The way my mind works, I can't look at an system without trying to figure out how it ticks, and how it may come apart (a useful tendency professionally, but for games it would probably be better not to do it….but that would be like asking a cat not to jump on a mouse).
For games the next step after understanding how things could come apart, is making sure that they don't (or accepting that the thing is irredeemably rickety, and move on). Making sure that things don't fall apart tends to include things like agreeing not to look at the man behind the curtain, always shaking dice well, and other fun social contract stuff. Most RPG have a similar enough structure that what is needed to keep things running fairly smoothly is pretty well (and implicitly) understood. The approach in HQ2 seemed different enough to me that I thought it could use some discussion.
(FWIW, I'm running my 12 year old in an HQ1 game that is slowly absorbing HQ2 elements, and I may be adding some of his friends. In my experience 12 year old boys are pretty unrepentant about anything that helps them win more, so this is something that I could well imagine facing. As a player in a face to face game, I doubt I could be bothered to keep track of the pass/fail cycle per se, but I could imagine looking at a win streak and thinking 'there is going to be a cost for this, what would be the most interesting way to pay that cost?' However these days I'm only playing in PBEM games, which run slow enough I'd not want to slow them down with additional diversions).
Powered by hypermail