> That said, I feel that we're not getting at the heart of your
problem. Put
> another way: why would you want to have a fixed length for
extended
> contests? I'm having trouble seeing the advantage to doing so. The
AP system
> works pretty well, so what is the problem that you're trying to
overcome by
> making extended contests a fixed length?
It's sort of puzzling to me too, although I think I can see the original posters point in a way - It's just that I don't think that in those circumstances an Exteded contest is the way to go!
I think this is sort-of related to a question on the Forge forum about using an extended contest to fix a spaceship in a HW Star Wars game (or at least, they both address similar issues in my mind)
Let's try and think of an example - say Buying a horse at the local fair - This could be a "straightforward" simple contest - your Wealth vs the cost rating for the horse. Or you might make an augment on each side Wealth augmented by your "Knowledge of Horses" vs the Cost rating augmented by the traders "Haggle mercilessly" - You'd use one of these when the acquiring of the horse is largely incidental to the story. But sometimes it might be much more important, and you want to devote more time to it and develop the details further (the hores merchant might become a source of information or conflict, a good result might gain an exceptional horse, a poor one a broken down nag, which might have consequences further down the line, etc etc. You can "plan out" your extended contest as the GM, thinking of the sorts of abilities you will use to oppose the hero, but if they bypass it all with a combination of high bid, lucky roll and Heropoint expenditure then you could be left with a contest ending earlier than you planned. I think in these situations you are probably better off either running a set of simple contests and using the "Carry over" mechanism of Heroquesting to produce a final result, or running lots of augments as "unrelated actions" before concluding with a single simple contest to conclude the chain.
At some stage I want to produce a "more explicit" example, but hopefully this will go some way towards explaining it.
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