Hollow Earth Expedition
Jun. 9th, 2009 02:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
theronTonight, I'm running the third part of the Hollow Earth Expedition game I've been GMing for the Rice Crew. HEX is a fairly neat little game. The mechanics support a rules-light approach, but actually have a fair bit of crunch and options in character creation. The two biggest issues I've had with it so far is that starting characters don't feel quite so larger-than-life as I think pulp heroes should be, and the linkage of damage to success levels skews some things rather oddly. Overall, it does a pretty good job, so the things we don't like aren't deal-breakers, and would certainly be subject to house ruling if we picked it up for longer-term play.
From reading the rulebooks and fan-published adventures, it does seem that the default assumptions for HEX aren't entirely in line with my own. The adventure I'm running tonight has a significant chase sequence at the beginning that the author recommends running as a series of contested die rolls. Which sounds to me about as exciting as watching a Spanish-language soccer broadcast with the sound off. To quote the good Dr Rotwang, pulp is "Adventure now. Make sense later." For a rules-light game, HEX sometimes seems a bit too obsessed with the fiddly bits. The equipment lists are lovely and evocative in places, but often too exhaustive and fiddly, for my money. There seems to be a tension between two intended styles of play, a crazy over-the-top-sense-of-wonder approach to pulp simultaneously coupled to a bullet-counting-survival-in-a-hostile-world-with-no-resources game, and the two don't always mesh very well. For instance, it's frightfully easy to get seriously or fatally wounded by just about anything. But it's also laughably easy to heal back up if you've got a trained medic or doctor. It may just be my own preferences, but this doesn't sit well with me.
So, tonight, I'll be stripping out all of that mechanical nonsense and winging it.
From reading the rulebooks and fan-published adventures, it does seem that the default assumptions for HEX aren't entirely in line with my own. The adventure I'm running tonight has a significant chase sequence at the beginning that the author recommends running as a series of contested die rolls. Which sounds to me about as exciting as watching a Spanish-language soccer broadcast with the sound off. To quote the good Dr Rotwang, pulp is "Adventure now. Make sense later." For a rules-light game, HEX sometimes seems a bit too obsessed with the fiddly bits. The equipment lists are lovely and evocative in places, but often too exhaustive and fiddly, for my money. There seems to be a tension between two intended styles of play, a crazy over-the-top-sense-of-wonder approach to pulp simultaneously coupled to a bullet-counting-survival-in-a-hostile-world-with-no-resources game, and the two don't always mesh very well. For instance, it's frightfully easy to get seriously or fatally wounded by just about anything. But it's also laughably easy to heal back up if you've got a trained medic or doctor. It may just be my own preferences, but this doesn't sit well with me.
So, tonight, I'll be stripping out all of that mechanical nonsense and winging it.