> I think this is the crux of the matter. If you leave changing your goal
> until its too late to stop you losing the contest anyway, I reckon that
> models reality well enough for my gaming purposes. I'd also be pretty
> pissed if I was the guy winning the contest up to that point.
Well, I think this all depends on what we mean by 'winning' and 'losing' in the context of the contest's narrative. To take an extreme case, if I'm getting creamed by the Lawspeaker at the tribal moot (down to 1AP in a debate), and I decide to <Trotsky impersonation> *nut!* </Trotsky> him one, I think it'd be sheer artifice to say "sorry, you're still starting at 1AP as this is the same contest". (One might in fact start inflating one's estimate of the scale of the defeat in the original contest, but...)
> However, given that you appear to be saying basically "exceptional
> circumstances might occur where I (as GM) might give one side a few
> bonus APs (or some similar mechanism) because that would reflect the
> situation better/make the story more interesting" I think all we're
> really disagreeing over is our personal thresholds for "exceptional".
I was deliberately not saying 'a few bonus APs', since that's a bigger can of game mechanical worms than even I was happy about unleashing in public. ;-) But certainly that'd be a general enough mechanism (to put it mildly), and 'exceptional' is broadly fair. Indeed, I think the majority of the cases I can think of where continuing the current contest seems an unreasonable mechanic, in practice I'd consider the way to proceed fairly obvious (obviously you escape/lose the suit due to using violence in the peace of the thing/otherwise fairly be pretty clear about how at least one of the two 'goals' has been achieved or not).
Cheers,
Alex.
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