Quinns Quest Reviews: The Greatest Dungeon of All Time? 

That’s hilarious but also horrible.

fumes????

​@@ZedAmadeus it happens, I got a d&d book that smelled like bad BBQ sauce and it didn't go away until I owned it for a year

@@AStrangeTrap thats so gross

that also happened with mine when i got it a few weeks back :D

Noted!

Damn that's a great one.

@@Quinns_Quest my favourite method has always been "let's do a one-shot!" which inevitably is actually more like a three-shot to finish, and by the time you're done either the group has or hasn't warmed to the system and you can move on to the next one-shot or pitch a campaign! the process of teaching new RPGs to a group necessarily involves games that won't land with enough people in the group to go ham on a big time investment, but if you're just low pressure one-shotting your way through systems, eventually you strike gold with something that has everyone agog and chompin' at the bit for more

@@Quinns_Quest Yessssssssss

That's actually great advice! First I did a "One-Shot" of CoC and after that I rushed head over toes into a campaign of The One Ring. Now we're about 7 sessions in and while two of my players seem to be having a good time the other two seem to be just "ok" with it and I myself haven't got half the fun I expected, mostly because none of my players really knows anything about middlearth (which I only got to know during session 1), which makes explaining the lore quite exhausting to me. The "one shot" approach seems to be a great way to circumvent that.

Quinns reviewing TTRPGs is absolute S-Tier material, but do you know about Rascal News?

Agreed!

I know, right? I got a huge TTRPG bundle a year or so ago that had like a hundred games in it, of which I have played exactly 1, and guess who just bought even more TTRPGs?

The most stressful f*cking thing I've ever seen

The art certainly reminded me of fun times getting stressed by the quips from my party members :p

A moment of respite. A chance to steel oneself against the coming horrors.

Horros brought low and driven into the mud.

The decision to make kill a skill is interesting, until you have to roll "kill" four or five times to complete the deed against an enemy, because an enemy is just a delve. It's evocative, because Spire has "fight" instead of kill, but the game's one-tone conflict resolution system doesn't reinforce the narrative and semantic distinction. Amazing vibes, until you roll to reduce the fight-delve's target number/health and don't actually kill anything.

​@@feruspriestyoure... complaining about dice rolls in a ttrpg?

@coynelaundry no, I'm complaining about how the vibe conveyed by naming a skill, "kill" is being focused on, when the underlying mechanic of the skill doesn't reinforce the weight being placed on its name. Put another way: I'm complaining about how the mechanics undermine the vibe. When, how, and to what effect the dice are rolled do not match the game's ethos.

@@feruspriestIf you think the only solution to an entire delve is using only one skill _and_ doing so 4-5 times without any significant change, that's not a design issue.

​@@TheNerdySimulation​@TheNerdySimulation that's not what I think, though. That's what you're attributing to me, but it's not what I wrote or what I'm arguing. You resolve *all* conflicts with the delve mechanics. It's the only system to resolve a conflict. Conversations, fights, seduction, etc are all just delves. A player *could* choose skills other than kill in a given situation. There could be significant changes as a result of rolling kill multiple times, too, or not--that's not the criticism I'm making. The mechanics do not support the vibe. The grammar of play, as expressed through the system, doesn't reflect the grit of the vibe. The world deserves a better system. "Kill" is a great skill name. In Root: the RPG, if you pull off a Backstab, you can straight up kill an enemy if the context allows for the skillcheck. 1 success, 1 death. That's a result of the system. In Heart, you have to overcome the Resistance of the Delve or Delve equivalent to kill someone in a combat. You can diminish the importance of killing that someone in the delve as one of many things that can happen along the route to beat the resistance, but it sucks narrative momentum to remove enemy avatars from a story without making the confrontation the crisis of that scene. The GM advice in Heart is, "stop planning," (109). That makes sense until the first time players say, "I don't have domain/skill/item to roll more than 1 die" and your team of badass freaks, due to a 50% fail chance on 1 die, implode before they do anything they envisioned when they made their characters. I backed Dagger in the Heart because I'm gonna translate the game into another system. The beats can stay; the progression system can stay as milestones. The abilities might not convert easily, but that can be done with description. A more robust system would make Heart play as cool as it reads.

🤯

All sandboxes are point crawls with some "empty spaces" much like dungeon crawls are supposed to have a significant proportion of empty rooms. Likewise, point crawls only feel different because the person populating them isn't including pause/break/rest/"empty" points.

What was emotional about it?

@@coldstream11 The various things our characters went through involving family members, friends, secrets from the past and so on.

I've been reading through the PDF. I am curious which of the three potential villains turned out to the BBEG in your campaign.

Big "Joel Hodgson flashing an OK sign and saying 'IT STINKS'" vibes

Though while Quinn several times points out he doesn't like d20 DnD clones, I think that message is still lost with the viewers. For example; his Lancer video. He clearly doesn't advise people to get it, but reading the YT comments that message wasn't properly understood. D20 brainwashed viewers.

Is... Is this one actually using heuristics to broadly apply the stank of Hasbro to anything that uses a certain shape of die? Huh. Takes all kinds to make the world go 'round, I guess.

That's my favourite thing to hear! Plenty of tips on the Quinns Quest patreon, plus I've done an older video here: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-N9NtdF51GWE.html

​@@Quinns_Quest OooOoh seen that one and I LOVED IT. I never DMed before and after seeing Heart's I totally wanted to go and check that masterpiece out again. Guess I have to suscribe to Patreon cuz Im enjoying this channel more and more. What a blessing for my mind! Ooh, also - now that I have your Atención, is there a way you could tell me which is the mystery song that's sounding on your past life's Mind MGMT's review? I totally loved it and I wanted to be able to set it on my Mystery Games Playlist. Oh and that video review also got me buying Mind MGMT - you built tons of Persuasión on your character creation I guess?

The very loud and ecstatic "YEAHHH!!" I yelled out this morning

Seriously. This is far and away the finest RPG review channel I’ve ever seen. I get so antsy waiting for the next video!

I'm not your babe, sweetie.

Ah, the dark tower strat

I mean... that kind of sounds like something a bad ass would do

Oh wow, excellent work

@@Quinns_Quest One of my main points of reference for the campaign was House of Leaves, and I wanted to try to capture that sense of different layers of narrative bleeding into each other. A recurring theme throughout the game was them meeting people who had figured out, to one extent or another, that their world wasn't real. The heart itself tried to keep this knowledge from them because it knew if the game ended it would cease to exist.

tbh the comics are good up until the point they are not anymore... the last volumes tough. That said, the beginning is amazing!

@@pedroh.m.8989 I do agree for a certain degree. The series starts SUPER strong so I guess it was difficult to keep that momentum for 20 issues. Nevertheless, powerful ideas, story and some nice meta narrative. The essays at the end of each issue are also super nice for any RPG fan.

In a game like this, combat isn't really a separate phase. It is a skill check in the same way that you might make a skill check to climb a cliff, persuade a guard, or sneak into a house. Which of course can be really different for people used to combat being a separate phase of play, but here it's quick and brutal, which I feel really feeds into the theme of the game. Likewise, healing also feeds into it. Sometimes you have a major fallout and not enough resources to buy healing at a haunt, so now you need to decide: keep it? Or risk taking on more to go out and get something valuable to buy healing? That risk and reward tension is super fun to play with. While your character can't ever die without you signing off on it, they CAN get so many fallouts they're basically twitching ground meat on the floor. In which case... You might as well pack it in :P

@@HelloItsFlux Absolutely, and I agree with all that stuff. I'm just wondering what *specifically* Quinn didn't like about the systems - e.g. what makes it feel like you're suddenly being pushed to optimise for safety and fiddly numbers?

A perfect sucker punch of a delivery

That'll surely come back to bite him in the next family meal

Look, dungeons are goofy, but a game that USES the goofiness of dungeons like it's turning a bottle of liquor into a molotov cocktail? Yes please