Introducing Narrativism to your Players

[Decurio]

Hello All.

After several discussions over at RPG.net (and I recognize a lot of you), I picked up HQ.

I am both pleased and impressed far beyond my expectations. Thanks to those of you who suggested I pick up HQ; as an old RuneQuester, I was a bit worried.

I recently sat down with my players and discussed the upcoming campaign (and wouldn't you know it we already have a split-some of them want to play Heortlings, some Lunars:P) and they seem to have a hard time wrapping their head around the narrativist bent of HQ.  In the past, we have played mostly simulationist games, so making the conceptual leap is proving to be bumpy.  

Has anyone else ran into this problem when starting a new HQ campaign? How did you ease your players into HQ's narrativist paradigm?

Thanks!

BTW, any word on planned future releases for the HQ line?

[Bankuei]

Hi Decurio,

I found a couple of things worked really well for introducing Nar play to folks not used to it...

Remember, for Nar play, 2 things are necessary:
-Player input (no railroading)
-Premise to be addressed (what is it about?)

To Sim accustomed players, the firt thing I usually stress is that There is No Plot.  This is key.  There are no wrong nor right answers, the GM isn't waiting with carrot and stick for a response.  There are no "Gotchas!" waiting to hose a player for their decisions.

The second point that I emphasize is Author Stance.  Which is to say, players can "engineer" their character into events, misunderstandings, or situations, as long as they can make it plausible.  It's the player who deliberately chooses to have their character fall in love with their enemy's daughter who makes things interesting, even if the character isn't aware of their newfound love's heritage.

As a GM, it can be hard to not to fall into old play habits, which is why I strongly recommend a few games of the Pool or Inspectres to break any habits out of you and introduce players to the idea of player input.  The reason I suggest these games is that they are somewhat heavy handed and extreme in terms of the player input, but they work great for showing you how to play without a plot and without railroading, because they are antithetical to the rules of those games.

When it comes to HQ, I always open things up for player input, especially when we're talking about spending Hero Points.  As far as running the game, I usually come up with a morally sticky conflict, and a roster of characters on many sides of it.  There are no plans for "what will happen" exactly, although I frame scenes around:

-Introducing NPCs
-Revealing relationships between characters("He's really HIS son!" "Oh!")
-Revealing how relationships change between characters("You lied to me! I'll never forgive you!")
-Actions/Reactions on parts of the characters regarding the conflict

A good sort of moral quandry that pops up often between Lunar and Heortling culture is one of "What is justice?"  Its easy to introduce some injustice, with groups on both sides trying to achieve justice as they see it or hide it for their own benefit.

Chris

[Decurio]

Thanks for the prompt reply, Chris.  

In addendum to my first post on the thread, let me bounce something else off the board: one of my players made the observation (and this may have to do with an increased understanding of how to apply the GNS model to active gaming) that in HeroQuest, the things we used to roleplay in RuneQuest are now formalized-after a fashion, of course.  E.g., if  Snorri, a weaponthane of the Isoltings, fell in love with the daugher of the chief of the Skanthings-whom incidentally are enjoying a lengthy bloodfeud with the Isoltings-then it seems in HQ that these relationships would be formalized, whereas in RuneQuest, we would simply roleplay the resulting situations.  

So, in practice, whats the advantage to HQ's approach?  I'll be the first to admit that I have practically NO experience actually running the game; I'm sure this wouldn't even be an issue a few sessions into the campaign, but I've got a seven people who are still halfway wondering why we aren't playing RQ.

Help me show them the error of their ways:)

[Nick Brooke]

So, in practice, whats the advantage to HQ's approach?

Your heroes rock when they're doing things that it really makes sense for them to be doing. Fighting against a hated enemy to defend the ones you love gets you direct ability bonuses in HeroQuest. You'll find other threads here that explain this in more depth (check this thread for some good examples), but personality and relationship ratings are the key to hours of multiply-augmented gaming joy.

Edit: forgot to mention Passionate Intensity, Brand Robins' excellent article which covers exactly what I'm on about.

Cheers, Nick

[Bankuei]

Right,

Along with Nick's points and what is mentioned in Brand's article, a key point to remember is that the relationship trait doesn't rate how much your hero feels towards another, as much as how important a character is to the story of the game.  The higher the relationship score, the more central that character or community is to your character's life.

So, even though Snorri and the daughter's relationship may go through its ups and downs, dramas and misunderstandings("I love you!" "I'll never forgive you!" "I'm sorry!" etc.), the rating doesn't change based on whether they love each other or hate each other at the moment, it still gives augments, what it DOES do is let you know how much of an augment it makes.

When players either ask that a relationship or trait be formalized, or spend a Hero Point, what they are saying is, "Hey, Narrator!  This is important to the game!"

And depending on what augments the players decide to use for their heroes, they're making a thematic statement.  Consider the murder scene from Gladiator, the son kills the father out of love, resentment, and jealously!  That says a lot more about him than simply a cold blooded murder without any emotion.  Likewise, your heroes may succeed or fail, and what they choose to apply or not apply also says something about how the players see their characters.

Chris

[Ron Edwards]

Hiya,

Here's an idea, based on one of the minor comments in your first post, Dec.

Some players want to play Lunars and some want to play Heortlings? Good.

Then let them do so. Pick a place in Dragon Pass in which both sets of folks would be expected to mingle, and maybe not necessarily fight like mad dogs. As I read the source material, that's actually most of Dragon Pass!

Then make up characters. Then play.

Because there is no pre-arranged plot ...
Because every character in HQ belongs to various communities, not just one ...
Because personal relationships are just as "powerful" as swords and spells in system terms ...

... you will end up with a story. A story about what really matters most: religion, money, family, love, or friendship.

Never mind coming up with "how to get them together." Instead, just provide a community for them to be in, with all the tensions a community always has.

Never mind coming up with a villain "for them to fight." Instead, just provide adversity that will, by the rules, kill them or worse. It could be external ("broos attack!") to the community, or it could be internal ("local priest has incestuous affair with daughter, chaos monster born") to it.

And remember: the players' job is to come up with the right thing to do. Not to accord with what you, "the genre," or references to what "a" Heortline or "a" Lunar would do. Can you see that such a context for play actually demands that the player-characters include both Lunars and Heortlings?

In my Narrativism essay, I chose the quotes from HeroQuest very carefully. Check'em out and see what you think.

Best,
Ron

[Decurio]

And this is precisely why I enjoy living in a time where ideas flow so freely and quickly-somebody remind me to thank Al Gore for inventing the Internet;)

Ron, that is an EXCELLENT idea, and one I failed to even pick up on; the Heortling-Lunar mix is an ingenius way to get (hopefully!) my players to take an active role in the clash of community/culture.  I still think our first few sessions are going to be a little bumpy, but then we've been playing simulationist and gamist games for well over twenty years.

I'm looking forward to change of pace!

Thanks for the feedback, folks; it is most definitely appreciated.

If my players like HQ as much as I think they're going to, maybe I can finally get them to try Sorcerer!:)

[Mike Holmes]

The other typical problem with "converting" to narrativism, is getting the players to buy into the idea (which Chris hinted at) that the ratings aren't entirely meant to reflect some in-game reality.

Consider the following, as an extreme example meant to see if you can wrap your head around the concept in question. You could have a character described as being a huge strong guy, who doesn't have a the ability Strong at all. Then you could have a small guy who would be described in-game as much weaker who has Strong 5W. In many games this would mean that the little guy was the stronger of the two. In fact there'd be some chart that would list how much each can carry or the like.

There is no such chart in HQ, and for a reason. Because the ability Strong doesn't neccessarily reflect the strength of the character. Instead it represents how often the character will be able to resolve conflicts favorably using strength. Again, in our example, if the two guys lift stones larger and larger to see who can lift the larger stone, in a situation that's not a conflict, the big guy will win. But, say the big guy is trying to pound the little guy into the ground. The little guy will likely win the contest (all else being equal), due to his Strong abilty.

Doesn't that make him stronger? No, it doesn't. The narration of the win could be something like, "Despite being much weaker, Skinny Guy manages to maneuver to get some good leverage and make his muscles work well to cut off the Big guy's windpipe, knocking him unconscious."

The skinny guy wins because of his strength, yes. but not because he's stronger. But because the game statistics said that the story should go such that he will win this way more often.

Does that make any sense?

Now, what usually happens is that everyone makes things easy to grasp, and matches pretty closely the ability descriptions to the in-game descriptions. So the above circumstance doesn't often (ever, even) occur. But it could, and it would be valid. Understanding this is key in figuring out how things work in a game like HQ.

For example, let's say that the hero is a good swordsman, looking to test his mettle against other reknowned swordsmen. He comes across several thugs with no training at one point. The swordsman's abilities long having been established (that is, there being no need to make a display of his ability at this point), the narrator decides that this is a conflict "that no self-respecting hero would fail" and calls it an automatic victory. He narrates as the hero carves up the mooks as he then proceeds to find somebody interesting to fight.

This is not to say that the thugs, outnumbering the hero might not have been a serious threat. In the example, imagine that with multiple attacker penalties, that the character would have been potentially in trouble statistically. The point is that it's not some in-game idea of power that makes the task something "that no self-respecting hero would fail," it's actually the needs of the players.

There should only be a roll if the players think that it would be neat if the character failed. Again, it's the players' needs that are being fulfilled, not some simulation of an objective in-game world.

How does this attitude pertain to the mechanics of HQ? Why is this true? Well, consider, for instance, that magic rolls against different target numbers depending on its thematic use. That is, if I roll my Leap Wall Spell against an inanimate wall, I don't roll against it's height, but against 14. Meaning that I'll be able to leap walls that are quite high - and rightly so, that's the description of the ability that makes sense. But, if I compete against another character who has a mundane Jump High, to see if I escape from that character, now I roll against his mundane ability. If he rolls against the wall, he rolls that ability against the wall's height. So, objectively, he's nowhere near as high a jumper as I am. No way he can beat me normally. But in a conflict, he may well have the higher ability and be able to beat me regularly. What's going on?

Well, objectively, the Leap Wall Spell allows much higher jumps. That doesn't change in-game. If my character loses to the mundane leaper, it's not because his character somehow leapt higher than a wall. He can't do that. Instead, some other explanation has to happen. Often in this case what happens is that the narrator will narrate the hero's magic failing him. "You try to leap away from him as he leaps for you - but the spell gets fouled up as you are impressed by his non-magical leaping ability, and he catches you before it goes off."

Indeed, in HQ, you always have to be able to narrate results like this. Even if my Leap Wall Spell is rated high enough to make it proportionally better than the mundane ability to match the in-game effect, there's still a chance of failure on my part. In which case the narrator has to be able to describe what happens. So all that the rolling does is to randomize things. Yes, if characters were to do the same conflicts over and over to "test" the results they'd become aware that the world was dominated by dramatic rules that don't match ours. But this is why you only roll for things that are dramatically important - when "testing" just don't roll, and apply the in-game logic that the Wall Leaping Spell wins every time.

Narraration delivers the plausibility, the rules deliver the drama. Not easy to understand for some, but it's the most direct way to understanding narrativism as pertains to HQ.

BTW, for those who don't believe the above, I'd point them to certain posts made by Robin Laws here:
http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/HeroQuest-rules/message/604
http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/HeroQuest-rules/message/4665

Mike

[soru]

Does that make any sense?

Quite frankly, no.

Things aren't really as abstract and complicated as you make things out, on the whole if someone has a high strong rating they are actually strong, if they have a high wrestling rating they are good at wrestling, and so on. Doing things that way really cuts down on the amount of abstract philosophising needed to run a game session.

I think your description and links may have been more appropriate to Hero Wars instead of Hero Quest, but then thinking about the game and how to run it has evolved a lot since back then.

soru

[Mike Holmes]

Quite frankly, no.

Soru, it's just one viewpoint on how to play. I understand that you don't share it. That does not make it wrong, however. This is what narrativism implies, systemwise. It's what the poster is  asking about. If you don't want narrativism, or at least want the in-game reality to have some "hardness" to it, then that's fine for you. But the point still stands in HQ as much as it did in HW. I've played more of the latter now than I did of the former.

Mike

[Decurio]

M. and S. you both hit on a conceptual issue thats been an issue with my group. Now that we've got a couple of sessions under our belts, things are beginning to click, but we are having issues where I thought we would. When you are used to Sim play, you expect to have very specific attributes/stats, whatever, for everything.  This makes a lot of intuitive sense.  Your character can only fight for x rounds because he only has x fatigue points.  

Narrativist play chucks that right out the window.  So far, we are having a blast with with campaign (and the tensions between my Lunar and Heortling players is really beginning to take root now that the first session jitters are out of the way).  As my group explores the leap from sim to narr play, I'll post updates on our progress...think of it as an experiment in progress:)

Cheers everyone,
Dec

[soru]

I don't want to get point by point, but you did say:

-
The other typical problem with "converting" to narrativism, is getting the players to buy into the idea (which Chris hinted at) that the ratings aren't entirely meant to reflect some in-game reality.
-

I agree with you that doing things the way you suggest often ends up causing problems. I have seen several threads here, on hq-rules, and on rpgnet complaining about this issue, and encountered it myself in real life.

Unlike you, I am unwilling to call those problems inevitable, or built into the nature of the system. I think they come from a subtle misunderstanding of how to best run HQ narratively, which I think can actually be resolved and overcome.

So I am going to contradict myself here and go into a bit of abstract philosophical discussion - hopefully everyone will realise this isn't necessary to understand and play heroquest, as unlike hero wars it plays perfectly well as a sim game as written.

There are 4 relevant mechanics:

hero points

ability ratings

ability names

situational modifiers

Each of those mechanics could in principle be treated as reflecting the gameworld (sim), or be there to help interesting things happen (nar).
So in theory there are 16 fundamentally different ways of playing HQ, whoch can be written down as SSSS, NSSS, ... , NNNN,

Of course, just about everyone would agree hero points are a narrative mechanic, even if you only use them to avoid untimely failures, and I would imagine everyone who uses them at all uses situational modifiers in a sim way, you get -20 because what you are trying to do is implausible, not because failure is more interesting. So really, there are only a few ways that anyone would actually choose to run it.

In those terms, the default rulebook way of playing HQ is NSSS, someone with Tall 18 is definitely taller in the game world than someone with Tall 16. This is a perfectly good way of playing the game, and I suppose it is what you think I am advocating.

There is also your suggested narrative-heavy way of playing the game, NNNS, where all you can say is that someone with Tall 18 is slightly more likely to win tallness contests than someone with Tall 16.

I think this is unneccesarily confusing, because the only actual in-game use of the ability names is to assign situational modifiers, and that is a sim mechanic. It's that confusion, not the idea of narrativism itself, that causes at least some of the problems.

A cleaner nar/sim split is NNSS, where the ability ratings are narrative (his fighting skill is significant) and the ability descriptions are sim (he learnt to fight with sword and shield when he was in the army).

Playing this way, who is likely to win a contest is narratively important, and that is determined by ability rating and hero points use, and how they win is determined by ability descriptions and situational modifiers.

This is analogous to how a scriptwriter would write a conflict, decide who is going to win and them come up with a plausible way for them to do it.

To come back to your original example, if a small guy should be able to beat a big guy (Strong 5W) in an unarmed fight, give him an ability name that reflects how he plausibly might win that fight, i.e. not Strong 10W but Dirty fighting 10W, Wrestling 10W, etc. In general, any time you have a perceived game world/game system mismatch, you can fix it by leaving the ability ratings alone and changing one or both of the the ability names.

In other words, always use ability descriptions that are something it is plausibile and consistent for that character to be good at. This is the way the character generation rules are written, everyone starts with the same ability values, but in differently named abilities, and the ability names are based on plausibility (a soldier would know how to curse, an Orlanthi would know about their myths, etc).

soru

[Peter Nordstrand]

Soru,

Please forgive me if I'm reading you wrong, but the way I see it you are not trying to help Decurio at all. Read his questions again:

Has anyone else ran into this problem when starting a new HQ campaign? How did you ease your players into HQ's narrativist paradigm?

Now, I am not a moderator or anything, but I do think it would be more polite to take your debate with Mike to a new thread. It is just my personal opinion, and I mean no offence.

With all due respect,

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

I am the moderator and I'll back up Pete in full on this one. Soru, please take it to another thread or to private discussion of some kind.

Best,
Ron

[Wulf]

I can't see why both of you are blaming Soru for some crime, it seems to me his is a far more reasonable, useful and RELEVANT post on the subject of introducing players to Narrativist play.  He is at least considering the subject from the point of view of experienced sim players, and which parts of HQ can be easiest and best played narratively. Mike Holmes, on the other hand, seems to believe the best way to learn to swim is to be thrown in the deep end of the pool and left to swim or drown.

Wulf