HeroQuesting

[frogspawner]

I'm sure characters can be just as heroic with 185% skills as with 500%+, or even 20W11 (whatever that means. 1120%?). That's just the sort of discrepancy we've have to put up with by not having a system to guide us.

Until now...?

BTW, my Cults of Terror says the Crimson Bat had Fly 500%, Bite 750% - and could swallow anything under SIZ 50 on a normal success (and 90 on a special, i.e., er, normally!). What other official yardsticks are there?

Whatever the actual percentages, is it fair to say that Questing at Heroically high levels should be as much about personality, obligations and politics as about combat and the usual adventuring skills?

[soltakss]

Imagine a 250% Jump heroic character leaping (for example) 5 metres from a standing jump: this is superhuman, and an ordinarily skilled person, regardless of luck, is never going to be able to jump that high. That's what I'm trying to achieve with a "very high level" skill system. (BTW - remember I haven't seen the new rules yet. I'm interested to see if it provides for some smooth progression into the Super Power rules - there may be an avenue there.)

There are physical limits to normal skills, though, at least there are in my game. Sure, with a good run up and a good Jump critical, a human can leap 7m horizontally or 3m vertically, but even with a Super-Duper Critical they are not going to be able to jump 7m vertically or 14m horizontally. In my world, that takes a Heroic Ability or Magic. Actually, several Gloranthan cults grant magic that does that with no run-up or skill.

The advantage of having a high skill is that you can do things easily that other people cannot. So, taking the Jump as an example. You are trying to jump over a chasm with lava flowing beneath and a horde of goblins behind you (a pretty normal state of affairs) and the GM says that such a Jump is Difficult and your Jump skill is halved. You have Jump 90% because you are a master/mistress but your Jump chance is 45%. Your colleague has Jump 150% and his jump chance is 75%. But, if the chasm is to wide then not even a special jump result will work - it's just too wide.

Remember also that in the case of opposed rolls (I'm treating combat as opposed in this sense), the Mastery "bump" system in HQ first bumps your own result up to critical, then bumps the opponent's result down to fumble. I'd be tempted to use this as the default behaviour in opposed rolls, and only if you STILL have bumps left would you bump up into Heroic and Superheroic Criticals (ie if you have over 100% and you roll a Critical and your opponent Fumbles, then you have a Heroic Critical - but not otherwise). Hope that makes sense!

Yes, it makes sense. I take it masteries would cancel in the same way as HQ, so 350% vs 250% is the same as 150% vs 50%.

My numbers may be off as I'm working from memory, but you get the idea. I'm aware there may be a quality leap between, say 99% and 101% - I haven't analysed that - but it's the principle I'm trying to establish. Also, it makes a less than 100% swordsman facing a 210% swordsman truly outclassed - far more than simply increasing Critical and Special chances would result in. That's a campaign power decision for individual GMs, I guess. For me, I want to have a path to superhuman levels of power available in the game system.

There is a problem with 101% - in RQ you'd get a 5% critical and 15% special. Using Masteries against someone with no mastery, your skill is 1% and 1 bump and you get no specials or criticals.

96-00 = Failure (Fumble Bumped)

2-95 = Success (Failure Bumped)

01 = Heroic Critical (Critical Bumped)

Even if you say that 1% is the equivalent to 5%, you still get no critical:

96-00 = Failure (Fumble Bumped)

6-95 = Success (Failure Bumped)

2-5 = Special (Success Bumped)

01 = Heroic Critical (Critical Bumped)

So, both results are actually worse than what the normal roll would be, on a Level of Success basis.

HeroQuest doesn't have that problem because you only have 4 levels of success - Fumble, Failure, Success and Critical. 1 is always a critical, 20 is always a fumble and the rest depend on the skill. So, 19 and 20 give the same results, but 1M (1W) gives 1 = critical and a bump down to the opponent, 2-19 = failure bumped to success, 20 is fumble bumped to failure. 2M gives 1=critical and opponent bumped down, 2=success bumped to critical, 3-19 is failure bumped to success and 20 is fumble bumped to failure. So, the results are always as good or slightly better when moving across a mastery.

BRP might not have that problem if there are no specials. If so, it's a shame as I like specials.

Well, not so much a "plateau" - but certainly a qualitative improvement in ability levels rather than "more of the same", but not specifically to "ignore" lesser mortals - that's not the intent. It's meant to be a way to allow superhuman results to be achieved by extremely highly-skilled individuals using (more or less) the current system. As I mentioned, think Hercules, Gandalf, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, etc.

RQM does that with Legendary Abilities which allow for people to do heroic things. Older versions of RQ had them as Special Abilities. I don't know if BRP has the equivalent, but it should do.

[soltakss]

I've just spent an hour on a post only to have it eaten.

Not happy!

[drohem]

Gotta add a me too! here.

Yippi! I thought when I picked up the Hero Wars book! Finally more stuff for Glorantha, the next edition of RuneQuest!

After reading I burned it while ritually cursing Greg to the seven Lunar hells (well, not really, but I wanted to!).

SGL.

Well, I am really a fan of the paperback book format. It makes it difficult to read through. I want to thumb to the rules section, but they are buried in the text.

[drohem]

I've just spent an hour on a post only to have it eaten.

Not happy!

Bummer.

Whenever I am going to write a long post, I usually do it in Notepad and then copy and paste.

[frogspawner]

Yeah, bad news. I just Ctrl-C it before hitting submit (like carrying an umbrella to prevent rain). But would that've helped in this case?

[soltakss]

Let's try again .....

I'm sure characters can be just as heroic with 185% skills as with 500%+, or even 20W11 (whatever that means. 1120%?). That's just the sort of discrepancy we've have to put up with by not having a system to guide us.

Until now...?

Absolutely. That's why I said that HeroQuesting and Powerful Gaming are not the same thing. In fact, High Level Gaming and Powerful Gaming aren't really the same thing either.

A character can have skills of 50% and act heroically and another can have skills of 300% and still act in a boring, uninspired way. I know, I've seen both.

Heroism is in what you do and how you do it, not in how skilled you are.

I always try and persuade my players to be more heroic. Sometimes it takes longer than others. My current gaming group will probably never act Heroically, no matter what their skill levels as they don't have the mindset for it. My previous gaming group probably couldn't act Unheroically, even if they tried.

Whatever the actual percentages, is it fair to say that Questing at Heroically high levels should be as much about personality, obligations and politics as about combat and the usual adventuring skills?

Well, yes and no.

HeroQuesting in essence should be the same regardless of skill/ability/power level. An initiate on a HeroQuest is as much a HeroQuestor as the Red Goddess slotting herself into the world.

But, there are areas where skill/power has its advantages. Somebody HeroQuesting into other realms where immortals live will need high skills/powers to keep up and compete. It's all very well sneaking into the next village and persuading the chief to let you sleep with his daughter and lend you his prize bull, all it takes is a couple of Fast Talks, a Seduce and a Run Away roll. But, try the same Quest in the Land of Faerie where the chief of the village shows you a row of heads on spikes of all the other young men who came to sleep with his daughter and borrow his prize bull and it's a different matter entirely. It's easy to fool normal people, but difficult to fool someone with Sense vagabond 200%.

If you HeroQuest at Heroically high levels, you need the skills and abilities to back it up. Period. Full stop. There's no getting away from it. You can have your whole village supporting you, but if you go against Ares and try to kick seven bells out of him, you need to be able to.

But, you have a good point about personality, obligations and politics.

Politics is normally a background thing where HeroQuesting is concerned. You may be HeroQuesting in support of, against or to circumvent various political powers. How you succeed in the politics can define how much you are supported/opposed and may even determine the quality of your opponents.

Obligations are important on many levels. Your relationships to your clan/village/city/nation/cult will determine how much support you get on the Quest. Your personal relationships with comrades determine whether you get Companions on the Quest. Your obligations to others may influence what you do on the Quest. A Yelmalian with "Never let an elf suffer needlessly" must make a value-judgement as to whether the elf being slowly roasted alive on a spit is needlessly suffering or whether the need is there, then you must decide whether to help him or leave him to be eaten. Sometimes obligations can make a Quest veer off into unexpected areas or can even force somebody to fail the Quest.

Personality is also something that affects a HeroQuest, or can affect a HeroQuest. It isn't the overriding thing on a Quest but it can have an effect. If you are doing one of the many "Storm God steals a maiden from her home" Quests and you have a nice, warm, friendly side and wouldn't hurt a fly then you are likely to have a different outcome to the big, brash, heartless brute. In all likelihood, the short-term outcome will be the same but the deflowered maiden may stay with the first and curse the second.

HeroQuest (the Game) covers this very well with Relationships and Personality Traits having the same weight as Skills and Abilities. BRP doesn't quite have that depth in mapping personality and relationships, but there's no reason why it can't.

BTW, my Cults of Terror says the Crimson Bat had Fly 500%, Bite 750% - and could swallow anything under SIZ 50 on a normal success (and 90 on a special, i.e., er, normally!). What other official yardsticks are there?

I had looked in all the RQ3 supplements and pulled out stat summaries of all the nasty greeblies. That's the bit that took an hour and died.

Fortunately, I've brought by DVDs to work to check the PDFs. Unfortunately, my PC only reads CD-ROMs, so it will have to wait until another day.

[Kloster]

...

I got the 'deluxe' boxed set of Hero Wars a few years ago (that same book, plus three others: Glorantha - Introduction to the Hero Wars (background), Narrators's Book - Game Mastering in the Hero Wars, and one of related short stories (quite good). Interesting, but I still haven't figured out how to play it. And it's put me off HeroQuest (the 2nd ed.) big time, too. But not HeroQuesting...

Exactly the same for me.

Runequestement votre,

Kloster

[frogspawner]

Heroism is in what you do and how you do it, not in how skilled you are.

Exactly.

If you HeroQuest at Heroically high levels, you need the skills and abilities to back it up. Period. Full stop. There's no getting away from it.

Right again, of course. Sorry, I shouldn't have mentioned "high level" - just loose talk. The point was the roughly-equal importance of personality/obligation etc.

Politics is normally a background thing where HeroQuesting is concerned. ... Obligations are important on many levels. Your relationships to your clan/village/city/nation/cult will determine how much support you get on the Quest. ... Personality is also something that affects a HeroQuest, or can affect a HeroQuest. ...

Politics/obligations are probably too setting-specific to generalize into a system easily. But personality should be manageable.

HeroQuest (the Game) covers this very well with Relationships and Personality Traits having the same weight as Skills and Abilities. BRP doesn't quite have that depth in mapping personality and relationships, but there's no reason why it can't.

That's pretty much what I'd like to aim for. I'm now revisiting Hero Wars (which I assume isn't too different from HQ in this), with the intention of mining it for personality/relationship stuff. Having looked at similar bits from Pendragon recently, I'm now thinking they're a bit restrictive and, frankly, dull. But maybe HW/HQ is a bit too wide-ranging? And does it lack "crunch" (i.e. proper rules), or am I just not understanding it enough yet? Anyway, the FATE system has been mentioned in another thread as combining RQ & HQ well, so I guess I'd better check that out too...

I had looked in all the RQ3 supplements and pulled out stat summaries of all the nasty greeblies. That's the bit that took an hour and died ... so it will have to wait until another day.

Very sad. It'd be good to get a consensus on what skill-levels constitute "High", "Hero" and "Superhero", just for consistency's sake.

(BTW, the roasting elf's suffering was obviously needless - elf can always be eaten raw.)

[soltakss]

That's pretty much what I'd like to aim for. I'm now revisiting Hero Wars (which I assume isn't too different from HQ in this), with the intention of mining it for personality/relationship stuff. Having looked at similar bits from Pendragon recently, I'm now thinking they're a bit restrictive and, frankly, dull. But maybe HW/HQ is a bit too wide-ranging? And does it lack "crunch" (i.e. proper rules), or am I just not understanding it enough yet? Anyway, the FATE system has been mentioned in another thread as combining RQ & HQ well, so I guess I'd better check that out too...

Somebody described Hero Wars as "Roleplaying the Combat and Powergaming the Roleplaying" which is about right.

HeroQuest (the game) does a much better job.

[RMS]

HeroQuest (the game) does a much better job.

For those above who were put off by Hero Wars, by all means look into Heroquest. It's much, much clearer and better written. It's an extremely tight, well thought out, and yet simple system. I still like RQ/BRP for lots of things (and my own homebrew rules for actually heroquesting), but HQ as a system is excellent.

[raymond_turney]

There are several problems with Herouesting, which annoy me when I try to write a system for it.

First, what is it? The concept of the heroic, and thus heroquesting, is actually fairly ambiguous. It tends to include actions that are very significant; actions that are heroic because they are very risky for the character undertaking them, actions that require exceptionally high levels of some skill to overcome obstacles or opposition, actions which are memorable because very flashy, actions which re-enact myth for the benefit of the community, and actions which open possibilities for the whole community by creating new myths.

As best I can make out, Greg's idea of a heroquest is built around the combination of myth re-enactment; or myth creation; with one or more of the other elements. But which other element varies. If a character combines his venture into the world of myth with contending against incredibly tough opposition, he or she will need very high levels of skill. or which are cinematic in nature, he or she will need very high levels of skill, otherwise not.

Partly to handle HeroQuesting, Fire and Sword has seven levels of success - fumble, failure, success, specials, criticals, and cinematic successes. So yes, to handle heroquesting you need higher levels of success.

You also need myths Greg actually produced a fairly small number of myths for either RuneQuest or HeroQuest; so most people end up writing their own. This is a lot harder than it looks.

There's a lot more to be said here, about narrative theory requiring transformation of the personality of the hero {which requires some means of describing the hero before and after change, etc} to the idea behind hero of a faces that a Hero deals with crises that require him to act outside the social consensus.

But I'm still working on how to do this for Fire and Sword, and it is not included in the current version of Fire and Sword.

Ray,

[Trifletraxor]

I think rules for BRP "heroquesting" should not be based on Greg & Glorantha, but rather a generic set of rules of how to handle characters adventuring on various "gods planes" in various mythologis, interacting with the god, demigods and creatures of myth there. That's what I would find interesting at least.

SGL.

[Shaira]

I think rules for BRP "heroquesting" should not be based on Greg & Glorantha, but rather a generic set of rules of how to handle characters adventuring on various "gods planes" in various mythologis, interacting with the god, demigods and creatures of myth there. That's what I would find interesting at least.

SGL.

I'd agree with you, with the caveat that rules should also deal with high-power interactions on the current plane - not all interaction with myth has to be supposed to take place on a different plane of existence (Middle-earth is a good example here - battles with Sauron, the Balrog, etc, are things we should consider modelling also).

Sarah

[Shaira]

First, what is it? The concept of the heroic, and thus heroquesting, is actually fairly ambiguous. It tends to include actions that are very significant; actions that are heroic because they are very risky for the character undertaking them, actions that require exceptionally high levels of some skill to overcome obstacles or opposition, actions which are memorable because very flashy, actions which re-enact myth for the benefit of the community, and actions which open possibilities for the whole community by creating new myths.

[...]

Partly to handle HeroQuesting, Fire and Sword has seven levels of success - fumble, failure, success, specials, criticals, and cinematic successes. So yes, to handle heroquesting you need higher levels of success.

Thanks for the analysis, Ray - I think you're spot on with the statement that there are actually several different issues all on the table here.

My own interest is principally in using BRP to model higher level play - what happens to characters after 100% skill (after Rune Lord Priest in RQ). Therefore this post is mostly going to be about game mechanics, rather than the philosophy and game concepts behind HeroQuesting per se - I want to tackle the nuts and bolts before building further, so to speak.

One of the issues we've identified here is actually benchmarking what constitutes high-level skill: we've had campaigns which felt themselves "high-level" at 150-250% skill, others that topped 500-1000%. Clearly designing a unified game mechanic should take into account such potentially wide ranges of skill.

What has your experience been with skill magnitudes in high-level play, particularly with reference to RuneQuest? One thing that has become apparent in our discussions on this thread has been the massive impact of certain Rune Spells (such as Arrow Trance and Berserk) which double skill levels, which further distorts the potential skill range (150% becomes 300%, but 400% becomes 800% and 600% becomes 1200%, all from a single Rune Spell); another has been the removal of the "4-point stackable limit" of Rune Spells in RQ2, which meant in RQ3 you could happily have 40 points of Shield, Crush, whatever, giving you killer armour or a +400% to hit bonus!

The thing which has been clearest is that pretty much everyone has had to houserule to get playable games at this level, to the extent that high-level BRP play almost splits into lots of different games - making it very difficult to generalise about high-level play. It'd be very interesting to hear your input on this!

Cheers,

Sarah

[RMS]

I think rules for BRP "heroquesting" should not be based on Greg & Glorantha, but rather a generic set of rules of how to handle characters adventuring on various "gods planes" in various mythologis, interacting with the god, demigods and creatures of myth there. That's what I would find interesting at least.

SGL.

At this point, I really don't see where heroquesting in Glorantha would be any different than what you describe as generic rules. The individual details would clearly have to be different, but the actual rules should be able to work in either case.

Here's a synopsis of what I did for heroquesting in my game. I gave every character a starting Free Will (shortened to Will, when I saw others using this label) of 21, just basing it off max human stats. A character on a heroquest can spend Will to overcome obstacles and can spend extra will to change the path of the heroquest. The catch is that Will does not regenerate, so it's very expensive to heroquest this way. One way to think of Will is as heropoints, but they can only be used on heroquests generally.

As characters become more powerful in standard RQ terms, they gain mystic links to runes. (In a generic game you could change runes to just powers.) This is how I tied characters to Glorantha runes. There is a catch. They actually exchange Will for the mystic link on a one-for-one basis. The bonus though is that the runes can be used on a heroquest similar to above and regenerate. They don't generally allow a character to change a myth, but they allow them to overcome obstacles that they normally lack the power to overcome: this is their god's ability infusing them and helping them to reenact the god's myths.

I give characters an appropriate rune for each each skill mastered (90%+), for every 10 points of divine magic, for extremely heroic mortal world actions, for certain god-linked artifacts, etc. If will ever reaches zero, the character apothesizes. This has a wonderful ingame balancing mechanism in that more powerful characters have more ability to surivie heroquests and acheive real results for themselves or their community, but as they gain power and become more like thier god they have less and less ability to actually change the myth (due to a lack of Will). Basically, the more they become like their god the more they become like their god, in all ways good and bad: more ability to do what the god did and less ability to do what the god failed to do. It also has the interesting side affect of having players cheering for missing skill checks because they don't want to lose their favorite character to apothesis. (We had a linguist whom I was nice to and decided that groups of languages all fit together so that he didn't get one rune for each individual language mastered.)

Characters do gain multiple links to runes and frequently need them to complete more involved heroquests. In many cases, the points are simply spent and results are applied: no randomness to the results. (This part might need changed to generalize the results.) The idea is that this is channeling a god's power into something the god did in myth, so it works automatically when used in the appropriate place. Otherwise, spending points can bring allies into the mix or take away enemy's resources, etc. as is appropriate. There are some very rare instances when Will can be gained or were runes are gained without giving up Will.

I use strictly straight RQ rules when more gamey parts are needed. The idea to me is that the character is raised to the appropriate "level" by the very fact that the character has managed to enter the heroquest. The opponenets are nasty in general, but are still scaled like someone on the mundane plane. I've never been a fan of super RQ takes on heroquesting in any form I've seen.

I have also used Pendragon type traits on and off in Glorantha games. I let the players choose them and let them move a bit through play. Unless they're extreme, I never call for a roll on the mundane world. They can come into play on the heroquest though as a character's true self is harder to vary from there. This is rare and my results have been mixed with it, so I put it separate.