Sunday, May 6, 2012

Constructive Criticism of Legend Quest

Years ago, we had a very good customer who came and saw us every year at the cons and bought whatever we had published. We love people like that! One year he had his two sons with him, and we confidently asked him if his sons played. He told us that they were just starting, D&D. We were of course offended. Here was one of our biggest fans and he was teaching his kids that out of date game. Here was his reasoning, and unfortunately, he was right: D&D’s class system was easy for the boys to learn. They were only like 6 and 8. They wanted to be “fighter”, “thief” or “mage”. Easy - You can do this; you can’t do that. In LQ, with our character building process, you can build anything. He told us that his boys didn’t know what they wanted for their characters, so he wanted them to have it nice and simple. Sure, he loved running stealthy elven archers who were great runners and climbers, and his adult players loved having useful skills that made sense, at least to them. (I think there was a massively powerful warrior who was a gem and jewelry expert.)
Why am I pointing out this seeming flaw in our game? Because we want to stress that LQ is not for eight year olds. It’s not that is any more violent than other games, in fact it is the opposite. But young kids haven’t learned enough to strategize how much of their skill they should be applying to defense/parrying vs. offense. Or how much of their skill they need for their spell’s accuracy vs. area of effect. This spell does X damage to one guy! That they can wrap their brains around. You can do a lot more damage now, but it might make you pass out from the effort, or you can coast now so you can cast more later - not something for little kids!
Now, if you are an adult (even a younger one), and you want a game with a huge amount of dynamic opportunity - try Legend Quest!. No classes! No alignments! You craft the character to be what you want it to be, trading off this for that. Best of luck, and enjoy!

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