> You don't. But, your example fits nicely into the rules as written..
OK, go. :)
> > The fight continues and now I can't decide whether Vader has switched his
> > goal to physically defeat Luke or whether he has switched it to "convert
> > Luke to the Dark Side".
>
> That's fine. It's explicitly in the rules:
>
> "At the beginning of an extended contest, you and the narrator explain your
> overall goals in the contest... It is possible to change this overall goal
> in the contest."
>
> (HeroQuest, p. 66, first paragraph below the 'Extended Contest Sequence'
> heading)
Which is why I offered it as an option. One possibility is to assume that Vader just switched goals. You also note I was asking which goal he seemed to switch to.
Then there's the issue of "did he just switch goals because his original goal was taken away"? -- that's something that I'm really not sure how to model in the rules.
> As for Luke losing the hand? Don't sweat it. It was, after all, only a
> minor inconvenience at the end of one conflict. It gets fixed up soon
> enough. A few APs traded for injuries and that's it.
Really? That's an interesting way to do it. So Vader successfully removing an entire set of abilities was handled.. how? I mean, not that I don't see your point (Although I'd go with "it was a simple healing contest done later".) but we do have the situation where Luke is unable to use any of his physical lightsaber attacks (and he DOES lose the lightsaber, which is a big deal, even if the hand isn't).
> (Saying that, there is a wider problem with HeroQuest as written, which is
> that victors in a contest generally incur no negative effects. I'd like to
> see some form of 'phyrric victory' device in the revised HQ, perhaps by
> handling orthogonal stakes in conflicts.)
Yes, we've had bunches of discussions on it. Absolutely it is something I would like addressed in the rules.
> On Sunday 23 Sep 2007 5:23 pm, Jane Williams wrote:
> > So in my
> > example, if I and a friend were cooking a meal, and
> > the phone went, I might leave him in charge of the
> > kitchen while I answered the phone: he then has to
> > cope without the recipe that only exists in my head.
>
> I'd run this the same way as archery(!). The goal is to produce the meal;
> the phone call is either so important that you give up on the meal and
> concede the goal or it's an event that changes the abilities that can be
> applied (Jane's 'Improvise Feast 5M2' ability can no longer be used and
> everything now rests on the friend's 'Cook Beans on Toast 14'). For the
> latter, see the examples in the Ranged Combat narrator advice column:
> <http://www.glorantha.com/support/na_ranged.html>.
And this is a solution I keep coming back to - that AP bids are allowed to cause mechanical effects. It is a solution, and in may be the simplest way to do it. It could lead to an arms race where everyone always tries to describe their bid in such a way as to get both an AP bonus AND a mechanical bonus, but that may not be such a bad thing. Just embracing that as an option and effectively eliminating the concept of the unrelated action could be the way out of the dilemma.
LC
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