Some Simulationism Concerns

[Mike Holmes]

This thread was originated from comments made here: http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=19987.15

This is an usefull summary on your thinking on the so-called GNS model (I admit I did not have the nerve to read seriously the articles hosted in the Forge about it). From what you say, I probably have a simulationist bent on roleplaying gaming,

Well, perhaps you do have a sim bent, but my definition, it must be noted, of Simulationism was really bad, a ham-handed attempt to shorthand what is a very complex concept (and a contentious one to boot). For example, it makes it seem like players in gamism and narrativism don't put any emphasis on having their character do realistic things. Which is completely incorrect. So beware using that shorthand as definitional. If you want to really understand these concepts, then you'll have to do more reading, starting with the articles - which it should be noted are outdated now - and then delving into the GNS forum.

Most importantly, it should be noted that the theory is really now in a "post-GNS" state. Which is not to say that GNS is invalid, but simply that good understanding comes more with getting a bigger picture. My use of GNS here, in fact, is probably more harmful than good in some ways.

...as I am interested in "immersion" in virtual worlds, or living under the skin of someone else. This would be bad news, since I have the intention of using HQ extensively in the future.

Lot's of trouble here, too. First, "immersion" is a tough topic as it can mean a lot of things to different people. Many people who play narrativism claim to be "living under the skin of someone else." More problematically, I don't think you should assume that HQ is going to be problematic for you, simply because I say that it's generally problematic for people who play sim. That is, you may find it works just fine for you, as, apparently, it does for Christian.

I think the campaign is rather simulationist according to your defenition since a good deal of it runs on the play and coherent (belieavable) simulation of the reality of this alternative world. But I have the impression that despite your opinion that HQ runs well for narrativist but not simulationist games, the game system would actually help me to run this campaign: Traits and Abilities of the characters would be given to the characters, according to the type of decisions they make and how they behave; and the ability to allow the characters solve contests their way by using their favorite Traits and Abilities would provide reinforcing feedback to further individualize each character.

See, all of this could be more narrativism than sim. Rather, I don't think that it's important to identify the creative agenda. I think you should stick to individual potential problems and such.

Now I took the time to sample your impressive contribution to the Forge, and I noticed that you started your participation claiming you also had a more simulationist approach to gaming. Reading your current ideas it would seem that somewhere along the road you had an epiphany on this subject, as I don't think you inclinations changed that much on the subject, but rather how you rationalize them. Similarly my feeling of having a simulationist approach may stem from a different interpretation of what you call simulationism. Maybe you can give me some clues on what changed in your thinking.

Not sure where you are in reading my stuff right now, but if my own ideas on this stuff were really well crystalized, there would probably be a single point that I could point you at that explained it. There isn't currently.

But I can tell you this - the differences between these sorts of agendas can be dicussed in specific cases in terms of techniques that make play fun or annoying. I think this is where it's best to head off in terms of such a discussion. Alexandre nails it when he says this:

Initially I was a bit doubtfull of this solution, since it might provide a loophole for the characters to win all kinds of contests using their pet Talent.

Good example. Now we can look at why this might be problematic, or how it's problematic.

I have the impression that the problems you cite are more acute for extended contests, as contrary to simple contests you cannot provide a defenitive interpretation from the die roll results, but must somehow say something even though the AP reserve is not depleted and the final result (and thus interpretation) is unknown.

Thanks to Fredrik for pointing you to Brand's article. The problem in question, the larger technique, is, in fact, even more problematic for Simple contests, in some ways. First I'll enumerate the technique that I'm talking about so you understand that better before going on.

The constest is about two snipers which try to take the other out by using their Sharp Shoot Talent. For a simple contest it's easy. If Zaitsev wins, König is pinned, if König wins, Zaitsev bites the bullet.

It's easy, because you've set up an easy example. But your example is too far forward in the process to understand the issue. That is, let's back up in this hypothetical to where the real participants in the game set up this contest, and propose a different hypothetical:

Narrator: Your character, König, becomes aware that my narrator character, Zaitsev, is now hunting him.
Player: Hmm, König decides that Zaitsev likely has the drop on him and panics. Instead of using his Sharp Shoot ability like we did last time, he's going to try to talk König into declaring their ongoing attempts to kill each other a draw.
Narrator: What's your primary ability?
Player: Fast Talk

OK, now as the narrator you have to decide how to frame the contest. There are several options:

• Ignore the bullets flying about as the primary arena of conflict, and focus on the social conflict. Put another way, have Zaitsev defend with a social ability, and have both characters augment with their Sharp Shooting ability to impress each other in the process. In this case, the stakes might be whether or not to move on to new stakes that involve actually getting to harm each other.
• Tell the player that the contest arena is still about shooting primarily by applying an Improv Modification to König's Fast Talk ability. In this case, the stakes for König are that he may end up being shot, and for Zaitsev, he may end up accepting the draw result between them.
• Tell the player that the contest is entirely about shooting, really, and if he does go with trying to talk down König, that you'll apply the "automatic failure" improv modification. This is quite akin to telling the player that this isn't a contest he should attempt (unless he wants his character shot - which actually happens in some cases). There are no stakes here, only a question of what will happen should the player insist on going forward.

Note that, in all of these cases, we don't allow anything to happen that's "unrealistic." That is, if you think that it's unrealistic to have one sniper talk the other down, then you simply use the third option. That said, there are many who would use option 1 or option 2 - it certainly matches film conventions at the very least, and I can probably find some real-life example where it's happened (BTW, no, I haven't seen the movie in question, but it's been highly recommended to me by my WWII buff friends). Alexandre, would avoid option 1, it seems, because that might lead to players always using the same ability to solve every plroblem. Essentially it's allowing a player to decide on the arena of conflict.

This is not unusual, however. If a player says, "My character is going to try to convince the bartender to give him a free drink," it would seem absurd to make this suddenly into a shooting match, correct? On the other hand, if the narrator were feeling cheeky, he might say, "This bartender has had enough with customers asking for free drinks today, goes over the edge, grabs his shotgun from under the bar, and starts opening fire."

Very simply, in HQ it's the narrator who decides these things in the end, but no narrator does this without player feedback. It is, in fact, the narrator's duty (perhaps his only really critical one) to make sure that the contests in question are entertaining for the player.

This is where the agenda comes in. Does the player want the contest to be some sort of challenge for him (the player) to overcome using his character as a tool? Does the player want the contest to be designed based solely (emphasis here, because all of these rely on this logic to some extent) on "What really would happen here?" sort of logic? Or does the player want the contest to be designed based on "What would give me an opportunity to display my character's values most, and thereby move the plot forward?" Players and narrators constantly negotiate for what they need contests to be. Yes, the narrator has final say, but if he's making contests that aren't entertaining, then I don't think anyone would disagree with me that he's doing a bad job?  So he has to consider what the players want. There's no "default" choice here that works well for every group or player.

Alexandre's concern is that players will, if allowed to engineer contests so that they will tend to win more, will always use the same ability. So obviously he doesn't want gamism in his game, or, perhaps, not gamism where the player has such an easy to determine optimal strategy. The thing is that, in HQ, there really is very little strategy to be had. If you're not allowed to affect the arena, if the narrator sets it at his whim, and then requires you to have the character respond to his choice, your only tactic for a simple contest is to ask which of the abilites on your character sheet is going to be highest for this contest, and then ask for every ability to augment, taking as many augments as the narrator is willing to allow.

Nobody plays HQ like that. Rather, when players do play like this, all narrators I've encountered automatically adopt a rule to limit augments. Meaning that the optimal strategy is the same, but that it takes less time to get to the result. Why anyone would play this way as a player is beyond me. There's no challenge in it at all. Rather, what I think happens is that the players try to be proactive in starting conflicts so that they do have some control over the arenas. But even that's a pretty lame form of gamism, and comes down largely to how much the narrator can be convinced of things.

I'm sure that there's somebody somewhere who likes this sort of play, but I think it's probably very rare. I think that my claim that HQ doesn't support gamism is pretty accurate.

What does that leave one with? Well, actually I'm betting that Alexandre's rhetoric is that he wants "What's realisitc." But narrativism demands "What's realistic" as much as simulationsism in terms of how you actually frame the contest. The fact is, however, that HQ's resolution system allows you to frame a bewilderingly wide variety of contests - anything you like, in fact. And there are an infinite number of potentially interesting, realistic, contests. So, largely I find any claim from Alexandre that he might want simulationism to be suspect, because his "what's realistic" comment seems to really be about retreating from gamism (and unrealistic use of characters as pawns).

Put another way, there's no reason one can't simulate a contest of wills between two snipers in an attempt to serve a simulationism agenda. The refusal to do so more often has to do with rejection of a gamism agenda - no matter how realistic the contests are - than a drive for simulationism. This idea is related to the "Beeg Horseshoe" theory, which actually claims that there is no such thing as simulationism.

I don't go that far, myself, and have my own versions of Beeg Horseshoe that say that some players do have a stronger simulationism urge than others based on emphasizing the unique nature of RPGs to be about creating a "real feeling" world (immersion and all that). I've claimed to be one of them to some extent. The only question is to what extent framing contests using dramatic potential as the observable prime motivator from the players becomes problematic in maintaining this particular feeling. That is, like the urge to gamism may feel problematic, does the urge to drama feel problematic in terms of setting up the "Sim feel?"

That's something that each group has to work out by itself. But here's my argument for why drama logic doesn't really hurt much here - all contests are determined by real people outside the world, and not by the world itself. That is, the game world doesn't exist, right? So it's always the narrator or some other real person deciding what contests to do. All RPGs have some rule like, "Don't roll to determine if you cross the street." In HQ, it's got it's own special name, the Automatic Success rule.

Is this 100% "realistic?" I mean, one could roll to cross the street. And, in fact, people get killed trying to cross the street every day - the stakes are as high as lethal combat for the character. If it was a CRPG, you'd take damage when a car hit ya. So why don't we do it in Table Top RPGs? Why don't we narrate characters going to the bathroom or what happens while they sleep? It's not interesting, correct? But why isn't it interesting? Because it doesn't say anything about the character or we as players playing the character. We focus on those things in every Table Top RPG, because we don't have time to live the full detailed lives of the character. We have to focus on some part of it. And the parts we focus on, are the parts that say something about the characters and the players as they play them.

So this decision logic is already in place - we're already cutting out tons of potential contests based on this logic. And we can ignore this and "immerse" despite this. So if we're already doing it by neccessity, then is it any worse to do it with greater intention? At least on the narrator's side? I mean, certainly we're not expecting him to "immerse?"

Since this problem affects more dramatically "quick" Talents than "slower" ones, or Talents that permanently modify the opponent, I should probably avoid extended contests for these. So for instance it would make sense to run extended contests on the "Street Brawl" Talent but not on "Press Button First" for TV games or "Flamme Thrower" Dragon's Talent.

You're thinking in terms of the abilities being used, and not in terms of the situation at hand. If, for instance, the contest was to see who pressed a button first, best out of 100 tries, then perhaps an extended contest would be warranted. Whereas if the situation is that the player is trying to impress a new crime boss with his Street Brawling abilities I think that an extended contest displaying them would probably be pointless.

HQ allows the scope of a contest to be whatever you want it to be. Again, based on how interesting the intermediate actions are to the players. There's no standard "unit" of action like in most RPGs (though the rule that says you can go X yards in one action seems to belie this). So players can't avoid setting up the scale of a conflict when it comes around - anybody who has such a standard scale is making a house rule for this or a very stretching interpretation of the rules based on reading and play of other RPGs.

As long as you understand that creating a contest requires looking at the scale of the contest, and the arena of the contest, I think that HQ can satisfy both the sim and nar agendas pretty well.

Mike

[Alexandre Santos]

Hi Mike,

I don't think that it's important to identify the creative agenda. I think you should stick to individual potential problems and such.

Agreed, I think it will be more constructive.

Put another way, there's no reason one can't simulate a contest of wills between two snipers in an attempt to serve a simulationism agenda. The refusal to do so more often has to do with rejection of a gamism agenda - no matter how realistic the contests are - than a drive for simulationism.

I do agree that I am trying to curb gamism. Or at least in my view a behavior of the PC which is unnatural to its character or to the world, and chosen by the player because of whatever quirk of the rules that render it advantageous. In my mind game rules are a necessary evil, and the more the rules - by their presence - modify the expected behavior of the PC from its character and his world, the worse.

I also aggree that realism in RPGs cannot be better than our capacity to interpret the world, which is limited. And that in the interest of game fun, a wise compromise must anyway be struck between our opinion of what is realistic and what is enjoyable for the players.

I am not against the players developping unexpected approaches during contests, on the contrary, it only shows they are involved and creative. My problem is when their tactics derive more from analysis of the rules than from the workings of the game world and characters themselves.

Actually, thinking about it, what spoils my "suspended belief" in the world and characters we are playing is the unability to play my PC as I envisioned (because I don't have the chance to show who he is, because of the plot or the rules), and when I am forced to think of what to do in the game in terms of rule mechanics and not in a more intuitive "in game reality" fashion). The actual "realism" of what's going on, or lack of it, is not so important.

So to give a somewhat contrived example, I could be put off from a toon cartoon game because my Jerry PC is prevented from doing his usual stuff (hold brooms a hundred times his weight, pulling TNT tubes from his pocket) because of rules or plot considerations (the rules give me little chance of knocking Tom with the broom, and I finish suing him to death because of my super legalist ability, or if the story is about an inheritage mess that auntie Minnie left to Jerry, and not about kicking Tom's butt). Of course, we all agree that in Tom and Jerry cartoons, realism is out of the window.

Back to HQ, if using fast talk in the sniper duel seems logic with the game world, and it adds enjoyment to the game, perfect. If the player player has invested everything in fast talk and is using his talent in an undescriminate, boring, and out of game logic fashion, then this should be prevented. As you mention, HQ allows one to modulate this by determining how to frame the contests.

Another parallel could be drawn with computer simulation games, like simulating a town economy or a company. For me, the fun of the game evaporates when I stop seeing the "simulation" to only concentrate on the parameters of the game and their in-game behavior. The result is that I optimise my strategy according to the game rules, even if such a strategy would be absurd in the reality that is simulated. You are then playing with a program, and not anymore "pretending" to manage a town.

[Mike Holmes]

I do agree that I am trying to curb gamism. Or at least in my view a behavior of the PC which is unnatural to its character or to the world, and chosen by the player because of whatever quirk of the rules that render it advantageous. In my mind game rules are a necessary evil, and the more the rules - by their presence - modify the expected behavior of the PC from its character and his world, the worse.

So, to get Jargony for a moment, what you're really trying to prevent is what's sometimes called Pawn Stance, meaning treating the character as a game piece, regarding only what the rules inform the player to do, and not considering at all the in-game "realities" that the character faces.

What's interesting is that your latter statement is basically that System Does Matter, in that players will pay attention to the system and do, for instance, unrealistic things if that's what the system promotes. Coudn't agree more. That said, the hope is that a system like Hero Quest doesn't incentivize players to do anything but "realistic" stuff. In my experience of playing it, that's exactly the case. I've never seen anyone engage in Pawn Stance play even slightly.

I am not against the players developping unexpected approaches during contests, on the contrary, it only shows they are involved and creative. My problem is when their tactics derive more from analysis of the rules than from the workings of the game world and characters themselves.

Right. And here's where the system helps - there really are no better or worse tactics in HQ. Rather, the only tactical advantages tend to be having the character do things that he believes in. That is, if he's trying to save somebody he loves, then he gets a bonus. By including relationships and personality traits as abilities, the game incentivizes players to do the realistic thing.

But, even better, it doesn't force them to do so. So a player can, in fact, choose to do the tactically unsound thing if he likes. But in that case, we're 100% assured that he's not going against type because the rules are incentivizing it, but because he's found some reason in-game for the character to do so. Maybe at that moment he decides not to chase the girl, but instead to chase the villain, realizing that his supposed love is just an infatuation, and that the villain's capture is more important. The player is definitely playing to character here, so we don't worry that he's broken type. The advantage of this is that, unlike systems that try to enforce things like character personality traits, the player is free to make the character dynamic again (see the Flat Characters thread going on).

Actually, thinking about it, what spoils my "suspended belief" in the world and characters we are playing is the unability to play my PC as I envisioned (because I don't have the chance to show who he is, because of the plot or the rules), and when I am forced to think of what to do in the game in terms of rule mechanics and not in a more intuitive "in game reality" fashion). The actual "realism" of what's going on, or lack of it, is not so important.

I don't think I could have said it any better. Many gamism decisions are entirely realistic and plausible. I mean, if you retreat from a situation that you're not likely to win, that lack of bravery is plausible, is it not? Even if what you really want is to be able to play the character heroically.

The problem is that being heroic is also plausible. Most RPG systems, however, punish you for going against the odds, often by taking your character away from you. The player is usually told that what he did was "stupid" play, and that he deserves what he got. That's right, the player played his character doing as he felt the character would do, and is punished for it.

HQ doesn't do this.

So to give a somewhat contrived example, I could be put off from a toon cartoon game because my Jerry PC is prevented from doing his usual stuff (hold brooms a hundred times his weight, pulling TNT tubes from his pocket) because of rules or plot considerations (the rules give me little chance of knocking Tom with the broom, and I finish suing him to death because of my super legalist ability, or if the story is about an inheritage mess that auntie Minnie left to Jerry, and not about kicking Tom's butt). Of course, we all agree that in Tom and Jerry cartoons, realism is out of the window.

Perfect example, I'd say. Again, it's not realism that's the problem, it's that the system doesn't allow for things to happen that we expect to happen in the genre of play. That's simply bad design. I always found Toon to be fatally flawed this way.

Note that you're railing specifically against simulationism here. Enforcing plot considerations is precisely simulationism. Allowing players to drive the plot as they see fit is narrativism.

Back to HQ, if using fast talk in the sniper duel seems logic with the game world, and it adds enjoyment to the game, perfect. If the player player has invested everything in fast talk and is using his talent in an undescriminate, boring, and out of game logic fashion, then this should be prevented. As you mention, HQ allows one to modulate this by determining how to frame the contests.

Precisely. What happens is that the narrator ends up creating a community standard about what's entertaining by using the Improv mods. If something is simply entirely implausible, he can simply call it an automatic failure. If it's somewhat implausible, he can moderate that effect by giving it an improv modifier penalty at some level. Players end up getting the picture. Again, the narrator can do this unilaterally if he likes, but I think that most will try to set up a standard that he believes will satisfy all players.

And players are then all on the same sheet of music. Not perfectly, but close enough that negotiations become less and less.

Another parallel could be drawn with computer simulation games, like simulating a town economy or a company. For me, the fun of the game evaporates when I stop seeing the "simulation" to only concentrate on the parameters of the game and their in-game behavior. The result is that I optimise my strategy according to the game rules, even if such a strategy would be absurd in the reality that is simulated. You are then playing with a program, and not anymore "pretending" to manage a town.

Quite. I've been saying for a while now, that the computer game designers could learn a few lessons from RPGs like Hero Quest. Sans a moderator to create modifiers to enforce a standard, it's difficult for a CRPG or such to be able to pull this off. But it could start with having personality traits and such that would give incentives for the player to play the character realistically, and to stop rewarding absurd behavior. The monster killing cycle is classic here. I can hear the CRPG designers saying, "well how do we get the players to kill the monsters if we don't give out EXP?!" Well, first, have the monsters threaten something that the characters mechanically care about. Other than that, they probably shouldn't want to be killing monsters. Right? As I always say, "Why did we kill the baby kobolds? Because they weren't worth any EXP alive!"

No EXP in HQ. Thank goodness. Only rules that inform the player to focus on what the character thinks and believes and to explore that in a heroic fashion. So that's what you get in play.

Again, I do get accounts of people playing HQ like it's RQ. But the only explanation that I can find for this is that they played RQ before, and assume that HQ should be played the same way. I note that these people want to change how HQ plays, which is proof to me that it doesn't support their gamism drives. It's not broken gamism, it's support for other modes of play.

Mike

[Alexandre Santos]

there really are no better or worse tactics in HQ. Rather, the only tactical advantages tend to be having the character do things that he believes in.

That is an important point: There should be no tactics to be considered by the player in the use of the game rules, so that he can rather focus on what he thinks the character would do in the game. I guess  that if we get the players to think in terms of trying to frame interesting contests, instead of min-maxing their characters to death, there will have been progress.

Most RPG systems, however, punish you for going against the odds, often by taking your character away from you. The player is usually told that what he did was "stupid" play, and that he deserves what he got. That's right, the player played his character doing as he felt the character would do, and is punished for it.

This is actually a problem that has plagued our games. There are some players which would like to interpret romantic, heroic characters, but as you mention it is impossible. Because of statistics, any unpragmatic, uncautious and irrational action is swiftly punished in our games (by death of the character), so that in the end all our surviving PCs have become quite cynical, ultra cautious and paranoid (i.e. boring): Despicable mercenaries rather than heroes. It's part of thir flatness.

It's in part to get away from this type of characters that we have moved to Falkenstein. The premise of Falkenstein is that you play Romantic and Heroic characters. The characters are not supposed to cheat, backstab, or be overly cautious, because that is not proper. Actions are supposed to be more flamboyant than efficient. It was actually a difficult turn in game style for some people ("what do you mean, I don't lie to him?"), and we will need some more time to adjust, but it's great fun!

It's one of the qualities of HQ not to cause incidental death of the character (as was the case with RQ). I mean seriously, can one really accept the character lovingly created by the player years ago to die from an unlucky roll? The problem in refusing random death is that this forces the narrator to hide and fudge somewhat his rolls, which in turn is damaging to the "believability" of the game.

I would much prefer to have the convention that PCs never die immediately from a roll (and that a PC death is allways a big and well circumstanciated issue), but that on the other hand the narrator allways rolls his dice publicly, instead of announcing a hidden result. This would give more tension to the dice roll, which was the point of rolling them it in the first place. Dice are usefull to produce uncertainty and the emotions that derive from this uncertainty. A decrease in uncertainty about the dice lowers their interest.

Enforcing plot considerations is precisely simulationism. Allowing players to drive the plot as they see fit is narrativism.

In that case I would say that I am trying to give our games a more narrativist slant, because I would like the players to be the producers of action or plot.

What happens is that the narrator ends up creating a community standard about what's entertaining by using the Improv mods. If something is simply entirely implausible, he can simply call it an automatic failure.

I guess the Improv mods are the best way for the narrator to shepherd the player's gamestyles within the limits of the logic and goals of his game, whereas in other RPGs such limits would have been more embedded and thus determined by the rules system. Of course the narrator has to care for the satisfaction of the players, so there should be feedback between both of them.

No EXP in HQ. Thank goodness.

The use of EXP points in CRPGs is totally inane. I wonder how can the game designers expect that I will spend my free time plowing digital fields or killing rats? However they seem to be right, millions do it, but that's not for me.

I must say that the experience system is extremely addictive. Players (me included) like to see their characters improve, and are more attached to 'improved' characters than to characters more powerfull but without an history of improvement. It's a very efficient and motivating reward system. The problem comes from the abuses that it engenders in the character's behavior, when a character does something to get EXP points rather than for an in-game reason. When you start viewing NPCs as EXP bags, something is really wrong...

HQ has mechanisms to "improve" (or at least modify) the characters over time. I guess it mitigates the EXP problems by avoiding a direct connection between the actions of the PCs and the modified Talents.

[Mike Holmes]

Before anyone accuses me, no, I am not posting as Alexandre, looking merely to confirm my own thoughts about play. Uh, rather, Alexandre, find something to disagree with me about, please! The fact that I'm hitting precisely on all your play problems seems just too good to be true. ;-)

Actually I have one or two things that I'd disagree with you on in all of that, but I'm not sure that any of it is germane to the thread. If you want to talk about "experience" and character attachment, for instance.

Mike

[Alexandre Santos]

Alexandre, find something to disagree with me about, please!

It's true that one can only discuss if there is disagreement. :-) But in that respect we still have plenty of fodder. So for instance I discuss about meta-gaming in the Play by Example thread.

If you want to talk about "experience" and character attachment, for instance.

Absolutely, like I mentioned before, I think experience systems are some of the most effective devices to make players become attached to PCs (a good demonstration is that our players ARE attached to their PCs, in spite of their flatness). They mark in a clear way that things have happened, and celebrate the PC actions and troubles by improving the character, which becomes more valuable to the player.

Now there are two downsides to this mechanism:
- if to get experience points the player has to "corrupt" the PC actions into something at odds with the PC internal logic
- this way of doing things gives us the tendency to always play newbie PCs, whose weaknesses prevents the players from playing the way they really want (because we will never play enough to allow the PCs to reach a viable level). The PCs are also quite unflexible. It would be impossible to have a PC develop an entire new field of competence reasonably fast for it to matter in game without devaluating the experience system. So the players are encouraged to always play the PCs the same way.

From what I understand you tend to remove the experience system from games (this would be a serious revolution for my gaming group), and replace it with a character modifying system which does not follow the usual logic: the player can improve whatever aspect of the PC he sees fit for his gaming pleasure, without regard for an apparent in-game logic.

I have the impression that this is a totally viable option, the only downside is that the players will not have the small satisfaction of putting crosses in their abilities when they make a good draw (in RQ, one checks experience boxes when the PC has a good draw). But I don't think this is essential, and if it avoids the skewing introduced by the experience system on the players actions, why not?

[Mike Holmes]

Some differences in perspective. Since HQ has no experience system per se, there's nothing to "remove." So better to say that I play games that don't have EXP systems.

And further, saying "without regard to apparent in-game logic" is also misleading. As Ron Edwards once put it, players are simply free to consider in-game logic as much as they wish, or ignore it if they wish. In actual practice, players do, in fact, pay a lot of attention to in-game logic. In fact, the HQ system actually has a rule that says that anything that the narrator rules as not pertaining to play costs double. Now, again in practice I don't tend to ever say that something is unrelated to play - to me, if the player thinks it would be cool to add something then, to me, it's related to play.

But players are informed that they're supposed to be thinking in terms of some sort of connection to play at least. And, interestingly, players often go out of their way to justify their purchases saying things like, "Oh, he's been practicing with his sword when he gets a chance." That's good enough for me. Even "He learned that way back when he was a young kid" works. In fact, just having the ability appear is fine with me, too. I've never seen a player add something that didn't make any sense. Like suddenly having a holy man come up with a pickpocketing ability out of nowhere. What's the point in corrupting your character concept so? If, on the other hand, the player explains that his character was a theif, briefly, before he was saved by a priest to eventually become one himself, the who am I to naysay such creativity? That's just cool.

This goes to the metagame thing, again, because players know things like when they might be stepping on some other player's desired area of creativity. I've never seen any player add an ability to have his character be like somebody else's. What would be the point in HQ? With no standard contests, there's no arenas of conflict to be jealous about other players having superior characters. Not when Origami is one of the most potent abilities in the game.

Anyhow, development in HQ is, if anything waaaaay incremental. When adding a level of ability against an opponent tends to mean less than a 1% shift in odds? Why worry about characters becoming too powerful seeming too soon (to say nothing of the more radically metagame POV that the abilities are actually not directly indicative of in-game power)? I've never seen that happen in HQ. After more than 200 HP given out in more than 60 sessions, the PCs that I have still haven't notably changed in power level. Or, if they have in some ways, it's been so natural a progression that nobody could claim it was unrealistic. Even if you do consider abilities to be hard expressions of in-game power.

To really "level up" in HQ, you need to add points to keywords so that a character has real breadth of ability. If you have a character with Warrior 17, and Swordfighting 10W3, and I have a character with Warrior 5W2, and Swordfighting 15W2, and we each augment with six abilities from our warrior keyword, then you're at 2W4, and I'm at 5W4.

Experience is more important than talent in HQ. And you can only get keyword levels by GM fiat. I usually only award them between stories.

So, in addition to rewarding dramatic play, the system also happens to be realistic. This is one place where I don't think you have to worry too much about sim/nar incoherence at all in HQ. Anyhow, I think that you get to "celebrate" abilities in HQ with each spending of HP on them that you do, which makes them celebrated about as often as one does in BRP.

Mike

[Bryan_T]

This is in response to discussion further up the thread more than the latest posts--sorry for being late to the party.

I find one of the key issues in happy HQ-ing is the character design.  That is, making sure to have abilities and passions that you as a player want to use.  Mike has many times said something to the effect that what you put on your character sheet tells him what stories you want to play.  I'd take that as maybe a first order approximation, because you could want to play stories mostly focussed on how your character deals with something outside of what is on the sheet, for example create a pacifist musician but want to deal with stories about how he/she deals with a war against a brutal enemy and--so what is on the character sheet may only tell part of what you are looking for.

The HQ augmentation system really does help reward you for playing to your strengths--with 'strengths' meaning areas where you have a lot of abilities.  That is, the enemy who easily bested you in a random first encounter may be someone you have a good chance of beating when you meet him again in front of your love, burning for revenge, defending the honor of your (family/town/clan/ship/etc), after he has insulted your pride and been revealed to be working for your hated enemy, etc.  The side effect of this is that beyond the individual traits on the page, getting the clustering of these traits right tends to affect play.  Not only do the augments give you higher chance of success, they tend to give the feeling that this really matters.  So a character who is really good at negotiating may have as much chance of success as another who is merely decent, but who is also charming, calculating, a gossip, a shrewd judge of character, and loves to bargain--but the latter is probably more satisfying to play in a negotiation, and can broadly address a large number of related challenges with those varied skills.  So it is helpful to cluster abilities around things that you want to spend time doing--both to be good at it and to make it more interesting. 

This is one of the things that I personally like about the 100 words method versus the list of 10 things method, you have more peripheral abilities, so you care more about the details of a situation.  Maybe this is not a very Narrativist thing, but at the same time I find it makes contests more colorful.  You aren't just trolling for rumours in a bar, you are using your wealth, the fact that you know a lot of people in this neighborhood, that you are boastful and exhuberent.  Mechanically it might be the same as someone else who a skilled gossip with keen observation of human personality who 'knows a lot of small secrets'--but the imagery of how you are getting the information is totally different.  Also, maybe the more interesting part, the consequences of failure are apt to be totally different.

None of this is about creating and resolving conflict per se, so I don't think it is Nar.  Some of it is playing the rules--using all those possible augments--so it could be viewed as gamism.  Alternatively it could be viewed as fully immersing yourself in the character to bring things into finer focus, which I suppose would be Simulationism (is that a word?).  Whichever it is, it is something that I think HQ does extremely well.  So those who enjoy looking at "what would my character realistically do" are pretty well supported, provided the narrator (or the player itself) wields improvisation penalties appropriately--the person trying to gather rumours at the bar by spending money and being boisterous should suffer some degree of penalty, because these are not directly related skills.  But at the same time it is a reasonable approach to try if that is where the character's strength lie.

Finally a disclaimer--all of this is based on my experience in play by yahoo-group HQ games, which may have given me an odd take on these things.

Regards;

Bryan