Thoughts after running Questworlds

[Khelbiros]

At a local gaming expo, my club demonstrated roleplaying games (mostly their own designs) to a mix of card, board and computer gamers. The idea was to come up with short, twenty minute demonstrations of a game. I thought this would a great chance to take the new QuestWorlds SRD for a spin. I'd previously run HeroQuest Glorantha before, but my group bounced off the setting, and from a GM perspective, I didn't like the adjudication: the resistance roll, bumping/cancelling masteries and then looking up the chart and narrating the result was time consuming.  Even after running several sessions, I couldn't get into it. (Unlike, say, Fudge, where the players roll, look at the ladder and you can keep the action going.) But I was always fond of the free form skills and how you could evoke a character from descriptors alone.)

Now QuestWorlds has got rid of the chart, and moved to a sleeker success-based system. Time to test it out!

My scenario  'Rescue the hostages from the terrorists summoning Cthulhu', with the heroes all secret government agent monsters, like Hellboy. Below is one of the shortened demo characters:

The scenario was all simple contests (roll and count success)

THE WEREWOLF

Concept:    Werewolf bodyguard:10                  
Background:  Trained athlete: 15           
Free Skill:  10
Powers    Werewolf: 5M
    +Enhanced senses: 10M
    +Regeneration: 10M
    +Claws:  10M
Flaws:    Get distracted by gnawing hunger 10  

What worked:

• The index-card characters worked well, as players could read it and instantly grok what the character was about. The fact that you could apply any ability to any reasonable situation lead to lots of creative roleplay. There was a player who used 'Charming smile' to nearly every challenge. Players who hadn't roleplayed before, or only played it during the dim and distant days of high school picked it up easily. One character used their Free Skill slot to become a sniper, and quickly unpacked their rifle to take out a cultist sentry.
• The player-side went well—the new rules are easy to explain. Roll under=1 success, bullseye=2 success, roll over=fail. And the mastery was explained as an automatic success. They thought rolling low on the d20 was simple and understandable.
• Players instinctively tried buffing (augmenting) even though I hadn't explained the concept in round, so that worked—one round of buffing, then the next round of enhanced action.

What didn't work:

• The resistance roll. Maybe it's just my brain, but it was a bit taxing to roll against each player action, compare successes etc, adjudicate the result. In the end, I was running it like a game with a static difficulty e.g 0 successes = Failure, 1 success - Okay success (Yes BUT), 2 successes - Awesome! That worked pretty well for the purposes of the demo and everyone had fun. 
• I web-surfed to see if there were any QW hacks for removing resistance rolls. I don't think that outsourcing the roll to the players would work, but I think there's merit in having a static difficulty variant of game, perhaps tucked away in the appendix!. 

Anyway, those are my observations from recent actual play.

Edited April 7 by Khelbiros
Typo

[Ian Cooper]

10 hours ago, Khelbiros said:

The resistance roll. Maybe it's just my brain, but it was a bit taxing to roll against each player action, compare successes etc, adjudicate the result. In the end, I was running it like a game with a static difficulty e.g 0 successes = Failure, 1 success - Okay success (Yes BUT), 2 successes - Awesome! That worked pretty well for the purposes of the demo and everyone had fun. 

Thanks for the feedback.

One observation is that I would tend to roll only when there was conflict. Otherwise I would tend to give an assured success if you had an appropriate skill. I might make you roll if you were stretching credibility as to what you ability could do.

In other games, folks tend to roll whenever you try to do something you have an ability for. Hence the need for an 'ability check'. In QW I would ask whether it will add drama to see if you succeed or not, bearing in mind you might fail, and if not move on. Picking a Lock? If adventure lies beyond it's really "do you have an ability for that", then it is an assured contest and you do it. Usually the resistance is whatever consequence you face from failure, and once you figure that out, you understand how the story will branch, and understand why you, the GM, are rolling.