Some tangential stuff, followed by some more relevant (I hope) stuff. My observations are based on absolutely no knowledge of the new HQ2 system - bar that which has been made available on this, and other, discussion lists. I don't think this makes the observations any less (or more...) worthy.
> Well, I'm going to be totally unhelpful, then.
> You certainly *may* do so, and no HQ police are going to show up to stop
> your game. As to how it's "supposed" to be, I say "who cares?". Once the
> book is in your hands, What Robin or David *intended* is moot. How you play
> the game is what is important. If you find that you have to "break a rule"
> then do so.
(Personally I think that the intentions of the designers are important, but I've generally found Robin to be really good at making what he is driving for nice and clear. I'm of the opinion that designers cannot go around assuming that players will "rebuild" rules so that they work properly. Some Assembly is obviously required, but it's only reasonable to expect that the pieces actually fit together and that some instructions are given. Raw materials might be useful to the master carpenters out there, but not everyone is a master carpenter - and more to the point - not everyone wants to buy a product and then have to fix it before using it).
> But any game that includes dice rolls will, sometimes, frustrate one side or
> the other with a set of "bad" rolls, and there's really nothing you can do
> about it. it doesn't matter if you're playing an RPG, Monopoly, Yahtzee or
> Risk. So the players may just have to live with their frustration.
The chance for unexpected, and unlikely, results can be a god-send. It is all about how the failure is interpreted. If the prospect of statistically unlikely results horrifies a given group then they should probably stop using dice and just compare static values in order to get their conflict outcomes - or default to using social agreement to resolve things. As for me, I like it when the system and the dice take the story somewhere noone could have expected in the time before the dice were rolled. I think you can get a lot of interesting narrative mileage (kilometreage sounds awful) out of such results.
Cheers,
-- John Machin "Nothing is more beautiful than to know the All." - Athanasius Kircher, 'The Great Art of Knowledge'.
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