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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ian Cooper" data-source="post: 9596116" data-attributes="member: 6703651">In Hero Wars, the resistance had statistics, just like PCs, even if it was an inanimate object. While measuring the world is attractive, it can break down in a game defined by abilities, not characteristics. What does Large mean? We make it an ability, not just part of the description. Can a PC put experience points into their Large to increase it beyond that of a horse? Because an ability represents your ability to overcome an obstacle, it doesn't work well if we try to use it to measure.In addition, the GM often improvises in a game that wants victory or defeat to spawn new branches in the narrative. When you want to improvise, requiring stat blocks becomes an obstacle without books of pre-generated stats. That is the wrong direction for a fast-paced storytelling game.In HeroQuest 2e, Robin Laws looked at this problem, and decided to drop the idea of giving opposition stats due to these issues and instead moved to the abstract notion of resistance. With different resistance levels, the GM would decides how hard/easy something is and uses the TN associated with that resistance.But how "hard" is something? HQ 2e introduced the idea of the pass/fail cycle - the notion that in storytelling, the ease with which our protagonists can overcome obstacles differs depending on which part of the story they are in and whether they have had prior success recently or not. The GM tracked victory/defeat, determined how challenging the next obstacle would be, and adjusted details to reflect that.You can see the full evolution of this idea in <a href="https://gameplaywright.net/books/hamlets-hit-points/" target="_blank">Hamlet's Hit Points</a>.It was...controversial. Some liked that resistance should work the way it does in fiction/cinema. Others disliked the concept of 'adjusting" the opposition based on story rhythm over player choice. In the UK, we would say that the pass/fail cycle was very "Marmite"; some loved it, and some hated it.With QuestWorlds we chose to keep the idea of the GM setting a resistance, based on their feeling for how challenging an obstacle should be, but not keep pass/fail. The concept of story rhythm is helpful as a factor for the GM to consider when framing scenes - how tough a challenge should I set up - much more than mechanically deciding resistances. So, yes, feel free to use the Hamlet's Hit Points ideas when deciding what scene you should frame next, but we trust the GM to have a feel for how hard something should be in the genre. Genre is key here, however. Something may be possible in some genres but not in the real world. Our core book example is using a knife to slide down a sail. In the real world, it can't be done (thanks to Mythbusters for proving this), but in the swashbuckling genre, it should be possible.Retaining the move away from stat blocks helps us with the speed of improvisation and avoids the issue of trying to use abilities as "measurements of the world." That said, it is good to try and keep your resistance consistent to avoid a loss of suspension of disbelief. The "credibility test" applies to GMs, too.That said, it is easy to put back. We might well look at it in a later volume.I am happy to put it out under ORC license via our GitHub repository, if other designers would like to have SRD text to use. Just let me know and I will get to it, as part of reviewing the SRD for any error correction from the Core Book.</blockquote>

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