[Heroquest 2] Pass/Fail and Setting-Heavy Story Now
Erik Weissengruber:
If this thing gets off of the ground, the personality mechanics recommended in S:KoH are a subject to consider.
Clans' Political Allegiances:
"You can use your relationships at the rating of your clan keyword. For instance, if you are friends with the Elves you can use your clan keyword to interact with them. They also act as a flaw if you try to act against them. If you clan has always had the Telmori as enemies and you try to co-operate with them, you clan keyword acts as a flaw against you." (65)
Concerning your Clan's Virtues (generated via the questionnaire in Sartar: Kingdom of Heroes)
"At the end [of Clan Generation] total the number of checks against each value. Find the top three values. These are the values held by the clan. Your hero is a product of these values. When you want to act in line with these values you can use them as an ability. When you want to contradict these values then count them as a flaw that acts against your action. Finally your clan likely has one or more enemies that they Hate. Write down the clan enemies, as peaceful relations are impossible with them." (58)
Rune Affinities and PC Action:
This is the challenging bit: by deciding on one's fundamental runes, a player is setting out boundaries for his or her action. And it is NOT the same as selecting a religion. A player may build up the Air rune for his Personality and never initiate or devote to Orlanth.
* Losing control of PC
"At times, the Narrator will treat your Rune Affinities as a sort of Flaw to be overcome if you want to act in a manner contrary to the Rune. Successfully overcoming the Rune Affinity means you can act in the desired way but at the cost of temporarily weakening your connection with that Rune as a Lingering Penalty [i.e. lasting well beyond any one conflict resolution instance]. Failure means that you must act in accordance with the Rune." (78)
This last bit confuses things. Does act in accordance with the rune mean initiate a new contest? Contests are supposed to be conflict resolution not task resolution. Maybe its just a fictional result accepted by the GM?
* Getting rewarded by GM
"On the other hand, the Narrator can also give you a Situational Bonus or even a Plot Augment to the use of a rune affinity if you have been consistently roleplaying the Personality Traits of that Rune." (78)
And this is not like Pendragon where there is a strict zero-sum dualism between pairs of Virtues and Vices (Chaste/Lustful, etc.). You give into Lustful once, you stand a pretty good chance of having it increase during character advancement at the expense of a reduction in your chaste. Rather, if you do what the GM thinks goes against your character creation decisions, your effectiveness decreases. If you do what the GM thinks goes in line with those initial decisions, your effectiveness increases.
Now, Hero Points will allow you to prevent Loss of Control. But the reduction of effectiveness can be slapped down at GM discretion.
So what to do? In any check of Affinity, does the player include both desired course of action and the consequences if he or she is compelled to obey the Rune Affinity rather than transgress it?
Have players justify their behaviour in a Burning Wheel-like phase at the end of a session, with the bonus to be applied in the following session?
Who gets to decide if a behaviour went against the Affinity? Maybe the player could draw attention to a significant violation and get a Hero Point out of it.
What if I want to make a dramatic change in the character, renounce past beliefs and start anew. How to get off of the railroad I may have set myself on?
It's called a Heroquest. You want to radically reinvent yourself? Do so. Muster the in-fiction positioning and the game resources and take a shot. This way, you are not playing Pendragon Pass.
The recent discussion of Pendragon over in Burning land has got me thinking of the fun to be had with personality mechanics like this: http://tinyurl.com/7xnsex4
But the focus here cannot be on maintaining a manor and wining Glory. In Glorantha it has to be about reinventing self and reshaping the world.
Erik Weissengruber:
Pendragon's Passions are a little more hard-core than the Virtues or Values in Heroquest.
I can roll my passions to help me in a jam. But if I fail the role or fail at the conflict I take serious consequences. Including bouts of melancholy.
If I fail to bring in my "For king and country" ability to augment my swordfighting in Heroquest, it's a mechanical reduction in effectiveness but nothing fictional! So much for a Narrativist game!
There is one portable solution: The Player may override the roll, but in so doing, automatically loses a point in that trait or passion.
So you want to be calm during negotiations, but you are highly invested in the Air rune. I ask you to roll some ability and try to overcome this huge rating you have in Air. You fail (and don't want to spend hero points on it). You can take the result or override it. For what penalty? Perhaps a 1 point reduction (which doesn't mean much in Heroquest). How about reducing it by the margin of defeat? If your "Steady Leader" ability is only 14 and your Air Rune is at 32 or something, you stand a good chance of defeat with a -3 or -6 penalty. That is a big whomp.
JoyWriter:
Ok, I think I'm getting the hang of this a little more (but not much): Is it that heroquest's mechanics are profoundly bland, but that is compensated for by the colour and thematic content of the setting itself, embodied by the player's responses?
In other words, it seems like the resolution mechanic doesn't say half as much as I thought about the themes involved, but the fact that it allows you to spend hero points on various things means that there are two layers of choices; what do you do, and how much do you invest in that choice if it goes pearshaped. And you make those choices by creating characters that are strongly enmeshed in all the thematic stuff your interested in.
In order to support that choice though, you probably need to be able to weigh up difficulty of a certain plan verses how it goes with your values: There's no bite in choosing between compromising with difficulty or exausting yourself in idealism, or in finding different ways to seek the same goals, if this landscape of difficulty is invisible to you. Yes ok there's always hero points, so you can run into things that are way out of your league then change your mind, but as a way of scoping out the world, it seems to me that the way that players get to ask questions about the world, absorb knowledge about it, situate their character in it, would be really important to make solid.
And maybe the skill system actually implies that themes should be given a halo of abilities, rather than tying them to abilities directly: Unlike rustbelt say, where explicitly recording a faith called "all outsiders are not to be trusted" with a certain rating matters thematically, and means it's something your going to be dealing with and maybe changing over the game, in heroquest you might actually want to take that belief and put things around it instead, that relate to it but do not themselves define it, because you don't want to fix it in place, but you do want to fill other conflicts with it's influence.
Applying that to relationships between clans, if you want the game to be about how the clans relate to their neighbours, then instead of just saying that the relationship is unfreindly, you could create a few abilities (three?) that each imply that, but deal with some history between the clans.
With that in place, judgements of the appropriateness of abilities and augments could become more interesting, there's potential for a bit of slippage in the character of the relationship that players can take advantage of, and that probably makes rigorous application of the bonuses and penalties less onerous.
So that's the main choices I'm seeing at the moment, the choices about what to do given the complexities of the situation and the choices of how much to commit to something when it turns out to be out of your league.
Do the community augment rules add a third category of choices? What is the disadvantage of trying to get community support? Can you put those resources in danger by your use of them? Is it just that community elders may ask for something in return for using them? Can multiple people use the same resource simultaniously, or is that just restricted by common sense fictional positioning (ie physical artefacts are a lot less flexible than stories or traditions, because multiple people can hold them)?
Erik Weissengruber:
Mechanics
They are not bland: they are firmly conflict rather than task resolution. That might be old news but HQ was one of the first to do it explicitly. As a conflict resolution system it is theme-friendly in that the GM should be presenting theme-appropriate challenges or the players leveraging their theme and setting-laden Abilities to bring about such challenges. But a mechanic is like a computer program or any other algorithym: garbage in/garbage out. The rolls are always opposed so there is some homology between player behaviour (“I am rolling against an opponent and we are both subject to chance"), and an implicit theme (“Heroes must always test themselves in risk-ridden ways against an antagonistic world”), and narrative fiction (“We are heroes up against the Doom Ninja”). Such a homology is nice but it is an aesthetic feature only.
System
The actual roll (d20) is just a roll but system governs what comes into resolution. The HQ2 system requires players and GM to state the premise of the series, the genre, and the setting and these higher-order decisions filter what is brought to resolutuion. The system allows laser focus on what is thematically significant but it doesn’t guarantee that will happen. The extended conflict system is not employed when you want to break out into detailed task resolution. that was my mistake in early GM-ing. Rather, every blow should be premiseful or setting-rich, or theme-y. The extended contest system is not a "microgame" like the Duel of Wits or Fight! in Burning game.
Erik Weissengruber:
The things system geeks worry about are not the same as players approaching a game for the first time.
Player Responses
* 1 of the newcomers to HQ, playing a troublemaking bastard daughter of the local trickster, remarks: "I wanted to talk to my father a little more. I didn't know discussions were part of a game."
* Another player seem genuinely surprised when the village woman with whom he was having a liason refused to kiss him when he went off on an impromptu raid. And to genuinely enjoy it when he brought the starvelling stick picker girl come along with the raiding party.
The fluctuations in the pass/fail rhythm did not even register on their radars.
The clan was presented with a problem: strong omens that their warmaking would be blessed and they would suffer in their wealth this year. And strange draconic shadows and surprise frosts on the settlement. The opposed roll mechanic in response to their clans' "Fear Dragons" flaw saw them thinking of fictional responses to the situation backed up by a wide variety of choices in the Abilities they were using to resist it.
After fictional positioning with a variety of factions, the players all pushed for a quick raid on tax collector caravans to get some coin, supplemented by disguising themselves as Woodpecker clansmen to deflect blame, and returning to the stead to seek out the source of the baleful magic. The opposition was provided by a senior clan member who wanted to use the clan's magic to ensure a successful spring planting. The players used their abilities to Augment the Resource roll by the proposer of the scheme. The use of multiple player augments to one dramatic roll was also grokked quickly.
The raid was against opposition that was NOT part of any prep on my part so I stuck to the pass/fail rhythm. Their clan's war rating of 29, augmented by some clever actions on their part and lingering bonuses from previous actions, came in at 45 (or 5 at 2 masteries) against the Lunars' 14. I justified the low resistance by proposing that they had ambushed a payroll caravan of the Lunar administration and they just wanted to grab some bags of coin so it was an ideal situation. Each player either played or narrated what they were doing to aid the raid. There was nice synchronicity between the courses of action narrated and the Abilities brought to bear.
System Concerns
The continuing crisis of the wealth and the prepped threats to the clan will escalate.
Currency now represents the region of mechanical complexity of import rather than any kvetching about pass/fail. Only one player got the 100 word description in. So in addition to the 3 main runes, occupation, and homeland Keyword, he has all these personality traits and charms and skills to pull on. But he did not have all his character creation points assigned. So every roll had this currency calculation going on as he decided if and how many character creation points would be assigned to the Abilities being brought to bear.
The other characters were all done "On The Fly." This means that they had 10 abilities to create in addition to the key words. Every challenge presented was an opportunity for them to make some statement about who the character was and how much of that he or she was. One player took the lead in arguing against the clan elders in favor of the raid and came up with some impressive barbariany-rhetoric. It was not from the heart so he characterized himself as "Cunning" and spent a few points to raise it above the default.
So the characters are SLOWLY defining themselves in response to the challenges presented them. What I thought would happen is that the world would define itself in the interaction between my preped elements and well-defined characters. So this dialectic is really interesting: I put challenges in their way to see what kind of people they are and how they react to the world, and they define their characters in ways I couldn't predict. Those who are newbies to Heroquest I throw suggestions, but they refuse them or work with them as they please (most of mine are rejected, which is fine because they are just suggestions). The character with the well-defined abilities makes little adjustments in the ratings. And the Gloranthaphile makes sharp and quick decisions. Then I have to make fictional decisions about the world that have little to do with my prep but which I try to make sure are consistent with that prep.
Hero Points and Such
A number of characters a carrying penalties (reflecting failure to overcome the Fear of Dragons) and bonuses from individual victories. In addition to the 3 Hero Points given at character creation, and 3 Hero Points for completing a story arc, they will get 3 at the start of the next sessions. This means that next session that have 9 HP to spend on character improvements, getting out of tight situations, etc. In addition to the 10 to 15 character creation points they have sitting around.
The pass/fail cycle will increase resistance until someone takes on a conflict they will lose. So we will see the currency fluctuations in response to that.
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