Shawn Carpenter

It sure did! I looked at it on my phone at lunch and thought, "Well, this is going to have to wait till I get home to read." So, you need to consider mobile formatting in the future. Your failure to do so this time resulted in me being forced to talk to my wife and kids at lunch!

When I run HQ (twice a week, once for adults and once for a mixture of teens and adults), I handle task difficulty by asking myself these questions: Does the story need the PCs to succeed at this task? If so, make it an Automatic Success. Could the PCs get seriously roughed up in this task? If so, make it a Costly Automatic Success. If the PCs fail this task, could the outcome be interesting and still advance the plot? If so, make it a standard contest of the appropriate type. Based on the following, what difficulty level should I use? PC experience vs. opposing force Narrative impact that is more pervasive than a simple Situation Modifier What Situation Modifiers apply? Does the Difficulty I arrive at feel right? If not, adjust it. When in doubt, I usually bump the difficulty UP. Very few stories are less exciting because they're more challenging to the protagonists. I narrate the results of any contests exactly as JonL suggests:

I'm taking a similar approach in the Balazar-based campaign I'm running for my wife and kids. I think cult advancement is best handled narratively within the fiction itself. I was also going to incorporate situational modifiers for things like beefing up your community through your actions and for instances notably "godlike" behavior prior to the final qualification trial. One of HQ's great advantages, IMO, is the ease with which Narrators can lean on the story thus far to help determine how it advances. Sorry, couldn't help but preach to the choir for a moment there.

None of this ruins my Glorantha, so no worries! I'm waiting for Gods of Glorantha with bated breath, but it won't change my ongoing campaign or interpretation of the world in any way I don't want it to. I'll use the stuff I like and ignore the stuff I don't. Business as usual, in other words!

That generalization glitters a bit. I've been playing games in Glorantha since the 70s and HQ is my preferred game engine for it. Same goes for some of my grognard friends who started playing about the same time. Throwing shade on games other folks like isn't an effective way to highlight your darlings. I have my reasons for preferring HQ to RQ, but I'm not going to enumerate 'em here. Why should I? If other folks enjoy that system, why rain on their parade? Why tarnish someone else's joy?

Agreed. I'd never do that when I met someone, either. However, when I was running demo games for modern miniature wargames at conventions, I made sure that the people playing knew what the game was about and what things might happen so they could take a pass if they wanted. I didn't want someone who'd lost a real friend or relative to an IED to be blindsided by an IED card getting drawn in the game and I certainly didn't want that to happen to someone who'd been on the receiving end of an IED (lots of servicemen and women were attracted to our tables). I feel the same applies to sitting down with a bunch of folks for a role-playing setting. I don't think you need to go to any special lengths to let people know that their actual feelings are more important than a bunch of make-believe hoo-hah. I usually say something like, "Hey, some rough stuff might happen tonight. As always, if something bugs you too much, let me know and we'll work it out." I feel like we tend to go down rabbit holes on stuff like this. Whenever I'm in doubt, I try to think back to something my dear old Dad told me, "Don't be a jerk." He worded it slightly differently, but I'm trying to clean up my language these days.

At the end of the day, it's the narrator's job to balance his own game (assuming they give a stickpicker's damn about this mythical "balance"). This requires them to weigh the procedural difficulty of the task against the narrative thrust of the scene and make a call. The suggested DN table in HQ:G can help with that, but isn't the final arbiter - that's the narrator's job. In my opinion, that's a common thread in all games in which the thrust of the story is the "GM's" responsibility. So, outside of purely narrative games like Hillpeople, a GMs have to think on his toes and make their own calls. Sure, there may be rules in place to guide that, maybe even to try to force the GM down a certain path (like universal threat escalation), but its probably only a shaved-tail GM that's going to adhere slavishly to the rules. Their job is to run an enjoyable game for their players, not gratify some stranger's game design philosophy. Speaking of which, it's my firm belief as a game designer that some mechanism exist purely to satiate a player's expectations of the game and are not integral to the functioning of the game beyond that.

These are some interesting and thought provoking observations! I see the nature of abilities, difficulties, and contests a little differently than you've described. Here's a caveat - I'm not going to support any of this with references to rules. This is just my approach to running HQ. Some of it is based on published rules, some of it is just me doing my own thing. The difficulty of a contest can be based on narrative requirements, but it doesn't have to be. If you're not running a campaign that has defined dramatic marks that you must meet, some contest difficulties should be based on your interpretation of the situation rather than dramatic impact. This can add an element of unpredictability to the story that might lead it in new directions. Even if you are establishing difficulty based on narrative impact, you should still take into account the actual difficulty of the task (unless the contest is an automatic success - more on that in a moment). It might be cooler if your party slipped through enemy lines without being noticed, but that doesn't mean it should be easy. Set the DN where you think it should be. Let the players spend Hero Points if things go too far south or, if they don't want to do that, let the narrative go where it will. Sometimes things are actually cooler when they go off script. Automatic successes are a narrator's best friend, especially if you apply consequences despite success. If the story requires the players to slip through enemy lines without being caught, let them do that. Still have them make a contest as difficult as you think the task should actually be and apply consequences that the party feels despite their success. Maybe they're forced to kill a sentry and have to figure out what to do with the body to avoid detection. Maybe they succeed but leave a clear trail that means pursuit will be hot on their heels, or the succeed, but only by leaving all their mounts and most of their gear behind. Or a beloved sidekick or follower is captured/killed on the way out . . . Differences in ability levels should have a huge impact on play. Mechanically, mastery advantages can be gross ("Oh, you rolled a critical, well I bump that down to a fumble). So can benefits of victory. The narration of contest results should be directly impacted by ability ratings, too. A complete victory from a 9W3 Humakti rune lord should be spectacularly different than one from a 18W housecarl, and the inverse is true of complete failures.

That version is better, in my opinion, at least.

Thed as written is a live grenade in the books. This isn't the same world in which her myth was originally written.

YGMV, but if I told my female players that their characters needed to awaken their "Vibrant Womb" while the menfolk activated their "Star Hearts," they'd probably tell me to stick it in my "Orifice of Dark Winds."

Thanks, gents!

Yep. I already have all that. I'm trying to verify that is also the point of contact for contributions, not just for guidelines and templates.

Who do we submit projects to prior to the Compendium's availability on DTRPG?

If you missed it, there's been an update on Jonstown Compendium on the RQ forum: I don't know about you folks, but I'm really looking forward to this. I'm cranking away on a couple of HeroQuest/Questworlds projects for it right now.

Sooo - not a big social media presence. That's too bad! Forums like this are great for choir meetings, but social media is where you find the converts!

Finding the right balance of narrative free-form and crunch is tough. There are times when something like Prince Valiant is fine and other times where I'd rather have something closer to Mutants & Masterminds. HeroQuest falls somewhere in the middle for me right now.

I played RQ up through RQ3, so the learning curve for RQ:G isn't all that steep. As I've gotten older, though, I've gravitated towards more abstract games. When I was writing wargames I described this as "outcome based" rather than "process based" rules. HeroQuest is, in the designer's own words, about overcoming story obstacles, not the myriad tasks involved in doing so. That appeals to me, so I'm using HeroQuest rather than RuneQuest to share Glorantha with my players.

One of the key lessons from the I Fought We Won battle is (to my mind) that unity defeats Chaos. Maybe instead of giving each player a specific skill raise, you could give them some sort of joint benefit when they all act together or are inspiring others to act together.

Is there an official HQ or HQ:G FB Page/Group? If not, should there be? Is an official, Chaosium sponsored QuesWorlds FB page/group in the works to support the game's launch? Inquiring minds with poor FB search skills want to know.

I'm just curious what kind of stories other Heroquest aficionados will be telling during the celebration of Greg Stafford's life and works. I'll be running two HQ:G games that week, one for my wife and kids which will involve their Balazaring characters accompanying Joh Mith on his trade route through Dragon Pass in 1615 and one for my online game which sees their Anmangarn clansfolk on a dangerous mission to bring their stricken chief's heir back from Whitewall. I'm looking forward to both of them and sending warm thoughts out to Greg in thanks for all the fun and inspiration he's gifted me with over the years! What are you folks up to? Feel free to be vague, as I was. I know there are players on the forum, too, with their prying little eyes and nosey little noses!

Setting aside artistic and philosophical terms for a moment, if one of Chaosium's goals is to grow the Gloranthan fan base, transparency is a good thing. Those of us who love Glorantha might not understand or like the sentiment that it is a difficult setting to come to grips with, but we only need to look at comments from new players on this forum to prove it exists. Most fantasy enthusiasts have at least a passing familiarity with terms like thane and carl, so the intent behind their use is pretty transparent. That intent might not be so clear if other analogous terms were used. I think that the players who are attracted to Glorantha are intelligent and intuitive enough to understand that a Gloranthan thane is not the same as a terrestrial thane. Further information on social roles in regional guides and campaign books will further underline exactly what "thane" means within the context of the fiction. I think this approach maintains transparency much better than a migration to unfamiliar terms or, worse yet, accurate but unevocative terms. Your 2L may vary, of course.

I think this thread's last couple of pages support Ian's comments admirably.

That seems odd to me, too. Granted, I haven't run more than a couple HQ:G games since its release, but I ran RQ1, 2, 3 for years. Players in those games were a LOT more cautious than the players in my current HQ:G campaign. They generally look for the most heroic way to approach a problem rather than spending a lot of time trying to stack all the odds in their favor. The game has seen some truly memorable feats of derring-do and its only just now approaching its first anniversary.

Agreed. If a setting becomes laden with too much canon, it ceases to be a jumping board for story-telling and becomes quicksand instead. Great stories are left untold while their tellers dig through layers of documentation to ensure that orthodoxy is maintained. At that point, the only safe course lies in stories provided by the priesthood. If those aren't provided in rapid succession, the laity quickly becomes restless.