In other news, my good friend Rob came over last night, and we had a grand time playing HeroQuest. It was my first experience with the game, and I really enjoyed it. It made me hanker for some solid solo play rules for Stalwart '85, but as I started to think about that, I immediately ran into the old bugaboo of supers RPG adventure design - the wide variety of powers that characters could have immediately puts up barriers towards concrete design. In a fantasy game, the heroes can ignore the trap, disarm the trap with a thief, or use magic to foil the trap; in a supers game, there are dozens of ways the trap could be foiled or even exploited, and a GM needs to be present to adjudicate the creative use of a power. HeroQuest always presented me with two or three viable choices in each situation, but it was only two or three - I could quickly sort through my options and pick one from a limited menu. Supers gaming theoretically blows that menu up and gives you an infinite number of options depending on your power set. Rob and I talked about cards, and maybe having a series of event cards to guide you through the adventure, but even there a supers game is wider in scope and scale than dungeon crawling; dungeons by their nature are limited environments with limited choices.
It's something I'll puzzle over more, but it was great to sit with a friend for a few hours and roll some dice.
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