Hi!
Poll is over, with vastly positive reactions.
At this poiont, I'd like to send drathe a PN to ask his opinion. After all, we do this as an "Inn" project.
His approval given, the next step would be deciding a deadline for finishing the project. I think we should define it "finished" at some point, so that authors who wish to use it can be sure their house rules ("moduels" / "passages") will stay compatible and not become outdated with "Tome 1.2".
I was a bit busy the last days, and still am, but I'll try to catch up with the discussion.
The List o'Lores(My own comments in
orc green).
Daedalus wrote:PREAMBLE
BASIC VALUES
BASIC RULES
When writing about "basic rules" and "basic values" I meant that every indiviual lore has it's basic value(s) and basic rule(s). But of course you're right, there have to be some "very basic" rules that apply to the whole tome, defining how to use it.
LORES
GAME SETUP
SEQUENCE OF PLAY I already have some ideas how this Lore could look like. The most basic Basic rule would of course be that Sequence of play must always be turn-based.
HEROES
ABILITIES ABILITIES seem to be a somewhat controversal point when compared to EXTRAORDINARY SITUATIONS. Will discuss this later, taking into regard Torilen's comments.
MOVEMENT
ACTIONS This should be a sub-category ("scroll") of the SEQUENCE OF PLAY lore.
COMBAT (basic values: Attack and Defense)
MAGIC
SEARCHING(when and what to search, how to search) An excellent example of a lore that requires sub-lores. It would be up to the lore to define how and when to use the sub-lores. I'll discuss sub-lores below.
TREASURE SEARCH
TRAPS/SECRET DOOR SEARCH
TRAP DISARMING Perhaps a sub-lore of TRAPS?
VISION/LIGHT
TRAPS
EXTRAORDINARY SITUATIONS (falling, swimming, etc.)
EQUIPMENT USE(WEAPON USE, ARMOR USE, EQUIPMENT USE)
MERCENARIES
MONSTERS
THE EVIL SORCERER'S TURN
MONSTER ACTIONS
DEAD HEROES AND MONSTERS
BETWEEN QUESTS (the Armory, events)
EXPERIENCE/ADVANCEMENT
OTHER (basic rules: )
So, my version (at the moment) would be:- Game Setup
- Sequence of Play
- Sequence of Players in a turn
- Sequence of Actions in a Player's turn
- The Gamemaster's turn
- Heroes (?)
- Movement
- Combat (Basic Values: Attack And Defense)
- Searching(When And What To Search, How To Search)
- Treasure Search
- When to search
- How to search
- Traps/secret Door Search
- When to search
- How to search
- Traps
- Beeing Trapped
- Trap Disarming
- Magic
- Abilities
- Natural Talents
- Learned Skills
- Vision and Light
- Equipment Use (Weapon Use, Armor Use, Equipment Use)
- Extraordinary Situations (Falling, Suffocating, etc.)
- Mercenaries
- Monsters
- Monster Actions
- Dead Heroes And Monsters
- Between Quests (The Armory, Events)
- Experience and Advancement
- Other
Actions, Abilities and Special SituationsTorilen wrote:though my thought was to include things like
climbing, falling, swimming in either the movement or action section....along with
pushing/pulling/lifting.
And perhaps new things (to make it a little more rpg if people desire) like moving
quietly, hiding, listening.
Daedalus wrote:Upon consideration, I agree with you about an Action section. Extraordinary Situations could be better represented with the original 6 actions. One approach could be to list them individually as actions, following the Instruction Booklet organization: Push/Pull an Object, Lift an Object, Carry an Object, Hide, Listen, and possibly Move Quietly.
Confucius wrote:The first thing to be done is what is necessary to rectify names."
OK, we have to define the Lores of Ability, Special Situations, and Actions more clearely.
Abilitiesare attributes of a character (a hero, or perhaps even a monster), and flesh out his profile to more detail. They may be skills he can learn or talents he was born with. Just look at D&D or some other PnP roleplaying game. They sport elaborated skill systems for a reason. Players like to improve their characters, not only by increasing the basic attributes, but by giving them some "specialities". The Imperial Army, for example, is a houserule of skills. Abilities/Skills could be things like reading/writing, swimmming, singing, use a certain kind of equipment, in short: everything that some people can do because they learnded it or have some exeptional talent, but that doesn't come natural to everyone. The original HQ rules have no skill system, but if some author wants to include a house rule to cover it, we should have a
Lore ready for him to have his rule compatible to the Tome.
Special (or "extraordinary") Situationsare brought about the heroes by the quest. Even if it is not part of everyday dungeneering, in some quests a hero may fall into a pit so deep that you have to actually calculate the damage he takes, be forced to cross a body of water or walk up a slippery slope. Let's say the floor of the room has given way, and the whole party now floats in a deep bassin of ice-cold water. Some party memebers might have the
swimming skill from the Abilites Lore, but regardless if none, some, or all of them can swim, or if the player's don't use Abililty rules at all, there has to be some rule to handle this situation. This example also shows that
Abilities and
Special Situation rules have to be weighted very carefully against each other, because of the overlapping. An author who writes a house rule on how to learn swim and how to use this skill in the quests, would have to consider if there are already any ruels that define the effects of beeing in the water in general. To make this work, we will have a hard time defining "Basic Rules" and "Basic Values" for both Lores, so that an author of one of them would have only to adress the
Basic values/rules of the other and still affect the single modules/passages correctly.
Actionsare a part of the sequence of play in a turn, and should be put in the Sequence of Play lore. One could use an "Action" to perform a geneeric task, like pushing and pulling, which everyone could do, to use a special skill, or to cover with an extraordinary situation.
Torilen wrote:For magic - the basic value would be the following, I think:
who can cast
how many spells known
how many spells per quest
spell list available
Too restrictive. Magic rules don't have to be based on "how many spells" a magic user can cast in a given time. Indeed, many games have each spell cost some points of magic energy, according to it's power. I don't see any compability issues in having such a system in heroquest. I even know at least two roleplaying games whith magic rules that are not spell-based at all. The magic users make up their "spells" on the fly, taking into consideration the effect they want to archive and use the rules to calculate the requirements. I don't know if something like this is possible in HeroQuest. Perhaps we have to restrict the
Lore of Magic to predefined spell lists. We'll have to think about this. Of course, our system is all about restrictions, so that house rules keep compatible with one another, but methinks the less restrictions, the better. We should think what is neccessary for our system to work, and keep to this.
Sub-LoresDaedalus wrote:As an aside, would it be better to subsume the Traps/Secret Door Search, Treasure Search and the Searching into a Search Lore rather than list them seperately?
Torilen wrote:daedalus - there would be benefits to doing it both ways for the searching...
Sadkitchen wrote:Possible idea is have a Lore of searching with 3 different “sub-lores” titled traps, treasure, and secret doors. Maybe even a fourth titled everything else.
Torilen wrote:Subcategories would be Scrolls
Daedalus wrote:I like Scrolls, too. Maybe each individual house-rule could be called a Passage or Secret.
Sjeng wrote:A scroll however is a seperate piece of paper with writing, so NOT inside the time per se. And it should be a subcategorie of some piece of Lore, right?
Well, I'm all for sub-categories. I even had sub-categoies in my first sketch of the Lores (called "Sections" back then
) at page 1.
The question is how sub-categories should work in our system, and I think it would something like this:
- If you want to write a house rule to cover a certain aspect of HeroQuest, look up the apropriate Lore in the Tome. Let's say you have an idea about searching, so refer to the Searching Lore.
- If the Lore in question has no sub-Lores, fine. Just stick to the Basic Rules / Values given in the Lore to make your house rule compatible with the Tome.
- However, if the Lore in question has sub-Lores, you must decide if you want to cover the whole Lore or just one of the sub-Lores. Searching has the sub-Lores "Searching for treasure" and "Searching for traps and secret doors".
- If you want to cover the whole Lore, you may use the sub-Lores as a template to organize your rules, but you may just as well abendom them at all. You may write a complete Searching rule wich covers the whole Searching Lore. This can still ahve separate ruled for searching for treasure and searching for traps/Sdoors, but it may also handele both of them together. As you have covered the Searching Lore as a whole, you can't use any other Searching Module with your's, even if it only covers a sub-Lore.
- If your want to cover only one (or some) of the sub-Lores, leave the main Lore as it is, and work with the Basic Rules/Values of the appropriate sub-Lore. For example, you had an idea about searching for treasure, desingned new treasure cards, and made up more detailed rules how to search for treasure in different locations. Why should you bother yourself with rules about searching secret doors? In this case your module only covers the sub-Lore of Searching for Treasure. The sub-Lore of Searching for Traps and Secret Doors is not affected. you may use another module which covers it, or just use the Original rules.
- Some sub-Lores may even have sub-sub-Lores inside. In my list above (which is of course not the last word), the Searching for Treasure Lore has the subs When to Search and How to Search. You may still decide to cover just one of them or both. For example, when you have designed new treasure cards (or a treasure table), this would only affect How to Search (the drawing of cards). If you made extra decks for searching empty rooms, furniture and tombs, you may also want to include some rules about when a hero will draw from which deck.
As for the naming, I'm with Sjeng here. "Scroll" has a nice sound to it, but I can't help beeing irritated that the scrolls are sub-sections of the Lores in a Tome...
Personally, I'd use "Chapters", Paragraphs" or the like, but "Passages", and even more "Secrets" sound also great.
By the way, I wouldn't use "Secrets" or any other special "stylish" name for the individual house rules. Stay with "modules". These are
not part of the Tome! The Tome is our project and written and agreed upon by us. Then any author out there can use the Tome to make his own house rules. The Tome is a tool for house-rule authors to use. It's purpose is to provide a system to keep different house rules compatible with one another, and everyone can use it as he sees fit. We will not judge the individual modules, integrating the ones we like into the Tome, and rejecting the ones we don't like. So we simply don't integrate individual modules at all. Modules
refer to the Tome. Plus, the Tome would soon become much too big and confusing, would it contain all the house rules based on it's Lores.
Daedalus wrote:We're going to need a way to organize things in threads... Ultimately, drathe as the Innekeeper may decide to open a new section to house this modular house-rule thing... We need to structure our contributions as a work in progress. Later, it may be refined as a finished thread that may not even require anything from the Innekeeper. ....
OK, you're absolutely right. I don't care about the details, but when we really start working on the different Lores, some more organized form would be helpful if not necessary.
Daedalus wrote:A final thought is I'd like this project to be on-going.
I don't want to put you down, but I think that would contradict the very purpose of the Tome, i. e. compability. An author writing a house-rule by the rules of the Tome should be sure that it will work together with all other rules that adhere to the Tome. not just the ones that are written in the same year, adhering to the same version of the Tome.