The performers of a [HQ] ritual decide themselves how hard the resistance and difficulty is going to be, and the difficulty rating acts as an effect multiplier for the consequences.
What this means is that the community that risks their ritual with a high difficulty, can get greater benefits if they succeed, than their neighbour who decides to play it safe with a low difficulty. If the ritual fails, the neighbours will suffer less than the community that gambled.
Another Good Thing with this idea is that the effects of a heroquest can be more easily calculated, as the influence of opposing rituals don't have to be accomodated to such a great extent.
The base difficulty of a ritual increases automatically with the amount of mundane support as the ritual becomes a greater influence on the myth-web of the world, but it can be lowered or raised by the community performing the ritual, depending if they want to play it safe (risk less, win less) or gamble (risk a lot, win a lot).
But the influence of opposing rituals can't be wholly negated so we have to throw in a slight randomizer that represents the external influence.
An example: the Herald of Winter (part of the Ernalda Festival rituals)
Basic plot:
During the Cornucopia celebration a stranger (the Herald) sneaks into the
party. He must be discovered and defeated before he can poison Ernalda, or
the forces of Winter will come early and in strength.
(I haven't written the myth yet, and so have no idea about the dramatis
personae, detailed events or actual consequences)
The ritual can be mechanized as two rolls on the resistance table, representing Discovery of the Herald and Fighting the Herald. If the Herald isn't discovered, he has a greater chance of really harming the Ernalda, but if he is discovered early, he has a decreased chance in the fight.
(More elaborate myths have many steps, and the simplest have only one -
Fighting the Herald.)
As this is a major tribal festival with lots of participants the base difficulty of the ritual is high, and the consequences will affect all of the tribal lands.
(If the lands are located in an area with weak ties to [darkness, chaos or
winter], the difficulty is lesser and vice versa. If the area has strong
ties to [fire, anti-chaos or summer] the strength of the ritual is
increased.)
The STR of the ritual is calculated from the invested support, skill and effort of the participants. The STR of the difficulty can be modified by the participants, but the base STR equals the invested support of the ritual + the mytho-environmental modifier + a randomizer (d3, d4, d6 or higher?) to represent the external forces influencing the ritual.
The higher the difficulty rating of the ritual, the greater the possible benefits. In case of failure, it will be a disaster for the tribe, regardless of difficulty. A standard success means that the rest of autumn will be as usual.
Rolling:
The ritual's STR is Active and the difficulty STR is Passive. The winner
gets a carry-over bonus to the Fight roll. If both Strengths were 10, and
the result on the d100 was 30, the Ritual will have a bonus of 20% on the
roll to defeat the herald.
The participants can modify the difficulty for each of the steps by
invoking either an easily discovered, but hard to defeat Herald (ZZ
deathlord if the Herald is tied to darkness), or an easily discovered wimp
(trollkin), or a very sneaky wimp (trollkin), or a sneaky deathlord.
A variant myth could be that the Herald is replaced by an envoy from Yelm, who tries to persuade Ernalda to go with him to follow Yelm.
Could this be a useful system for rituals?
I just realized that this was pretty rule-heavy, and the digest may not be the right forum for further discussion. I will gladly continue discussion in private, if Loren says we need to take it off the digest.
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