> If you don't know what the scene is going to be in advance, then how
>do you prepare for it? Anyway, the questions that you ask when setting
>the scene are not esoteric. They are imminently practical.
*nod*
However, to play Devil's Advocate for the other side, HQ1 lets you do
this as well.
>Example:
>One of my PCs decided to infiltrate Yolanella's court with the
>intention of gaining influence over her. The PC attended a banquet and
>used his Seduction ability to make an impression on her." (A true, if
>distasteful episode from my game)
I'm curious as to why this was distasteful, but that's neither here nor there.
>What was the purpose of Yolanella in
>this scene? She has power (Satrap of Spol) and the player wanted to
>use that power for his own purposes. How hard should this be to do?
>I set the difficulty based on what I thought my players would enjoy.
And the argument here is that you could always use the HQ2 rules to adjust the written stats to that difficulty.
>Note: I had no idea that the player was going to try this before he
>brought up the idea in that night's game. I couldn't have prepared for
>it if I had wanted to. Using HQ2 this wasn't a problem at all. In most
>other games, it would have given me a migraine.
But presumably a write up would have "Haughty 5W2" or "Mistress of Manipulation 10W" or "Seen Every Trick in the Book 14W3" or some such you could improvise off of.
In other words, people would play it as "HQ1.5" as the saying goes.
I happen to agree with you because I see HQ2 (from what I understand) as requiring no "statting at the table", because you don't actually stat. You just assign difficulty. (Hard = Base +9) This, to *me*, is easier than going "Hmm.... she's Mistress of Manipulation 10W, so probably knows something about manipulation, so I'll knock 5 off that for improvising."
But that's *me*. (And some others here).
LC
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