Re: Re: Starting a group...

From: Gary Sturgess <gazza666_at_...>
Date: Thu, 7 Dec 2006 09:55:01 +0800

Wow, thanks everyone! Lots of great advice there.

Rather than quote and respond to you all individually (which would be a long, boring, message that I won't trouble you with), let me respond in a general fashion.

I note some caution about my description of the players as power gamers; I may have to be a bit more precise here. By "power gamer" I mean merely that the players (and myself) like to have important, powerful PCs. I do not consider this to be in any way "roll-playing"; many of us entered the hobby through some hook like, "You can be Aragorn/Fafhrd/Elric/King Arthur/Kimball Kinnison/Conan!" The desire to be powerful doesn't automatically make you a munchkin, any more than the reverse automatically makes you a superior roleplayer. I grant you that the powergamer/munchkin crossover is considerable, but the latter is a PROPER subset of the former, I promise you. :)

Now, having said that, I really do like the idea of creating a bunch of steads and going that way. My reservations are as follows:

• I really like the "HeroQuesting" aspect of HeroQuest. While I'm aware that there are practice run quests and the like, these don't strike me as the sort of thing that captured my interest in the first place. As far as I am aware, for most heavy duty HeroQuesting you'd best be a fairly powerful individual with quite a lot of support to have much of a chance, especially given that I understand that the official stance is you can only attempt a "real" HeroQuest once.
• The other GM in the group (who's going to be running RuneQuest) is going to be running a group of Orlanthi. I'm somewhat hesitant to "play in the same pen", as it were, since it would invite comparisons that would inevitably lead to one or other of the games being dropped in favour of the other. (And while I'm very intrigued to give HeroQuest a shot, I really like RuneQuest as well). I imagined that playing Lunars would be sufficiently different.

But given that our RQ dudes are starting at Rune Level (using Nikk Effingham's excellent character generation rules), it occurs to me that if I use stead level guys with more of a focus on how they relate to the clan, that could be "sufficiently different" as well. And in fact I actually have something I downloaded ages ago for a RQ game with a similar theme that I'm sure I could adapt (from the Shattered Norns pages, I think).

I think you've convinced me to give it a bash. Thanks!

Oh, and incidentally, Rob, if you're anywhere near Perth Western Australia, you're WELCOME to play. ;) Otherwise I suspect it will be a long commute.