Narrative Rights In HeroQuest

[NickHollingsworth]

Does anyone have any comments on how to handle who has narrative rights in HeroQuest?

I ask as a result of some of the comments made in the thread 'Some magic questions, among others'. There are posts in the thread that alude to the players narrating the outcome of a contest. But I dont recall seeing this issue tackled in the HeroQuest book.

In our HeroWars/Quest play we assumed the old RuneQuest default that the GM narrates the whole world and the players just describe what their characters do.

Before waiting for the new HeroQuest rules to be released we experimented by using http://www.randomordercreations.com/thepool.html">The Pool for a month.  This was yet another eye-opener for me.  I enjoyed turning the narrative over to the players to explain what had happened when they won a contest. And I enjoyed it when they narrated new facts into the story forcing me to improvise off in a new direction.

As a result I would like to give the players scope to contibute to the narrative now we are playing HeroQuest again.
But The Pool is just too flexible for the sort of games we tend to play in our HeroQuest campaign
(and if I want to run a completely improvisational episode we can always use The Pool again for an evening or two).
So I feel like I'd benefit from some structure that would help me know to what extent to do this
and something that would let them know how much creative freedom they have.

I dont want to discuss rules variants in this thread. I want to sort out:

What are the HeroQuest narration rights as she is writ (in case I have failed to spot that its already explained).
How people handle letting players narrate or otherwise contribute.
What approaches seem practical.[/list:u]

This is how we do it at the moment:

The GM knows the rough background of the story. Sometimes its only a few ideas, sometimes more.
The GM describes the world to the players to the extent that their characters are aware of it.
The players describe what their characters try to do.
The GM dictates modifiers etc based on what he knows about the npcs and the setting.
If the players succeed or fail the GM describes the result. The players may pipe up and say what they think happens and the GM may include this or not. They probably get listened to less when they have failed.
Its the GM that makes up NPC; decides when the cavalry arrive; decides what complete defeat of success mean; lets his favourite NPCs live to fight another day; etc.
The players dont have any 'rights' over narration at all. They can say what they want to achieve and roll for it and probably get what they want. But they cant actually

say whats happened.[/list:u]

I suspect this is how most HeroQuest groups play. Cos we've always done it like that.

(If you read this and say to your self 'yeah, so...'. Then can I suggest you read The Pool carefully, then take a couple of hours out from your next session to run a quick game of it. Use your normal campaign setting if you have one. See whats different about play. Then reconsider.)

[Bankuei]

Hi Nick,

There are brief mentions in how the level of success "helps the narrator determine the outcome" or something along those lines.  In other words, it's set at the default assumption of most groups that the GM narrates, all the time.

You might want to check out the Scene Request rules and Goals and Conflict rules of Trollbabe.  They've got a lot of heft to them that I can see being applied very effectively to HQ play.

Chris

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Nick,

Check out the thread Stance is still not power for some good foundation thinking about this.

I prefer to keep these three concepts very distinct from one another.

1. Who organizes and "cues" what happens.

2. Who determines what happens.

3. Who describes (narrates) what happens.

They aren't the same things, and the order presented above doesn't have to be the order in which they happen.

At first, I thought you were asking about #3, which is a neat question and has a lot of implications ... but then the second half of your post seems to be more about #2, especially in terms of Director Stance (bringing stuff external to player-characters into "action").

So I'm a little confused about just what you're asking, and especially in terms of Extended Conquests. After all, if I donate 20 APs to my buddy who just hit 0 APs in the middle of an exchange, and if I say, "I toss him my sword!", that's both #2 and #3, and that kind of behavior is implied pretty strongly in the Hero Quest rules, I think.

Another example: a character rolls a Follower ability to bring the follower-character into the scene ("he shows up!"). Outside the rules as written? "Obviously" inside them for anyone who thinks about it? Logical extension of the rules but not addressed by them?

What do you think?

Best,
Ron

[Nicolas Crost]

Hi Nick,
So I'm a little confused about just what you're asking, and especially in terms of Extended Conquests. After all, if I donate 20 APs to my buddy who just hit 0 APs in the middle of an exchange, and if I say, "I toss him my sword!", that's both #2 and #3, and that kind of behavior is implied pretty strongly in the Hero Quest rules, I think.

Well this would seem pretty much inside the rules for me (same thing for the follower example).

But suppose a player would upon a victory (in an extended contest) say: "Well, I disarm my opponent" (thereby explaining the enemies loss of 5 AP). What about that? From that point on the enemy has lost his +3 bonus to his swordfighting skill. So supposing the narrator didn´t really want the player to do that, is this where the buck stops? Could the narrator go: "No, you didn´t!"?
I guess those cases where a player narrates the outcome including meaningful consequences for characters other than his (or his followers) are the interesting ones because they include #2 and #3.

Best,
Nicolas

[simon_hibbs]

But suppose a player would upon a victory (in an extended contest) say: "Well, I disarm my opponent" (thereby explaining the enemies loss of 5 AP). What about that? From that point on the enemy has lost his +3 bonus to his swordfighting skill. So supposing the narrator didn´t really want the player to do that, is this where the buck stops? Could the narrator go: "No, you didn´t!"?

If the player wanted to disarm his opponent, that should be in the statement of what they wanted to do that round, which might affect the ability they are using or the ability their opponent might use to defend.

I don't think HeroQuest doesn't have narative rules of the kind you're talking about.

Simon Hibbs

[pete_darby]

But suppose a player would upon a victory (in an extended contest) say: "Well, I disarm my opponent" (thereby explaining the enemies loss of 5 AP). What about that? From that point on the enemy has lost his +3 bonus to his swordfighting skill. So supposing the narrator didn´t really want the player to do that, is this where the buck stops? Could the narrator go: "No, you didn´t!"?

If the player wanted to disarm his opponent, that should be in the statement of what they wanted to do that round, which might affect the ability they are using or the ability their opponent might use to defend.

I don't think HeroQuest doesn't have narative rules of the kind you're talking about.

Simon Hibbs

But wouldn't it be easy to write them...

So the default is that "final cut" narrative rights belong to the GM by default: HQ allows/ encourages/forces a greater degree of input for players than many other games, but the GM is always the final authority. Reasonable?

So Ron's example of lending 20 AP's half way through an exchange (and I'm not sure that's actually allowed...) by "throwing a sword" is treated by the GM as another suggestion: depending on the outcome of the contest, he may decide the sword never got there, or by chance struck the villain in the eye...

The follower example... well, unrelated action, and with a shedload of penalties unless it's been established that they're around anyway. But that brings into question what the relathionship trait represents: strictly, it's strength of relationship, not chance of turning up spontaneously. So, I'd say outside the rules, but not beyond the pale.

Now, given that the interesting part is Ron's #3, and the answer in the rules is pretty clear cut (GM narrates), the really interesting bit is how to change that answer while maintaining a definite answer for any given action.

Instinctively, it feels like narration is too small a prize to force a hero point expenditure. That being said, I'd instinctively give narration rights to the player that spent most HP that round... without my book, I forget whether you're allowed to spend more than one.

Beyond that... default to GM?

[NickHollingsworth]

But suppose a player would upon a victory (in an extended contest) say: "Well, I disarm my opponent" (thereby explaining the enemies loss of 5 AP). What about that? From that point on the enemy has lost his +3 bonus to his swordfighting skill. ... Could the narrator go: "No, you didn´t!"?

I suspect in the above example the GM would want to know that the opponent was going to be disarmed on a success before agreeing on the skills, modifiers and (if relevant) the AP bid.

This general question though - when can a player describe something that alters facts - is exactly why I asked the question in the first place. In the 'Some magic questions, among others' I made a comment that I then realised indicated that I thought this:

Extended contests are not just about AP gain and loss.
They are also about the change in circumstances since these effect what skills are appropriate and what modifiers apply from then on.
This is true for other sorts of contests too.
We base decisions about what modifiers and skills are appropriate on what is 'established fact'.
What has been narrated is part of what establishes these facts.[/list:u]

Hence I wondered what rights players have or should have to narrate.

But Ron points out that I am muddling different things together when I say 'Narration'. So I will have to get my head round the definitions before I can carry on. But in the meantime heres a couple of points....

Ron, am I right in thinking the three concepts you broke narration into are the three parts of 'Fortune in the middle'.

And I am also interested to know why the issue of players narration rights, where that does not include the power to extablish facts, struck you as an important topic.

I read the

Stance is still not power thread, which includes a post by clehrich where he lists different narration rights. This is what I think I see him list:

1.

Ordinary narration rights for players: they can add fluff and colour as long as they dont establish any facts.
2. Strong narration rights for players (Assertion): within predefined boundries they can introduce new facts as long as they dont contradict already known facts.
3. Very strong narration rights for players (Trumping): within predefined boundries and at some sort of cost they can alter but not destroy already known facts.
4. Undoing things for GMs: GMs have the right to contradict players but never should.[/list:u]

I dont see a concrete difference between his #2 and #3 since he seems to limit both to extending known facts without breaking them.

Importantly (for me anyway) I dont see how #1 can work at all. Or what the point is.
(a) I dont see how one can tell which bits of a narrative are just colour and fluff and which bits will later turn out to be facts because they have relevance to some contest no one forsaw when they were described.
(b) If onme can do that and it is just colour and fluff then, given fortune in the middle, #1 only seems to allow the player to repeat his statement of intent in a different tense, perhaps with some flowery phrasing, but with the GM watching carefully to make sure he doesn't slip in any nuances that were not pre-declared.

Anyway as I said, I was going to leave off replying to this for another few days to read through the related threads and give myself a chance to express my questions more carefully. However events have caught up with me and sadly (?) I'm going to be unavailable for a few days. So apologies for an ill structured post as I am about to leave, and please dont take my silence to indicate I have lost interest in this thread. I will pick up when I get back.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Nick!

Here's my thinking: that when we talk about "narration" there's a danger of missing what's really being discussed. The example I used to use a lot is of a player making a series of successful rolls when his character strikes a broo with a mace in RuneQuest. It really doesn't matter whether the player or the GM says, "His head flies apart in a pulpy spray of bones, blood, and brains!" The dice told us all that, and we're just talking to get the event firmly established in the imaginative space.

Whereas it seems to me that you are talking more about authority over what happens in that space, and who has it when - especially relative to dice outcomes (before, during, after). The #1 (plain old saying "what happened" with no possible controversy is important, though, due to the brute fact that someone has to do it, whether it's always the same person, shared among persons, or traded around among persons.

Your list ...

Extended contests are not just about AP gain and loss.
They are also about the change in circumstances since these effect what skills are appropriate and what modifiers apply from then on.
This is true for other sorts of contests too.
We base decisions about what modifiers and skills are appropriate on what is 'established fact'.
What has been narrated is part of what establishes these facts.

... is brilliant and perfect, as well as your subsequent question, and I hope you can see that this issue applies to any and all role-playing. The many different possible answers have given rise to many design decisions in Forge-originated games over the last year, including Donjon, Dust Devils, Otherkind, and my Trollbabe. Again, these are not always going to use the same answers.

So, regarding your question about Fortune in the Middle, the answer is yes and no. It's "yes" if the game features this process (like Sorcerer, Hero Quest, and others) and "no" if it doesn't, because the issue applies to all role-playing, regardless of resolution system. Even if we were talking about a game with no Fortune at all, it applies.

Best,
Ron

[simon_hibbs]

I just want to address the disarming example, explaining how that is intended to be run in HeroQuest for the purposes of comparison with more narativist methods.

I suspect in the above example the GM would want to know that the opponent was going to be disarmed on a success before agreeing on the skills, modifiers and (if relevant) the AP bid.

It depends how you intend to model disarming a character. If disarming can simply be modeled with as an AP loss, then it's just a normal extended contest exchange. If losing the sword will inflict a penalty on the character's ability, then it's not a normal AP loss situation and so is not part of the extended contest and should be handled as an unrelated action.

This is how many Feats work, for example the Shield Breaker Feat does a very similar thing. It's handled as an unrealted action, and because it is magic the target must defend with a magical ability, or the default resistance of 14.

You can also use a mundane ability for the same kind of purpose, for example I might have a 'Disarm Foe' unarmed combat style ability I chose during character generation because my character is a pacifist martial arts monk. That ability is clearly appropriate to taking someone's sword off them, so I'd roll by ability against their Close Combat or whatever as an unrelated action, and if I succeed they're disarmed. The level of success might tell us how far away the sword ends up.

If I don't have such a clearly appropriate ability, the referee might let me use another combat skill with a penalty.

When we were playtesting Hero Wars and brainstorming the rules there wasn't realy much discussion of narativist game mechanics or narration rights. There was some discussion about when you describe what's happening. Robin prefers to roll the dice and then explain what that means through game narration, but the final cut of Hero Wars and Hero Quest assume that the players say what they want to achieve, the Narrator rules on it and then you roll for success. The different levels of success are then interpreted, and I supoose who interprets that is up to the group, but the interpretation doesn't drive or feed back into the rules outcome.


Simon Hibbs

[RaconteurX]

My experience in playtest was that a more collaborative effort between player and narrator is what Greg and Robin themselves preferred, and obviously recommend in the rules. The chapter on Narrating stresses cooperative storytelling, though HeroQuest does not insist that this style is the sole valid one and it can be played quite easily in the more traditional vein wherein the narrator makes all the important rulings. Certainly that works best where players are unfamiliar with a more narrativist style of play, but it can be easily abandoned when that unfamiliarity (hopefully) fades.

[simon_hibbs]

The chapter on Narrating stresses cooperative storytelling, though HeroQuest does not insist that this style is the sole valid one and it can be played quite easily in the more traditional vein wherein the narrator makes all the important rulings.

My own take on this is that the main narativist mechanic in this respect (narative rights) is the use of Hero Points. Players can clearly use HPs to assert facts about the setting in relation to their characters, and I do give the players much more say in the outcome of contests in which they have expended HPs or achieved high success levels.


Simon Hibbs

[Ron Edwards]

Damn good points, Rac & Simon. My own experiences jibe fully with yours.

Best,
Ron

[RaconteurX]

One thing I plan to do henceforward, an idea borrowed from Fred Hicks' and Rob Donoghue's marvelous Fantastic Adventures in Tabletop Entertainment (aka FATE) is award Hero Points whenever I call a hero's flaw into play during an adventure. This encourages players to consider flaws as valid, indeed worthwhile, abilities. Every good hero needs a flaw, but players often need a reason above and beyond the demands of deathless art (to use an old Ken Rolston phrase). :)