PDQ system

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Mankcam

Hallowed Be Thy Swo
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I've just stumbled across the PDQ System, and rather after the fact, it seems.

It looks like a neat little rules-lite system, a little bit on the narrative/story game side of the spectrum.
At first glance, the mechanics strike me as a cross between Fate and HeroQuest, and it seems easier to read then both of those books.
I have the pdf for 'Jaws Of The Six Serpents', which is a savage sword & sorcery setting using the PDQ System.

I'm just wondering how it plays, and if anyone has experience with this system?
 
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Jaws is a beautiful piece of work, really capturing the sword & sorcery mood well. I also played Truth & Justice, which is less polished but still a terrific supers game. The way it spins subplots out of fight scenes is genius, the closest thing to playing a comic I've found.

Mechanically the influence of Fudge is strong, but the game has enough of its own flavour and spin to make it feel very much its own system. For a time my group were playing most of the PDQ games available and they never failed to run smoothly and need minimal rules checking. Shame that only the first two Achtung! Cthulhu adventures were released for it and not the whole line, but you can't have everything.
 
I will take a better look at it, but from the outset it does feel like Fudge/Fate meets HQ, and feels quite an easy read as well.

I'm certainly going to give it a good read, its very flexible with lots of possibilities
 
I love PDQ...

JAWS is brilliant and I love Swashbucklers of the 7 skies. Very easy system to play and work with on the fly.

Shame it seems to be stagnant. :sad:
 
Was this the system in Hollow Earth Expedition?
 
I've both played PDQ and run a short (12 sessions) campaign set in a S&S setting. Easy to run, easy to pick up. I'd play it and offer it at a suitable con in a heartbeat.
 
I have Truth & Justice and I think that it's a decent supers game. I've never managed to run it, mainly because a) I mostly play online these days and b) it's a high-trust game. And I've had a couple of bad experiences with 'that guy' - something that's easier to avoid if you are gaming in a regular group with people that you know well imo.
 
I'd also suggest reading The Zantabulous Zorcerer of Zo, which might not appeal to you as a game necessarily but it's a fantastic demonstration of how to put together adventures with the system.
 
Personally I'm not too mad on some of the more Comedic stuff. Like Ninja burger or Questors of the Middle Realms. That said you can mine them for ideas and stats.

Achtung Cthulhu have a version for PDQ as well. So, if you wanted to run a Raiders of the Lost Ark type of game that would come in handy.
 
Sorry for the thread necro, but wonder Mankcam Mankcam, if you ever got around to picking this up and playing it? If so, what were your impressions?
 
Sorry for the thread necro, but wonder Mankcam Mankcam, if you ever got around to picking this up and playing it? If so, what were your impressions?
I'm sorry to say the real life got in the way of me giving this a go. We've only just returned to our Middle Earth game, and we have Conan 2D20 lined up after that.

But I still really want to give Jaws Of The Six Serpents a spin one day. It has so much pulpy sword &sorcery flavour, and feels pretty rules-lite.

Just not enough time to run or play everything. But I'm not shelving it, hopefully I may be able to give this a spin next year
 
I'm sorry to say the real life got in the way of me giving this a go. We've only just returned to our Middle Earth game, and we have Conan 2D20 lined up after that.

But I still really want to give Jaws Of The Six Serpents a spin one day. It has so much pulpy sword &sorcery flavour, and feels pretty rules-lite.

Just not enough time to run or play everything. But I'm not shelving it, hopefully I may be able to give this a spin next year

Ah, well, if you ever do would love to see a play report or something.
 
Again my eyes scan over my two PDQ books and I think that this would have possibly been a better generic system, rather than introducing my group to Fate Core for a rules-lite, pulpy set of narrative-heavy mechanics.

It's easier to get your head around than Fate Core and HeroQuest, which are the two games I tend to compare it to.

Not much more complex than RISUS or Fudge, it's a shame that it hasn't taken off like Savage Worlds, Cypher, OpenD6, Cortex, or Genysis, as it seems perfect to cover the same ground.

One day I will run this...
 
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I've just stumbled across the PDQ System, and rather after the fact, it seems.

It looks like a neat little rules-lite system, a little bit on the narrative/story game side of the spectrum.
At first glance, the mechanics strike me as a cross between Fate and HeroQuest, and it seems easier to read then both of those books.
I have the pdf for 'Jaws Of The Six Serpents', which is a savage sword & sorcery setting using the PDQ System.

I'm just wondering how it plays, and if anyone has experience with this system?
Well, I have played a few one-shots with it. The only one I remember more about than "yeah, and then we played that", was the Ninja Burger game...where we just laughed too much. Especially when somebody got punched in his connection to the clan by a fall, or something:grin:!

So my conclusion was that the system works great for comedy games. I could see playing something like Paranoia with it as well. For other kinds of games, I'm not quite persuaded:thumbsup:.
 
I have the sword & sorcery book Jaws of the Six Serpents, and the tongue-in-cheek high fantasy book Questers of the Middle Realm. From the outset these books look pretty good. I mean PDQ looks like it covers the same territory as Fate Core, Everway, or Savage Worlds; things that are portrayed well with pulpy, broad brushstrokes.

PDQ has very simple mechanics, no bells or whistles, just a bunch of individualised narrative descriptors/traits for characters and opponents. Kinda like RISUS and HeroQuest in that respect.
Perhaps not much meat on the bone, but for a heavy narrative system this would strike me as a good thing, the less gamey nuts and bolts the better.

I actually love crunchy games, my favourites are Mythras, RuneQuest, Call of Cthulhu, Conan 2D20, and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay at present; so these games hit the spot for me. Also some D20 OSR-adjacent games appeal to me, like Five Torches Deep, Dungeon Crawl Classics, Sharp Swords & Sinister Spells, and Shadows Of The Demon Lord. I try not to get into the 'traditional-vs-storygame' debate thingy, but if anything I swim more in the 'traditional' end of the pond.

However sometimes I do like a more narrative-focused game, which I tend to use Fate Core for, and I'm looking for even less mechanics to not get in the way of the narrative flow. Just like some people find the Game Tokens Economy intrusive in 2D20 games, I tend to find that Fate Core may have a few dials too many for the kid of game it is - however PDQ strikes me as being pretty good in this respect, it seems to have far less things to get in the way of the narrative flow.

I will have to pursue PDQ further one day, but I just have other games ramping up beforehand. However I''d be interested in reading more of others experiences and whatnot. Given the cottage-indie nature of this system, I understand this will be a very small pond :thumbsup:
 
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While other rules lite games have come along that I like to run for similar style games, I still run games with PDQ. I'll probably always come back to the system. Especially Jaws of the Six Serpents, which I just love. I tend to prefer it over Barbarians of Lemuria for S&S gaming. Achtung! Cthulhu is pretty good too, which includes a few of the ideas found in PDQ#.

As for whether it can support a long game - I played a nearly 10 year campaign of Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies (the longest "campaign" of my gaming career). I'd happily do so again. It's the most fondly remembered game among my friends. So I'd say with the right group, it does fine in a long game.

One thing we never did do was try to make damage "make sense" for the Qualities being hit. Nobody ever got "punched in the girlfriend" (a notion I always found idiotic). Just treat damage as an abstraction. The more you engage in conflict, the less effective you are over time until you take a break from it. It's that simple. It behaves like a delayed death spiral (you can take a hit or three before you start to feel the spiral take effect in your current conflict). There's no need to treat it as anything else unless you're actually going for slapstick.

And after a while you can stop generating story hooks from the first Quality hit. You'll have enough of them going once the game really takes on a life of its own. They can be a good source of "random events" if you like, but aren't strictly necessary.

Mechanically, besides the system's granularity being a possible issue, the clunkiest part is keeping track of Failure vs Damage ranks. Early on we wanted to know which Qualities were reduced by which source of damage (something the game never says to do - but is how we interpreted it). That made healing up a bit of a chore. Ultimately, it's much easier if you just keep track of the number of each via tally marks for the purposes of healing up between scenes. Let the players pick and prioritize how they heal.
 
Again my eyes scan over my two PDQ books and I think that this would have possibly been a better generic system, rather than introducing my group to Fate Core for a rules-lite, pulpy set of narrative-heavy mechanics.

It's easier to get your head around than Fate Core and HeroQuest, which are the two games I tend to compare it to.

Not much more complex than RISUS or Fudge, it's a shame that it hasn't taken off like Savage Worlds, Cypher, OpenD6, Cortex, or Genysis, as it seems perfect to cover the same ground.

One day I will run this...
I almost always reach for PDQ whenever I'm tempted to run Fate. For me it's actually better in that space than Fate is. It's definitely easier for a group of players to get their collective heads around, and it's dead simple to run. I don't know that I'd say the same for HeroQuest. Mechanically, they're pretty comparable in my opinion from a crunch level perspective. But I do think of HQ as being much more narrative in nature. PDQ can actually be run in a pretty traditional way. In this I tend to think of it as being pretty close to BoL, Mini Six or Sharp Swords & Sinister Spells (another game I adore).
 
One thing we never did do was try to make damage "make sense" for the Qualities being hit. Nobody ever got "punched in the girlfriend" (a notion I always found idiotic). Just treat damage as an abstraction. The more you engage in conflict, the less effective you are over time until you take a break from it. It's that simple. It behaves like a delayed death spiral (you can take a hit or three before you start to feel the spiral take effect in your current conflict). There's no need to treat it as anything else unless you're actually going for slapstick.
I cna see it work as long as you can come up with something that seems appropriate and makes sense.
 
Could you just add a "health" quality and have damage reduce that instead of the other qualities?
Easily. Most starting characters have between 10-16 "hit points" depending on how you allocate your ranks. Simply total up the number of ranks you have, including average and poor for any defined Quality (but not the Weakness) and that is your HP amount.

Or easier still simply say everyone starts with 16 HP.
 
Could you just add a "health" quality and have damage reduce that instead of the other qualities?

Easily. Most starting characters have between 10-16 "hit points" depending on how you allocate your ranks. Simply total up the number of ranks you have, including average and poor for any defined Quality (but not the Weakness) and that is your HP amount.

Or easier still simply say everyone starts with 16 HP.

I don't own it, only read about it, but I think the HP Lovecraft Preparatory Academy game has a conventional (or more conventional at least) damage track of some kind. I'm sure I read something comparing it to Stress tracks in Fudge.
 
I can perhaps see an arguement for all characters to have an additional Trait called 'Resilience', equal to the number of ranks in the character's Qualities.
'Resilience' would be a measure of capacity to remain active. In game mechanics it would act as physical, mental, and social 'hit points', all under one trait.

You would still have to reduce the other Qualities as your 'Resilience' declines, because losing opposed rolls in Conflict Scenes is also about having a declining proficiency to act within that scene.

I'm not sure I would see a need for having a separate 'Resilience' trait, but it may be helpful for some people to conceptualise.

The other way to do it is just to calculate the 'Resilience' scores (as above) at the start of any Conflict Scene.
This way it is not really adding any additional permanent trait to the character sheets, but may help everyone conceptualise things during an actual Conflict Scene. That's probably gonna be something I may consider if I run PDQ.
 
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I guess I'm weird because I understood that reducing a quality ("hitting the girlfriend") wasn't about "damage" literally so much as an abstraction of the idea that stress you gained from getting hurt and exhausted caused you to say miss a date, or you let something slip that allows a villain to track her down, it's all about your problems overflowing into other parts of life. Thus causing future plot hooks, which was early handling of "fail forward" in a way as your character suffered new things came up that would challenge them in the future. I.e it helped generate the soap opera dynamic of certain superhero comics, in a way health simply doesn't. I liked that.


A good example is Spider-man he can fight through a heck of a lot of things and scrapes and bruises and a broken bone but it may mess up his personal life for a bit because he was fighting crime instead of attending class, staying on time for a date, or whatever. So he has to explain it, or cover it up, or deal with relationship trouble because he missed something due to his fight. It's a rather elegant solution in building the flow of comic book supers.
 
I guess I'm weird because I understood that reducing a quality ("hitting the girlfriend") wasn't about "damage" literally so much as an abstraction…
No, you're not weird, that's absolutely the intention here.

Failure to recognise abstract systems is behind most of the problems D&D had for years too, leading to all those attempts to make parts of it more realistic. It's not realistic. The more you try to make it realistic the less sense the whole thing makes. PDQ is pretty clear about its damage mechanic: it's a device to produce certain game results, not to provide an accurate description of the physical state of your character.
 
No, you're not weird, that's absolutely the intention here.

Failure to recognise abstract systems is behind most of the problems D&D had for years too, leading to all those attempts to make parts of it more realistic. It's not realistic. The more you try to make it realistic the less sense the whole thing makes. PDQ is pretty clear about its damage mechanic: it's a device to produce certain game results, not to provide an accurate description of the physical state of your character.
In a game where ninja clan delivers pizza and commit seppuku if the pizza is late or if they're seen while delivering it, I don't think "it produces absurd results" was a drawback...nor did we see it as such:thumbsup:

Now, I wouldn't use PDQ for other of games. But then I have the same issue with D&D as well - and yes, your analogy is apt - so you can't really accuse me of singling out PDQ for its narrative nature, or something:devil:!

Some of us just prefer game events to map well to in-game events. Some games simply aren't made to accommodate this taste. Those games suck ahem, simply aren't made for those of us who have this preference, because to us, they seem almost dissociated:gunslinger:!
Of course, if it's not a problem for you, more power to you:shade:!
Meanwhile, I'd have to stick to games like Mythras, Cepheus (and I'm currently reading En Garde). Woe is me...but not really:grin:!
 
Some of us just prefer game events to map well to in-game events. Some games simply aren't made to accommodate this taste. Those games suck ahem, simply aren't made for those of us who have this preference, because to us, they seem almost dissociated:gunslinger:!
Of course, if it's not a problem for you, more power to you:shade:!
Meanwhile, I'd have to stick to games like Mythras, Cepheus (and I'm currently reading En Garde). Woe is me...but not really:grin:!
See and to me, the whole point that the game produces in-game results more often than hit points, health loss, or injury systems. I mean yes, say in Mythras you take a lot of health loss in your arm, that's a mechanical effect and might cause a game effect.

Example: losing the arm, requiring healing. Now in life, it probably requires surgery and rehab (Depending on the setting) But it's meant to simulate a specific real-world idea of the damage, not a game's impact of the event. Quite often in such games, long-term impacts are at best a small pothole, you drive over it, it's annoying and nothing more. Unless it's at the very extreme levels like loss of an arm.

A good GM will make that matter, but I've seen many players balk at such things (they're at times a weird lot and not one specific group.) Like sure they want to fight, but don't want to get hurt. For games that take the abstraction back to the game with say D&D's Hit Points, there is a risk it gets /strange./ But less impactful to the game unless they go completely down. (Which is rare with so much magic.)

One of the reasons I like this different method of abstraction is that they're less likely to balk at something spinning up more stuff in play, than an actual injury that lingers.

I've seen someone quit a game because their character suffered attribute loss as "brain damage" and lost being his class since he no longer had the requirements. (This was a D&D cousin but a brutal game variant and that happened because of a critical hit.)

I think one version of Traveller did the stat loss thing (Cepheus may have not looked at it yet.) Which is also an abstraction you turn into a narrative result of sorts.

Another friend ran crit failures differently, in one case my halfling simply lost his quiver as the belt that held it on over his shoulders snapped, and I had to resort to axes. It was a more /interesting/ critical failure than the first one to me. Because it was an inconvenience that made things challenging but kept conflict ongoing with a D&D-like game he was making.
 
Doesn't Supers! Revised also apply damage directly to your stats? I believe the Vortex system (Doctor Who, Primeval, Pulp Fantastic) does it as well. Someone please correct me if I'm misremembering.
 
See and to me, the whole point that the game produces in-game results more often than hit points, health loss, or injury systems. I mean yes, say in Mythras you take a lot of health loss in your arm, that's a mechanical effect and might cause a game effect.
See, the thing is you want the game to produce mechanical effects... in which case, I recommend LotW's injury system, BTW:devil:!
I want the injury system to be brutally realistic. Then the characters taking care not to die is what leads to the game effects. Same thing, different ways to go about it.

Example: losing the arm, requiring healing. Now in life, it probably requires surgery and rehab (Depending on the setting) But it's meant to simulate a specific real-world idea of the damage, not a game's impact of the event. Quite often in such games, long-term impacts are at best a small pothole, you drive over it, it's annoying and nothing more. Unless it's at the very extreme levels like loss of an arm.
Sure, in some systems it might be possible. In others, not so much...

A good GM will make that matter, but I've seen many players balk at such things (they're at times a weird lot and not one specific group.) Like sure they want to fight, but don't want to get hurt. For games that take the abstraction back to the game with say D&D's Hit Points, there is a risk it gets /strange./ But less impactful to the game unless they go completely down. (Which is rare with so much magic.)
Yeah, as stated above, they can be ignored.
One of the reasons I like this different method of abstraction is that they're less likely to balk at something spinning up more stuff in play, than an actual injury that lingers.
Then use it, man. I don't like it, so I don't. Different stuff for different people...
Please note, I'm not even critiquing PDQ's "damage". It's fun in the right kind of game:thumbsup:.

I've seen someone quit a game because their character suffered attribute loss as "brain damage" and lost being his class since he no longer had the requirements. (This was a D&D cousin but a brutal game variant and that happened because of a critical hit.)
Never seen such a game. But I don't know how that's different from the character dying, anyway.

I think one version of Traveller did the stat loss thing (Cepheus may have not looked at it yet.) Which is also an abstraction you turn into a narrative result of sorts.
Yes, many versions do...but you don't lose a class in Traveller. Because you haven't got one in the first place.

Another friend ran crit failures differently, in one case my halfling simply lost his quiver as the belt that held it on over his shoulders snapped, and I had to resort to axes. It was a more /interesting/ critical failure than the first one to me. Because it was an inconvenience that made things challenging but kept conflict ongoing with a D&D-like game he was making.
Sure, but that's related more to things not being two-dimensional. Like, you know, Mythras achieves with Manoeuvres/special effects:shade:!
 
Doesn't Supers! Revised also apply damage directly to your stats? I believe the Vortex system (Doctor Who, Primeval, Pulp Fantastic) does it as well. Someone please correct me if I'm misremembering.
Yes, Supers! Red does, but they're designs specifically as damage soak abilities, which is interesting. I don't remember Dr. Who's handling have to get it out again. It might. Though rarely in those settings and rules is damage long lasting.
 
I want the injury system to be brutally realistic
There are many, many genres of fiction where injuries are far from brutally realistic. Attempting to play such a genre with a system that guarantees brutally realistic injuries is likely to be unsatisfying. Then again, people seem to like Invincible for some reason.
 
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