Brex

HW/HQ re-booted my gaming, got me involved in play-by-mail RPGing, taught me how to be a narrator/GM, and was a major step in developing my son’s love of gaming. So I'd say it did quite a bit for me My gaming history is probably not uncommon: several years in early adolescence playing several game systems, with a group of munchkins. Lost my group and didn’t game for a few years. In university met a fantastic game master and played a few systems over a few years (including RQ3) with much deeper character development – but it was all out of game development, the rules didn’t really support it or take advantage of it. After graduation I stayed in touch with that GM but moved away and went for over a decade without any RPG activity in my life. Then that GM tipped me off to Hero Wars coming out. Still without a gaming group, I used the Hero Wars Yahoo groups as my creative/gaming outlet. I read nearly everything posted and got involved in quite a few discussions. Heck, I even contributed some ideas that saw print in one form or another. When I was offered a chance to join a play-by-yahoo-group game I jumped at it, and played in a few short-lived a couple more enduring games *. All of my RPG-ing as a player since then has been in some variant of this sort of format. The straightforward nature and low prep requirements of HW/HQ gave me the confidence to start a game for my son once he was old enough. HQ actually made a natural next step from the excellent kids intro RPG Night-Time Animals Save the World (google it if you have younger kids, it is a beautiful, elegant, design). We ran that game for three or four years and had a lot of fun with it, starting from before the long winter and carrying through to after the Dragon-Rise. (Eventually my son found some of my old ShadowRun books, thought that setting looked cool, and asked if we could switch to playing that system instead. Great setting, but the mechanics run sooooo much slower. Sadly it is a crunch based setting and I’ve never come up with a way to port in the HQ rules that has satisfied me on that front). In the same time period my game with my son ended, the online game I was in ended, the HQ yahoo groups were replaced with proprietary forums, and Moon Design came up with some actions and comments that seemed pretty dismissive of much of the community driven products that had helped support early HW/HQ (and which I had really enjoyed). Between it all I wandered away from the game, but I wandered away with a much larger gaming tool-box, a richer imagination, and a lot of good memories. * By the way, first edition HQ is possibly the best game ever for the play-by-mail/forum/etc. sort of format – all that scouring your character sheet for augments becomes a positive in this format, because it fuels creative narrations of what the character is doing and routinely pulls in all sorts of different aspects of the character. That is a problem in face-to-face games, but in the text-based online version it finally achieved my goal of having the whole set of background and personality and quirks of a character being a mechanical part of the game.