Complete Successes

From: miker19036 <miker_at_...> <miker_at_...>
Date: Thu, 20 Feb 2003 21:43:31 -0000

The recent discussion on feat use has reminded me of something that has struck me as problematic, and I'm curious see if and how it's being addressed in HQ, and maybe even how people are handling it now.

It seems that a number of feat uses involve achieving a Complete Success. Now, conceptually, this makes perfect sense (i.e. to completely succeed at attempting Decapitate Foe means someone's head is rolling around on the floor). Unfortunately, in Simple Contests, these are a bit difficult to achieve. Not only does the actor need to achieve a critical success, but the defender needs to critically fail. While the actor can bump his result up to the necessary critical, he has no control over the defender's result. This can make a Complete Success very difficult to achieve.

I seem to recall some very early discussion about HW2/HQ talking about bumps being able to "go around the bend," but I may be mistaken.

So, will/how will this this be addressed in HQ, and what are people doing now? This hasn't been a big problem thus far, but I'm revisiting my use of the rules, and realizing that I need to use them a bit more (this makes sense, really).

Mike Ryan