>From: "parental_unit_2" <parental_unit_2_at_...>
>What I got, overall, is that for more free-form scenarios, the
>narrator has to have a very detailed setting, and a strong set of
>narrator characters with close ties to player characters.
Well, I think that the setting itself isn't particularly important. That is you could do this with very little detail other that that which supported the rules requirements. That is, as long as you have your keywords written out, and they make sense, you're pretty good right there. One certainly doesn't need any more stuff than is in he HQ basic rules homeland keywords to do this sort of thing.
>There also does seem to be a "plot" in improvised scenarios: The
>narrator devises one or more conflicts to drive the scenario, and
>possibly some key events that will be initiated by narrator characters
>(e.g. healers arrive in the clan needing an escort). However, conflict
>resolution and intermediate events aren't all glued together into a
>plot to the same extent as they are in the HQ book examples.
That's not even quite accurate. What the GM does is provide events that happen to which the characters respond. Often this is just playing the PCs, essentially. Not just at random, no, the events are designed to provoke an interesting response. But what's key is that the events can't be designed to provoke one and only one response. That is the GM controling plot, and not what we (well, I at least) are talking about.
Instead of coming up with conflicts to drive the scenario, he looks at the characters and just sparks an already extant potential conflict there. This makes play about the characters' issues, not about them simply responding to some outside conflict imposed upon them. This is key.
That's not to say that you can't have conflict occuring on this level, just that, in this style of play, it just drops to being backdrop. So, let's say that you've set the characters on some metaplot mission - play focuses not on the goal of the mission at all. That becomes ancillary. The real questions are asked "underneath" that plot. So it's not "Do we Kill the Megawhatsis?" the questions are like "When at one point you're faced with losing your lover, or the village standard, at station four of the Heroquest, which do you choose to protect first?"
So, obviously, it's important to have values for the character for them to choose between. This is the biggest value of the relationships, and personallity traits (especially virtues). They give you something to play off of in this regard.
Given that any answer to such a question posed by play has to be valid for a player, this is why it's so important that you can stat the world out easily. Using this mode of play, you never know just where things are going to go. So you have to improvise new difficulties constantly.
Mike
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