>From: "Silburn, Luke" <luke.silburn_at_...>
>
>Ashley
> >>Ask the player of the penalised character what form
> >>they'd like their personal shafting to take.
>
>For some players this is golden advice, others don't like it at all
>however. I have one player in my regular group who find the whole
>narrativist, 'make up appropriate in-game instances of the generic
>mechanical penalties' aspect of HQ very alienating - ...
Actually, and I'll probably surprise some people with this, but I think that "Setting Stakes" before contests is a tool that has limited uses. That is, for the most part, I don't do this. I use it in cases where I need to teach a player that I, or others playing, are trustworthy in making up outcomes. If I'm willing to let them in on the process, then I'm not trying to hose them, right? Or where there are other potential problems with a player not liking a contest outcome, I might set stakes. For example, if it's a case of a two players having their Heroes go at each other, I might have them negotiate the stakes first, so that they can trust each other in the process, that they as players are collaborating to create a fun situation, not competing against each other as players.
But otherwise, I don't do this. Because, quite simply, I think it's a lot more fun not to know what the potential outcomes are. The system (wisely, IMO), specifies that the players should indicate what their characters goals are. And, in doing so, it does give the players some control of the outcome in this fashion. But within the mechanical result that says that the winning side must get their goal, there's a ton of room to come up with interesting other effects.
For instance, the penalty for the loser isn't automatically related to the goal of the winner. If you're fighting to save the princess, and you get a "Minor Victory" over your opponent, yeah, you get the princess. But the opponent may also be wounded in the process. And have ran. None of that is specifically indicated by the mechanical outcome, but it's all sensible narration to explain the outcome mechanical effects. As are a myriad other things you can narrate. You could say that the opponent falls off a staircase out of sight and is injured on impact. Or even that he's simply intimidated terribly by your character's fighting prowess, and now is merely afraid to confront your character in any way. All of these results are mechanically sound.
Thus, when a failure result comes up, unless it's the explicit goal of the attacker in a fight to do harm to your character (as opposed to, say, saving a princess), the narrator is free to make the "injury" be any sort of result he thinks is interesting. Sure, injury makes sense. But, in addition to the aforementioned fear, maybe his battle magic backfires, burning out his ability to use it at full power for a while? Or...
Well, actually, what I do is to look at the character in question, and come up with some difficulty that will create a real new problem for the character. Sure, wounds always work, but are rarely a contentious thing - they exist to be fixed. If a character, instead, now has a penalty to use his magic, what does that say about his relationship to his god or spirits or whatever? In fact, generally, damage that penalizes certain relationships can be a great form of potential conflict.
Anyhow, not knowing which of the myriad outcomes of a contest will occur adds a lot to contests. So I only advocate setting stakes prior to the contest when there's an over-riding reason to do so.
Mike
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