>From: David Dunham <david_at_...>
>
>I suppose it depends on your narration style. I think that unless
>it's dramatically important that you get stuck, that the attempt be
>interpreted as <Open the Seas Today>,
You're hitting on something important here, David. I first understood this from something Bruce Ferrie said regarding contests to get information. It's what I now refer to as the "hidden clause" idea. Basically all statements of goals include clauses that aren't explicitly stated.
To prove the point, I'll resort to absurdity. If the contest is to "Open a locked door" we understand that failure here doesn't mean that the character can never open any locked door again. First, we assume that the goal actually refers only to "the locked door before me," not to other locked doors. Secondly, given the "no repeat attempts" rule, we know that there's a clause that says, "and not give up," or somesuch. That is, the character isn't going to simply stick his picks in, wiggle them for half a second, and then pull them out declaring that he's given up. He's going to keep at it until, for some reason, he decides to quit. That could be either because he has decided that the lock is beyond his ability, or that he simply feels that it's taking too much time, or because a guard is coming, or something else that makes it logically the end of his attempts.
The point is that as RPG players we all have an idea of what's at stake when somebody attempts something, without having to state these clauses. So, in reality, there's an understanding of the stakes involved that's larger than the pure semantics of the statement of the action.
So, Bruce took this a bit further, and says that the actual negative outcome stakes for any contest should be whatever is most interesting, not neccessarily a literal negative of the stated goal. That is, the rules are pretty clear that failure means that the character doesn't get what he intended to get. What you can play around with, however, is the nature of the goal statement. In Bruce's example, the stated goal is to find some information, for example in a library. The obvious failure condition is to narrate, "You don't find what you're looking for." But that's potentially disasterous for the plot - it might leave the player with nowhere to go, and nothing to do with his character.
So what Bruce proposes is that the goal statement includes a hidden clause, "without pissing off the librarian." So failure can mean getting the information, but pissing off the librarian in the process, such that the character will have problems later when looking for further information.
What's going on here is that the narrator is deciding on what the most interesting stakes are for this contest. Note that he could decide that this is an automatic success deeming it "something no self-respecting hero" would fail at. Indeed, failing to find a book in a library after a dilligent search with unlimited time (especially if the character is good at this sort of thing), seems to me to fall under that category. So the narrator is simply creating some more interesting stakes after the fact. The goal statement could have been, in fact, "I want to get the information without pissing off the librarian."
Now, you might retort, you're qualifying the contest by saying that they have unlimited time. What if they don't have unlimited time? Well, then that is, in fact, a case where not meeting the goal might be interesting. That is, OK, now the demon has come to life because we didn't make our time goal in finding out how to stop it in the library, so now we have to deal with the demon. The only case where it's bad form to cause people to fail is where failure means that there's nothing interesting to do now.
As in the case of the Opening being the way to the adventure.
That is, there is no "standard" contest anywhere in HQ, the opening notwithstanding. All such contests presented in the text are examples. For example, the test to join a religious cult as presented in the text...that's given a somewhat typical set of circumstances, and the text even says that you don't have to do the contest if you don't want to do so. It's not a hard and fast rule that you have to follow every time, just a good idea in certain circumstances.
Let the circumstances of the contest decide what the stakes of the contest are, not happenstance, or player action statements that are not being thought of in terms of what's at stake. Don't say, "Oh, it's an opening attempt, let's use the contest in the book" unless the circumstances match those for this example contest. As I've said, consider what's really at stake. The question is whether turning back is the right negative consequence for the opening contest in question.
As I gave in a previous example, perhaps losing your way is a better negative consequence in a particular case. Or being cursed. MoS gives several examples (IIRC) of bad things that can be caused by the Closing. Apply one that is most interesting in that it moves the action along, rather than shuts it down. Sometimes that means you get turned back - maybe people chasing you catch up to you. Sometimes it means...
Well this is the fun part of being the narrator, it's up to you what failure means. It's your job to come up with interesting and creative ideas for what failure means. You get to really hose the characters, instead of the system telling you in what way the characters are hosed (usually quite uninterestingly in other games).
I have one more "proof" that this is the only really functional way to look at HQ resolution. Interestingly it's combat. Because, as it turns out, not only are the negative stakes maleable, but the positive stakes as well. Consider, the rules say that if you get a victory, any victory, that you get your goal. But if your goal is to kill the opponent (as it often is - though not always - in combat)? Then the rules explicitly say that you need to get a complete victory to get this particular result. So what the rules are doing is explicitly bringing out one of the unstated clauses of the goal, which is not just to kill the opponent, but to do so "by inflicting bodliy harm upon him," ans saying that we'll use that as the goal here instead of the explicit one. The game system tells us that only in extreme circumstances is actually killing an opponent the right stakes, and that at all other times, injury or the like, is much more interesting.
This is because a dead character is the ultimate dead end for a player. These stakes should only happen under the absolute right circumstances. Interestingly, in an Extended Contest, the player can often force the issue with parting shots and the like, so the system is giving the player the ability to make a conscious decision as to when death or the like may be appropriate.
Yes, I'd argue that this means that under certain circumstances, it makes sense to allow death as the actual goal, and achievable on a marginal victory. The example that I've given before is for hunting for food - if characters had to get complete victories to bring down game, they'd die of starvation (I'm being facetious, but you get the point). I'd also argue that if a narrator character wasn't important enough to ever get a name, then he can be killed with a marginal victory, too - this is essentially Robin Law's "Mook Rule" from Feng Shui, so I'd hope he'd agree with me. You should keep the protection that player heroes get only for villains and such that would be cool to see come back.
Now, I sometimes get pushback on this idea, and largely it comes from a very valid fear. That is, yes, if you use your ability as narrator to come up with the failure stakes of a character to let him off the hook, then, yeah, you're doing your players a disservice. I most wholeheartedly agree. Always hammer the character on failure. Go to town.
A problem in many RPGs is that all combat has "the ultimate price," death, as the only likely negative consequence. And so we've gotten used to that idea. But, again, the one place where the HQ rules are absolutely explicit about this is in the case of character death - it should only rarely be the chosen failure consequence (if ever, since you don't have to even state combat stakes in terms of death at all). Our experience with other games informs us that death is the "right" stake here, and HQ has to correct that impression.
To me, this screams that the narrator should be coming up with better failures than just "you don't get it." Instead, the system gives you an injury or something that becomes a complication for your character, an obstacle to be overcome. If you play this way from the start, players will begin to expect complications as the result of failure, instead of the system punishing them as players by shutting down their options. And then they'll not only expect that these are the sorts of stakes that are coming down the pike, but, better yet, they'll begin to love when their characters fail.
And this is when the HQ rules really start to humm, in my experience. If players know that, no matter what they do in contests, that the results will be fun for them as players (even if the results suck for the character), then they're informed that they can concentrate on playing their character as a hero with the motives on their character sheet. As opposed to figuring out how to have their character shy away from conflict, because they're worried that the system will punish them as players.
So many systems claim this as a feature, that system lethality makes players have their characters act "realistically" because the player fears character loss as much as the character does. Well, what really happens is that the player figures out how to make his character's motives match the player's in keeping the character alive. Instead of having the only criteria for what to do being the character's personality traits, relationships, etc, the things on the character sheet that the character cares about.
Yeah, sometimes having this sort of "plot immunity" will lead to players having their characters do things that seem to be just a little unrealistic in the name of following their motives. In books and movies we call these characters heroes. In any case, the level to which a player does this is only motivated in HQ by how cool it makes the character seem. So, no, in HQ you don't see players having their characters idiotically walk off of cliffs - like you might see in D&D - to avoid a horde of trolls (since in D&D he has enough HP to survive the fall, but they don't). Instead they turn to face the trolls.
I'm starting to get far afield here, but what I'm trying to say is that being creative in determining the stakes for a conflict is key to, well, at least my vision for how HQ works. If, instead, you think of listed sample contests as "standard" and having fixed results, then, yes, HQ is going to be problematic. Oh, not really any more problematic than, say, Runequest, where you could have the same problems of failure occur. But you're missing that HQ can do so much more than these other games can do.
Leastways that's how it seems to me.
Mike
Powered by hypermail