QuestWorlds is coming—who else is hyped?

[Wolfpack48]

It is in the book, though, and the SRD, and lists of publishers and games that use ORC, and so on. I suspect Chaosium figures thst it’s not interesting enough to gamers at large to mention in ad copy, and that people actually interested in ORC will be looking at resources like those;

Licensing agreements are such fascinating reads though! Surely that should have been the name of the game itself.

 

[pemerton]

This passage hits on something that’s become really important to my gaming:

Stories advance by two methods: conflict and revelation.

• Stories advance by conflict when your PC is prevented from achieving their goals because there is something that must be overcome—to gain a desired person, thing, or even status.

• Stories advance by revelation when there is something that must be understood—a secret learned, or the past revealed.

Not every struggle or progression is best approached as a conflict. There can be resistance without anything that’s really antagonism.

Lots of challenges are conflicts, of course, and some things that aren’t innately conflicts can be approached productively as if they were. It’s just not the only show in town for getting from here to a desired goal. It makes me glad to see that spelled out here.

And in the context of RPGing: who gets to decide (i) the content of a revelation; (ii) whether and how it is revealed?

My recollection of HeroWars and HeroQuest is that, generally, the answer to (i) is the GM. Does that seem right?

I'm less sure about the answer to (ii).

 

[Autumnal]

In QW, the answer to both probably defaults to the GM, but a lot depends on how the player and GM choose to set the stakes. If the player’s goal is something like “a complete traversal of this cave reveals confirmation of my theory that the Lemurians are the worst litterbugs ever”, and the player wins a contest, then the GM can lean back and say “take it away!”, letting the player narrate the results. In other circumstances it’d make more sense to have the GM do it. I’ll see what kinds of examples we get when they go into it in detail - this si from the introductory high-altitude survey of concepts.

 

[pemerton]

In QW, the answer to both probably defaults to the GM, but a lot depends on how the player and GM choose to set the stakes. If the player’s goal is something like “a complete traversal of this cave reveals confirmation of my theory that the Lemurians are the worst litterbugs ever”, and the player wins a contest, then the GM can lean back and say “take it away!”, letting the player narrate the results. In other circumstances it’d make more sense to have the GM do it. I’ll see what kinds of examples we get when they go into it in detail - this is from the introductory high-altitude survey of concepts.

There's an intermediate position.

Suppose that the GM is answering (i), ie deciding the secret stuff.

If the player declares "a complete traversal of this cave will reveal whether or not Lemurians ever dwelled here", how is that answered? The GM decides whether or not Lemurians dwelled there - that's in category (i). But can the player establish that their PC's traversal of the cave is able to reveal the truth, whatever that is?

 

[Autumnal]

Yes. But I will answer more fully when I get to thst part of the book.

 

[aiouh]

I have glanced over the SRD, does this play similar to Powered by the Apocalypse/Forged in the Dark family of games, albeit with crunchier character options?

The way the contest procedures arise to resolve conflict with varying degrees of success feels very similar to the Move Resolution mechanic.

 

[pemerton]

I have glanced over the SRD, does this play similar to Powered by the Apocalypse/Forged in the Dark family of games, albeit with crunchier character options?

I think it will depend a bit on what you count as "similar".

I would answer no: rather than fiction-first moves, which are key to Apocalypse World and the design of which gives the game its particular feel (by centring certain sorts of fiction as the way to resolve a conflict), this system uses a generic resolution system. And it tends to take the "scene" as the basic unit of play.

I regard it as more like Burning Wheel, or even 4e D&D (albeit closer to skill challenges than to 4e combat).

 

[overgeeked]

snip

I’m curious how different this edition is to the prior editions. I have HeroQuest 2E. Any ideas on what’s so revolutionarily different enough to warrant picking this up?

 

[soviet]

I'm never sure which edition people mean when they say HQ2E - the Issaries book that revised Hero Wars, or the Moon Design book that revised HQ1 proper. Technically the Moon Design book was a third version and Questworlds is now the fourth.

 

[PrunellaUK]

I hope Chaosium doesn't mind if I quote direct from the book:

The first version of the rules, Hero Wars, was published in 2000 (ISBN 978-1-929052-01-1).

The second version, HeroQuest, was published in 2003 (ISBN 978-1-929052-12-7). We refer to this as HeroQuest 1e to disambiguate.

The third version, HeroQuest: Core Rules, came out in 2009 (ISBN 978-0-977785-32-2). We refer to this as HeroQuest 2e.

HeroQuest Glorantha was published in 2015 (ISBN 978-1-943223-01-5). It is the version of the rules in HeroQuest 2e, presented for playing in Glorantha. We refer to this as HeroQuest 2.1e.

QuestWorlds was published as a System Reference Document (SRD) in 2020. The version of the rules here is updated, mainly to clarify ambiguities, from the version presented in HeroQuest 2e and HeroQuest 2.1e. This makes this rule set HeroQuest 3.0e, despite the name change.

However, to simplify, we identify this version as QuestWorlds 1e.

To my mind that makes the new QW the fourth edition of the system.