> An extended contest goes into detail. "Conan grabs for a vine -- but it breaks. He breaks his fall on a ledge. 2 RP against him." (rinse & repeat)
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> It may well be that each bit of detail can be summarized the same: "Conan tries to climb a little higher." "Harrek deals Onslaught another unhealable wound." Psychologically and mechanically it's not the same as a simple contest, resolved in a single roll. The odds aren't quite the same (which is unfortunate), but an extended contest gives more scope to using hero points, or to get help from friends ("Angelina heals Onslaught. And Leika throws darts at Harrek, distracting him.").
I think there is a potential problem with this approach, as it is taking the standard Conflict Resolution mechanic of HQ and then breaking it into a number of Task Based resolutions. It is exactly this that turns me off of the example in the book.
To resolve a conflict in HQ you take two opposing interests and decide to what degree those interests are met, but if you break this down into a sequence of "I try to hit him again" or "I try and climb a bit higher" you loose visibility of the greater conflict through concentrating on the smaller scale, which then potentially means that the overall conflict is no longer resolving the conflicting interests, just the actions seeking to achieve them.
Indeed on a theoretical level I think it may be meaningless to divide a conflict up into tasks.
This leaves us with having to actually resolve something related to the two opposing interests at each step in the extended conflict which implies something potentially transformative which would not lend itself to iteration. It can be done but it isn't easy and can lead to limitations when the nature of the conflict appears to shift.
So for me the extended conflict is broken, because an action is not representative of the overall conflict unless you force it to do something it can't quite support.
In my probably controversial opinion the old extended conflicts were capable of supporting conflict resolution but most people used them to break down the conflict into tasks and then hit problems because the system didn't model task based conflicts very well. An example complaint being that it didn't model a close fight with damage to the victor. This would not be a consideration in the overall conflict so it didn't really need fixing, we are not resolving relative damage levels but the conflict of interests. The system of chained simple contests was the hight of adaptation to the task based approach, subverting the simple conflict into a task based system.
Jamie
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