>From: "Sam Elliot" <sam.elliot1_at_...>
>Josh's devotion one I agree with, sure if there's so much invested in it,
>it can be an automatic success.
I'm going to go off on a bit of a peregrination here. This is supposed to be one of the upcoming articles for Narrator Advice, so perhaps we'll see it cleaned up there later. In any case, it's a tad torturous, so try to bear with it.
Here's the trick with failure and goals. When a player states a goal, there are unstated clauses that come along with that statement. Let's examine the chasm thing yet again. The goal will be stated as "Get to the other side" likely. But understood is the clause, "without falling to my death." This is the obvious example, however, and so what people usually think of in terms of the "stakes" of a chasm leap. So when they fail, the thought is that you must invoke the repercussions of not succeeding with both of these clauses. Not only does the character not get to the other side, but also he falls.
Well, first of all, you don't have to assume the "falling" clause is the stakes. For example, you can merely do the standard example we use in this case, and the character runs up, fails to have faith that he can make the jump, and stops just before leaping. Because you only have to prevent the actual stated goal from being achieved. But...this voids the other rule about not causing plot progression to cease, right? I mean, now we have this situation where the character can't proceed, and we've given the player no more options. Yes, he can come up with some other creative method to get over the chasm, and sometimes that's OK to allow. But never (OK, maybe rarely) allow a third attempt at the same goal, because that's asking for the game to just become all about getting across this one chasm.
So we invoke "No, and" in this case, sorta; the rule that says to apply other conditions to the defeat to make for new conflict. But isn't the "and" falling in this case? Well, "without falling" is just one option, and if it's the clause, and it means character death, then it's not a good choice for advancing the plot along. Basically, all tasks have a general unstated clause of "without anything untoward happening to the character." Meaning that you really can inflict just about anything you want on the character. Does that mean that you'll make the Major Failure an "Inability to Sing" because they missed their roll to get over the chasm? No, there are lots of options that are plausible negative outcomes of the leap.
The simplest example is that the character gets hurt, "Ragnar hurtles himself as hard as he can so as to ensure that he crosses the distance, but he makes a bad landing, and sprawls on the floor bruising himself in several places. The neat thing here is that you can pick a response that feels like it matches the mechanical result. That is, the implication with a Minor Defeat that causes Ragnar to be wounded is that if he'd rolled a Complete Defeat, he'd have plummeted to his death. This gives the roll outcome that "whew, that was close," feel that we want for a jump.
Now, this involves a little bit of misdirection if you will. That is, you're altering the statement of goal to some extent to get this to work. You're not doing "no, and" really, you're just doing the "and" in a way. That is, the goal was explicitly stated to get across. So from a very technical POV, some might claim that we can't allow the character to be across at the end. What's happening, however, is that you're effectively assembling that full, unstated goal, "To get across the chasm without anything untoward happening." The entire thing has to be accomplished or it's some sort of partial failure. At first glance this might seem to be a dodge - you're letting the character off "light." But isn't this precisely what one would do in a "Combat" situation? The stated goal will always be something like, "I want to kill him." But doesn't that mean "kill him without getting hurt myself?" Maybe not in all cases, but that's generally understood.
Now you say, but, Mike, that's still not parallel. If you fail your roll to kill the character, unlike the chasm situation, you don't kill the opponent. Well, maybe you do, and maybe you don't. Even in the chasm situation, you could decide to say that the character pulls up before his leap, and twists his ankle. That is, you can decide to do "No, and." This is good because now the character has something new to worry about than just crossing the chasm (can he even make it home with the twisted ankle?). So, in combat, you can, in fact, decide to have the opponent get away unscathed, and have the injury occur to the defeated character. That's pretty standard, actually.
Now, the next objection would be to note that this would imply that you can kill somebody even with a failure. The logical extension is that if you can make it across the chasm with the only part of the failure being that you're injured, then this means that you can kill a target, and the defeat only means that you're wounded. Well, two notes here. First, the chasm doesn't really try to stop you. From that rationale, there's no goal that it's trying to achieve. We theorize that it's trying to make you fall, or get hurt otherwise, but it's not really actively trying to do that. So when it gets its Minor Victory over you, we really don't have to enforce any such goal. Really we don't ask the chasm.
With an opponent, however, he's got the same goals as the character attacking him, perhaps, "to kill the Hero, and get away unscathed." In which case, his victory does imply that he should live, and the attacking character should be wounded (and certainly this is what you'd do in a player hero vs. player hero contest). This is a rationale to some extent, but it becomes a necessary one as proven below.
Here's the really interesting thing. The above result, the narrator character getting a Victory over the player hero, is an "and" only result. If the character's goal is to kill the player hero, then by the rules, doesn't that mean that the "no, and" result for the character should mean that he fails to live through the contest? From another perspective, isn't it odd that you never get to succeed at killing opponents in HQ (barring the very rare Complete Victory)?
But I wouldn't do it any other way. I mean, this concept is what allows the player heroes to go off and be heroes.
But isn't combat, then, an exception to the rule? The rule says that the victorious character should get his goal, no? But in combat, they can't usually. Where does this exception come from? Well, it comes from the impediment results based on the outcome level of Victory. Only a Complete Victory can result in something as startling as death. What does this imply? Well, one way to look at it is that some goals simply require a higher level of Victory to actually achieve. And this is a somewhat functional way to look at it - leaping the chasm can't cause death unless there's a Complete Defeat works, even if that's the supposed "goal" of the chasm. But just leaping the chasm itself only requires a marginal victory to accomplish.
But then the rules aren't consistent. You get your goal with any success, except when you're not allowed to do so. What's going on? Well, again, it's looking at the goal statements in a less rigid fashion that allows this to work. The goal of combat is sorta "reversed" in most cases. That is, instead of "Kill, and not be hurt" we take the primary goal as "not be hurt, and kill the bastard if we can." See how suddenly the kill part becomes the "and," the result of the impediment, and not the result of the success?
But here's the really fascinating part - you don't have to always do this. What does Complete Victory mean, when parsed down to its basic root? Well, it's easier to see by looking at it not as "dying" but the other possible conditions. Basically we're looking at drastic changes in situation here. Banishment, for instance, means that the character is no longer able to do what he used to do in that kingdom, because he has to be gone. Apply this back to death, and we see that death means simply that the character can no longer do the things that a live person can do (which, interestingly doesn't mean to me in Glorantha that the character can no longer be played). Basically this is what a Complete Defeat does to a character. It alters them in such a way as to make it so that they can no longer engage in certain contests until the condition is "healed."
Well, let's say that Ragnar the player hero is fighting against the thugs of Lord Evil. Does killing one of them mean that there are no more left to kill? No. So does Ragnar really require a Complete Victory to kill a thug?
The objection here is to go back and say, ah, but that's an "active" character, not a chasm, so if his goal was not to be killed, then we can't kill him with a marginal victory. Doesn't he get the "reversed" goal of "Survive, but kill Ragnar if he can?" Well, no. Goals are metagame declarations made by the players, not actual in-game character task goals. The narrator is fully free to interpret the mook's goal as Kill Ragnar, and try not to be killed, too. Meaning that mechanical Failure can be interpreted as Ragnar intending to kill the mook first.
But wait, doesn't that mean that we've "unreversed" Ragnar's goal? Well, yes. Basically we can interpret the goals any way we want here, there's nothing saying otherwise. In fact, from the above we can see that this must be what we're doing all the time in HQ. In some cases we consider the explicit goal to be the failure stakes, and in other cases we consider something related, but unstated, to be the stakes.
The next objection is to point out that we've just made it possible for a player hero to kill mooks, while not allowing the player hero to be killed with similar results applied against him. But that's a good and necessary thing - we want dead mooks, no? Thematically mooks don't matter, and there will always be more of them - until the character gets a complete defeat against them. Then they, as a thing with the ability to compete in this arena are altered so that they can't do so any longer. Meaning, likely (though not necessarily, they could be permanently run off or something), that they've all been killed. Whatever the case, they as a form of conflict are now eliminated. Any result less than complete defeat means that they might come back - with penalties of some sort likely cause by other levels of defeat - but they can come back.
This view of how to look at contests comes, actually from a question somebody asked (paraphrased), "How does a hunter eat if he needs a Complete Victory to kill a deer?" The answer is that the deer in this case is not a player hero who, if altered to death will end that source of conflict. That is, there will always be more deer to make conflicts out of in the forest. So killing one with a marginal victory is fine. If the character gets a Complete Victory does that mean that he's killed all of the deer? No, the conflict at hand was being able to get something to eat. So a complete victory means that the deer no longer pose a contest in resisting this any longer. The hunter "knows" this woodland now with his Complete Victory to such an extent that he no longer has a need to roll to see if he comes up with food. The deer are his whenever he wants them.
(Note how all Complete Defeat results automatically say something about the winner, too? If you verbally berate somebody so that they can never compete against you that way, it can be said that you have some sort of dominance over them.)
So, to get back to our chasm - when the character jumps and gets a complete defeat, does this mean that he dies? It could. If we interpret the goal as including "not falling to my death" and invoke that as the failure clause, sure, he could end up "dying" in midair (only to die as soon as he hits the ground if not saved, say, by magic or something). If it's appropriate for the character to die there, apply that result. But more often it's not appropriate. In this case, say that the failure goes against the primary goal of getting across the chasm. Meaning, perhaps, that the character balks at it, and is so frightened by the experience that he'll never be able to leap this, or any other such chasm again. He's altered, again, in such a way that he'll never be able to participate in such a contest (until, again, "healed").
The last objection to this line of reasoning is to wonder if this drains the tension out of contests. If the player's character is going to get his way even when he fails, and isn't going to experience the worst repercussions (speaking of character removal from the game here), even when he fails as badly as one can fail, then where's the tension in the rolls?
Well, the narrator simply doesn't tell the player which way he's going to interpret the results before the roll. He could have the character fall to his death. It's the narrator's call as to whether or not this time and place is "appropriate" for such a loss. Does Indiana Jones fall to his death, or does the director decide on some other nasty fate for him? We suspect that Indy will live to the end of the film, yet somehow the tension is maintained. Because there's always that chance that the director will do something radical at that point. More importantly, just because the character doesn't die, doesn't mean bad things don't happen to the character. Failure still means that the narrator is going to apply some nasty result to the character. That "and" can be harsh - we still root for the character to win, even if it isn't likely that he's going to die. And, further, the narrator doesn't have to allow success on the "main" goal. He can say that the character failed. The "and" clause will make it an interesting defeat. So the player doesn't know what's going to happen, and tension is maintained. This is observed in loads of play using these techniques.
So we get the best of all worlds, we can interpret defeats in many different ways to make them the most interesting they can be in the situation presented. And yet we're still following the rules (maybe closer than ever before), still have the sense of structure that HQ provides so well, and still have the tension that you find with other methods.
Mike
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