Disposable enemies (the Giant Tick revisited)

[Snowden]

I'm thinking specifically of the giant tick.

If you think of the tick's goal as "hurt the hero" and the hero's goal as "don't get hurt by the tick," the outcome could be narrated as:
Minor victory for the tick!  It latches onto your neck for a few seconds before you smash it with your sword.  10% penalty.
The tick has succeeded, and the hero has failed.  The fact that the tick got killed (instead of running away, or wandering off after drinking 10% of its fill, or whatever) is incidental.

Maybe the forest could have a "Giant Tick Attack 9W" rating to occasionally unleash on the hero; the ticks would die no matter what but if the hero won the "Giant Tick Attack" ability would take the usual penalties until it was complete victory-ed out of existence.  This would be the system's way of saying, "these ticks are boring.  Move on."

Does this seem like a good idea, or even make sense?

[Brand_Robins]

Does this seem like a good idea, or even make sense?

Yes.

This is largely the way I deal with incidentals in HQ. Really, if you're fighting a mook or a bug or a random thing in the woods, that thing doesn't matter. What matters is how much it keeps you from accomplishing your goals before you get rid of it.

I played a HQ Conan game not to long ago in which there was a scene in which the barbarian character was attacked by a half dozen soldiers sent by the huge evil sorcerer of ultimate doom to capture him. His goal was to not be handed over to Ye Olde Master of Doom, and interrogate them for information. Their goal was to turn him over to the sorcerer.

He rolled a major failure, and the player expected to be humiliated. Instead I had him kill half the soldiers, get knocked unconscious and dragged to the Sorcerer's tower, only to wake up just before the guards locked the door to his cell.

The soldiers didn't matter, so it didn't matter that he killed half of them. All that mattered is that he didn't succeed in his goal of not being handed over to the sorcerer – but he didn't fail completely, so he still had a chance. Plus, if you can make the failure turn into something more dramatic, it's always good.

The one thing I will note is that this works when you have opponents who are disposable. If you're playing a game in which every NPC is a named character, another human being who matters and who can't just be vanished, then you need to deal with it another way. Most games, however, will have occasional random ninjas -- and they can just be stomped.

[Snowden]

Thanks, I really like your suggestion to apply varying degrees of success to the goons' goal (instead of the PCs' literal "health") in order to put the PCs into varying degrees of hot water.  I've seen modules attempt stuff like this in the past ("If the PCs are defeated, they wake up in a cell just as the warden is turning to lock the door -- they have one round to act!"), but it wasn't directly tied into the characters' performance.

I imagine getting the hang of stuff like this makes it a lot easier to "improvise" play that feels tailored to the PCs' general power level; I'm really looking forward to trying it out!