>Hi again,
>
>Just a quick comment before I go to bed:
>
>Luke's stakes were never "rescue his friends" or "defeat Vader" in
that contest. His stakes were always "get out of this in one (spiritual)
piece."
>He could have died but still have won by not turning to the dark side *.
Fair enough, but he doesn't choose those. He goes to the city to save his friends. Now, the whole thing is a trap and he never even really gets a chance to do this. By the time he gets to Vader, there's a new challenge going on.
It is possible that the PC at this point goes, "Oooh, in that case, I want this to be about me succumbing to the darkside". I suppose the argument could be made that this is what he decided, thus playing the scene out when it did. Or, is it possible Vader gets to set the stakes, and the PC has no choice in the matter. I remember in HQ1, one could try to set up two orthoganal goals in a contest. This sometimes caused problems. Has HQ2 pretty much come down on the side of "there is only one thing at stake in a contest"?
>[I may be misremembering this from the film as it's been 25 years
since I've seen it - as you'd already pointed out my memory of the order
of events
>isn't very good so I might have misjudged the tone of the final punch
up and "these may not be the stakes you are looking for".]
I think your interpretation is legitimate.
>Actually I lied - here's another one. HQ2 provides two tables to work
out what happened in a conflict.
Ahhh... interesting.
>You use the rising action one for most of a session and the climactic
one (I may have the name wrong, it's how I've labelled 'em on my
photocopied game reference)
>for the grand finale, where a contest wraps up an situation or story
arc for one or more characters.
That is new. I'm not sure what I think of that. I'd have to see the tables.
>The rising action table doesn't tend to dish out lasting effects for
protagonists who win contests but the climactic one can.
>My one adventurer death with HQ2 was actually a victorious Humakti
Weaponthane collapsing onto a pile of defeated enemies at the end of the
conflict.
> That'll teach the player to keep wanting to play Humakti...
Yeah. Damn Humakti. :)
Thanks again.
LC
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