

They need material components that may be hard to find, words and gestures

Then you can build something around that. In a lot of cases lean on the 'credibility test'. Agree how magic works and simply deploy a credibility test over new rules. So spells are forgotten once cast? Great, it's not credible to use the same spell without a 'rest' having occurred in game. Spells need to be learned and more powerful spells are known to more powerful wizards. You have a spell book ability, and you start with 4 spells. When you find a new spell it is a contest to learn it, and more powerful spells have greater resistances to being learned (using your Wizard keyword). I would not list spells - you can use the source material for names, but I would let the player make up effects on first use. But you could list a spells effects, but just treat them as a credibility test restriction

Make sense?