Quoted By:
^Short version? Quests feel limited in the "board game / shared game" environment partially due to presentation and limited mechanical access. It's not strictly necessary, but it helps with the "vibe" of the game.
Mechanically speaking; the use of dice lets us do basically anything you want in a quest you could do in a tabletop game or boardgame, it's just a little limiting. The fact you can't mix multiple dice sizes is a little disappointing, but otherwise simple having an XdX + X is enough for 99% of game interactions. For difficulty checks or damage numbers it's plenty.
But what about other mechanics? This is where trouble starts again. The same thing happened in NWS Quest once more; having individual rules or one-off mechanics, even if focused through the dice system we have on this board, can lead to problems. First, players have to actually remember and use these mechanics. My absolute favorite idea I had for NWS was for the "javelin" item, a weapon which let a player deal bonus damage on the first round of combat which dealt more damage the SOONER you used it after an update. So it posted it within the same hour of the update or vote prompt, it would deal the most damage, an hour later, it would deal -1 damage, and so on. I really liked this concept since it felt thematically fitting to the weapon and rewarded players for specific action (responding to a prompt quickly)- but suffers from real life getting in the way, plus especially if the QM doesn't have a set or well documented update schedule. (Sorry).
I also ran another quest on here with a Freeform magic system called "Leave the Wizard's Tower". This game had a Wizard main character who learned words of power; every word controlling either an element or action / influence over an element as well as meta-magic words that did certain things. An example was UMA, which meant water, and TELE, which meant grow or increase element. So if you used TELE UMA- it would make any body or unit of water get deeper, fill up, multiply, flood, etc. I thought this magic system was really cool while also being pretty simplistic. The issue? Players couldn't remember every magic word. Maybe just having the effects as the names (Grow) (Water) would have been better, but even then, having a bunch of disparate tools or mechanics like this and forcing the players to keep track of isn't very fun or reliable. Players are notoriously bad at solving puzzles yo think are easy. (Yet somehow solve extremely difficult puzzles you make up on the fly?)
So how do we teach players how are mechanics work and make sure they can keep them all in their mind? It's important to remember that you, the QM, have more or less unlimited time to think about and remember the rules of your game, where as players are only seeing it through a layer of smoked glass, secondarily, with their only interaction being voting. It's the same as running a homebrew tabletop game and expecting players to match your autism.
