>From: "Rob" <robert_m_davis_at_...>
>
> > Actually, I've had the reverse problem - they assume that they can
>kill
> > all the opposition after they've defeated them, and it's very hard
>to
> > get them to be happy with their enemies not being all dead.
>(Especially
> > bandits when their clan hates Gagarthi, and broo who they also
>hate.)
>
>Hehehe...I have this too. I must admit, if its a big deal to them I
>let them. One time a player butchered a Lunar Townie I made him
>take killer _at_ 17. Now he roleplays it. Ho hum!
Right out of the book, too. The whole "assign a nasty ability" is just never going to work. Basically your legitimizing the behavior that the player wanted in the first place. Now he can say, "Well I'm only playing the flaws you gave me!" The reason I like HQ so much is that flaws and penalties make heroes more interesting, not less. But this means that you can't disincentivize players with threats of them either.
You're correct, Rob, to let them kill their opponents if they want to do so, if the opponents are "generic." I could go on and on and on about the rationale about this but you can find my reasoning on The Forge if you really care to look for it. Basically, Complete Defeat means that you've eliminated a source of conflict for that hero. So what you're not allowed to do without a complete defeat, really, is say, kill a particular NPC. The example given on The Forge is one of hunting deer - how can I hunt if I need a complete success to actually kill the deer? The answer is that you're not killing all of the deer. There will still be deer for your character to kill later.
Complete Success does not equal Death automatically. Sometimes a marginal success means death. It all depends on the goal. No, this does not mean that the players have an easy end-around to get it so that they can kill anyone with a marginal success. It means that when they're fighting deer, or mooks, or somebody who doesn't matter to them as a continuing challenge that narrating death is the right thing to do in many cases.
> > When the hunter fought off a Telmori single-handed armed only with
>a bow
> > and a fruit knife (that could cut anything),
So he's now Fangle Snangleson, Slayer of Telemori with Fruit Knife, right?
As far as making players good with outcomes, again, it's a matter of framing. Don't narrate yourself into a corner where there's no believable way out of things. I've seen narrators do that. When you're going along, always be thinking about how it's going to end, knowing that in all liklihood, that Complete Defeat isn't going to happen.
With practice it becomes second nature.
> > Versus the bandits, it was a separate contest between "Have mercy,
>I was
> > only trying to stop myself from starving" vs "Hate Gagarthi"
>augmented
> > by "Humakti initiate" and "Death" affinity.
> >
>very cool idea. I'll be using that next time I get behind the GM
>screen!
Agreed, this is a great thing to do, and very realistic. If you want to really humanize your heroes, contests like this point out just how hard cold blooded murder (which is what killing a surrendered foe is, psychologically) really is. A fact that, somehow most gamers seem to be blythly unaware of, instead assuming somehow that it's more heroic to slay the injured.
That's not to say that it's not dramatic and realistic in some cases to do just this - take the soldier in Falluja for instance who shot the wounded folks. It's just that it makes this feel all the more realistically shocking in play if in other cases the heroes consciences kick in.
Mike
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