Narrator Advice
Passionate Intensity:
Augmenting With Personality Traits
by Bradley "Brand" Robins, with acknowledgements to Mike Holmes, Ralph Mazza, and Michael Schwartz
Copyright © 2004, Bradley Robins
"Personality is only ripe when a man has made the truth his own."
-Kierkegaard
One of the most commonly-voiced positives of the HeroQuest system is that it can make a hero's personality
matter as much as his skills. So the fact that your hero is Loyal Until Death can matter as much as-or more than!-the fact
that he has a broadsword. Sometimes this will be with contests in which a personality trait is used as a primary ability,
but most often it will be when heroes augment other abilities with their personality traits. However, many players and
narrators face uncertainty when using personality traits in this way. Which ones are relevant? How many should be used?
Can a positive personality trait sometimes become a flaw? This article attempts to answer some of those questions, and
proposes a few tricks that can be used with personality traits.
The first question is: "How many personality traits can be used to augment a contest?" The answer: as many as are relevant.
This leads directly to the next question: "How do you determine which personality traits are relevant?" To answer this,
I'm going to create the Passionate Intensity Clause, which states that a personality trait is relevant if, and only
if, it is passionately engaged in the contest. The key here is that the personality trait used to augment must be something
that reveals a part of the hero's personality as he profoundly interacts with the situation. It cannot be something that the
hero doesn't care that much about, or which doesn't make a statement about who they are in the situation, or that just plain
isn't relevant to the roll.
Example: a knightly hero armed with a sword and shield cannot use his
Brave 5W to chase two 8 year olds in rags out of the village because there
is nothing brave about the action. His personality trait simply isn't relevant. Similarly, he couldn't use his
Brave 5W if he was at a tournament at which no one was going to be killed.
Even in battle, his Brave only comes out if he is at the front of the battle, doing brave and daring acts. If he is
hanging back and playing safe he can't use his Brave because he isn't passionately engaged in the battle-he isn't
bravely putting his neck on the line, so he doesn't get to use his bravery to make himself stronger!
So how do heroes make sure they can use their personality traits to augment themselves in important situations? How do they
make sure they're passionately engaged? The answer is by interacting with the story and creating opportunities to engage
their personality traits so that when a contest comes up their heroes already care about it. This effort will combine the
attempts of the players to get as many augments as they can for their heroes with their personality and the development of
the story. Then everything-game power, hero stats, and story-come together at one point. Players will want to get their
heroes involved and to make a story that depends on their heroes' passions because it gives them both a good story and a
mechanical bonus.
Example: Our Brave 5W knight is also
Honorable 1W, Combative 17, and has a True Love trait at
15W coupled with a Hate Heortlings 19. He is at a tourney and is going to
have to do battle at a point later in the day. Normally, few of his traits would be relevant, as the tourney uses rebated
weapons, so there isn't a lot of bravery involved; he hasn't done anything that relates to his true love; his honor isn't
on the line; and he'd have to be lucky to get a Heortling opponent. However, what if our doughty knight swears to his true
love that he will win for her if she gives him her favor, then challenges a Heortling to single combat with live weapons,
and insults the Heortling until the warrior insults the knight's honor? Suddenly, all of his personality traits are engaged
and relevant. His honor, his true love, his hatred, his bravery, and his combative nature are all on the line, so all give
him bonuses. The player has also managed to go from having a simple (boring) swing-fest at a tourney to having a bitter
enemy, love on the line, and a thousand other story possibilities hanging on his actions. (What happens if he kills the
Heortling, or if he loses? Will his love leave him, or has his pugnacious nature annoyed churchmen? Was the Heortling he
challenged an ambassador?)
The final question is: "Can a positive personality trait sometimes become a flaw?" My personal answer is yes, but this
trick should be used lightly to avoid the perception that players are being "punished" for taking lots of personality
traits. Sometimes, however, having a powerful passion will have a downside, and so personality traits may give penalties
to actions that go directly against them. Our Brave, Honorable, and Combative knight, for example,
should have trouble backing down from a fight in which a superior opponent insults his honor and then calls him out.
Everything about the hero means that he should leap into the fray. Similarly, a
Pacifist 15W hero might not only have a tough time getting into a fight,
but may be at a disadvantage through the whole fight because of his aversion to violence.
The balancing point to using a personality trait as a flaw is to give the hero a chance to turn it around. If a hero can
reverse the situation in which the trait was used as a flaw (or comply with it in the case of situations in which the
flaw is urging him to do something), he is automatically passionately engaged. So, if our Pacifist hero gets to
a place where he can try to stop the battle, or our knight takes up the gauntlet in the next fight, their relevant
personality traits automatically augment them. After all, the traits are obviously important, because the heroes wouldn't
be in the situation in the first place if it wasn't for them!
Those options should cover most situations in which personality traits are used as augments. There is one other trick
you can use with personality traits: the Opposed Personality Trait Contest. A player can use this tool to determine
what to do when his hero is divided against himself. When a hero has two personality traits that are at odds with each
other (or a personality trait and an attribute like a relationship) and the player wants a springboard to creativity, he
can roll a contest using the two traits and let the dice decide which comes out on top.
For example: Our Combative knight finds himself facing off across the battlefield against his true love's
brother. The knight is torn, because he doesn't want to hurt his lover-but his honor and Combative nature demand
he fight her brother. The knight's player has a simple contest between the two personality traits to help him decide what
his hero would do. If his Combative wins then he attacks, if his True Love wins then he avoids engagement
with the brother.
Such contests will usually be simple, but in the case of very important or interesting tests of character, they could
be run as extended contests. This would be appropriate for situations in which a hero is divided between "light" and
"darkness" and their soul (or at least their whole future) is on the line.
Example: After killing his true love's brother, our combative knight has wandered in exile for many years. His
true love hates him now, and all that is left is his anger and combative heart. His Combative has gone up to
15W-equal to his True Love trait. Now a message comes from his lover,
telling him that she will have him back if only he will give up the sword forever. Caught between a life of love and
peace and a life of glory and blood, the narrator and the player decide to handle the contest as an extended roll in
which the knight's feelings of love war with his lust for violence.
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