[Heroquest 2] Pass/Fail and Setting-Heavy Story Now
Erik Weissengruber:
Here is what I wrote to the game's participants after the session. It would be nice if players were aware of the interaction between setting limits (esp. Stretches) and the decisions we make about their abilities, and to underline that it is not only possible for them to define their Abilities in ways that affect the setting, but that they are encouraged to do so. And to hold out the promise that such decisions on their part will result in a more engaging story:
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"So, is Handor the golden boy, superstar, spotlight guy?
No.
He has 1 NPC ally trying to use him for a very particular agenda. That NPC's agenda is HIS, not mine. Moreover, all of the other NPCs have agendas for you. Go with them, against them -- whatever. Your characters' choices make the story.
And decisions have major consequences, as was illustrated by the battle with the demon at the end of last session:
The thanes rode out to find the Kinslayers and ran into a dragon-shaped demon that has been warping the weather, sending killing frosts and causing sudden thaws of glacial ice to bring floods. Handor's character description said something about being marked out for destiny and that destiny was symbolized by a comet-shaped birthmark. James said something about cutting into it to release its power.
My preparation notes indicated that the demon had a vulnerability to exorcist magic. Given that James' character was bearing a clan totem, something on his character sheet mentioned an extraordinary destiny, and he was making a very specific action using one of his previously undefined special abilities, I interpreted that action as a kind of exorcism.
And from this point forward I will continue to do so.
This is the way your characters' creatively-defined Abilities become part of the game world: you propose how an Ability might affect the situation and, using the game's jargon or me considering behind-the-scenes decisions I have made about setting and opposing characters, we pin down just what that Ability means in this setting. And from that point, going forward, we have defined how that Ability interfaces with the setting.
[This bit could have used a rewrite: maybe I could have said "we use the game's jargon, I my pre-game prep, and you your feelings about where you want the character to go" or somesuch]
Think of Bilbo picking up a magic invisibility ring. Which then turns out to be something much more. If that situation had come up in a game, I might have dropped some earth-shaking magic item into a set of caverns. Or a player might have had some way of linking an Ability to a cruddy old ring he found in a creep's personal stash. I like the way this game allows vague intuitions or colourful descriptions to crystallize into concrete, significant, and situation-changing Abilities with real game-mechanical weight behind them.
And you can all do it. Just remind me to give you opportunities to do so."
Web_Weaver:
Hello again Erik,
Thanks for taking the time to write these reflections up, they are very interesting. HQ isn't very prescriptive when it comes to play styles, so it is always interesting to see how someone actually uses it.
One of the reasons that you havn't seen a lot of descriptions or discussions about using stretches to define a creature's abilities, is because this appears to be your own interpretation. It sounds like it could work, and certainly by challenging the PC's it provided an opportunity for creativity.
However, stretches are always described in the context of choosing abilities. Indeed the main advice is if somthing is a stretch it may be best for the Narrator to suggest an alternative ability.
Certainly in the Glorantha section of the Core Rules, and the recent Sartar Material, Stretches are used to help define the setting, especially for things like magic use, but even those are focused on the abilities of the PC.
I do think that some of the Sartar material, especially the scenarios, occasionally twist the uses for Stretches as well, but that material has subtley drifted the rule set in my opinion.
For the write up of a ghost, it may be appropriate to rule a physical interaction a stretch, or maybe impossible, this isn't placing it on a scale of difficulty relative to the players, it's just saying that hitting it with a sword would stretch the story and or genre's credibility.
Jamie
Erik Weissengruber:
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One of the reasons that you havn't seen a lot of descriptions or discussions about using stretches to define a creature's abilities, is because this appears to be your own interpretation. It sounds like it could work, and certainly by challenging the PC's it provided an opportunity for creativity.
I meant to say that I haven't seen any productive discussions of using Stretches anywhere. Not just in dealing with individual creatures, but with whole categories of creatures, but in any resolution context at all.
I have also not come across any discussion of the enabling assumptions specified at the start of the Heroquest rules, those of Genre/Setting/Mode/Premise. The Sartar Book seems to say "here is Glorantha the way Greg and Jeff would do it, hop on board. No guide to adapting the system outlined by Laws to the particular material at hand. Saying "YGMV" is not the same as providing guidelines for how to use Laws' enabling assumptions in making "Your" Glorantha.
What I have done with my demon keyword is no more than to say: here is what is plausible or implausible in my Glorantha using my High Fantasy/Dragon Pass/Epic Chronicle/Heroic Barbarians vs. Empire as my Genre/Setting/Mode/Premise decisions. To my mind I am following strict chapter and verse:
"Using a somewhat implausible ability is known as a stretch. If your Narrator deems an attempt to be a stretch, you suffer a -6 penalty to your target number. Further, any major or complete victories you might score are instead treated as minor victories." (Heroquest 52)
"Implausible" makes sense only in the nested contexts of G/S/M/P. As you say, "stretches are described in the context of choosing abilities," but I would add "and in G/S/M/P-defined contexts of what constitutes implausibility."
It is actually at the intersection of those contexts:
[ Ability Description < Stretch decision ] G/S/M/P >
Laws reinforces the connection between stretch adjudications and higher order assumptions in the game text:
"The definition of stretch is elastic, depending on genre [my emphasis]. All sorts of crazy stunts ought to be possible in a high-flying martial arts game. Conversely, even common cinematic conceits ought to be impossible in a realistic espionage game inspired by John Le Carre novels" (52)
And in my take on Dragon Pass, mundanes will be ploughed by Heroes, Heroes by Superheroes, and Minor Gods will have some edge over individual Superheroes but better watch out for teams of them (this is the hierarchy going back to the Dragon Pass boardgame). Demons have fearsome abilities but are prone to exorcistic magic. These are some of the basic decisions about what is plausible in the Glorantha I knew and in the Glorantha I am presenting to players. I don't want to go willy-nilly making all sorts of complicated rules about what is a stretch when dealing with a Great Wolf, as opposed to a Dire Wolf, or a Timber Wolf. Just to elaborate on my guidelines for plausibility as we explore the setting in more depth.
I would quibble with your assertion that it is a "main" piece of advice that "if something is a stretch it may be best for the Narrator to suggest an alternative ability." Selecting the most believable convincing or realistic Ability instead of going for a Stretch is a marginal case of Stretches:
"Narrators running series in those rare genres that enforce very strict realism should, rather than impose a penalty, instead propose a more suitable action description." (53)
If I want to make sure that a character's particular choice of a martial art style really fits a given situation, and the setting has been strict about such details, I won't allow a Boxing Ability to do a takedown of someone who has grappled you: it's flat out impossible, just doesn't work. But in the genres and premises I want to run, say a noir story about crooked fighters and the mob, I would allow it as a stretch. That is me allowing broad interpretation of Abilities within the limits of G/S/M/P.
I hope I am following the principles you outline in your post:
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For the write up of a ghost, it may be appropriate to rule a physical interaction a stretch, or maybe impossible, this isn't placing it on a scale of difficulty relative to the players, it's just saying that hitting it with a sword would stretch the story and or genre's credibility.
Exactly. The pass/fail mechanics offer a simple range of obstacles (6 in total?) in the place of endless finicky tinkering with ratings. And credibility tests where you judge an action as absolutely incredible, a stretch to credibility, or within credibility, are a way to keep to those 6 simple tiers of difficulty even in extreme or fantastical situations. I want guidelines for me to keep difficulties with those values without sacrificing plausibility.
I wasn't trying to drift the rules set, just connect the dots between the "Before Starting" material on pages 8-9 and the material on Stretches (52 - 53), Credibility Tests (74-75), and Extraordinary Ability Frameworks (96-106).
And, to get up on a soapbox, I was disappointed by this lack of attention to these parts of the Heroquest system in Sartar: Kingdom of Heroes, and see no sign that the writers of Pavis are paying attention to it as well. I don't think they are drifting the rules set, if that is taken to mean the totality of the system. They have pulled out the resolution mechanics and the algorithm for setting difficulty levels but ignore the systematic framework Laws developed for them in the first place.
Sarah Newton's article "Asymmetric Gaming" points out the challenge that Laws' system -- in its basic assumptions -- poses to many conventional roleplaying habits:
http://sarahnewtonwriter.com/2011/12/13/asymmetric-gaming-musings-on-heroquest-2nd-edition-part-2/
"When your character fights the dragon, rescues the prince or princess from the evil sorcerer, or destroys the space station in your tiny starfighter, in HeroQuest none of those opponents are defined using the “stat blocks” you’d find in other games. Rather, the difficulty of achieving those individual goals (fight the dragon, rescue the prince, destroy the space station) is defined. Moreover, that difficulty isn’t defined by how objectively hard each of those goals might be to achieve (starfighter against space station? no chance!), but instead by how difficult it should be in terms of the story. If the story, by its genre, dramatic structure, or structural necessity, suggests that a hero with a stray arrow should, right now, have a decent chance to kill the dragon which has terrorised the land for decades, then that’s what the difficulty of that task will be, regardless of how formidable the dragon might “objectively” be."
Maybe all of Laws guidelines for keeping credibility decisions consistent are an attempt to provide some of the illusion of objectivity that the rules, according to Newton, disavow radically. I like to see them as working with "genre" to give a context for the characters' abilities, of integrating those player-defined Abilities within an unfolding framework of characters' interaction with each other and with the setting (which is what I like to think Newton means by "story"). Maybe I am on the old-guard objectivist side when I think of credibility stretches as setting limits on character action (STOPPING a non-Runelord character from posing any kind of deadly threat to an NPC Hero) instead of breaking limits to permit greater player character effectiveness (Newton's example of giving a PC a shot to take out a mighty dragon*). But for a setting to be significant it has to give resistance as well as afford opportunities.
You don't walk on your carpet despite the friction, but because it offers some friction. A perfectly frictionless surface doesn't give you limitless freedom: it is more likely to have you flat on your ass. And how can you talk of a current with no reference to the resistance of the medium through which it must of necessity pass?
* To return to the letter of the law: the maximum victory a Stretched Ability will win over an opponent is a Minor Victory. I take that to mean "including any Hero Point expenditure". So our Stretched bowman can ding the beast but not bring it down. To have Bard take out Smaug, that would require something other than a Stretch.
Erik Weissengruber:
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I wasn't trying to drift the rules set, just connect the dots between the "Before Starting" material on pages 8-9 and the material on Stretches (52 - 53), Credibility Tests (74-75), and Extraordinary Ability Frameworks (96-106).
Rewrite that: to make the setting have weight there is an inevitable drift back towards HQ1 and Hero Wars. HQ2 is more concerned with the envelope of plausibility surrounding the characters than really making the setting have any weight. I think my Apocalypse World play was bleeding over into my HQ2 prep.
Web_Weaver:
In general I am right with you on the way that the Sartar material tends to ignore a lot of the genre / setting context of HQ2. In a R.Laws panel back when HQ 2 was still in a pre-release state I remember pointing out to a doubter that Glorantha is bigger than a genre pack, but instead could contain any number of genres and setting expectations. But, now we are faced with a thoroughly detailed and defined setting with little reflection on the chosen genre, campaign scale, scope, or even the resources that it so clearly advocates but doesn't make much use of.
Of course this was probably always going to be the case, as published Gloranthan material has a momentum all of its own which has always been relatively system agnostic. I would love to see a chapter in each book that talked about how the material could be used in different ways to achieve various effects at the table. Or a piece on how the more grainy rules interpretations could be streamlined for more vanilla HQ2 play, but alas this isn't really their priority. The Glorantha fan in me doesn't mind a bit as long as we see current material, but the system geek in me is frustrated. But of course that part of me is easily distracted by new shiny gears, such as those in Other Worlds.
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