The way I understand this is that you don't even have ability ratings for non-player entities. Are you running PvP?
So, you use the resistance from the chart (session 1 = 14 resistance) and you modify it with difficulty, according to your story's needs. I think it's never to do with how strong the Hulk is compared to Spiderman. It's to do with what the resistance in the current conflict is. You can fall back on the pass/fail cycle if you don't have a feeling for the way your story is going but I think the idea with HQ is that you don't try to make things 'realistic' or 'a simulation'. The credibility test is there to make sure the story hangs together with it's own logic and within the genre.
I may be way off-base here but it reads to me that you might be falling back to more traditional methods of getting your numbers. Would that be fair?
In HQ2, it's all about the conflict and the difficulty required for the story. If you want Superman to be beatable in an arm wrestling competition, you only need a good story reason for why the resistance is the way it is. Equally, when Robin later accedes to Kal El's counter-challenge, the resistance need not be the same as before. The advice in the book says something like: "arrive at your resistance number first, then narrate why it's that way" - in my opinion the second half of that clause is equally important.
People being scaled differently shouldn't be important. The resistance the players pit their characters' abilities against can be different, even if the antagonist is the same.
You should indeed rank credibility tests above all. Robin Laws was on RPG.net a while ago writing on this very subject Here's the link: http://tinyurl.com/ygzpgb5 - shouldn't be hard to find.
I hope that is helpful.
M
-----Original Message-----
On Behalf Of L C
Sent: 27 November 2009 01:37
To: HeroQuest-RPG_at_yahoogroups.com
Subject: SuperHeroQuest
So I've been thinking about a Super Hero game in HQ.
While I get using the ability ranks as story effectiveness and using character description as credibility tests, it remains something that trips people up.
In some ways, I wonder if the new focus has removed some of the benefit of the infinite scale HQ has.
Take, for instance, the Justice League of America or The Avengers. Superheroes of wildly differing power levels. The range of superstrength alone in both groups tends to be pretty huge. The issue is when people have their super strength as an important part of their characters, but are in completely separate scales of said strength. I'm not sure how to handle that in a game. I suppose I could just acknowledge the difference in say Spiderman and Thor's strength as credibility tests when necessary.
Thoughts on how to handle that?
LC
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