>From: Labrygon_at_...
>This has elements of the fun of searching your sheet for relevant
>abilities.
>It has a sort of 'cliffhanger' drama to it, where failure is brought back
>by
>the heroic use of some obscure ability. I allow use of hero points to bump
>those rolled augments to suitable levels. Each ability can only be tried
>once.
Actually I've considered using a method like this. But there's something about it that's just not quite right. That is, yes, there's this rising tension as the player tries to scramble to get where he needs to be to win. But the problem is that the player is looking for ever decreasingly important augments. This does make the pace fun, but it seems to me that it means in the best paced conflicts that you're going to go over the top rolling for a bonus from something relatively irellevant. Some dreg of an ability that you managed to get in.
Now, that said, I think that's probably not fair to the system and if I tried it for a while I'd probably like it. Here's the thing, however. I think that's true of the normal system as well.
Many people on first playing the system report that they feel that "low roller wins" effect. Consider: If you're playing D20, and you have a +4, and I have a +6, and you roll a 13, and I roll a 10, you win the roll. Only in the case of me rolling between an 11 and 13 will I feel that the the skill had an effect. Otherwise D20 is just a high roller wins system.
Actually I'm being slightly unfair, in one way, because the margins are actually smaller in HQ. But I'm being unfair because your players are being "unfair" in that they're not recognizing that the HQ scale goes from 6 to 100 or so. Which is to say that conflicts in the same level of mastery are very close. Which is realistic and dramatic. That is, if you don't have a clear superiority over your opponent, then, yeah, it's a crapshoot. That's realistic and dramatic.
What I'm getting at is that after you play the system a while as written, it works really well, IME.
Most importantly, what I like about the current system is that each conflict is a chance for the player to display their character in terms of how the character relates to the conflict - and to display them completely. This is what Josh and I like. With the method above, I'd always be worrying that we hadn't included something rather important. I mean, if you win on the initial die roll, then it feels like your love for whatshername wasn't involved. And that's all we really care about is whether or not it was (whether or not it had an actual effect on the outcome is irrellevant for us, it might have, and that's plenty).
Note that this also means that we're not interested in trying to win the contests - failure is just as good a way to display the character as success. "He tried hard to win, given his love for her, but was defeated despite it" is just as dramatic as winning. Which is to say that we don't "grub" up stats. We only bring up those that are interesting to point out. And not just interesting to the player, but interesting to everyone at the table. The more you play, the more everyone gets an idea of what interests everyone else. In fact, if the contests isn't really all that interesting, very few augments get presented.
Meaning in the end that there's never a dull moment. It's always precisely as exciting as it should be.
Jane, the numbers themselves are, of course, uninteresting, but it's precisely like you say that the numbers inform the player as to when to bring things out in interesting fashions that make the numbers important - ofteh the narration that justifies the augment, for example. The level is important, too. If you have a +3 standard augment from something, maybe you should bring it up if it's only tangentially involved, because, know what? It can be pretty fascinating to discover that it's partially applicable in that situation. If I reduce that to a +2 my modifier, then that says something interesting about the applicabilty of the abililty to the contest in question (which, again, informs the player more about what's suitable in the future).
I think that we're really on the same sheet of music here, Jane. Josh wasn't saying "Gee, I love +2!", but instead, "Gee, I love that my character is in love with somebody involved somehow in this situation (and that the system makes that relevant)!"
I don't expect everyone to understand this. It's a different aesthetic than many players are used to. And I'm not saying it's a better aesthetic than any other. Just that if you play with it, the HQ system works brilliantly as written. I used to ask that people give it a try, but, know what? I'm past that now. All I can do is say that it works, try to describe how it works, and let anyone who might be interested take a shot at it. If it's not your thing, it's not your thing.
I do agree that there are some impediments in getting to this aesthetic for those who otherwise might be interested. Contact me off the list if you have an interest in how to get there (it gets pretty off the topic of the HQ rules per se).
Mike
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