Hero Quest, and Legacy

Hero Quest is the best game ever made.

The best thing about Hero Quest is the gold. Every quest grants your characters gold that can be used to acquire cracking equipment that improves your character’s chances at surviving their next quest.

Okay, but is Hero Quest really an RPG? Perhaps, perhaps not. If it is, it certainly leans heavily into the strategy-board game side of RPGs, similar to the RPG-like Gloomhaven or Betrayal at House on the Hill. At the same time, Hero Quest did do something that was prevalent in early RPG games; your character sticks around after every quest.

“What’s special about that?” I hear someone cry. “My character sticks around after every session of every RPG I’ve ever played.”

True, but session and quest are not synonymous. Originally, D&D was designed for GMs to create their own dungeons, quests, and campaigns…and then what? If you ran a dungeon, and your character got to level 3, what happened next? Well, you found another quest, another dungeon, another campaign…not always with the same DM, not always with the same players. Your character gained gold, levels, and equipment, and could slot into any quest, dungeon, or campaign that any DM had created. The purpose of playing wasn’t to tell a unified cohesive story, but rather engage in a milieu narrative about first this dungeon, now that one. First this dragon, now that undead king.

This is a system-focused framework, more akin to a poker-tournament than anything else. Each player gets their winnings from each game, and then moves onto the next. Characters are singular, personal, and not inexorably intertwined with the setting and characters in which they were introduced to the world. This idea was formalized in the D&D Adventures League, at the time called the RPGA.

Narratively, it’s more akin to a series of comic books, YA novels, or episodic TV shows, where the conflict in one episode/issue might only loosely connect to the next.

Nowadays, there can be little incentive to hold onto a character sheet beyond a single major quest. By the time you start another, you might have a different character you want to play. Or a different system. Campaigns are now more like miniseries or collections of long-form comics than separate episodes. Gone are the days when you hear that someone is looking to run a dungeon and you pull out your trusty wizard in anticipation of increased experience and loot.

“Gone? No no no, good sir! Have you not just done a post on the OSR movement? There are those who regularly roleplay in this episodic manner. Regularly, I say.”

True, but modern RPGs aren’t really designed to be played this way anymore. Pre-built modules of modern RPGs can take months to complete, depending on availability, while long-form campaigns could last years. Devotion to a single character for that long isn’t for everyone. Now, with narratives becoming more complex and a myriad systems bursting out of the indie underground, creating bespoke characters for every game is far more common, reasonable, and in most cases a necessary.

So what is lost with this new world? A sense of devotion, perhaps? I remember when I was young having my halfling, Sir James, go on multiple different adventures without overarching narrative. D&D was a game, and I was changing the game every time I played by getting new equipment, levels, or allies. The dungeons changed around, the monsters were different, but it was still the same “game.”

Looking back at it now I realize: RPGs were the first Legacy Board Games.

Legacy board games are all the rage now, but back then there was no such thing. Every board game played the same way every time. You set out the pieces the same way, you rolled your dice the same way, and you ended the game the same way.

RPGs were different. Not only were you delving into different dungeons every time, finding new monsters to kill in addition to the familiar ones, but this time you had an axe instead of a sword. This time you had a new magic spell. Now you had a magic ring that made sneaking easier, or your hits stronger. Every coin and experience point you got was not just getting closer to winning this game, but also the next.

It’s a different flavor of game than a longer campaign. Even if slaying the Foozle takes twenty sessions, it’s still one story; a single season, as it were, of a 90s television show. Complete and isolated from everything else. It’s a board game you played once.

Carrying the same character to another adventure has a different thrill all its own. A new challenge, a new story, a fresh villain and unknown threats waiting to be vanquished. Early editions of D&D had milestones too, granting your character wizard towers or strongholds with followers to lead and all the possible adventures that come with them.

It is, in an interesting way, thwarting the cohesive narrative ambitions of the RPG. It’s more in line with the isolated stories of 80s and 90s Television, where there was always a return to status quo. In RPGs the status quo is the wandering adventurer, heading off into the distance to find a new tavern with a new quest. The Foozle couldn’t make good on their eternal vow of vengeance, because there was no guarantee that you’d ever meet again. A new adventure, a new episode.

So where did the longer module bespoke-character style of RPG come from? Who knows for sure? Perhaps as players got older they didn’t have the time to spend their weekends with a single character through a multitude of modules. Maybe what was once a year filled with fifty five-hour sessions became a year of twenty three-hour sessions, and so larger pre-built modules took the place of longer modular campaigns. Maybe the influence of movies, books, and other media made us care more about a rich game-narrative than an engaging meta-narrative. Maybe capitalism demands expensive campaigns instead of cheap pocket dungeons and pamphlet tombs.

A fun twist is that Legacy board games are now influencing RPGs.

Consider Sunderwald, which has you mark up the rulebook after significant sessions, changing the world and the rules based on how the characters play the game. If your character survives a journey into the woods, you earn the right to define something about their race, for example.

Or there’s Banda’s Grove, which has a system for building and shaping your campground similar to Frosthaven. How you build your campground will influence what happens in later sessions, with small choices early on resulting in drastic differences.

Or there’s Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast, an as-yet unreleased game which promises unlockable characters, plots, narratives, and adventures as you play.

There are even “simpler” kinds of legacy, such as the unsubtly named Legacy: Life Among the Ruins, which encourages drastic changes to the world with every generation you play through. Rod, Reel, & Fist has a Legacy mode with an evolving adveture region that requires multiple sessions to fully explore. You could even look at games like Blades in the Dark, which gamify “the state of the world” in a way that smaller-scope games don’t bother with.

One of the important parts of RPGs is the idea of choices mattering. When our characters save the Mayor’s chicken or thwart the warlord’s schemes, we want it to make a difference. Sure, we can say it makes a difference — the GM can describe the confetti and celebratory banquet ’til the cows run off to pay the babysitter — but feeling that difference, either through concrete changes to the world or through significant rule adjustments, can really drive the point home.

This, of course, doesn’t apply to one-shots; but when games last longer, there are some fascinating methods of messing about with long-play.