In one of their Chit chat episodes, Panda’s Talking Games was discussing genre emulation and the relevancy of PbtA in current game design. I don’t want to go into the PbtA fox hole here but it would be interesting to analyze a little bit how well does QuestWorlds handle said genre emulation.
And, as I am following their topic, maybe it would be good to first define what the term genre emulation means. In short, it means the game’s ability to play like the genre it is played in. The genre can be broad (fantasy, cyberpunk) or narrower (80’s action movies, Mexican drug cartels). I would add that it is the feel the players get that their game is helping them to bring the desired genre to life. And the word game here means the actual game that is based on a game system. For example, the HeroQuest Glorantha game is based on the QuestWorlds game system.
QuestWorlds is a really open-ended game system for simulating a story instead of simulating any specific genre. In QuestWorlds the system does not really change depending on the genre as it revolves around story obstacles. And every genre can have story obstacles as it is maybe the widest abstraction there can be. On top of that, the characters can have any abilities their players want. Yes, the player can come up with their own abilities and there are, usually, no lists to choose from. The ratings for the abilities just tell how likely are they going to resolve the story obstacle if they are using that ability to resolve it. “Anything you can imagine, you can play”, right? Well, at least anything with story obstacles that is. I wouldn’t use QuestWorlds for Phil and Senda’s (the hosts of the podcast) great Turning Point(affiliate link) game either. But Turning Point is more of a game system (as is QuestWorlds) than a specific game for a certain genre, in my opinion. I have had Turning Point games in the fantasy world of Glorantha as well as in our own world genres.
But it’s not all bad. QuestWorlds has something to help with genre emulation: keywords. All the other concepts of the game stay the same genre to genre but keywords give some room to fiddle inside it. I have written a little about keywords already in this blog. Basically, the keywords ask genre-specific questions from the players when they are creating their characters. For example in QuestWorlds based game HeroQuest Glorantha(affiliate link), that you could say emulates the “Glorantha genre”, the runes are the building blocks of the world. So much that the character has to define three runes to be the most prominent ones as keywords. Another example could be from a (hypothetical) wrestling game having a gimmick keyword telling, with just one word or phrase, how does that character resolve the story obstacles in the wrestling ring, or outside it. Other usual keywords are something like occupation, species, homeland, and such.
Whatever the player chooses for their keyword it still doesn’t change the rules of the game. They don’t get bonuses to their rolls or situational modifiers nor can they combine the abilities in some specific way. They can come up with any keyword ability that the designer of the given game didn’t even think of and that is all fine. Then they just have to justify how that keyword can be used to resolve the story obstacle at hand. This is also the downside of this kind of freeform system as it might be hard to come up with the phrase or ability for the keyword. The game designer might provide a list of possible, and preferred, values for the keywords but these are mainly descriptions of the genre to give the players some creative juice on how to use their keywords. Coming up with the abilities and playing with them is especially hard if the player does not know about the genre. And this brings us to the topic of learning about a genre.
As Phil and Senda sain in the podcast episode, games with predefined playbooks that play well together and can have cross effects with each other are much more helpful to players new to the genre. It is quite nice to just read from the playbook what moves your character can do and how your character plays with that other character type (playbook) when they are doing their things. The player is handheld into the genre and taught, by highlighting certain tropes using the rules, how the genre works. Well, QuestWorlds does not hold hands. If the player wants to learn the genre they have to read or know about it so that they know what does a certain phrase means in that genre. For example, having an ability of “I clear standoffs” might mean totally different things in the Mexican cartel game and in the game based in the interesting world of poker.
It is true that QuestWorlds can be used, with just the SRD, without writing anything beforehand, to emulate any genre out there. Starting from scratch the players would just agree on the keywords and then use the rules as written. In the end, every genre is just stories and QuestWorlds handles stories well. But the other side of the coin is that you have to know the genre well beforehand. Or be willing to build your own version of the genre, bending the tropes to your liking. In the end, you can come up with more meaningful and fun abilities, and keywords, when you know what kind of stories are told in that specific genre.
Worlds of QuestWorlds 
For me, HeroQuest 2 (essentially the same as HQG or QuestWorlds) laid out very well the idea of genre emulation, and i can imagine how the engine could handle genre extremely well. (I would much rather play a QuestWorlds cyberpunk game, say, than a game that required extensive detail on every kind of bullet that can be fired and every hacking program.)
However, I feel like HerQuest Glorantha has suffered from poor implementation: They have a flexible system, but those who have written for the game are so focused on just writing a story and the idea that HeroQuest doesn’t have statblocks that it’s very difficult to get any gameable information out of HeroQuest materials–including the core HeroQuest Glorantha rulebook.
Another problem with HeroQuest Glorantha has been the exclusive support for only one kind of campaign: Heroes as part of a Sartarite clan. It feels a pity to have this incredibly flexible system and such a restrictive framework to use it in.
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I too look forward to Genre books. Here might at least show an implementation other than Glorantha (which I love but have a hard time getting others to dive into). I need more guidance to grok this system. He to potential seems vast.
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