Plot Immunity

[simon_hibbs]

Mike, good points regarding Coup de Grace.

The general problem is a difficult one, I can't yet see a satisfactory way of one the one hand always making sure that all simple contests realy do produce a definitive result, and yet also systematicaly have different levels of success be meaniningful in an obvious way.

In the end, it simply isn't dramaticaly desirable for simple contests to always produce a definitive result.

I think I have more to say on this, but I have to go now.


Simon Hibbs

[Mike Holmes]

Basically, this is a failure to understand how the "No Repeat Attempts" rule works.

Does that rule really still apply if you succeed at a task?

Well, see that's the thing, what constitutes success for these purposes? I think that the intent certianly is to have a player who got a marginal success, not make another attempt in order to get a better success.

Your examples assume that there's something about the narrative that would force one of the two situations to come up. But the way I read it, if there's a marginal success, then the result can't really be that you're standing over the other character with your sword pointed at his throat, unless you state out of character that you won't kill the character. Because that would void the result. If you can't commit to that, then it's the GM's job to narrate something other than this so that it's plausible that the battle ends there. Maybe the authorities come along (making further attempts on the character's life possible but as a different contest involving the authorities).

Again, there's a conflict of vision on how the system works. Can a marginal success leave the player in a position to do a "repeated attempt automatic success" or not?

Mike

[buserian]

Second, this relates to the idea of the automatic partial success method that's been bandied about. That is, if there's a character with information, you can state the conflict as, "I want to get the info from Rolf" or, "I want to get the info from Rolf without him hating me." In the first case, you need at least a marginal victory to get the information. In the second, you always get the information, but failure means that you get a penalty based on Rolf's ire. So, basically, you have a full spectrum of possibilities here where anything can be successful at any level. Again the question is whether just allowing this to happen based solely on GM peference is alright, or if there are some sort of guidelines in terms of the mechanics that make some statement as to when to use a particular framing, and when to use another.

I haven't finished reading all the posts, so I may repeat something, but ...

First, Mike, you are misstating this. The preevious discussions that I read and participated in were NOT that the _players_ could state the goal in this way. The discussions related to the _narrator_ staging the contests in this manner. That is, it was not the goal of the player that his hero would automatically get the info -- it was that the _narrator_ wanted the heroes to have the info regardless of victory or defeat, and structuring the contest correctly to achieve that.

I think this whole subject is blowing somewhat out of proportions.

If I am a party of heroes, and I face a bunch of mooks who are standing in my way on the road, and their appearance there is just an annoyance, with no importance to the plot whatsoever, then we can just kill them without even rolling -- what self-respecting heroes [heroes who kill people for no reason] would fail against a bunch of mooks like this? [This also leaves aside the question of why these unimportant mooks are there in the first place ...]

The point of the victory level is to determine how well the hero achieves his goal. If his goal is Kill Count Julan, then he will face a much higher resistance than if his goal is to Defeat Count Julan.

Additionally, the rules do not that I recall state you can only die on a Complete Victory -- they say that you can only take someone to a Dying result by reaching a Complete Victory. Now, if I am a Humakti superhero and I am facing 100 mooks, a Marginal Victory might mean that I only kill 1 of them, a Minor Victory might mean I kill 10% of them, a major victory might mean I kill 50% of them, and on a complete victory I actually kill 100% of them. Regardless of whether I kill 1 of them or all 100, if I get a marginal victory I am victorious -- maybe I kill that first guy in so horrid and flashy a manner that everyone else runs away, or faints in fear, or swears to follow me. Or maybe that means this was a ritual duel, and I managed to kill the champion (such as he was), and so I get safe passage across their lands.

The player states his goals -- the narrator structures the contest to help the player achieve those goals in a manner appropriate to the contest, the circumstances, the player's competence level, and the needs of the story. Killing a mook is usually pretty easy; killing a major NPC is usually difficult. Even if you DO get a complete victory against Count Julan, the best the rules _require_ you get him to is Dying -- death is at the option of the narrator. If Count Julan is important to the plotline, it may very well be impossible for the heroes to kill him right now -- as they close in for the kill, 100 followers rush into the square, some fighting off heroes, some blocking them from the count, some carrying him away to safety. Or his body falls from the cliff into the water below -- and as we all know, if there's no body, they aren't really dead.

Happens all the time in stories.

buserian

[soru]

But the way I read it, if there's a marginal success, then the result can't really be that you're standing over the other character with your sword pointed at his throat

But standing over a slightly injured (and not particularly humiliated, magically corrupted, enlightened, or whatever) character with your sword at his throat is certainly a possible real world situation, and is also in-genre as the final definitive result of a contest a lot of the time.

If the only way that could happen in game was with a complete victory, the defeated character would be picking up a long-term penalty, which makes no particular sense.

soru

[issariesguy]

Hello All,

I held off commenting at all, because this whole discussion is amazingly reminiscent of a conversation Roderick Robertson and I had about a year or so ago. He wrote up an article about the whole subject of killing people, and submitted it to Pyramid forever ago. I just found out a few minutes ago that it was published last month. It gives some thoughts about the whole concept of killing foes, and actually suggests a lot of answers that already appeared in this discussion. If any of you are Pyramid members, you should check it out. If you're not, um, maybe Rory will share some thoughts -- he's not a member of The Forge yet, but indicated that he might check it out.

The link to the Pyramid article is http://www.sjgames.com/pyramid/login/article.cgi?4619 (but you have to have a subscription and log in to read it).

Sorry to plug a pay site, but the article really does answer a lot of these questions.

Cheers,

Stephen

[simon_hibbs]

...But the way I read it, if there's a marginal success, then the result can't really be that you're standing over the other character with your sword pointed at his throat, unless you state out of character that you won't kill the character. Because that would void the result. .....

I disagree. Defining all possible outcomes before the contest is resolved
is neither realistic, player empowering, or naratively desirable.

It's not realistic because in my experience in the real world, not every attempt to resolve a conflict actualy resolves it. It all depends on the nature of a conflict. Not every game of chess ends in a clear victor, some end in draws and that is a perfectly valid conclusion to a game.

There's nothing wrong with people changing their mind. it's perfectly plausible for a character to go into a conflict with the intent to kill, but at the last moment to show mercy (shoudl the opportunity arrise). Pre-programming character behaviour into the contest mechanics would make that impossible.

It's not naratively desirable because it makes the game so much more deterministic, reducing a potentialy important source of plot upsets and character 'defining moments'. Flexibility in determining outcomes gives more narative freedom.


Simon Hibbs

[Alai]

([*] Not a guarantee.)

I'd think in most games, no-one and nothing is truly 'immune' to plot developments -- the best one can hope for is to be 'resistant to' 'em. And how is that quantified?  Surely in a sense that's exactly what character abilities are?  They define that entity's capacity to change the plot/resist having the plot changed in a way that's unfavourable (by whatever criterion) to them. So in the "hunting" example, the deer doesn't have any such dispensation -- though it could have been given such, had it had a 'character sheet' (and I mean that in the loosest possible sense...), either individually or by reference to 'generic deer "stats"'.

As regards the specific case of death in "physical contests"; for the standard consequences chart for such, one might say it offers a degree of 'plot protection from death', but surely at the option of the controlling player, not in any mandatory sense. And one can certainly imagine circumstances in which a non-standard set of consequences would be more appropriate.

Cheers,
Alex.

[Mike Holmes]

Buserian and Simon, you're both just leading me back to where I started.

I completely agree that all the alternatives presented make sense. I'm not trying to argue that mooks or deer should not be killed by marginal successes at times. And I agree in other cases that NPCs should have the same plot immunity that the Heroes have. It was in fact my agreement about this that caused me to post this thread in the first place.

Beause the notion, while "how it should be" is handled oddly in the text - there are essentially two valid, yet incompatible ways to handle these things. The one way says that you determine success mechanically, and then match the narration to the consequences as defined by that level of success. The other method says that you should alter the level of success required for a certain result based on the drama of the situation. Which both work fine alone. But they can't stand together, unless there's some way to know when to use the one and when to use the other method.

For instance, if a player has his hero attack to kill NPC A, then, if NPC A is important, then I use the rules as written. If NPC A is a mook, then I have to interpret from the rules that there's another way that I can handle the contest that doesn't match the first. Nowhere does the text even admit that the split even exists, much less where to handle it. I mean, if you assume that the above example is accurate, then doesn't that sorta void the rules as written more or less? Basically the rule seems to be, use the consequences in the book, except when it doesn't make sense to - in which case, why are they supposedly set at those levels? I mean, couldn't the rules be rewritten that the GM assigns which level of consequence applies to which level of success? If that were the case, then wouldn't that cover all of the cases as a whole, rather than to say that the consequences are X, and then have it be obvious that there are exceptions to the rule (which in a way are actually more common than the cases covered by the rule)?

So what I'm trying to do is to distil down the principle involved into a restatement of the rules. What I'm hearing is that the principle is, "When a character should have plot immunity, use the normal method, but in all others, assume that marginal success means that your goal was accomplished exactly as stated (intead of being a partial success)." That's how I operate now, effectively. But what I was hoping was that the principle would make straying from the consequence/success pairings less of an exception, and more of a simple application of the same principle. I showed how that can be done by altering the "target", but that leaves something to be desired. Especially regarding where and how to apply consequences.

Basically in the "normal" case, the consequence is the result, but in most actual cases, the consequence represents an additional effect to the actual success. To illustrate, if I get a Minor Success on an Important NPC, the -10% represents a wound directly, or somesuch - the mechanical result represents the primary effect of the success. If I get a Minor Success attacking a mook, then he's dead, and the -10% can only be applied to something else. Or not applied, which is what I find happens in most of these cases (I realize that you can, and it's fun, it's just distinctly different). It makes me want to divide contests into "success/failure" and "partial consequence" sorts as a prequalifier. Almost as if there were an entirely separate form of resolution that the GM could choose to declare. That would be functional, but, again, is obviously not what the current rules are trying to say.

Buserian, I sort of agree about what you were saying in that it's a GM job. That is, there's an unwritten step where the GM "adjusts" the player statement to a coherent contest for purposes of the game. This is basically done by selecting the resistance in a way, as a way of indicating the "target". Target indication is important, because the target is who is going to receive the mechanical results of the event. But, again, to void the normal consequence rolls, you have to do a strange mental dance and target somebody other than the obvious target.

Mike

[buserian]

Buserian and Simon, you're both just leading me back to where I started.

Sorry about that. But, to an extent, I think you're making a mountain out of a molehill.

Beause the notion, while "how it should be" is handled oddly in the text - there are essentially two valid, yet incompatible ways to handle these things. The one way says that you determine success mechanically, and then match the narration to the consequences as defined by that level of success. The other method says that you should alter the level of success required for a certain result based on the drama of the situation. Which both work fine alone. But they can't stand together, unless there's some way to know when to use the one and when to use the other method.

Doesn't Heroquest present the contest results as guidelines? If it didn't, then that may be where the problem lies -- those results are guidelines, which can and should and must be adjusted to fit the storyline and the contest involved.

buserian

[Mike Holmes]

Sorry about that. But, to an extent, I think you're making a mountain out of a molehill.

I've admitted that this doesn't prevent me from enjoying the game. So what I see it as is just discussing the molehill at length. I couldn't blame anyone who might be disinterested.

In any case, I'm doing a lot of "thinking aloud" as it were. But I think I may be getting somewhere; see below.  

Doesn't Heroquest present the contest results as guidelines? If it didn't, then that may be where the problem lies -- those results are guidelines, which can and should and must be adjusted to fit the storyline and the contest involved.

From my reading it seems like:
1. Particular levels of victory have particular effects. These are not mechanical per se in the section that discusses them, but they seem to match the mechanics of the consequences section. For example, it says that long-lasting permenant effects are only achievable by Total Success. I suppose one could say that somehow the death of a mook didn't count here, but it's hard to see how. Hmmm, is there an "important" clause in there somewhere? I'll have to read up. Seemed pretty unambiguous last time I read it (early in this discussion), however.
2. The consequences are likely meant to be optional (it says that the GM "may" assign consequences), but when they are assigned the rules don't seem to be ambiguous at all - a particular level of success gives a penalty to the opponent of a certain level. That is, only with a Complete Victorycan you assign a "dying" effect to someone. Now, dying can actually mean a lot of things, banishment for instance, but it would be a stretch to me to say that a mook dying wasn't dying. Simply put, there's definitely no clause in there about character importance.
3. All of the above is contradicted by weird loopholes. Basically, by treating a bunch of people as a single target, for instance, lesser successes can mean death. Here the argument would be that the thing being "killed" is actually the group. Again, this is the "target" oriented approach. Overshoot, and you can kill somebody if they're incidental to the conflict.

This is what the rules seem to me to say. How to reconcile that into an interpretation that supports what we're all saying it should?


Hmm. I've just gone through a quite exttensive mental perigrination and I'd like to display the outcome. I won't bother with how I got there (the process may be apparent anyhow). I've written this three times and started over, so hopefully I'm posting the most coherent version. In thinking about targeting in terms of in-game objects, I've been missing the real "target." Here's the principle as I'm seeing it now:

Complete Victory eliminates some game function of some game element. If that's not true, then the success required is less than Complete Victory.

Examples:

[*]NPCs exist to provide challenges for the characters. If you kill them, they can no longer provide a challenge. So you can't kill one without a Complete Victory.
[*]Mooks exist as an extension of a group. If they die, there's another to take it's place, meaning the source of potential challenge isn't removed. So you can kill mooks with marginal success. Destroying the group of mooks would probably require a complete success, unless it was part of yet a larger group from which it would itself be replaced.
[*]Deer exist only as a criteria of success to hunting. If you kill one, the hunting challenge isn't eliminated. So you can kill deer on a marginal success. A complete success might mean that you'd figured something out about this hunt that made it so that you'd always get deer hunting in this place. In other words, you'd have eliminated the challenge of hunting in this place.
[*]Jumping a wall doesn't make it any less of a wall to be jumped, so the only thing that would require a complete victory would be if you wanted to jump the wall in such a way as it never challenged you again in this particular way. Simply jumping it only requires a marginal success. [/list:u]This principle is no revelation, my intent was not to come up with something new, just a simple way to think about these things to make the process simpler. I think that the principle as I have it does that (probably will for me).

What it doesn't do simply, however, is address the "coup de grace" issue. Fortunately, I think we can extend it to do so. To restate the "problem" the rules seem to state that you can orchestrate a contest such that the result would be to leave the target helpless, such that it should then be an automatic success to accomplish removing it as a challenge. To use the classic example, if I make the NPC unconscious instead of trying to make him dead, then I can do this on a marginal success, as the character is still potentially a challenge. But then if I kill him, a simple task, doesn't that remove the character from being a challenge? Shouldn't that require a complete victory?

Bear with me for a moment. All successes that are less than complete victories are transformative to an extent. That is, the target gets some penalty that represents the new condition. Often, however, the effect has in-game ramifications that aren't represented by the mechanical effect. I could be told by the GM that the wall I just jumped now has a -10% to resist my future attempts to do so, but what's really important is that I'm now on the other side. To extend another classic example, perhaps I'm now able to attack somebody I couldn't before. The point is that the in-game situation changes as well, meaning that the presentable challenges change. In fact, this is required by the "no repeat attempts" rule. That is, all resolutions imply that the situation has changed so that the same contest is no longer available, and you have to try other things to proceed. In the wall example, if I wanted to attack it's "wallness" or ability to resist my leaping it, I wouldn't be able to do so again by jumping it again, because that's the same challenge. Maybe I could dig at it to lower it.

Now, this means that, in theory I can't kill the NPC unconscious before me, because despite it being appropriate to use the automatic success rules instead of one of the other methods, I'm prevented from doing so by the "no repeat attempts" rule. Now, before you say that I'm advocating those Kludgey narrator provided excuses as to why the character can't kill the chararter, let me say that in some cases a narrator could rule that the character being unconscious represented a new situation, and that it would be viable to allow the kill.

It's just likely very undramatic this way (OTOH, in some cases it's completely warranted, I'm sure). Further, the rules say that there should be some consideration given to killing, it's dramatic, and needs to be handled this way. Well, what that implies to me is that a new contest is called for, one that dramatically represents the new situation. So, in the case of the unconscious NPC, what I'd do is to create a new contest for the PC doing the killing that wasn't an automatic success (by definition a non-dramatic situation that the hero should just succeed at). For example, the player could roll some personality trait, against another of his own traits. Yes, this means that the NPC is no longer the target. Basically, the situation has transformed the NPC from one kind of challenge to another (like the wall example). The one challenge leads to another. So the challenge remains, just altered in form.

The neat thing about this is that the target is now no longer a standing fighting NPC, but the conundrum of whether to kill or not. That is, if the PC decides to kill the NPC, then that doesn't eliminate the conundrum for the future when other opportunities come up to kill people. So the marginal victory gets you the death of the NPC in this case. And the character inflicts a -1 on his own ability to resist killing.

This is sooo cool. It means that you have something a lot like UA madness meters built into the system. The book notes that the GM should assign abilities like "Killer Reputation" to PCs, but what I'd suggest is that the "wounds" given represent these things. A character that succeeds in killing somebody will automatically be better at killing next time. A PC who fails to kill will have a harder time next time.

So, I think that, for me at least, I've killed about four birds here, three completely unexpectedly. I have a principle that helps me decide what appropriate framing for contests is in terms of possible victory outcomes. But I've also addressed the problem with the Coup de Grace concept, and in doing so I've managed to meld the normal rules for how to handle heroes killing NPCs with the normal consequences of contests, and gotten rid of some niggling concerns I had with Simon's arguments about chaining contests to boot.

Big grin. You may now deflate my balloon by pointing out holes in my logic, or rules violations, if you can find any. :-)

Mike

[lightcastle]

Big grin. You may now deflate my balloon by pointing out holes in my logic, or rules violations, if you can find any. :-)

I'm a little too impressed to try and do that.  It's an elegant solution, in that the root goes right back to addressing how one chooses to frame conflicts and why. I'm certainly adopting it informally, I think I will still just "judgment call" things, but I'll have an idea of what the underlying logic is, which is nice.

I have to ask you a question, though. Are you an engineer or programmer? This is just curiousity, stemming from the fact that you have so systematically attacked this issue from the view of the internal logic of the system as written.

[Mike Holmes]

I think that half the reason that I did all this was so that I could simply go and do what I have been doing - just feeling better about it knowing that the principle exists. There were just elements that made me feel at times like I was making up rules as I went along, but I felt that there was something guiding the whole all along. So I had to discover that.

And you got me, I am a programmer/analyst by job description, and spend most of my time working with statistics - programming solutions to generate the statistics, and methods to more quickly and carefully analyze the numbers. I also have about half of an Engineering degree. So, no surprise that I came at it from this angle. :-)

Mike

[lightcastle]

So, no surprise that I came at it from this angle. :-)

Gotcha. I don't have that kind of rigour, but when someone can wrestle that puppy to the ground in order to put together a coherent way to expose the logic underpinning what so many of us are doing intuitively, I'm a happy camper.

[Bankuei]

Hi Mike,

I've been watching this with some interest, and here's the best I can offer at the moment...

I base the required success level based on the results of overcoming a given conflict.  For example, dealing with an immediate conflict, such as jumping over the fence, beating the mob of mooks, only results in immediate benefits.  Looking at my book, that means only a marginal victory is required.  Longer term conflicts may require higher levels of success, with the conflict that changes the campaign or the hero itself being the kind that requires a Complete success.  The latter might be something like overcoming alcolhism, or killing a long term rival("The man with 6 fingers!"), etc.

The only other rule that I use to avoid the "double jeopardy" syndrome of trying again, is that I require that another seperate contest lay between the next try.  Therefore, failing to kill a foe, but injuring them, would then probably result in a some other contest, such as a chase, before another combat contest would arise.

I don't know if that helps you any, but that's what I use for my game.

Chris

[Mike Holmes]

That sorta helps, Chris. That is, it's another data point on how people are doing this sort of thing. And I think that how you're doing it follows my general principle if I don't misunderstand something.

Note that some of what I gave above are just examples. For instance, the roll to kill someone could just as easily be a chase scene or something. The example that I chose merely addresses the situation that could be narrated into where the NPC in question is lying unconscious, or has a knife to his throat or something (which was the problematic case). That doesn't mean that all contests will go that way, just that I have a reasonable application of the rules when it does.

Another reasonable application is to just make it an automatic success, assuming that drama is satisfied by that. And the contest to be a killer is just one sort of contest that could occur at that point. Another could be to kill the helpless person without losing the respect of some follower or something. There are infinite possibilities - I didn't mean to imply that I would only do this the one way that the example showed (I thought about it afterwards and realized that I could have been read that way).

Part of the problem is that I sorta started to get into other principles that the example leads into. I should have stayed with the original point. The most important thing is the idea that contest results alter or eliminate a particular source of challenge. I think as long as you look at it like that, it's easy to know when you're doing it "right". Well, is for me at least.

Mike