>My suggestion would be to make the assasination
>attempt one contest and the Duke's reaction the start
>of a new (perhaps extended) contest.
Yeah, I agree. But this avoids the problem rather than solves it.
>Au contriaire! anything can happen in the next half hour/hero wars game.
You
>can do anything at all using the rules, or rather, you can try to do
anything
>and the game system lets you give the whole narrative-thing some numbers to
>guide you.
>AP are not hit points, and this is not a combat simulation game.
APs control the ebb and flow of an encounter. Generally this flexibility is great apart from determination of initial APs which, IMO, isn't so great.
From: Roderick and Ellen Robertson [mailto:rjremr_at_...]
>Klutzes can be useful too! He forced the Duke into a bad starting position.
>The Duke may have been the best swordsman in the world, but he couldn't use
>his sword. His other opponents have time to get ready, or stab him a couple
>times, or whatever (there were more than one assassin, at least as I read
>the scenario).
>He is in a bad position vis a vis the other assassins, because his was
>prevented from using his "good" skill.
While I don't have any problem with someone getting an advantage over the Duke in this manner, I think the advantage gained is way too high. The difference in ability between sword and hand-to-hand might be two masteries - that means this klutzy assassin, who failed, still manage to clobber 40APs from the Duke.
From: Bryan Thexton [mailto:bethexton_at_...]
>But surely each participants AP are based on the
>ability that they are actively using to achieve their
>goal. In other words, in either case Indy is using
>his gun, so his AP are 45.
Oddly enough, in group contests they are, in one-to-one extended contests the starting APs are very much governed by first actor.
So that's one answer to my problem. Treat all exended contests as group contests. That allows everyone (even just two people) to decide what they want to do, regardless of what the other person wants to do, and base their starting APs on that. From that you decide who goes first, i.e. first actor and opponent. There's no reason to suppose that opponent wont then immediately switch ability in the face of what the actor is doing, and I don't see any reason why the actor shouldn't switch ability before he does anything.
So what this comes to in the end as that generally people will use one of their best abilities, if not their *best* ability, in all statements of intent in order to get high APs, and then swap abilities as appropriate.
Alex Ferguson:
Made a number of additional ideas (for which my thanks), plus some more thoughts on General Abilities (for which, again, thanks). (He did call me David, though :-) ).
From: Robin D. Laws [mailto:rdl_at_...]
>My experience during playtest was that characters always had
>abilities reasonably relevant to the basic situations (fighting,
>persuading, magic) in which this might theoretically be an issue.
>If they faced an improv penalty, it was a niggling one. Have
>you had this problem crop up frequently in your games?
I haven't played HW yet, I'm just looking ahead. In fact I'm doing more than that, I'm trying to pick holes in HW, because I'm predicting that when I come to run it my players will pick holes in it and I want to be prepared for them.
AFAICS there's possibly 3 or 4 holes, IMO, in HW, and I think they're all fixable. Of course, other people wont agree that they are holes, and some may see holes which I don't. I see that there's an optional rules area on the web - I'd like to see that used to present some alternate ways of doing things to 'fix' these 'holes'.
Dragonquest uses an AP system where the number of APs are based on the character/creature rather than the skill being used. Some of us might prefer to use something along these lines in order to get around the objections I've been putting up.
From: Wulf Corbett [mailto:wulfc_at_...]
>I started this 'Indy and the Swordsman' thread... what have I DONE!!!
>Oh, well, it's better than Oscar vs. the Troll...
I thought hard about resurrecting Oscar then thought better of it :-)
Richard
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