Thanks to everyone for all your input on this issue - there's a lot of food for thought there, which will take me a bit of time to digest!
The thing that strikes me most is the difference in playing styles which I *seem* to be seeing. I, and my players, prefer what's probably an old style of RPG which is structured around exploration, conflict, and lots of hardware (swords, gems, piles of coins, traps, etc). Including, but not limited to, dungeon-bashing. In short, I guess this is old Griffin Mountain / Big Rubble / Borderlands style adventuring. Whilst social interaction and interpersonal intrigue features in our games, it's not the focus - our heroes tend to get tooled up, march out into the Place of Danger and Mystery, draw their swords and prepare their magics, and get stuck in.
I'm well aware it's not everyone's cup of tea! However, for us HQ manages the style perfectly well, just occasionally throwing up some unclear bits where I need to go away and think (and often end up begging for hints & tips here!).
The big reason we're playing HQ and not some incarnation of RQ is a definite perceived superiority in the conceptual framework of the rules. The handling of personality traits, runic associations, and Really Powerful Characters is streets ahead of what RQ used to offer - plus of course the structured way in which the players assume a good deal of the narrative activity, which goes down a storm.
So, of course, our heroes regularly get enmeshed in combat, injured, healed, injured, healed, etc. Hence my question about cumulative damage.
My questions to this list generally focus around clarifying how people have interpreted the rules, with a view to finding out what the intent of the rules is, and where the "crunch" (if any) lies. When Hero Wars first came out, we spent far too long trying to houserule it to be more like RQ; with HeroQuest, hopefully we've learned our lesson: also (humbles it me though it does to admit it... ;-) ), the more I play the game, the more I realise that the sophistication and depth of the rules is something you can generally rely on - and it's usually only after a good chunk of playing time that you realise how neat and elegant some of the rules are.
I had a look at the crunchy contests PDF - it did remind me somewhat of my old HeroWars houserules. They look v. well written, but I will keep with the HQ rules as written, for the above reasons.
I'd be interested to hear people's comments - is there anyone else out there who runs "dungeon bash" style games (I couldn't think of a more acceptable shorthand...) with the HQ rules?
Regards,
Sarah
Powered by hypermail