> As a player, there are always some contests you are more willing to lose than others. Given the difficulty cycle, if you've been on a winning streak and are coming up to one of those ones that you really don't want to lose, it would seem natural to engineer some less critical contests along the way.
The pass/fail cycle is just a tool for GMs. And note that in HQ, players probably don't know what the resistance is (otherwise Mock Contests, p. 27) wouldn't make sense.
> Or with a little longer view, at less critical stages, to approach contests with fairly weak abilities (i.e. not really try hard, as a player, to win them), in order to have things be more favorable later on.
Even if the GM is using the Pass/Fail cycle, she's encouraged to ignore certain contests (p. 71).
> For example, having humiliated your foes with words, and escaped their ambush, you know you are heading for a formal trial by combat with them. You've been winning, so upcoming contests should be harder for you....do you go straight to the trial-by-combat, or do you go and ask your clan for their blessing?
Asking your clan for a blessing is tangential, and explicitly outside the Pass/Fail cycle.
> In other words, how do you feel about players stepping outside the story to try and influence how it plays out, rather than simply having their characters try appropriately hard at each point along the way?
I agree with Nikodemus that this sound silly. Play the story.
But even if someone thinks they can minimax this, I think the system is already set up to deal with it.
And again, Pass/Fail is just a tool that GMs are free to use to help make things dramatic and interesting. There's no reason to use it just to use it, and if the results wouldn't be dramatic or interesting (i.e. if a player were trying to abuse it with silly tangents), they shouldn't use it.
David Dunham
Glorantha/HQ/RQ page: www.pensee.com/dunham/glorantha.html
Imagination is more important than knowledge. -- Albert Einstein
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