QuestWorlds is coming—who else is hyped?

Arilyn · Feb 23, 2025

@Autumnal Sunset is a beautiful cat. Love the name!

Autumnal · Feb 23, 2025

Arilyn said:
@Autumnal Sunset is a beautiful cat. Love the name!

She is by far the most gorgeous cat I’ve ever lived around. She and her brother Moonrise are constant delights, and do a lot to help me get through bad times.

Autumnal · Mar 17, 2025

Hey, @pemerton - sorry it’s been so long, but <gestures at the world>. Anyway, here’s the rest of the answer to your question about narrative control. There’s a two-page text box on optional rules for player narration. Player and GM agree on the stakes. If the player wins the roll, they narrate; otherwise the GM does. Additional successes on the winning side let them add new additional details. The passage ends with this:

Why do we say you control the prize? Because you decide its fate. Control includes letting your opponent seize the prize. The winner controls narration about the prize; that means they may opt to relinquish it. Why would you elect not to gain the prize? Because you decide that the story becomes more interesting if you do not get the prize. Now, you still get your additional upshots to narrate, even if you cede the prize. This means you can choose to surrender the prize but use the upshots to move the story in a direction you want.

This technique is not for everyone. Some players are very uncomfortable with this narrative authority. Some GMs find it difficult to facilitate a game where player narration can pivot the story suddenly. Some GMs enjoy improvising, but others find it too pressurized. For this reason, we don’t make it part of the vanilla rules.

So there you go. The default is still the traditional division of labor, but the game won’t hate you if you get more communistic about it.

Autumnal · Mar 18, 2025

Some scattered bits I like:

1. QuestWorlds leans really strongly into the play-to-find-out philosophy. In discussing character creation, it tells players to remember that nothing they write as backstory is true for the campaign until it matters in play. And this is one of the examples of choosing powers. The last paragraph is the one that impressed me:

Ripley, the GM, discusses magic in the Ouvergend setting. Ripley explains ectosmithing is the ability used to craft clockwork devices powered by ghostlight batteries.

Kwame decides that their PC, Yakov, who is a con artist, could have become attracted to ectosmithing because the field is filled with inventors with big dreams and a poor record of delivery that attract foolish investors.

Kwame considers using an ability slot for the keyword Ectosmith on Yakov’s character sheet. Kwame decides to defer the decision; they want to find out in play if Yakov just cons people about his ectosmithing skills or whether there is something genuine there.

2. Nearly every RPG I know has something to say on the subject of encouraging use of diverse abilities in play so that characters don’t settle into being one-trick ponies. QW, on the other hand…

In pulp fiction and genre TV shows, characters are often two-dimensional. Once we become familiar with them, their reactions are predictable, the abilities they use to solve problems consistent, their catch-phrases well-worn. Don’t be afraid to embrace this when creating your character—in the roleplaying medium a character who goes all in on one concept is more memorable than one who mixes a range of concepts. This extends to using the same ability to meet with obstacles set by the GM—don’t be afraid to re-use the same ability to solve a problem—instead embrace using your favored approach. Over time, this will give your character a strong idiom—the swashbuckler, the gunfighter—and the GM should play into chances to let you reinforce that.

Of course, in QW, developing specific strengths within a general aptitude - breakouts for keywords - is an integral part of the system, so focus manifests differently than in many systems. A little bit of hierarchical detail adds a lot of flexibility.

3. On flaws:

Your PC’s dominant flaws may arise more or less unconsciously from play—in the course of the story. When you are playing your character, you may naturally play them with a particular characteristic, such as cowardly, dominating, or reflexively dishonest. You might then want to add these as flaws. If you decide flaws for your character before play, but more spontaneously occur in play, the combined weight of these personality traits may make your character too unlikable to support the dramatic weight of an ongoing story. To avoid this, we recommend adding most flaws using the As-You-Go method. Let them emerge from how you play your character—and then add them to your character sheet.

A worse problem with flaws occurs when you use them to hog the spotlight and thereby exert control over the rest of the group. Many so-called flaws are in fact fun to play, in a very selfish sense. They can exert more of a disadvantage on other players, who have to work around your flaws more than you do. A common problem arises when you invoke a flaw to seize control of the story, which now centers on your flaw and its management, and not on the shared story the group was pursuing.

When invoking a flaw, remember the rule that you should build on what the GM and other players are creating. Invoking a flaw should enhance the story that is emerging in play, not be the story in play. Consider how writers use a flaw in a story. Flaws make existing obstacles harder for the protagonist because they have to overcome their own flaws first, they don’t provide the story obstacle. Use your flaws to add drama, rather than become the drama.

This book has sooo much voice of experience in it.

Duke_ · Mar 18, 2025

This game is my jam currently, which is kind of funny because there were things that turned me off in the previous editions (like the "pass-fail cycle"). No small amount of it is also that my tastes have changed in the years since the previous editions.

I think a lot of people in my current group wouldn't love it so much, but I can maybe drag a subset of them into a game. I've been enjoying it quite a bit solo though. I played a great and appropriately wild Gamma World game using the SRD. When the book released, I took the additional information and example to refine how i play it, and started a Glorantha game, using the old HeroQuest material as a genre pack of sorts.

Looking forward to what they'll release in the future. I really want to see the supers genre pack they have planned to release in Worlds & Quests. I think it would be an amazing game for supers, and I'd love the see what Ian and crew have for "official advice" on how best to do it.

Autumnal · Mar 18, 2025

Doing anything different for solo play? Using any supplemental oracles or anything? I’ll be doing solo play myself, so I’m very curious.

Duke_ · Mar 18, 2025

Autumnal said:
Doing anything different for solo play? Using any supplemental oracles or anything? I’ll be doing solo play myself, so I’m very curious.

I could and would talk for days about this, and this going to be a long reply. I'm going use a spoiler block because ultimately this not directly related to QW and is at best tangentially on-topic to thread.

I've been playing solo off and on since the fairly early days of the hobby, and I continue to refine it all the time. I think that's just the nature of solo play. You'll never perfect it, but you'll have fun, and that's all that matters.

The first thing any solo gamer needs is a basic oracle to handle yes/no and/but type questions. Usually I try to incorporate the game's core mechanic as best I can. In the case of QW, if I can find any way to make it a regular contest, I will. Are you checking if there's a random encounter? Roll a relevant ability to avoid notice against an appropriate resistance for the current flow of the game.

If I absolutely can't make it a contest (e.g "does the haunted house have a basement?"), I look to the game's core mechanic. For QW, given even odds of true or false, I roll a 10 vs 10 resistance. If something is more or less likely, increase the likelihood or the resistance in steps of 5. Usually you wont need to go past 15, but you absolutely can. 20 v resistance 10 for something very likely, or even 5M vs 10. Invert and increase the resistance instead for less likely outcomes, or just rephrase your question. After rolling, I check the result.

Zero degrees of victory (true) = "Yes, but"
Zero degrees of defeat (false) = "No, but"
1 degree of victory (true) = "Yes"
1 degree of defeat (false) = "No"
2+ degrees of victory = "Yes, and"
2+ degrees of defeat = "No, and"

I'm not 100% there on the odds using the QW core mechanic. It leans very heavily towards "Yes but" and "No but" results. That may be what you want.

I also have an oracle I've used for a long time, based on Freeform Universal RPG (listed in the QW appendix as an inspiration, which you may be aware of as a fellow QW enthusiast). It has the advantage of being fast, easy to use, and often giving cool results. The disadvantage is it's separate from most games' mechanics, so a bit of a contex switch. Roll a d6 straight up, or with one or more "advantage" or "disadvantage" dice depending the estimated likelihood. I waver on whether or not I want to use it with QW. It skews more towards "and" results rather than "but".

No, and...
No
No, but...
Yes, but...
Yes
Yes, and...

I try to use the core mechanic whenever I can, because it feels more integrated and less like I'm cobbling together a bunch of disparate system. I'm still tweaking resistances and stuff for QW, but +/- 5 for most situations seems ok.

The second thing you need is a more open-ended oracle for questions that can't be answered with a simple yes/no and/but. "What does the situation look like when we arrive at the destination?" There are tons of different oracles out there. Mythic Game Master Emulator and its scads of tables is pretty popular, but there are many. But Mythic is not my cup of tea. It feels slow and clunky in actual use.

My absolute best solo game experiences have come using The Gamemaster's Apprentice. These are decks of cards that are jam-packed with inspiration... each card has one of the classic elements, a futhark rune, die results, other symbols, catalysts, items, names, sensory input, a noun, an adjective, a verb, and more, all in one card draw. If somehow the one card doesn't give you enough inspiration, draw a second or even a third. Interpret it in context. Mix and match to get something cool if you drew more than one card.

Worth noting that there are also "yes/no" answers on these cards, and even "YES+" and "NO+" results, but there are no "yes or no but..." results. So I don't use them for yes/no because "but" is almost always interesting. This is down to personal preference.

The main advantage here over stuff like Mythic GME and its dozens of tables is speed. It's just much, much faster to draw a single card and get 20 different categories of info than it is to roll on 20 different tables to get the same info. Take from the card or cards what works and discard the rest. Get your inspiration with the least mechanical friction possible, and get back to the story.

I have the base deck, plus fantasy, scifi, and horror decks. The base deck is fine for most purposes, but the others are a little more tailored. There's a website with the basic deck, and if you're tech savvy, you can randomize a card from a computer since they offer jpegs of all the cards when you buy.

I can give detailed examples about how this works in practice, but I've rambled enough for now. And ultimately, the solo experience is deeply personal. What works for me doesn't work for everyone else, or possibly anyone else. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

overgeeked · Mar 18, 2025

Duke_ said:
I also have an oracle I've used for a long time, based on Freeform Universal RPG (listed in the QW appendix as an inspiration, which you may be aware of as a fellow QW enthusiast). It has the advantage of being fast, easy to use, and often giving cool results. The disadvantage is it's separate from most games' mechanics, so a bit of a contex switch. Roll a d6 straight up, or with one or more "advantage" or "disadvantage" dice depending the estimated likelihood. I waver on whether or not I want to use it with QW. It skews more towards "and" results rather than "but".

No, and...

No

No, but...

Yes, but...

Yes

Yes, and...

Not the poster you're responding to, but that's a great response. Thanks for that.

If you're concerned about dis/advantage skewing the results, you could use a variation on that from the aborted Yes And system designed for Adventure Time. Use 1d6 as your yes/no and a Fudge die as your and/neutral/but. Apply the dis/advantage to the 1d6, but not the Fudge die. Thereby skewing the yes/no but not the and/neutral/but.