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Heroquest aims to replicate the world of fiction and film, not to replicate real life. For this reason, there is no need for a wide range of dice to simulate different sized weapons, or detailed mathematical formulae translating your character’s physical and mental characteristics into precise numbers. The emphasis is shifted off the character’s equipment or physical-mental statistics, and onto the character’s abilities. Even your warrior’s trusty halberd, “if sufficiently important to even mention, is treated as an ability you use to solve problems.” Thus, all that is needed to play the game is a single twenty-sided die to make ability rolls, and perhaps another for the narrator to roll for the opposition. Whether your character’s ability is “Climb Tree” or “Tall” or “Great Ax Combat,” it is listed the same way. For example, if Wilm has Climb Tree at 17, his player needs to roll a 17 or less on a 20 sider, with a 1 being a critical success and a 20 being a fumble. The narrator will assign a difficulty rating for the tree (say a 14, a standard moderate resistance), and roll as well. If one succeeds and the other fails (or critically succeeds versus a success, etc.) that side wins. If both succeed or both fail, victory goes to the one rolling the lowest. In a relatively uninteresting contest, one die roll by the player and an opposing one by the narrator can settle things, with the narrator then describing the action based on the degree of the character’s success or failure. In a dramatically important contest (like a life-or-death melee) the contest is settled with a series of rolls, with victory going to the first side to score five or more successes and the degree of victory decided by the relative number of points on each side (5-0 is a pretty solid character success, 4-5 a very marginal defeat, etc.). So if getting Wilm up the tree is just a small part of the session’s storyline, we can roll once for Wilm and the tree. If this is a perilous and portentous ascent to steal the egg of the rare giant owl of Elgibren, then we might make it an extended contest and narrate how Wilm’s critical success has him shooting through the lower branches, then his marginal failure means he stepped on a rotten branch that threatens to drop him to his death, and so on until he reaches his goal or fails.

Many systems have some sort of “automatic failure” rule, more or less capping the upper limit of a character’s progression. For example, my long-time love Runequest had a permanent 5% chance of failure; 120% Sword Attack still left 96-100 as a miss with 100 being a fumble. Furthermore, most systems I’ve played have some sort of mechanism where you more or less plateau; either the character can’t progress above a certain level of achievement, or progression becomes harder until it’s nearly impossible, or “better” becomes increasingly meaningless. HeroQuest does not have any of those mechanisms. If you wish to raise your character’s ability past 20, you record each multiple of 20 as “w” (signifying a “mastery;” the Mastery Rune in the first edition looks like a block-letter “w” so the authors kept the convention). A 22 would be 2w, a 43 would be 3w2 (or “three double mastery”) and so on. Improving from 3w2 to a 4w2 is no harder than improving from 17 to 18. In a contest, you simply by canceling out masteries on both sides equally until one side is down to a 20 or less. For example, Wilm is 3w2 with Sword and Shield Combat, and he is fighting a broo with Razor Sharp Horns 17w. Cancel out opposing masteries, and you are left with Wilm at 3w fighting the broo at 17. That mastery does two things for Wilm. First, he can “bump up” his level of success. If he rolls a 5, that would be a failure (over a 3) bumped up to a success. If he rolls a 3, his success becomes a critical. And if he rolls a critical naturally, he has an unused mastery. Unused masteries can “bump down” the opposition, so now the broo’s success becomes a failure. So if you want a game system that lets you be Flying Snow storming the palace against the entire Qin army in Hero, now you have one. The power gamer should find much to enjoy.

But how do I know what abilities my character can have? Again, there is no limit beyond what the players and narrator choose. An “ability” is anything a character can use to solve some sort of problem. There need not be any pre-made list of possible abilities. If you want your character to have Run Along Tree Boughs as an ability, and the narrator allows it, you have that ability. Later, if you have to run on ice, you can try to convince your narrator that the skill could stretch to this new challenge. You can even begin with an ability like “Owns Bright Gem String 17” and have no idea what it does until you choose something (with narrator approval).

It is thus the roleplayer-storyteller who will most likely embrace this system. Whatever ability you might want to write on your sheet, you may. You don’t decide your character class and then your abilities; if anything, it goes the other way. You pick one to three defining abilities or “keywords” (depending on your campaign) and ten additional secondary skills for color, and you’re done. You want “A Girl in Every Port 5w”? Be our guest! You decide what sort of character you want, express this in terms of abilities the character uses to solve problems (or flaws that create problems, if you wish to try life as an Alcoholic 14).

The wargamer-tactician is likely to be disappointed with this system. There are no hit location charts, no weapons list to select from, nothing of the sort. If you loved Spike TV’s program exploring who would win in a fight between a Spartan and a ninja, you won’t find the answer to such questions here. Assuming one was Hoplite 17 and the other Ninja 17, they would be as equal as their ability scores. They would each try to solve their problems in different ways, which their players would specify. If the situation favors neither opponent, and the ability scores are equal, it doesn’t matter if one is clad in solid plate armor with an eight foot spear or wears only a black suit and carries a sai. Only if one or the other is able to frame the problem more favorably would the equipment matter. (So if the ninja and the Spartan were both specifically standing face-to-face and swinging at each other, the Spartan might get a bonus; but if the ninja was using his abilities of stealth and agility as fully as the Spartan was using his toughness and ferocity, they would be as even as their ability scores.)

In short, the HeroQuest system favors the imaginative and social aspects of the role-playing game, at the expense of the strategic and tactical. That is not to say there aren’t mental challenges, but they are likely to be more puzzle-solving than anything like chess or Warhammer. The narrator presents the situation and the challenge, while the player seeks to frame a possible solution for which his or her character’s abilities are best suited.

I’m leaving out some details and simplifying, but not by much. The actual mechanics of the game are described in about sixty pages of the Core Rules, with the rest devoted to advice to narrators, scenario-specific details and so on. I have tried to include enough detail to convey the flexibility of the system, as well as how it is possible to have an interesting and exciting game with only a single d20 per player. Flexibility and simplicity are definitely the strengths of the system. If you are one of us old guys who doesn’t want to spend three weeks just learning how to play a game, or if you are a new player who wants to get started without having to ask, “Now, how do I do x?” every ten minutes, this is a great system. I recently tried to learn DnD 4e and it took me several sessions before I could even remember to describe my spell as a “blast” instead of a “burst” (and with a new DM who took me at my word I ended up nuking my own party more than once). Sure, I could have sunk $30 and several days to buy and study the Player’s Handbook, but I have a life, wife, children, a job, and bills. And even with the PH I’d have been lost for days if I’d had no prior experience with the game and had wanted to understand what a wizard, warlock, paladin and so on were before I committed to playing one. And I’d need still more books and months to prepare if I wanted to be a Dungeonmaster. By contrast, HeroQuest is 132pp. and the .pdf is $20. Learning the basic mechanics takes a few hours, since there are no complex character classes, detailed descriptions of dozens of spells and class powers, or lengthy lists of equipment describing how a broadsword differs from a shortsword from a mace, spear, or thirty other weapons. You can start with a blank character sheet and just begin playing, writing down keywords and abilities as you think of them until your character is fully fleshed out.

There are two ways to create a generic game system, as the second edition of HeroQuest aims to be. The first is you can have a rule for almost any contingency, as GURPS does; the other is to have only a few broad rules that can be stretched to cover almost any contingency. “If members of your group are often at odds and rely on their chosen rules kit as an arbiter between competing visions of how the game ought to develop,” then all those rules and charts may be strengths. If you have a specific idea of the sort of world you want to create or hero you want to play, you may find that very specificity working against you, at least until a new sourcebook is published. You might need a thousand pages of rules by the time you are done. On the other hand, you can almost always redescribe a magic spell, ray gun, occult pact, appearance, underworld contacts or whatever as an ability to solve a certain sort of problem. Thus, with less than two hundred pages of rules you have a system that can be fitted to any world. But there is a fine line between “abstract” and “vague.” If I can’t specifically describe equipment, how can my rule system present a story like the Battle of Thermopylae, which was largely determined by the superior equipment of the Greek hoplites? I don’t mean the actual battle, where the narrator will know ahead of time how the battle will turn out; I mean a situation where the outcome is presently undecided, but will be based on something too specific for these rules to consider. Given that the Persian Immortals were crack heavy infantry like the Spartan hoplites, matching ability ratings tells us nothing. If we say that the hoplites were situationally advantaged by defending a narrow mountain pass, we have covertly considered equipment when we were supposed to be able to ignore it, since the whole reason the hoplites had an advantage was their equipment; on flat, open ground the lightly armed, faster Immortals could have outmaneuvered the Greeks, exhausted them, and defeated them. So in general, the narrator and players will have to take account of all sorts of details and circumstances which simply can’t or aren’t described by these rules, meaning that an explicit or implicit list of equipment, of one’s cash on hand (versus Wealth ability, which is more like a bank account), and so on will be essential as the narrator frames the challenge and sets resistance and situational modifiers, while the players seek to frame the solution to best fit their heroes’ assets. I haven’t had enough experience with the new system to know whether it will be as effective in working out these sorts of situations as the first edition was, with its greater attention to equipment types and quality, values of things and so on.

So if you want a system that can accommodate many different campaign genres and character archetypes in an easy, flexible quick-playing system, then you should enjoy HeroQuest. But if you crave more detail to help you visualize your character, to settle disputes between participants, to ensure common ground between multiple narrators, or to play out peculiar situations, you may either give up on this system or have to add your own, possibly extensive house rules.

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