It is worth mentioning that while RPGs are "storytelling games", they are not purely storytelling tools. They have to offer a believable abstraction of reality as the background to the story, and reduce the number of disagreements among naturally contentious players and the GM to a tolerable level.
So a lot of the rules in an RPG will have no readily understood storytelling equivalent.
As for the fight with the Ringwraith, Tolkien's problem was to make the reader feel the awesomeness of the power Frodo is going up against, using the words of the English language as his tools. A GM has to be able to make the player feel that the monsters might kill his character, while making that actually unlikely, while at the same time insuring that all primary PC's get a share of the action. Since the challenges are different, and the tools to overcome them are different, the issue of how Tolkien wrote Frodo's first Ringwraith encounter is of limited relevance to RPG game rules..
As for HQ 2nd edition, it looks interesting and I'll probably buy a copy. That said, my system, Fire and Sword, available for free at BRP Central is somewhat different. My players did not much like HeroQuest I when it came out, and I thought that even if they liked it there was much too much room for argument in HQ to make it a good choice for my group.
If HQ solves the problems your group needs solved, I encourage you to play it. If it does not solve those problems, I encourage you to play another system, steal what seems useful from HeroQuest and move on. Arguing on the HQ list with the people who like HeroQuest about the basic design philosophy of HQ strikes me as worse than a sin, it is a waste of time.
Ray,
From: John Hughes <nysalor_at_...>
Subject: Re: HQ 2
To: HeroQuest-RPG_at_yahoogroups.com
Date: Sunday, June 7, 2009, 6:58 PM
epweissengruber wrote:
> Laws raises the point that the characters in stories do not really
"improve" over time.
>
> Let's put LoTR in Heroquest terms. Frodo dodges the Ringwraith not
because of some super-huge bonus provided by the Ring, but because at
this point in the story his "Hide" ability of 17 was more than enough to
overcome the moderate challenge that Laws' rules led the Narrator to set.
>
If you're going to invoke storytelling, fights in most stories aren't
about power, or tactics, or blow for blow exchanges. They're about
consequences, personal decisions, *character* development. The fighting
is seldom an end in itself: its often merely a necessary afterthought.
Of course characters will change over a lifetime - knowledge and wealth
and power generally increase, physical skills decrease, and doing things
becomes less important than having others do things for you. But that's
not the point. And your Frodo example is even more misleading ... While
wraiths never do much more than glower menacingly, the encounter is
about appreciating the terror and reality of Mordor and as a baptism of
life beyond the Shire. It's about Frodo **growing up**.
John
____________ _________ _________ _________ _________ _________ _
John Hughes
nysalor_at_mythologic. info
Questlines: http://mythologic. info/questlines/
Mytheme gallery: http://mythologic. info/mytheme/
There was a muddy centre before we breathed.
There was a myth before the myth began,
Venerable and articulate and complete.
From this the poem springs: that we live in a place
that is not our own, and much more, not ourselves.
And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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