Just a quick thought of my own, with no more knowledge of the HQ2 rules than what has been discussed on the mailing lists. This might be completely obvious to everyone else, but I've just been working it out in my own head, so more than anything I'm looking for agreement or not to this way of looking at things.
That contest difficulty is based on the story flow can be entirely consistent with having objective, un-altering, ratings of your world, so long as you keep flexibility in the story narrative.
For example, say you have a castle rated at "impregnable 5W2." The story is about a group of heroes leading a troop of mercenary soldiers, and they need to get into this castle for plot reasons, say to capture the Bishop's Heart, needed in order to save their employer from false imprisonment. However, experienced though they are, they have been having a rough time of it, and are due for an easier contest, which for them would be perhaps 10W.
You don't lower the toughness of the castle, you give them a circumstance which makes it easier. A peasant, not wanting the soldiers sitting around and stealing on his food tells them about a secret entrance. Or as they approach the castle they see black smoke billowing up, and as they get closer they see great chaos as the barracks are burning. Or having seen how strong the castle is they scout it carefully, and find that the baron commanding it leads his knights out on a security sweep at dawn every fifth day, and nobody checks the nearby woods carefully, so a surprise charge when the gates are up would perhaps get the heroes in to the courtyard.
Or the castle gets bypassed altogether. The heroes learn that the Bishop's Heart has been taken from the castle to be sent to the capital, so their new challenge is to catch up with those couriers. Or when the heroes show up the Baron is in the middle of auctioning the Heart to the highest bidder, and their challenge now is to win that contest. Or the players come up with the idea of faking papers ordering them to take the Heart to the King, and the challenge is to make and support the forgery.
In short, in the end the narrator helps the story twist and loop such a way that its route hits highs and lows at appropriate spots, no matter the broader terrain. Which would be the big difference from traditional scenario design, where the contests were pre-set, with the player characters either hitting them in some pre-designated fashion or as the players chose to work they way through the dramatic landscape.
Or to put it in quicker Gloranthan terms, Harrek is always at W6 (or whatever it is), but you "get lucky" and only have to deal with his advance raiders, or Lunar mystics kidnap you before he attacks for their own reason, or whatever.
Which sounds great in theory. What bothers me as a player is that it sounds much harder for players to take ownership of things. My inclination has never been to sit back and wait for the Narrator to tell us what is next, but rather my preference is to find out what is going on, then go make things happen in our own way. Part of this of course is to try and find an easier way to solve things: Can we counterfeit the Bishop's Heart somehow, or blackmail the witnesses so that they'll tell the truth? But part is a player view of what is interesting: what if we use this mis-carriage of justice to rouse the other merchant lords to fund a revolution to overthrow the arbitrary and capricious First Confessor, or on the other hand what if we feel like running a prolonged siege? I would think that for many narrators it might be all the harder, when players change the intended plot like that, to maintain both the 'objective' ratings and the story flow appropriate ratings. It is a lot to keep in your head at one time while also improvising, I'd think!
Powered by hypermail