A Question About Simple Contest Stalemates -- The Giant Tick

[soru]

According to the numbers up thread, you said the tick was 9W, the player 3W, which makes the tick the better fighter. I wouldn't count hero points as part of a description of player power, spending a hero point is more 'I knew he was better than me, but I got lucky'.

Most of the time, if you have a fight out of the blue, its to add some excitement, or just to buy yourself some time to work out what happens next. Comparisons with hollywood movies that substitute flash-bang action and special effects for plot advancement and dialog are probably justified. But for most people, theres no shame in running a game thats no worse than the efforts of overpaid screenwriters.

The problem with a simple contest is it doesn't meet those goals, it's abstract and doesn't fill 'screen-time'. I wouldn't say I would never resolve an attack on the player as a simple contest, but it would definitely be an exception rather than the rule. Generally, if you have a player attacked, its for a reason, if that reason isn't good enough to justify an extended contest then why not skip the attack entirely?

Watch Star Wars, LoTR, Buffy and you can count the number of combats resolved as simple contests on the fingers of one hand. And when they do occur (e.g. Han taking over the shield generator in RoTJ), it's always at the initiative of the protagonists.

There's one famous exception to this rule, which is the sequence in Raiders of the Lost Ark where an arab swordsman challenges Indy, and he just pulls out a gun and shoots him. That always gets a laugh from the audience, simply because it is such a breaking of the usual rules.

soru

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

Soru, I think there's a major difference between the way you're interpreting Simple vs. Extended Contests, and the way I do it. I'm fairly certain that mine is more consistent with the rules text, for whatever that's worth - that's not really the point, though. The point is to understand the difference.

Which is: To my understanding, in-game time or complexity of the conflict has absolutely nothing to do with Simple vs. Extended, in game mechanics.

A months-long, multi-variate, incredibly complex military conflict involving thousands of people may be resolved using a Simple Contest.

A single fleeting, flirting conflict between two rivals, in a three-second encounter, may be resolved using an Extended Contest.

To me, Simple vs. Extended is specifically and only a matter of how much the actual people who are role-playing care about the conflict's nuances. Looking over many cases, choosing Extended Contests will indeed be positively correlated with the conflict's in-game time and complexity, but as a secondary effect, not as a causal or primary reason for that choice.

The implications of this approach to the distinction between the Contests are as follows.

Extended Contests become, by definition, revelations about the player-characters as protagonists. We get to see how all of the character's abilities, potentially, get "drawn upon" for something he or she cares about (or rather, that we the real people care about).

Whereas Simple Contests, once played, are more like "Bang, the Situation has now changed, based on the outcome. New Situation, revise and rinse your notions." They do not reveal as much of the protagonists, per unit "event" in the game-world, and tend to confirm what we know about them instead.

Best,
Ron

[soru]

I agree with your theory, but not with your interpretation of my examples or with your conclusions.

The point of the film examples is not what actually happened, but what the director chose to show.

In star wars (to pick an example hopefully everyone will know), lucas could have cut straight from briefing:

'our X wings will hold off their tie fighters while whoever can get through makes a run down the trench'

to

'pan shot, X wings and tie fighters wheeling'

to the meat of the story:

'Luke in the trench, Vader on his tail'.

That would have been the film equivalent of handling the X Wing vs Tie battle as a simple contest:

'Minor victory. OK you are in the trench, but the x wing force has taken a lot of casualties. And here comes a Tie fighter not like the others...'

Could have been done that way, but would have been a worse film for it, IMHO. Because, using you own rules, the participants (the audience in this case) had never before seen fighter versus fighter combat in this universe. So without the extended sequence, they would not have got to learn anything about it, and the cod mysticism would have had to bear the whole weight of the story.

Now in a longer running series like Babylon 5, you do get the same kind of spacefighter combat treated in that way. 'fighter wing encounters mysterious ship under attack by space pirates, quick CGI sequence driving off the pirates, move on to boarding the mysterious ship'. Because the audience have seen it before, and there's nothing in particular new to say about it this time, it's just a plot point to be got through asap.

So that's the examples. The conclusion I draw from them is that when a new HW narrator asks 'how do I handle this as a simple contest', the right answer is not 'here is how I learnt to do it', but 'run it with your players as an extended contest. Then if something similar happens again later in the campaign, you will know what to do'.

Because at the beginning of a campaign, you haven't established anything. You don't know which PCs are badass, which will act smart, which will never surrender despite the odds, which have a useful magical talent, which have a fatal weakness for cheese. And if you and the players don't have a shared understanding of that, they will very likely end up uncomfortable with your narration of simple contests.

If anything, the names 'extended contest' and 'simple contest' are somewhat misleading, because it leads narrators to using simple contests before they try extended ones. It might have been better if they were  marked 'contests' and 'advanced rule:quick contest resolution' respectively.

soru

[Ron Edwards]

Mmmm! Good point, and well explained. Apparently we're not disagreeing as much as I thought ... although I'm not sure your previous posts are entirely consistent with this last one. Reader's choice, and not worth debating.

I hope our combined posts can be helpful to people who are still struggling with these issues.

Best,
Ron

[Scripty]

According to the numbers up thread, you said the tick was 9W, the player 3W, which makes the tick the better fighter. I wouldn't count hero points as part of a description of player power, spending a hero point is more 'I knew he was better than me, but I got lucky'.

...
soru

Just a quick point. Given the number alone, you say that the Giant Tick has the advantage, which is true. However, the Tick does not have Hero Points. This, IMO, shifts the advantage easily to the player's side. You may disagree, but I have found Hero Points to be a decisive factor in many contests. I always consider them when creating a challenge. IMO, and my opinion alone, an equal contest is hardly a challenge when one side has Hero Points. An opponent with 5 or so above the player is a more significant challenge to a Hero, but certainly hardly worth breaking a sweat over, IME. Now, when you get into a situation where the opponent has a 10 or more point lead on you, that's the arena where I would say an adversary has a definite advantage. If the adversary has "Villain Points" or Hero Points of their own, then all bets are off. Generally, however, I don't give just any NPC Hero Points. It makes them too random a factor, IMO.

That's just my experience with HeroQuest, though. Your opinion may differ. When I say that the player was the contestant with the advantage, it's coming from the position that the player has Hero Points to spend, which I have factored in to the contest itself. IMO, Hero Points are too significant a factor to be ignored.