OK, so yesterday I ran my first game of HeroQuest (set in the star wars universe). I'm not going to go into too much detail because I may post something in actual play when we've done a few more sessions. The basic setup is that the characters are on a mission for the Rebel Alliance and they have to deliver a message and a mysterious cargo halfway across the galaxy.
One of the group has a ship but as we begin play I've said that it has been beaten up in a previous fight and I've given it two 'wounds' - Disrupted Wiring 17 (-10%) and Disabled Hyperdrive 20m (-100%). They have therefore hitched a lift on a cargo freighter and quite naturally want to try and fix their own ship while it is loaded up in the cargo hold. They spent quite a bit of time preparing to fix it and have started planning out their augments, so I think this will be a great opportunity to try out the rules for extended contests.
So how the heck do I actually do it?
The way I was thinking of doing it is to calculate the starting AP totals and then just alternate 'attacks'. So the PCs say some technobabble for their attack and bid their APs, then I make a 'complication' attack like 'You haven't got the right parts', 'A fire might break out', or 'You need to realign the hyperaccelerant to the fusion core'.
Is this the right way to do it? Help!
thanks
soviet
That would, indeed, work. You can even make it harder core -- don't tell them a fire might break out, have the fire break out. Toss in action, chances for characterization, and the like in the midst of it. Don't just say they don't have the part -- say they don't, but the Hutt at the other end of the ship may, if they're willing to deal with a Hutt. Then the social character can help repair the ship by doing a deal, and so forth.
However, in generaly I find that its a good rule to not go to an extended contest (no matter how much setup) if you and the players can't each think of at least a half dozen cool things to do in the contest. If you've got a vision of "this and this and this and this!" then you'll rock. OTOH, if you're just fighting with AP and trying to make stuff up to keep from sounding boring then it can become an excercise in bean counting.
Quote from: Brand_RobinsHowever, in general I find that its a good rule to not go to an extended contest (no matter how much setup) if you and the players can't each think of at least a half dozen cool things to do in the contest. If you've got a vision of "this and this and this and this!" then you'll rock. OTOH, if you're just fighting with AP and trying to make stuff up to keep from sounding boring then it can become an excercise in bean counting.
Hmmm. I never originally envisioned fixing the ship to be more than a side issue, but the way they've responded to it makes me want to make more out of it. It's also a nice safe practice run for extended contests as it's not exactly a life or death issue.
I can think of a few things to happen, or obstacles to overcome, but it's possible my players don't really have anything in mind beyond 'I fix it' and will end up just reacting to events. I suppose thats not necessarily a bad thing as long as the events I give them are interesting enough.
So the extended contest would work like this, yes?
::player: I try to identify whats wrong, bid x ap (roll)
:me: the engines are blackened from the laser damage so you can't see what you're doing, bid x ap (roll)
::player: I try to replace the damaged parts with my spares, bid x ap (roll)
:me: the parts you have aren't compatible, bid x ap (roll)
::player: try to fix them in place with brute force and an arc welder, bid x ap (roll)
:me: a fire breaks out, I bid x ap (roll)
...etc
Is this right? So essentially there is a tactical game of bids going on, except each bid is justified with an attempted solution or potential obstacle. (Or, ideally, attempted solutions and obstacles are invented and an ap bid made to match).
Also, with the simple contests that I've done so far it's felt like they were a bit flat sometimes, without a solid enough outcome. It seems like when abilities are very close in rating, the contest is just a coin flip to determine who narrowly wins. Maybe I'm doing something wrong? I figured that with an extended contest we might get a more satisfying ending one way or the other.
soviet
Quote from: sovietSo the extended contest would work like this, yes?
::player: I try to identify whats wrong, bid x ap (roll)
:me: the engines are blackened from the laser damage so you can't see what you're doing, bid x ap (roll)
::player: I try to replace the damaged parts with my spares, bid x ap (roll)
:me: the parts you have aren't compatible, bid x ap (roll)
::player: try to fix them in place with brute force and an arc welder, bid x ap (roll)
:me: a fire breaks out, I bid x ap (roll)
Something like that, yea. There is a response in between though. You bid, the world resists, there is a result. Then the world bids, you resist, there is a a result. So it would be:
::player:: I try to identify what's wrong, I use my "Fix Starship 10m1" and bid x ap (roll)
::gm:: The engines are blackened from laser damage, so you can't see what you're doing. It resists with it's "Dark and Difficult 5m1" (roll)
::player or gm, depending on how you run the game, looks at the results and then narrates, for example gm says:: Okay, you manage to get in there and figure out that the sparks are blown. The problem is that you don't have repalcements. It's using it's "Obsolete Model with Hard to Get Parts 17" and bidding X ap (roll).
::Player:: Oh yea, I use my "Jury-rig 2m1" to ram the ones we have into place (roll)
And so on.
QuoteSo essentially there is a tactical game of bids going on, except each bid is justified with an attempted solution or potential obstacle. (Or, ideally, attempted solutions and obstacles are invented and an ap bid made to match).
That's pretty much right. Just be warry of how you pitch it. Done with the right outlook it becomes a great way to motivate player driven action and intense responses. Done with too tactical of an eye it can become bean counting.
QuoteAlso, with the simple contests that I've done so far it's felt like they were a bit flat sometimes, without a solid enough outcome. It seems like when abilities are very close in rating, the contest is just a coin flip to determine who narrowly wins.
That can happen, yes. In fact it often will happen when both sides are equal and equally prepaired. In stories (and life) equal forces rarely get a stunning victory or loss without great luck, and HQ follows that way. It's only when you have one side outclassing the other (either through base ability, lots of augments, or use of the situation) that you'll get regular large wins/losses. The mid range fights tend to have mid range results.
QuoteI figured that with an extended contest we might get a more satisfying ending one way or the other.
You could, but only if people are looking to do it. With an extended contest you can get bigger wins and losses -- but only if poeple make big bids at the end, use desperation stakes, and really go for the throat. If you just go through looking to eek out a win, you'll still generally just eek out a win as you won't be bidding big to take the opponent out once and for all.
On the basis of what you have said, my suggestion would be to use a simple contest. I personally have run enthusiastically into a couple of extended contests and then found them petering out half-way in. What I now favour is building up to a simple contest by playing out those augments you said your players are getting together.
If you are able to decide in advance what the challenge is, by this I mean the fiddly complexities like the engine room is on fire, the captain is not happy for a potentially dangerous procedure to take place on his ship while not in a port, or whatever, then all those player augments are actually directed at the situation. If you have decided in advance what the difficulty level is then it may well be that by the players bringing all those augments in, they have a mastery over the challenge and so there is indeed a dramatic result. This then serves to show the value of all those other abilities (or shows them how their characters might usefully develop if they fall short).
I think the above allows you to reduce also the number of simple contests, if you feel these are falling flat. You haven't said this (so apologies in advance), but I bet they fall flat because you haven't mapped out interesting outcomes of failure. In this instance, however, I think you can have - a failure to fix the ship, however marginal, remains a failure and leaves them stuck on board another ship where there could be interesting things going on (the captain asking what their cargo is, for example, then being very surprised when they say they don't know). A success, alternatively, means they can get away, limping perhaps, and feel flushed with having stacked up all those augments to good effect, perhaps having narrowly escaped rousing the curiosity of the captain. You can also ask the players to suggest in advance what a victory or defeat will mean - this way, they know in advance what is riding on that roll (and so do you for that matter).
So, stepping back, my suggestion is to work on your simple contests, on making them count, on building each of those up to a crescendo where you finally say, "Well guys, it's been interesting so far, but I'm afraid it's time to bring the dice out...". This is because, in my experience at least, the extended contest is most definitely not a fix and can easily peter out if you bring it out too early. Conversely, if the players know in advance the likely consequence of even a marginal defeat, you might take as your [meta-game] target, giving them that shaky feeling in the legs because you are saving it all up for a single roll of the dice.
You said this contest is not a matter of life or death - I'd wait until it really is before you give an extended contest a go. This I think would give you all the impetus to make it work. I think extended contests are the aces in your pack and I'd suggest you save them up. I'd be very interested to see what you decide and how it goes.
Good luck with it.
Sam.
I agree that a good way to spice up Simple Contests is to have that pseudo-bidding thing still going on, just in terms of the augments. You could handle it just like you described above, only each step is an augment and not an additional roll. Once there've been enough thrown out on both sides of the conflict, a simple roll can break the tension you've built up.
The good thing about this approach is it's pretty much fizzle-proof. If both sides aren't feeling the heat as augments come flying in left and right, you can just stop, roll, and be done. Whereas running out of steam halfway through an extended contest leaves you in a more awkward situation.
I'm not sure if it's directly applicable but I've always liked this (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?p=87150𕑮) post that Mike made a while back on the subject of turning climbing a tower into an extended contest.
I hope it helps,
- John Galloway
Well, we played again last week and we resolved the 'fixing the ship' contest.
I thought long and hard about what everyone here said and in the end decided to prep for both and ask my players how they wanted to do it. I came up with a big list of cool actions/obstacles and what sort of AP bids they would be, and I was really psyched to try them out.
Problem number one was that the player of the mechanic character, who would have been the driving force behind the whole scene, had to cancel at the last minute. This really threw me and I don't think I ever quite recovered - I felt that this session went much worse than the previous one.
Anyway, the hacker character tried to fix the computer damage first, which we did as a Simple Contest, and he succeeded with no problems.
So we move on to fixing the disabled hyperdrive and I ask them straight out how they want to do it. After a bit of thought they go for the extended contest, although they don't seem to really know what that actually means yet. So I start explaining the system, what APs are, how it's going to work etc, and I get three very confused looking faces staring back at me. I can see this isn't going to work out, especially without the presence of the Mechanic's player, so I stepped in. I abandoned the attempt and we went for a Simple Contest instead. This was definitely the right move, although I was disappointed not to be able to use all the cool stuff I had prepared.
To make a bit more out of it I went through each player in turn and got them to describe their actions and how they were augmenting the roll. This went OK - the Jedi used his Offer Enigmatic Advice ability (though I made him come up with an actual phrase to say) to augment the mechanic, the pilot character used his relationship to the ship to show the mechanic all the quirks and modifications, the hacker used the fixed central computer to run diagnostics, etc. In the end they managed to patch together a decent score and got a minor success. I used some of the technobabble I had prepped for the extended contest to narrate the attempt and they 'healed' it to Burnt Out Hyperdrive Coil 17 (10%). Result!
The rest of the session didn't go quite so well. I'm not quite sure what happened but I seemed to get put on the back foot early on and never quite recovered. I think I got a bit carried away by the ability of HQ to make anything a contest, and rolled for things that on reflection should have just been narrated. After asking for the rolls I also sometimes found it difficult to interpret the results of failure. At the end of the session the Jedi character was trying to calm down an angry mob that was trying to stampede the lifepods, which ended in him taking a swing at one of them. I ran this as a simple contest (assuming he would win TBH) and he rolled very poorly and got a major defeat. I had the rioter KO him with a feint and a headbutt. At this point the session really fell down - everyone was so used to D&D style play that they were really confused as to how this came about. On reflection this *was* very unsatisfactory so I have decided to rewind and play the scene out again next session.
In general think I need to focus on fewer contests but make them count for more. Maybe I even need to pause for a second in play and scribble out a 'conflict table' that tells me what different levels of victory and defeat might mean? Is this the way other people do it? I would like to go for more 'narrated' simple contests where there is a back and forth of described actions and the roll happens at the very end, but can see this being a step too far out of the comfort zone for my D&D-centric players.
As a side note, Mike, your post about Interesting Failures on the yahoo group HeroQuest-rules has been a very big help here. Thank you! I can also see how, if I actually can't come up with interesting ways to describe failure, maybe I shouldn't be rolling for the incident at all.
The current situation in the game is that the cargo freighter the characters are hitching a lift on has emerged from hyperspace and is being attacked by pirates. The characters have split up into 2 groups. The jedi and the hacker are onboard the freighter, while the pilot and mechanic are onboard the Wraith (the group's newly fixed ship).
How would you guys run these conflicts?:
1. The Wraith takes on the 3 small pirate ships that are strafing the freighter's sole defence turret.
I was thinking this should be an extended contest because I can come up with lots of different 'moves', and my players have got some interesting ideas as well. How many 'sides' should there be? I guess I would do the 3 fighters as one side but with 3x AP. Each time they lose 1/3 their total AP one of the fighters gets shot down. I would represent the Wraith or the turret being ganged up on by multiple ships using higher AP bids and the multiple attackers modifier. Should the turret be a side in itself? Should the Wraith be one side with one AP total but both players (mechanic/gunner and pilot) get to make actions, or should one player just augment the other? I'm not too clear on how to best do this.
Also, this running space battle will escalate as the two larger pirate ships get involved and try to perfrom their own actions. Is it OK to do this as a separate contest / series of contests later on, or should the whole sequence be one big extended contest?
2. The jedi and the hacker are trying to calm down the mob.
There are various related incidents stored up here. Should this be a single extended contest beginning with attempts at persuasion and escalating into violence / high AP bids, or should I do a 'calm down the mob' contest, and if it fails do a 'force back the mob' contest, and if it fails do a 'save the alien child from being trampled' contest? If I do it as an extended contest I can cut between the rioters and the space battle outside, with shot down enemy fighters and hull impacts making a difference to the crowd's mood.
Anyway, this post is long enough for now! HQ sure is a lot of work to get your head round (no experience of Narrativism, conflict resolution, or anything much beyond D&D in my group 'til now). Any input you have is very much appreciated.
Thanks
soviet
Tricky huh?
I haven't the experience of FTF GM-ing to have stock answers - I'm sure these will come. I also think you're half way to finding the solutions yourself anyway.
I do observe what is possibly over-planning of how things will go. So, your number 1 of the Wraith taking on the three pirate ships - was that the players' decision, something you expect will happen or something you've decided will happen? Seems you can set up a nice ituation between the two groups of players, say if the one thing you decide upon in advance is that the cargo ship will take a fatal hit - can the jedi and the hack get off in time? Can the others save them?
My impression is that if you plan out how the contests might go, you have a 67% chance of starting the session on the back foot when the players do something different. A common recommendation would be not to plan anything in advance (and you can always ask the players if you run out of ideas). Unfortunately, I think there are two issues here - we aren't all as clever at ad-libbing as some and you might enjoy that in-between session prep time anyway. Perhaps the trick is somehow to restrain yourself from over-planning, which I myself find very difficult :)
Abandoning the extended contests seems to have been sensible. You know when you play a new card game, the others always start trying to explain it and you end up having a dummy round (the newbie always winning, somehow)? Well, I think the only way you can explain extended contests is to do it. And to do it, I would definitely suggest some play aids. To whit...dig out a boardgame which has a numbered board (like snakes and ladders - I think Carcassonne has one too). Find some counters - miniatures'd be great, including for your followers, and their position on the board can be the action points. As well or instead of this, use poker chips or similar - I've seen some very attractive glass beads used for this, your bids are then very visible. Don't bother explaining it beforehand, set it up with the players helping, make it explicit that you are all trying the rules out so it ain't all on your shoulders, then give it a bash.
I like your description of the build-up to 'healing' the ship (I love the jedi offering enigmatic advice as an ability, by the way!) I'd be interested to know what you think the players thought of it. especially, perhaps, after all that, getting a 'Minor' victory. That's ussually pretty good, but I do get the feeling that marginals and minors can seem like small change. Perhaps doing a 'regular' fries instead of 'small' sort of thing.
Your over-rolling of the combat as turns is very interesting - you'll have seen exactly this in the discussion on HQ-rules then, and Mike's response. All very good advice and something which just comes with experience. Again, I think replaying it with the players seems like a very good step (but quickly I suspect). If you have them on board to sort teething problems out and can do this sort of backtracking, you're doing very well.
Stopping to think. Interesting failures. Here I think I dohave a trick to offer. If you are coming up to a roll, stop to refresh yourself, but don't think of the game, take two minutes to chucksome water on your face or whatever. Tell the players that when you come back, you want them to have come up with an interesting success and an interesting failure (but reverse the emphasis). If you can get them to buy into the interesting failure, you're there. If no-one can think of one, well I guess the message is clear. I play PbEM and mostly try to get the players to narrate any defeats post-hoc, ending up with much better stuff than if I had done it.
As for your two situations, I do think you run the risk of running a fabulous extended contest combat for one half, and replaying a combat which didn't go so well for the other half. Are your players capable of sitting and watching other people play and enjoy it? If so, here's a suggstion. The cargo ship is fatally wounded, as I suggested. The jedi and hacker are, I presume, trying to organize people getting to the life pods?
If you can hook their rescue across to the others in the dogfight, you might make it fun.
If you have one player manning the gun, the other the pilot, I think you can resonably split them up yes. Enemy fighters as followers of one another seems fine too, but remember they might return from the dead, depending on AP - could be fun. Try not to get confused with the numbers. Also, try and make it about something other than killing the pirates vs. dying (cf Mike's stuff). The defeat isn't interesting :)
For the jedi and hacker, I reckon you'd probably be best advised to move swiftly through the part you are redoing and on to something else. Maybe just create a difficult situation for them to resolve should they win or not the first roll, and see what they do with it.
Glad you reported back.
Sam.
Quote from: sovietThis really threw me and I don't think I ever quite recovered - I felt that this session went much worse than the previous one.
This is something that every GM has been through. If the game starts off wrong in your head it can be damn near impossible to get it back on the right foot again. Lord knows I've had nights like that. In fact, these days if I know I'm out of game-head for some reason I usually cancel game and do something else instead. It results in slightly less games, but in more of them being good, and in everyone at the table knowing that they're there to game rather than just because we're doing as expected.
YMMV, of course.
QuoteI think I got a bit carried away by the ability of HQ to make anything a contest, and rolled for things that on reflection should have just been narrated. After asking for the rolls I also sometimes found it difficult to interpret the results of failure.
These are things I've struggled with too. The way I've gotten past them is by drilling the following into my brain. It could work for you too.
1. Roll dice or say yes. Lifted from Dogs in the Vineyard, this rule is basically about not futzing about with undo complications. Either you let the characters succeed or you move to a contest.
2. Contests are Dramatic Moments: Contests in HQ aren't really about whether or not you could technically do something, they're about doing something interesting and important right now. For this reason I let a lot of things fall under the "competent hero" clause – people can do many things because they are bad ass. The only things they have to roll for are the ones that draw attention to the parts of the story that are important and dramatic.
3. If you can't think of interesting results for both failure and success, then it isn't really a contest. This is an important one, and one that years of gaming with other games really screwed me on. You don't roll just to roll, you roll to determine success and failure – and if both results can't be interesting then the roll isn't going to be interesting. If you're giving the results to the dice, then you need to be ready for whatever results the dice come up with.
So let's apply these rules really quickly to an old D&D standby – picking a lock. Do we roll for picking a lock? It depends on the circumstances.
1. The character is practicing picking a lock that he bought at the store just to hone his skills. Do we roll? I'd say no. Failing will have little effect other than to make the character look bad, there isn't any drama in it, and so there really is no need to make it a contest.
2. The character is picking a lock on a door, behind the door is an exciting confrontation of doom! Do we roll? My gut says no. Now, individual circumstances could change this – but the point isn't really whether or not the characters get the lock picked. If they don't then they don't get the cool confrontation. Losing doesn't mean anything cool, it just means sitting out in the hall and fiddling your thumbs and probably wanting to try again. If failure can't be interesting, don't roll. I'll also note, that "it's a really tough lock to pick!" doesn't make it interesting. "The guy inside will get away if you fail" does – but that's because there are interesting consequences, not just a big inanimate unresponsive thing in the way.
3. The characters are being chased by the Doom of Doom, and the only thing between them and freedom is a locked door. Do we roll? Yes. Because now the whole scene becomes about the character saving his bacon (and that of anyone else with him) by his skill with locks. If he succeeds they get away – and how much he succeeds by determines how much they get away by. And if he fails then the characters have to face the Doom, possibly face to face, possibly just for a few more minutes while the PC finally finagles the lock. Either way, it's going to be interesting.
QuoteAt the end of the session the Jedi character was trying to calm down an angry mob that was trying to stampede the lifepods, which ended in him taking a swing at one of them. I ran this as a simple contest (assuming he would win TBH) and he rolled very poorly and got a major defeat. I had the rioter KO him with a feint and a headbutt.
This brings up the big silver bullet that made HQ task-resolution gel for me: Don't ask the players what their characters want to do next, ask the players what they want to accomplish next. Every time you go to do a contest make sure everyone knows what it is they want to accomplish with the contest, and what they risk if they fail.
This is important for several reasons. First, these things aren't always clear, and they really need to be. If the Jedi knew that his failure risked him getting KOed by an angry mob before he rolled, it wouldn't have come as such a shock. Also, being clear on it would have allowed for negotiation of other ideas for failure – such as if he fails the mob not only doesn't calm down, it starts blowing the place up, leading to another challenge in which the jedi has to decide how a guardian of peace and calm deals with a destructive riot of otherwise innocent people. This can also be important as knowing the intent of the conflict, rather than one task, is what sets conflict resolution apart from task resolution. If you're dealing with the goal being "swing my sword" you're on a task. If you're dealing with the goal being "kill him" then you're on conflict.
Second, knowing what it is that you're trying to accomplish gives clear ideas for what happens on different levels of success and failure. If the jedi's goal is "calm everyone down and get them to work with me" then a major success or failure has a different result than if his goal was "make them all flee the area" or "I want to be sure the children get off first."
Finally, asking them what they want to accomplish rather than what they do lets the players have more stake in setting up the conflicts. If the jedi suddenly finds himself in a situation and is just reacting to the immediate task at hand, it gives the player less narrative control than if he can help set the nature of the conflict by suggesting his goal rather than his action.
Quote1. The Wraith takes on the 3 small pirate ships that are strafing the freighter's sole defence turret.
You're ideas are pretty good. Trust the force young jedi. ;)
As for this particular:
QuoteShould the turret be a side in itself? Should the Wraith be one side with one AP total but both players (mechanic/gunner and pilot) get to make actions, or should one player just augment the other? I'm not too clear on how to best do this.
The best way to do this is going to be partly determined by what the characters do and what their goals and intentions are. If they're all about getting out of Dodge, then the pilot may be the main character augmented by the gunner and the mechanic. If they're all about blasting down the wraiths then it may be the gunner as the main character, augmented by the other two. If they're about a big extended fight with lots of flying, shooting, and fixing damage on the go then it could be all three of them working together. You could give them their own AP pool, and when they're out they're taken out (the gun gets hit, the flight controls fail, the mechanic hits his head and goes unconscious or runs out of parts...) and then the others have to deal with everything (leading to the rest of the fight being all shooting, or all flying, etc). You could make them work from a joint AP pool to represent their teamwork and the fact that if all of them don't do well they're boned.
It's all about what you, and the players, are wanting to do.
QuoteAlso, this running space battle will escalate as the two larger pirate ships get involved and try to perfrom their own actions. Is it OK to do this as a separate contest / series of contests later on, or should the whole sequence be one big extended contest?
This, once again, will depend. You also need to be careful about pre-planning like this. You never know what your players will do -- I've had times where I planned something like this only to have the players tell me their goal was just to get out now now now, do the equivelant of blowing their turrent and then hitting the hyperdrive button, and spending all their AP on one bid. Really, how do you have the others become involved later in the contest if there is no later in the contest?
If you want to be sure they're part of the contest, then either make them their own side from the start, or simply add them in to the "big enemy" pool of AP. Then for the first rounds of the contest, simply have them do petty actions like "We watch and wait for an opportunity for 1 AP."
Quote2. The jedi and the hacker are trying to calm down the mob. There are various related incidents stored up here.
First, you need to know exactly what the players goals are. If they start with "calm down the mob", then that's a good first conflict. If, otoh, they start with "rescue the children and leave the others to their own idiocy" that's a very different contest with a very different set of results, as is "get everyone safely onto the lifeboats". Especially as the latter changes the whole scale of the operations.
(My gut tells me, BTW, that I would have the easiest time doing the last example as an extended contest, and the others as a simple constest with more simple contests likely to follow -- they're calm, now we get them on their boats, now we overcome the damage to the launching system to launch them safely, etc. In one case the players have small, discrete goals that chain together. In the other they have one big goal that can easily be broken into multiple actions and segments, and for my brain that's just easier to run as an extended contest.)
And in either case, how they go about it can change the results a lot. The jedi jumping onto a podium and giving a speech is going to lead to a different set of possible results than if he starts using mind-warp on the leaders of the mob to get everyone to sheep-walk into their designated life-pod.
Yeah, not doing the extended contest was definitely a good thing. For one thing, I'd say definitely follow people's advice and make a "dry run" before you use an extended contest in a dramatic situation in the game. My first attempt fell super-flat, all it did was give us some practice with the mechanics and a feel for what to use (and not use) extended contests with. For another, if the player who'd have had most of the spotlight in the contest isn't there, there's no point in running it that way.
Quote from: sovietI came up with a big list of cool actions/obstacles and what sort of AP bids they would be, and I was really psyched to try them out.
How a contest is framed is largely up to the players and their goals, and what happens during an extended contest even more so. You'd likely not have been able to use much of your list of obstacles even if you'd run the contest as extended. Here's why. Did you have a cool obstacle on your list for the Jedi giving Enigmatic Advice? And for every single other thing the players decided to do? I suspect not. You can't really prepare for every eventuality. The good news in HQ is, you don't have to. You can afford to improvise (and you should because the spotlight should be on the PCs and their cool, if not necessarily successful actions). Target numbers and bids are easy to determine, you don't have to think them all out beforehand.
There's other stuff that's much more useful to prepare than lists of details IMO, I'll get to that in a moment.
QuoteProblem number one was that the player of the mechanic character, who would have been the driving force behind the whole scene, had to cancel at the last minute.
Next time, consider having the character of the absent player fall mysteriously ill, be trapped in a defective hatch or something, and let the other players work out whether to try and rescue the character, or go ahead and attempt repairs without his help, or what. In D&D unforeseen player absences can throw a session. In HQ, the system is easy enough to use to adapt to a new situation on the spot.
(If they go for rescuing him, the players need to know right away that the character will be unconscious or they will be frustrated if they manage to get at him and he still can't help them do the repairs.)
QuoteThis went OK - the Jedi used his Offer Enigmatic Advice ability (though I made him come up with an actual phrase to say) to augment the mechanic, the pilot character used his relationship to the ship to show the mechanic all the quirks and modifications, the hacker used the fixed central computer to run diagnostics, etc.
See, without you NPCing the mechanic, the other players would have had to get together, pool resources and work out a course of action to do the job on their own, or rescue the mechanic first and then deal with the mob without having repaired the drive. Cool, no?
And imagine... If the players had tried to do the job without the mechanic, they would likely have *gasp* failed at it! In which case they'd be stranded in the place with a ship that still wouldn't fly and might be in a worse condition than before – so you needed to have cool developments prepared in case that happened.
This is the kind of prep that you need in HQ that you don't need in D&D: cool things to happen if characters fail.
(Does the mob contain anyone with whom a PC has a relationship? And are you using Relationship Maps by the way? Both can be very useful to break a faceless mob of mooks up into a multi-dimensional conflict with which the players can engage.)
QuoteAt the end of the session the Jedi character was trying to calm down an angry mob that was trying to stampede the lifepods, which ended in him taking a swing at one of them. I ran this as a simple contest (assuming he would win TBH) and he rolled very poorly and got a major defeat. I had the rioter KO him with a feint and a headbutt.
Ow. Two points here. One, I'm slightly confused, possibly because I've never played SW... Isn't the point of being a Jedi be kind of, um, invincible in a one-on-one against a single mook? or perhaps SW games don't model the concepts from the films?
And two, only partly related to the above, how did the PC's TN and a mook's resistance TN get to be so close that a major defeat was possible? More specifically, how did you frame the contest, what abilities did the player use and what did you base the resistance TN on?
The player's goal here was "Stop angry mob from stampeding lifepods", yes? Or perhaps "Calm down angry mob"? Either could work depending on what the player stated he wanted the character to achieve in this conflict. Or did you frame the contest as "take swing at that loudmouthed mook over there?" That wouldn't be so good because it's task resolution thinking, not conflict resolution. Which may have led into you narrating that humiliating KO when really what the player wanted was to step in front of a mob and subdue them, right? (He might still have spectacularly failed at that of course; but the way you narrated the outcome, the PC didn't even get to try what he really intended.)
QuoteAt this point the session really fell down - everyone was so used to D&D style play that they were really confused as to how this came about.
How do you mean, they were confused? It seems to me that the KO outcome is utterly and frustratingly precisely what might have happened in this scene in a D&D game. PC tries to talk to mob, mob screams and advances, initiative is rolled, PC rolls badly and gets KOed in the first round.
QuoteIn general think I need to focus on fewer contests but make them count for more. Maybe I even need to pause for a second in play and scribble out a 'conflict table' that tells me what different levels of victory and defeat might mean?
As efvereyone has said already, do contests only when the PC's failure would lead to interesting stuff; or when a player asks for one (which will happen only when a player wants spotlight on a moment, which means they find the conflict interesting). Especially when a D&D-trained player consults their char sheet and explains something they'd like to attempt that you feel neither the player nor you would care to see in detail on a wide screen, simply narrate how they look cool succeeding at it and move on. D&D players like that. They not only get to do things without rolling, they also look cool doing them. That's new!
You'll have them speed up in your wake in no time at all, and come up with bigger and more interesting things to attempt and goals to state. "I step in front of that mob and stop them from getting to the lifepods," instead of "I draw my light sabre and light it up. I can do more? Ok, then I take a swing at him."
If a player keeps announcing actions, ask, "What you you want the character to achieve here? Assuming he wins, what should the victory be?" Make suggestions. "Light sabre, huh? Ok, everybody knows what that is. So you're trying to bring them to follow your orders on your authority as a Jedi?" The player may of course say, "No. I want them to realise that if they don't fall back, all those in front will be sliced in half in a single swing," or something. In which case the goal is "keep mob away from lifepod", rather than "get them to follow my orders".
And I'd say really,
really stay away from preparing lists of consequences. You're gonna squeeze the life out of the game if you use pregenerated lists. Have the page with the little Consequences table open and work from that. When you're not sure, use the old wander-off-to-bathroom/fridge/smoke-to-think stunt. If still undecided, read the description of Hurt, Impairment or whatever out and work with the player; make a suggestion, get their input, that sort of thing. Consequences are much more about what is cool and interesting in a scene than application of cut-and-dried results - and it's not generally a good idea to force the game into places where a scene has to play out the way you had planned. Much better to work out consequences on the spot, and to let players in on the process.
QuoteI would like to go for more 'narrated' simple contests where there is a back and forth of described actions and the roll happens at the very end, but can see this being a step too far out of the comfort zone for my D&D-centric players.
My experience with D&Ders is that they get this bit just fine – as long as you make sure that you're not drawing out contests artificially. As you've said, you need fewer contests in the game than in D&D (fewer by far), and some contests that you will have will be narrated in one sentence from each side – but that is fine.
Only a very few contests will be interesting enough for people to go back and forth narrating stuff, and again, even in those cases if you insist on all augments being played out in detail you'll kill the fun. You want to focus on the dramatic bits that make everyone at the table go Wow (or Whoah, depending...). Like the Jedi repairing a hyperdrive by giving Enigmatic Advice. In a case like that, asking the player to think up an enigmatic line like you did is cool because everyone will enjoy that a lot. Having the hacker play out each of his augments for fixing the computer problems, on the other hand, is likely to send everyone at the table (including him and you) to sleep.
For your planned contests I'd like to know more detail.
QuoteThe Wraith takes on the 3 small pirate ships that are strafing the freighter's sole defence turret.
Have the players already decided that this is what they will do? What is their stated goal?
QuoteAlso, this running space battle will escalate as the two larger pirate ships get involved and try to perfrom their own actions.
Hm. Are the larger pirate ships already there? In that case, why aren't they in the conflict, in other words why hasn't any player yet said what their character means to do about the larger ships?
What kind of input do the players get to give here? Are you just planning to throw wave after wave of pirate ships at them? If so, for what purpose, and why can't they be let in on the whole plan right from the start so they can be proactive about dealing with it?
What you write here sounds like D&D thinking to me. Apologies if I'm wrong, just trying to get clarification.
QuoteThe jedi and the hacker are trying to calm down the mob. Should this be a single extended contest beginning with attempts at persuasion and escalating into violence / high AP bids, or should I do a 'calm down the mob' contest, and if it fails do a 'force back the mob' contest, and if it fails do a 'save the alien child from being trampled' contest?
Your first idea of having one contest is better because it is oriented towards conflict resolution. The second idea breaks things up into individual tasks. You don't need a separate "force mob back" contest nor a "save child" contest. Either could be part of the outcome you will be narrating, and you also need to narrate both the advancing mob and the child in danger as part of the setup, so the players can adjust their goals and use augments appropriate to the situation.
Example: let's assume for a moment that one of the PCs has Stand My Ground and the other Defend the Innocent. If the players are aware of the mob physically advancing and the child about to be trampled, they can use these abilities to augment, so you need to include the description in the setup. (Works the other way round, too: to make a situation more dramatic, include details that trigger things on char sheets – the more the better.) Now here's the thing. Once you narrate those details, for all you know the player with Stand My Ground may state that he "Will not let the mob get past me to life pods" and the other that he "will dive in and save that child" – thereby abandoning the "main" conflict? oh yes! That's the beauty of it and the reason why detailed prep of actions and obstacles is bound to fall flat. The better you get at setting up a conflict, the more the players get to make their own choices and the more you simply go and respond.
So what happens? Let's say the child is saved but the Stand-My-Ground player gets trampled by the mob. So now the mob gets to the life pods and the PCs are now without a means of leaving the ship and have a lone, scared alien child with strange food requirements on their hands. Fun, no? (If not, then of course you shouldn't have set up the conflict like this in the first place.)
I'd suggest to run this conflict as a simple contest btw, partly because you say that you and your group are struggling with D&D habits. In my experience simple contests are worlds better for kicking free of D&D habits than extended ones because you can't escape into round-by-round thinking.
If you decide to run this as an extended contest, one more thought: your concept of "escalating" assumes that you know what actions the players will take and where the contest will go. It also assumes that once "escalated" into violence there can't be a way back. Far from true in HQ.
QuoteIf I do it as an extended contest I can cut between the rioters and the space battle outside, with shot down enemy fighters and hull impacts making a difference to the crowd's mood.
Could be very stylish, yes. Although you can still cut back and forth a couple of times if you do simple contests only. And if you decide to run two sets of extended contests with the two affecting each other, beware the nervous breakdown. That's going to be seriously hard work, so do it only if you're confident that you have enough practice running extended contests and that you'll be able to keep the pace and tension high for everyone involved.
Quote from: StalkingBlue
How a contest is framed is largely up to the players and their goals, and what happens during an extended contest even more so. You'd likely not have been able to use much of your list of obstacles even if you'd run the contest as extended. Here's why. Did you have a cool obstacle on your list for the Jedi giving Enigmatic Advice? And for every single other thing the players decided to do? I suspect not. You can't really prepare for every eventuality. The good news in HQ is, you don't have to. You can afford to improvise (and you should because the spotlight should be on the PCs and their cool, if not necessarily successful actions). Target numbers and bids are easy to determine, you don't have to think them all out beforehand.
I haven't really had any difficulties with guessing target numbers, but never having even seen an extended contest before I was trying to be as prepped as possible. Particularly because of how unusual a scene it was to play out (Round by Round mechanical engineering? You don't do that in D&D!), I just thought up some technobabble and obstacles in advance so that I could concentrate on helping my players understand what was going on in a rules sense.
Quote from: StalkingBlue
(Does the mob contain anyone with whom a PC has a relationship? And are you using Relationship Maps by the way? Both can be very useful to break a faceless mob of mooks up into a multi-dimensional conflict with which the players can engage.)
I'm not using relationship maps, no, because I'm not too sure what they are really. Behind the mob are two of the hacker's followers (his sister the medic, and his bodyguard), and within the mob is a bigoted thug the jedi had an earlier non-violent bar-room confrontation with. I guess I could make him the ringleader here to make it all a bit more focussed.
Quote from: StalkingBlue
QuoteAt the end of the session the Jedi character was trying to calm down an angry mob that was trying to stampede the lifepods, which ended in him taking a swing at one of them. I ran this as a simple contest (assuming he would win TBH) and he rolled very poorly and got a major defeat. I had the rioter KO him with a feint and a headbutt.
Ow. Two points here. One, I'm slightly confused, possibly because I've never played SW... Isn't the point of being a Jedi be kind of, um, invincible in a one-on-one against a single mook? or perhaps SW games don't model the concepts from the films?
And two, only partly related to the above, how did the PC's TN and a mook's resistance TN get to be so close that a major defeat was possible? More specifically, how did you frame the contest, what abilities did the player use and what did you base the resistance TN on?
OK. It started out as trying to calm the mob and drive them back, and I said the thug from the bar was in there. The player then said he would take a swing at him (unarmed combat 17, couple augments, versus Thug 15 augmented with Fight Dirty 15). The dice came up Major Defeat, and everyone kind of went 'Yikes!' I felt under a lot of pressure to 'make it count' so (wrongly) I KO'ed him, thereby taking him out of the scene.
Quote from: StalkingBlue
The player's goal here was "Stop angry mob from stampeding lifepods", yes? Or perhaps "Calm down angry mob"? Either could work depending on what the player stated he wanted the character to achieve in this conflict. Or did you frame the contest as "take swing at that loudmouthed mook over there?" That wouldn't be so good because it's task resolution thinking, not conflict resolution. Which may have led into you narrating that humiliating KO when really what the player wanted was to step in front of a mob and subdue them, right? (He might still have spectacularly failed at that of course; but the way you narrated the outcome, the PC didn't even get to try what he really intended.)
I was never fully in control of this game session really, and wasn't framing my conflicts properly at all. I think by the end we were just rolling dice and I was filling in the descriptive blanks. Stating goals kind of went out the window. This is what I need to concentrate on in my next session, framing contests and interpreting defeats so they are interesting.
Quote from: StalkingBlue
QuoteAt this point the session really fell down - everyone was so used to D&D style play that they were really confused as to how this came about.
How do you mean, they were confused? It seems to me that the KO outcome is utterly and frustratingly precisely what might have happened in this scene in a D&D game. PC tries to talk to mob, mob screams and advances, initiative is rolled, PC rolls badly and gets KOed in the first round.
Well they were confused because I hadn't narrated it very well, with the back and forth of augments and actions like I should have. We just kind of rolled it and then the reaction was 'My swing missed so I'm knocked out?'. I probably should have done it as an extended contest just for the practice.
Quote from: StalkingBlue
Especially when a D&D-trained player consults their char sheet and explains something they'd like to attempt that you feel neither the player nor you would care to see in detail on a wide screen, simply narrate how they look cool succeeding at it and move on. D&D players like that. They not only get to do things without rolling, they also look cool doing them. That's new!
Definitely. I think in the back of my mind (and probably theirs too) there's a voice saying 'You didn't earn it 'cause you didn't roll!'
Quote from: StalkingBlueFor your planned contests I'd like to know more detail.
QuoteThe Wraith takes on the 3 small pirate ships that are strafing the freighter's sole defence turret.
Have the players already decided that this is what they will do? What is their stated goal?
Yeah, this is what they said. They prepped for launch and they were going to fly out and take them out. They haven't stated a goal as such - we are definitely struggling with adopting this line of thinking. I've been trying to prompt them but it's not been easy.
Quote from: StalkingBlue
QuoteAlso, this running space battle will escalate as the two larger pirate ships get involved and try to perfrom their own actions.
Hm. Are the larger pirate ships already there? In that case, why aren't they in the conflict, in other words why hasn't any player yet said what their character means to do about the larger ships?
What kind of input do the players get to give here? Are you just planning to throw wave after wave of pirate ships at them? If so, for what purpose, and why can't they be let in on the whole plan right from the start so they can be proactive about dealing with it?
What you write here sounds like D&D thinking to me. Apologies if I'm wrong, just trying to get clarification.
OK. They are on a freighter heading towards a planet called Kursk. They've just come out of hyperspace near an 'anomaly' called the Pericles Rift and have been attacked by pirates. There are 3 pirate fighters and 2 larger pirate raiders. The raiders have been lurking around in the freighter's blindspot taking potshots at the engine with their Ion cannons, and now the fighters are strafing the defence turret. My intention for the raiders is that, when the coast is clear, they will come out, fire boarding pods, and then strafe the ship. One of my players mentioned they were shepherding the freighter towards the rift, which seems like a good idea for me to steal. Any boarding pods that get through could then become the problem of the hacker and the jedi.
Quote from: StalkingBlue
beware the nervous breakdown.
I can assure you, this is happening already!
thanks
soviet
The suggestion that in advance you prep for the failures, not the rest of it, I think is just perfect. Kerstin's advice gave me a thought. Just a suggestion - the whole combat with the ships thing...you could have a bash at not rolling for it all, if only to achieve a cathartic moment where you all see the power of the system. I'd not plan it this way in advance, but say the player of the pilot isn't able to make this session?
Also...
QuoteI'm not using relationship maps, no, because I'm not too sure what they are really. Behind the mob are two of the hacker's followers (his sister the medic, and his bodyguard), and within the mob is a bigoted thug the jedi had an earlier non-violent bar-room confrontation with. I guess I could make him the ringleader here to make it all a bit more focussed.
...or...you could have the bigoted thug go down under the crowd right in front of the Jedi's eyes.
I think these are some very difficult trick to learn, especially if one has a background in most rpg's already. Whatever I at least say I do so from a position of being halfway there. Try not to sweat it too much, don't forget your supposed to have fun too. It does sound like a very enjoyable game.
Sam.
Quote from: Mandacaru...or...you could have the bigoted thug go down under the crowd right in front of the Jedi's eyes.
Cool. So does the Jedi swallow personal affront and help the guy?
Quote from: sovietI'm not using relationship maps, no, because I'm not too sure what they are really.
Relationship Maps are described in Ron Edwards's Sorcerer and Soul. To outline very briefly:
1. You create a set of NPCs and relate them in certain ways (marriage, sexual relationships, kinship, obligation). The way this is commonly represented is by placing bubbles with NPC names in them on a page and linking them with lines (hence the name "map", it looks a bit like a mind map).
2. You give your NPCs conflicting goals and wants, so once the PCs start interacting with any of the NPCs on the map, they will set the map in motion.
3. You get PCs to interact with the map by making your NPCs proactive. This is important and one of the huge differences to D&D conventions. As someone said somewhere here recently, in D&D NPCs are limited to either of two roles: obstacle or wallpaper. When you use an r-map, NPCs will come to the PCs and try to enlist them in their own causes – and it's not going to be an adventure hook, it's going to be a genuine choice. Who do I side with here? Do I try and stay out of it all (and risk getting them all incensed at me for it)? Can I maybe take advantage of more than one side?
Note that you won't be doing steps 1-3 all in that order, you'll be going back and forth between them as you decide on connections, goals, possible benefits for PCs etc.
Too abstract? Let me play around a bit and give you an example, just with the NPCs you mentioned.
You have:
- Bigoted thug
- Mob leader
- Pirate captain
- Alien child
I'll make the mob ringleader the pirate captain's little brother, who has always dreamt of being a big fish of some kind, but never went beyond small-fry troublemaker.
The bigoted thug has care of the alien child, the sole survivor of an alien gang family. He saved her from their ship as it was breaking up and took her along to coax/scare information out of her about where her family's treasure trove is. Only she doesn't appear to speak any language the thug knows, or maybe she just doesn't speak. As long as she hasn't spoken, she's precious to him...
See how just these two connections already bring the NPCs to life and help you decide on their actions?
The mob leader can step forward and offer to help the Jedi calm the mob. All he asks for is to be appointed "evacuation manager". (He wants recognition from the Jedi and a position of power... or perhaps he's just manoeuvring to betray the PCs later and deliver the ship into his big brother's hands? You don't even have to decide that yet.)
The thug can hurtle himself into the fray to save the child, calling frantically for the help of the hacker, who's standing closest but is just now busy placing an intricate code lock on the escape hatches to make sure no pods are triggered in the stampede.
If the child is saved, cool. Maybe now one of the escape hatches opens, a new vulnerable spot for the pirates to attack. If the child is trampled, also cool. Only don't kill her off, just have her be in bad state. The player will likely have the medic attend to her – voilá, further complications in the making.
Now all this is just an example, cooked up on the spur from the NPCs you were talking about. You'll have much better ideas than I could obviously, it's your game. (You might consider posting your ideas if you want to try this out. I've had the most wonderful advice from people here on this sort of thing.)
QuoteIt started out as trying to calm the mob and drive them back, and I said the thug from the bar was in there. The player then said he would take a swing at him (unarmed combat 17, couple augments, versus Thug 15 augmented with Fight Dirty 15).
Did the player abandon the "calm-the-mob" goal just to hit the thug? Or was he trying to hit the thug as part of intimidating the mob? I'd assume that it was the second, because abandoning a heroic goal to go into a fistfight over a personal matter doesn't seem very Jedi-ish to me, and also because "I hit that one" is the usual way to proceed when you're trying to calm down a mob... when you've playing D&D.
If the goal was still "calm-the-mob", then at a minimum the PC needed all his augments for calming the mob – say, Intimidating Presence, Calming Aura, Exert Authority or whatever else a Jedi has. Also any relationships to people in the mob or aboard the ship – he's trying to save the people and keep the ship safe, isn't he?
I'd also let the player use their best "mob-calming" ability as the primary ability, with Unarmed Combat as an augment.
On the other side the thug might have had extra augments for being backed up by a screaming mob (if you want him to be the mob ringleader, then he definitely gets community support from the rest of the mob), for being terrified of the pirate attack and desperate to leave the ship, or something.
Am I saying that the PC ought to have won this one? Not at all. In fact it sounds rather likely that a stampeding mob could be too much to handle for one lone Jedi and his hacker friend. Not in the sense that they get beaten about the head, but in the sense that at least some people might get past them and screw with the escape pods or escape hatches, potentially causing big additional trouble for the ship.
Or maybe not. Depending on how many augments come into play, where the dice fall, and whether a HP is spent.
QuoteI was never fully in control of this game session really, and wasn't framing my conflicts properly at all. I think by the end we were just rolling dice and I was filling in the descriptive blanks. Stating goals kind of went out the window. This is what I need to concentrate on in my next session, framing contests and interpreting defeats so they are interesting.
Hey, some days are better than others. :-) You're getting there, it just takes practice – and for a group used to D&D-isms in play, some major reorientation on the kind of input that everyone can and should give.
And honestly, get input from your players. This isn't a lone-GM-vs-pack-of-players game like D&D. Ask for ideas. If you get any, tell the players how much you like the idea and use it if at all possible. When you narrate an outcome, consider making it clear that you are only making suggestions. (I've heard one narrator use "probably" almost constantly.)
QuoteWell they were confused because I hadn't narrated it very well, with the back and forth of augments and actions like I should have. We just kind of rolled it and then the reaction was 'My swing missed so I'm knocked out?'.
You don't have to narrate a back and forth of augments in every contest. It really depends on how interesting the conflict is and what the player and you as narrator come up with to entertain people. If it's just a fistfight, a simple exchange of blows might be all that's being narrated – or if they are excited about the fight or about the reason for it, people will start out screaming insults, going graphic in narrating finger-stab to eye or whatnot.
I kinda suspect that the confusion may have come about because between the mob turning up and the Jedi being knocked out, the conflict got narrowed down from what was really supposed to be happening (Jedi facing off mob) to a single task (Jedi boxing thug). In which case the confusion would be a good sign actually. Because it means that the players were still on board with the overall conflict.
QuoteI think in the back of my mind (and probably theirs too) there's a voice saying 'You didn't earn it 'cause you didn't roll!'
Not so. In this mode of play, a player earns the right to look cool
by creating and playing a player character.
(I can't believe I'm writing this. Not so long since people here were telling me the exact same thing, much to my bewilderment...)
QuoteThey prepped for launch and they were going to fly out and take them out. They haven't stated a goal as such - we are definitely struggling with adopting this line of thinking. I've been trying to prompt them but it's not been easy.
Here's the thing. As things stand you don't have enough info to decide on how to run the contest. You need to know the goal first. No worries though, you can do goals for everyone right at the beginning of next session, and work from there. Defining the goals will give you important pointers on what the contest should look like, because it's the goal that will enable the players to apply all the appropriate augments for their characters.
And I agree with Sam: It might be good idea to keep die rolls to a minimum. If you are struggling with defining goals and kicking out of task-resolution thinking, simple contests are the way to go. Extended contests have a way of reinforcing D&D habits of play simply because of their seeming "round-by-round" structure, in my experience. (They are really a quite different animal, but it takes time to work that out.)
QuoteThey are on a freighter heading towards a planet called Kursk. They've just come out of hyperspace near an 'anomaly' called the Pericles Rift and have been attacked by pirates. There are 3 pirate fighters and 2 larger pirate raiders. The raiders have been lurking around in the freighter's blindspot taking potshots at the engine with their Ion cannons, and now the fighters are strafing the defence turret. My intention for the raiders is that, when the coast is clear, they will come out, fire boarding pods, and then strafe the ship. One of my players mentioned they were shepherding the freighter towards the rift, which seems like a good idea for me to steal. Any boarding pods that get through could then become the problem of the hacker and the jedi.
Cool setup. See, you are good at defining goals, you have defined them for your NPCs already:
- Raiders: shepherd ship towards (and into?) Rift;
- Fighters: take out defence turret;
- Raiders: launch boarding pods and board ship;
- Boarders: overcome resistance and take control of ship.
(Note that I'm breaking the overall conflict up into sub-conflicts in a rather arbitrary manner and just following your description, there's many ways you could do this.)
Now all you need at the start of next session to do is help the players define their own goals.
Those could be purely reactive goals, such as:
- prevent ship from being forced into Rift;
- prevent fighters from taking out defence turret (note that I don't state "take out fighters" as the goal);
- prevent boarding pods from docking on;
- fight boarders back (again, not "kill raiders").
In addition the players will hopefully also come up with proactive goals, ideas of their own. Dunno, perhaps something like...
- Discourage attack by pretending they have a disease aboard.
- Surrender the ship to lure everyone on board, then strike back from hiding.
Or whatever.
And on a side note: If you decide to include some more complex NPCs as I've explained above, you can give the players even more ideas.
E.g. perhaps someone knows the pirates' vulnerable spot, but he is being sought for a crime and wants to be let off as a condition for telling the player heroes what the vulnerability is. This NPC would have to come walking up to a PC when things look appropriately grim, give them some bit of useful information (to give him cred) and then offer more if the Jedi promises to help him to be let off by the prosecutors.
(Expect D&D players to shy away from that sort of deal at first, because they are used to stuff like this turning out to be a sham or a trap.)
QuoteQuote from: StalkingBlue
beware the nervous breakdown.
I can assure you, this is happening already!
Hey, don't worry! Note the context of my quote – what I meant was that you'll have an easier time if you stay away from extended contests for most, or all, of this. The setup is dramatic and complicated enough as it is, I suspect it will run just fine with simple contests only. You're doing cool stuff here and you'll have fun.
...and what Kerstin said (all good, but then that's Londoners for you) brings us back to a central point: once the conflict is resolved, it stays resolved. No last swings from the ground, no desperate attempts to escape. (The get-out there is spending HP of course.)
As long as you and the players have this in the forefront of your mind as you get towards rolling the dice (preferably with at least a vague idea of what failure means), then you are making for a good, dramatic contest and can steer away from the tit-for-tat stuff.
Sam.
OK; we played again last week and this is what happened...
I'd been really nervous building up to this session because of how badly I'd thought the last session had gone. I was quite concerned that another bad session might kill off any enthusiasm for 'this new-fangled game that isn't dnd'. Interestingly, the player of the hacker character told me that he'd enjoyed last session, and I got that impression from the jedi's player as well, so the BAD SESSION feeling I'd got last time may not have been quite as true as I'd thought it was.
I also had a bit of a chat with my players about the last session and explained a bit about interesting defeats, stating goals not tasks, and tried to encourage them to contribute to the narration. In fact, with almost every contest / exchange I did this session, I had a quick brainstorm with the players beforehand where we sketched out some possible victories and defeats. I think they were a bit bemused at first but they took to it quite well after some prompting. I'm trying to get them to narrate each others failures so they can really stitch each other up and I can sit back and enjoy it!
In play I was intercutting between these two threads:
The Riot
After a quick recap we get into the rioting crowd 'replay'. This went OK, but I couldn't quite seem to translate the vague but cool scene I had in my head into something fleshed out enough for play. The players also seemed a little short of inspiration here so rather than stretch things out into an extended contest we just did it as a simple contest so we could move on. So, the Jedi appealed for calm, augmented by the hacker who used his Logical and Spout Technical Jargon to feed them some technobabble about how it was much safer in the armoured freighter than in those vulnerable little escape pods. Despite all this they lost, so the crowd kind of surged and went for the pods anyway.
We did a couple more simple contests later on as the jedi rescued an alien child from being trampled (but is now stuck with her as he can't find any matching alien parents), and the hacker climbed up on a table and fired into the air to try and scare the crowd into submission. Yeah, a repeated attempt essentially, but it seemed to work well enough in the scene so we did it anyway. He failed despite a fairly low resistance, so the pods started launching. He also ducked a thrown bottle and recognised the culprit as the xenoarchaeologist he'd spoken to earlier (potentially interesting confrontation later).
Later, as the battle outside reached its peak, the power started to drain and the pods stopped being able to launch. The hacker realised the pirates had hacked into the ships computer and were going to shut down the shields next. He decided to oppose that so we did it as an extended contest. I started to become concerned about 'nesting' contests so I bid high to get a decisive result quickly; the PC got a very good success so it was all over in one round. We interpreted this as the PC now having access to the pirate ships computer. Meanwhile the jedi took advantage of the power loss in the pods to Force suggestion an end to the riot (finally!).
The Space Battle
I decided to do the space combat as a single extended contest with 2 sides - the Eisenstein (objective: escape from the pirates and get to an inhabited sector) and the Pirates (objective: disable and capture the Eisenstein). The pirates consisted of two separate raiders and one 'horde' of 3 fighters. I figured out the APs of both sides and ran a single round of the contest with low bids to set the scene and help explain the system to them. The PCs would then enter the contest as a 3rd side depending on what they wanted to do.
Cue the players. To try and be as transparent as possible with the system I gave them a list of all the stats and abilities of the pirate ships and the Eisenstein (both players have Identify Ship etc and come from this sector so I hand-waved any dice roll). They thought for a bit and said their objective was to try and drive off the raiders and capture one of their ships if possible.
They had quite a good idea for a first action where they managed to launch a deserted shuttle as a decoy, and transmitted a Force suggestion that some important (ie valuable!) potential hostage was escaping on it. I thought this was cool but would mess up their APs bigtime, so rather than punish them for their idea I did it as an out of sequence Simple Contest. They got a Major Victory, so I ruled that the wing of pirate fighters are out of the fight for a few rounds as they pursue their new quarry .
Their first proper action was to drift behind the raiders all stealthed up and, augmented by the pilot, the gunner would fire his Ion Cannons at one of them. We calculated APs for each player (based off one player's piloting skills and the other player's gunnery skills) and then pooled them into one total. I think they quite liked this enforced teamwork thing; they moved over to sit next to each other and started plotting together whenever the scene switched. They bid 20 AP, we discussed possible failure / AP loss consequences (ie they could drift too close, alert the raiders too soon, and get shot up), and they got a 2x transfer. I ruled they took out one ship and the other ship got frazzled by the EMP backwash and is now vulnerable.
Calculating the APs and explaining the system has taken a while, however, and my other players (the jedi and the hacker) were starting to look a bit left out. I had been intercutting between the riot and the space battle but the space stuff was taking up more time, so I gave the jedi and hacker players control of the Eisenstein. They loved this, and they were soon plotting and conspiring just like the other two. They decided to try and shake the remaining raider out of their blind spot and put it out in the open, which I treated as a variable augment (possible failure: they lose ground and the raider is now out of sight). They succeeded and got a +4 to next round's shooting.
The remaining Raider made a low bid and moved up towards the front of the ship ready to fire a boarding pod, opposed by the PC pilot's dogfighting skill as he is right on his tail. Then the Eisenstein's defence turret took its shot, augmented from last round, and whiffed big time. I interpreted the AP transfer as the shot going wild and forcing the Wraith to take evasive action, so the raider could get safely into position to fire its boarding pod. Then the PC hacker used his access to the pirate ships computer to disable its engines, and the other PCs swooped in to finish it off with an EM pulse from their Ion Cannons.
So in conclusion, this was a really good session and I think everyone enjoyed it. The players plan went more or less perfectly, partly because they spent a couple of HP each on bumps, so the only thing that went wrong from my point of view was everything was over so quickly! The big space battle was basically over in just two rounds, so I never got the opportunity to use some of the cool stuff I had prepped. Still, we have plenty of interesting things to explore next session: What will the jedi do with the (secretly force sensitive) alien orphan? What will he do when he realises that the bigot from session 2 is trapped in one of the unlaunched escape pods... and only he knows about it? What will the hacker do about the man who threw a bottle at him in the riot? What will the pilot and gunner do with their captured pirates? What will the other pirates do when they return to the scene? And will the players take the time to rescue the escaped rioters when more pirates are on the way? Without really planning it we seem to have ended up with some interesting bangs here.
Despite my doubts beforehand, the Extended Contest rules actually worked very well in practice. Although this session was dominated by a battle just like it would have been with dnd, HQ really made it work. I found the AP gains, losses and transfers were a great spur to everyone's imaginations and we were riffing off each other to create an exciting, dynamic scene rather than the blank dice rolling we sometimes get in dnd. And I know that with more practice these scenes will get much better and much quicker, as well. In all, I think we really broke through a barrier here; everything certainly 'clicked' into place for me and I'm now looking forward to (rather than partly dreading) the next session.
Thanks very much to everyone who contributed to this thread!
soviet