The problem with understanding narrative games for us 'old hands' is that it goes against the grain of what people are unfortunately calling 'traditional roleplaying games' - the games we play instinctively. In our experience it has been the sub-culture (normally encouraged by rules systems) to attempt to win every 'contest'. So, in HQ, we naturally want to make our Target Number as high as possible in order to do what we think is the point of the game. Contrastingly, HQ is designed to be a narrative-style game where we are not so much interested in winning as telling the story of what happened, as defined by narratives based on Contest Outcome.
To get our terms straight, I see scouring as the unfortunate side-effect of wanting a high Target Number; it is the long process of making sure you get every suitable augment that could be applied to the Main Skill possible (and a lot of the time every tenuously connected augment too!).
The problem with this is two(at least)-fold.
Firstly it takes too long - while we are scouring, we are not playing. Interestingly, this is not speaking of the length of time the other players have to wait for the scourer to be ready. If it's not taking too long then it's possibly not scouring.
Secondly the methods we use to play HQ (outside of the ones laid out in the rule book) reflect our motivation for playing. Scouring reflects a need for a higher Target Number so we can succeed our Goal or (at best - subjectively used term) a need to 'accurately portray what my character can do/is like'. This is not playing a narrative-style game as it was intended. To quote my own recent post: "... look for ways to tell the story of the exchange instead of trying to win it at all costs" and to show the other side of it: instead of trying to show what should have happened with characters like ours.
I'm sure you've heard of 'failure can be fun' (often, sadly, called 'failure is fun') so I won't get into what that means. Suffice to say the payoff in a narrative game is not necessarily the win-situation; it's the satisfying narration. If you haven't seen it yet, get your players to narrate their own Defeats and see them spontaneously begin to enjoy it (possibly for the first time).
You say that in the second instance you'd include the fighting skills as augments, even when the contest narrative focus is on the political situation. I'd be interested to hear how you would narrate the outcome, making sure you include the augments. I'd bet that it would not be a narration that focused on the political situation. It would be interesting to compare our narrations. I think if I were given the same Main Skill, Augment List, Goal and Outcome as you'd have built (including those fighting skills) and was asked to narrate what happened, focussing on the political situation, I'd be in for a struggle. I suspect that you intended to leave the augments out of the final narration, possibly as implicit. Would that be fair?
I think the key here is to know what kind of story you are telling and what the scenes are for.
So to focus more tightly on the topic of scouring again: when we establish a goal that is aimed at the kind of scene we want in the kind of story we want and then look for augments that address the goal (see my post on the subject) we quickly realise that scouring is much harder and less fruitful. What we find fruitful is bringing out the side of our hero that narrates satisfyingly into our scene/story - that's the payoff.
Incidentally, the definition of 'kind of story' and 'kind of scene' doesn't have to be restrictive. Jamie's second scene above was focussed on politics. Be as free or as restrictive as is rewarding for you; however some structure of this kind is important. Anything goes would make for a very rambling book, I think.
All the best
M
-----Original Message-----
From: Sam Elliot
Sent: 13 April 2008 11:31
Subject: Re: Re: Scoured augments (from HQ rules -
Equipment)
On Sat, Apr 12, 2008 at 9:18 AM, Jamie <anti.spam_at_...> wrote:
> This really shakes down to how much you focus on conflict resolution,
> in our play we have often used conflict resolution but still drifted
> into tasked resolution habits, leading to skill focused contests and
> augment scouring. Whenever I find myself scouring my sheet it is
> usually a result of being too focused on the activity and less on the
> story behind the roll at hand.
>
> As a quick example take a sword fight between clan champions with the
> goal, 'Get the enemy tribe's champion to back down in the fight in the
> interest of peace'.
>
> This is clearly a situation that is Conflict Resolution centric, and
> the contest is going to centre on the fight, but there are at least
> two ways to handle it:
>
> 1 - focus on fighting as the main skill and augment with everything
> that you can tie into either the martial contest and the political
> situation. [Skill: Sword Fighting. Augments: True blade, Recognise
> enemy fighting style, Hate enemy tribe, Relationship to tribe, Peace
> lover, Political intrigue]
>
> 2- focus on the political situation and leave the fighting to
> narration colour. [Skill: Political intrigue. Augments: Relationship
> to tribe, Peace lover].
>
> The second one might feel odd because the actual fight is the central
> contest but the dice roll only resolves the political situation.
> However, the fight can be used both to colour the contest and to help
> differentiate between contest results.
FWIW, in the second instance, I'd use those martial skills to augment as well. That is, I don't really see how the different framing of the contest relates to "augment-scouring".
That said, I don't have a problem with augments, so don't worry overly about me.
Sam.
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