On Vox: [QQ!] Know when to hold 'em, know when to kill 'em and raid the corpse...
I'm calling Questy Quest! pretty much a failed experiment. It makes an interesting exercise, and stands well for the first 30-45 minutes, but today's playtest shows that it falls apart when given any decent length of play. I'm pretty well scrapping the idea. A few of the core concepts that made the system what it is were, to my mind, fatally flawed, and it would be too much effort, likely wasted, to try to sand out the imperfections. I'll probably keep it in my arsenal as something fun to break out, but continuing to write and polish the rulesheet is wasted time.
The big fault? GM-switching play just does not work for an open-ended game, and gets worse when characters have no united goal. Temporary GMs don't have the longevity to implement a plan of any overarching effect, plus they are often hesitant to apply negative effects. As such, the "action" tends to mill about the single initial scene, and focus on more and more trivial actions. It's a great system for more intense action, but there's no neccesary impetus to the plotline. There were a few good and interesting aspects to the system, but the things that would have had to change were the elements that uniquely composed Questy Quest!.
Now, I suppose it's on to Head (characters inhabit someone's mind), The System (fantasy bureaucracy a la Brazil with magic), or getting Days of Madness runnable again (fast-zombie post-apocolyptic campaign, in which I seem to be the only person not really interested).
This "innocent dead take the bodies of the living" idea I'd been toying with might have some merit behind it, although I think it really needs some basic structural investigation to see whether it has the latitude in it to be a playable story.
Originally posted on fleb.vox.com