[HeroQuest] Fields of Freedom

[Matt Snyder]

And from another country...

Matt, when you post comments about last night's session, I think you ought to mention the concept of granting Hero Point awards from fellow players, as well as from the narrator. It's a great way for us to let each other know what we liked about each session.

A rule hack! Do tell, Matt; what's this all about?

Mike

Yep, a rule hack. Here's how it works.

In previous sessions, I awarded an allotment of Hero Points. I believe they ranged around 4-6 or so, me not really being too certain about the "proper" range (that is, one that works for us!). When awarding the points, I'd go around the room. I tried to tell each players something they did that I liked. For example, I said something like "Dave, you get 5 points. I thought your dialogue and role-playing during the melee was great. Lisa, you get four points. I really liked the way you surprised me with your decision to help Lady Thorel."

Now,  that worked ok. But, then I noticed people talking to each other after the sessions. (Or, they informed me about the post-game chit-chat after I left to go to bed!) Flash, Lisa and Wendy and/or Tony stayed up at Flash & Lisa's house and talked more about the game. But, they might have talked about something great that Dave did during the game. Unfortunately, Dave didn't hear about that.

So, I took that idea and came up with this for our fourth session (I think it worked extremely well): I give everyone 1 Hero Point to award as they choose. They can give it to another player, or even keep it for themselves. But, they have to explain why to everyone else. They really only get to award one "great thing" in the session, but I found that it did a pretty good job of jump-starting discussion of other stuff, too. For example, "Well, I'm torn. I really liked it when Lisa did X, but I'm going to have to give my point to Dave because he did Y."

Then, I also award a baseline of hero points for everyone based on the overall enjoyment level of the session. Pretty subjective, I guess, but it's really no different from my previous awards of 4-6 points to each player. Last night's session was extraordinary. I awarded a baseline of 7 hero points to everyone, plus everyone's votes on top of that. I think Flash walked away with 9 points total. (Maybe I'll find that even 7 is miserly. We'll see how that works out.)

I did not let myself award one point to one person last night, but I think I will do that in the future. Kind of a GM's "MVP" award. I don't mean it to have more weight than player awards -- just that I can highlight something I liked, too. There was lots to like last night!

[Mike Holmes]

Sounds pretty good - I like that the award is nominal.

That said, why not make the players give it to somebody else, if it's good for discussion? Why allow a player to give it to himself? From a Game Theory POV, that's creating a conflict of interest it seems to me. Given that it's a nominal reward, that's probably not a big deal, but given that it's nominal what's the advantage of allowing a player to give it to themselves?

Hmmm. I have only two players tonight. I'm thinking of using this, but with my version the rewards become perfunctory (they must exchange). Hmmm.

As to overall level of reward, the official rule is that they get HP before and after every "adventure." I too count this as every session, and if that's the case, then 7 is about right. In fact, I recently realized this myself, and have started to give out big piles of HP each session.

Mike

[Mark D. Eddy]

I hope that Matt is enforcing the rule as described. If you want to keep your Hero Point, you have to describe the cool thing that you did that means that you deserve to keep the Hero Point.

At least that's what I read his rule as saying.

[Mike Holmes]

I'm assuming that he is enforcing it that way. The thing is that with rules like this, there are odd social presures at work. Let's say that I think that I had the best scene, so I want to give it to myself. Well, if the others don't think that I had the best scene, they might suspect me of hoarding. Even if they don't, I'm disincentivized to give myself the HP because they might think that.

If you simply make it mandatory to give it to someone else, then you take that pressure of that decision away, more people get rewarded (at least two, the guy with the actual best scene, and the person he thinks was second), and more connections between players are forged. If I say, "Yep, mine was best because of X" there's not a lot of reason for others to respond to that. It ends up being an internal reinforcement, and nothing more, possibly. Wheras even giving the HP from one player to another says something about what the player thought of that player's play.

This is generally true with all such mechanisms. For example, at cons to determine the winner of an event I have everyone vote for somebody besides themselves. This garuntees that I'll be getting what they really think, and not the results of a greedy player who couldn't resist voting for themselves. Similarly, if the change is made to Matt's system, nobody ever has to wonder whether or not a player giving a HP to himself is doing it for the right reason.

Mike

[Ian Cooper]

As to overall level of reward, the official rule is that they get HP before and after every "adventure." I too count this as every session, and if that's the case, then 7 is about right. In fact, I recently realized this myself, and have started to give out big piles of HP each session.

Without wishing to be seen stating the obvious the number of hero points you want to give out depends on two things:

1: The rate of advancement you are comfortable with. Consider that once you have a mastery advantage you ought to win a contest and probably get a minor victory, once you have a two mastery advantage or above you ought to win and inflict a major defeat. So once players reach 1W2 they should defeat most mooks and at 1W3 they are pretty unstoppable for normal joes. So be aware of how you may need to transition the conflicts in your game as heroes expertise rise and adjust your awards to get a comfortable advancement rate for all of you.

2: Hero Points also allow heroes to shift chance in their favor. The challenges you set or the heroes create for themselves will generate a burn rate of hero points. My rule of thumb is that only let them burn more than you give out if you want to create some sort of doomed feel, or offer something at a price, otherwise parity represents told an unexceptional story and points above parity are rewards for enjoyable play. Set the level of points above parity by your feel for advancement rates as described above.

Make sense?

I wouldn't give out more than about 3-5 above parity but that's my comfort with advancement rates. YMMV.

[Asaraludu]

I'm assuming that he is enforcing it that way. The thing is that with rules like this, there are odd social presures at work. Let's say that I think that I had the best scene, so I want to give it to myself. Well, if the others don't think that I had the best scene, they might suspect me of hoarding. Even if they don't, I'm disincentivized to give myself the HP because they might think that.

A solid point, though last night this was not strictly enforced.  Every player ended up voting for someone else, though Matt left the option open to vote for themselves.  I know that at least for myself, it was important to vote for someone else regardless of whether or not I may have thought I had the scene-stealer.  Part of it could simply be that I felt it'd be selfish to vote for myself, and just as you said, it tends to shorten the discussion.  I think that most everyone in our group would shy away from voting for themselves for similar reasons.  The whole "gentleman's game" bit, I suppose.

[Mike Holmes]

That's precisely my point, A, I feel that way, too. So why not take away the possibility of rewarding yourself, and never have that conflict come up? Where you know you are the right person for the reward, but you still reward someone else anyhow. It's just pointlessly uncomfortable.

Mike

[The GM]

How is it that this game has this quality? Put another way, why didn't previous games? What was done this time that has changed the attitudes of all of the participants? Was it Matt's refusal to play the one night when people didn't seem engaged? Did that send a message? Is it something about Matt's attitude? This is, indeed, a social contract issue, and my question is how it was established? Was there a piece of paper with requirements on it?

Yeah, I think Matt took it seriously enough that we understood it was important to him, so we treated him with the respect he's earned as a pal and give his wishes some weight.  Also, we really wanted a cool, tight game. In order for there to be a chance in hell of that happening, you have to go in with a certain mindset. IOW, we take responsibility for our own fun. No, we do not have a SC written down. I think everyone would have rolled many an eye at someone posting 'rules of conduct' or some other type of socially reinforcing document. We're good enough friends that if someone has a beef, they can have it addressed.

What do you think he's doing to come up with these conflicts? What's his inspiration? I'm actually interested more in what you think it is, than in an answer from Matt.

I believe that Matt is playing to his target audience. Who gives a crap what my character believes, or what Ton's character believes? That's just a piece of paper, easily changed or discarded. What doesn't change so much is *us*, the players.  He's playing to different facets of *our* personalities.  Very clever.

Again, what did he do that made them better? Was it better characterization? Or was there something about the composition of the NPCs that made them seem interesting to what was going on?

All of the above, really. It never seemed that his NPCs were 3 dimensional before. Now, they have a breath of life to them.

Do you feel that Matt has made it clear that people should speak up if they want to do something? Basically, is this Matt missing cues, or a player too shy to make her wants known? A bit of both? Something else?

Nope, at the risk of sounding critical, he dropped the ball on this one. Granted, she could have said more, but she tried twice, got no response and gave up.

So, how was it that Matt nailed making these things emotionally engaging? Was it the situations or NPCs or what that caused the action to be so engaging? Again, what do you think inspired him to come up with the things that worked? Compared to other games where things might have been less engaging?

The trust factor was pretty high.  It didn't seem a risk for us to engage in his scenarios. We couldn't get it wrong or screw it up. We didn't worry much about 'Matt's good time.' We focused on 'Our good time'. (Our includes Mr. Snyder.)  An important shift in our group, I believe.

I have to ask. What did he say? Why was it such a shocker? Again, how did he know it would be. Anyone can make up a surprise, "There's an earthquake, and the tower begins to fall!" But whether or not it's engaging has more to do than it just being a surprise. What did he use that existed already to make this statement a real shocker?

Because he knows us, he knew what would pull at our strings...note, I say *our strings* not the characters. Who cares about the characters when it comes to planning a whammie scene? It's not the character who reacts, it's the player! ;)

That's precisely my point, A, I feel that way, too. So why not take away the possibility of rewarding yourself, and never have that conflict come up? Where you know you are the right person for the reward, but you still reward someone else anyhow. It's just pointlessly uncomfortable.

I think we should have the option open because simply closing it off implies that we don't have the maturity to pick 'the best scene'. Immaturity is not an issue with this group.

[The GM]

Nope, at the risk of sounding critical, he dropped the ball on this one. Granted, she could have said more, but she tried twice, got no response and gave up.

Ok, I suck. Talked to Wen and that wasn't the case at all. She said she loved it and understood that Matt has split focus going on.

See, that's what happens when I try to be insightful.
Blah. Sue me! ;)

[nellist]

I wanted to comment on the HP award because I tried the same approach but hit on a problem. I still like the idea of players rewarding other players but my implementation failed.

I also gave the players HPs (I gave them two each) that they should assign to other players as a reward for creating fun. The bad news was that everyone agreed that player X had created the best event, and he then got all the HP. Now, his contribution had been good, but he got something like 8 HP and others didn't get any. It was not a fair distribution of HP, so I dropped it. I now* give a couple of points, plus a few specific things like one for "biggest AP transfer", one for "most heroic action", for "best dialogue" etc. (these specifics are mostly made up one the spot to give each player similar scores.

*'now' being the last time I played, which is not recent. I also no longer use straight Hero Points but "Heroic Taglines" in a Dying Earth/Hero Wars hybrid.

[TonyLB]

Isn't a fair distribution the very antithesis of what this sort of system is trying to achieve?  Meritocracies do not reward everyone, they reward the meritorious.

[inky]

Isn't a fair distribution the very antithesis of what this sort of system is trying to achieve?  Meritocracies do not reward everyone, they reward the meritorious.

Yes, but this system tends to give the most meritorious person a disproportionately large award. That is, if you have five people, and they all agree person X did the best job, person X ends up with 8 points and the next-best person gets at most 2. Which is fine if X did a really great job, but if they only did somewhat better than the next-best person, it's a weird result.

I don't know any way to fix this without greatly complicating the system, though. Maybe give them two points each and say they can't give them both to the same person.

[Asaraludu]

I wanted to comment on the HP award because I tried the same approach but hit on a problem. I still like the idea of players rewarding other players but my implementation failed.

As a longtime game-master, I've tried a great variety of session and story award methods.  I was never a fan of awarding characters for dungeon sieges, unless that was somehow a focus for the story.  So I'd come up with similar awards - "most dramatic scene," "most gripping action sequence," etc.  When I started down this road, I posed a "what did you learn?" question to each player.  However, it was still subjective to my tastes.  And, many years later, after I started having conversations with the group (same one as on this thread) in between our TROS sessions, I came to realize the very different tastes of the players.  So it was sometimes unsatisfying to them when I gave out arbitrary awards.

Off on a slight tangent here - when figuring awards in TROS, I had a tendency (in my old-school ways) to hand out awards at the end of the session, though Norwood recommended handing them out on the spot.  Then we'd have short discussions on how many points the character would earn for actions pertaining to their SA's.  Other players had a tendency to chime in if they felt I was being too skimpy, or simply off-base, with one of their fellow players.  I really enjoyed that, as it was a sign of players investing themselves in other players' characters.  I'm thinking of resurrecting that campaign again, but am looking to get more player involvement when looking to award SA usage.  I'm leaning toward a slight bent on what Matt used last session.

Wendy has always been difficult for me to run a game for.  Perhaps Matt is feeling some of the same pain.  For years, I mentally relegated her to being a fringe player, someone who creates a character but rarely gets truly and deeply involved in the game.  Since that's one of my goals as a narrator, when I rarely saw Wendy proactively involving herself in the situations at hand and not reacting as I'd expect to my attempts to cajole her into action, I decided that was just how Wendy was, and returned my story focus to the other players who so readily took the reins.  Very unfair, I'm sure, but I'm still molting out of my old-school thinking.  What really puzzled me was when she started showing more open involvement in some of my TROS sessions.  When Lisa ran her WOD: Carnival game, she showed even more initiative, fully taking the game in a different direction when it seemed that the session in question was about to stall.  Now with HQ, and Matt's open admission of trying to create some sort of dilemma for each player character during each session, I can see that involvement increasing.

I think it's a great idea, and one I plan to steal outright for a possible TROS comeback.  It makes perfect sense with the TROS system, considering spiritual attributes.  And really, its a great idea for any story-driven game.

[Asaraludu]

Yes, but this system tends to give the most meritorious person a disproportionately large award. That is, if you have five people, and they all agree person X did the best job, person X ends up with 8 points and the next-best person gets at most 2. Which is fine if X did a really great job, but if they only did somewhat better than the next-best person, it's a weird result.

I don't know any way to fix this without greatly complicating the system, though. Maybe give them two points each and say they can't give them both to the same person.

What Matt did for last session was to award 7 HP to each player, then give each of us a single HP to award to another player.

Flash (Squire Gwyn) walked away with 9 HP
Lisa (Gabrielle) took 8 HP
I (Bronn/Finn) took 8 HP
Dave (Ser Thomas) got his base 7
Wendy (Asheria) had to leave before awards were handed out, so her vote is not yet in.
Matt didn't award a point as part of this process, either.

Interestingly, I think that because of our varied interests, and because most of us in this group are very outspoken gamers in our own ways, it is not always obvious where the points are going to go.  While Dave and I thought that Flash's portrayal of his craven squire in the face of the "shocking" scene that tested his character's personality traits was the scene-stealer, Lisa enjoyed my character's insidious actions worming his way into the lord's court in order to carry out his own justice against his ancestral enemy.  I could have as easily given my point to her for a bit of highly dramatic role-playing between her character and one of the NPCs, but I decided to award my point based on action at the moment of dilemma in this case.  I think Dave gave his award to Flash for similar reasons.  Flash, on the other hand, was intensely interested in the playout of events with Lisa's great moment of decision, and awarded his point to her.  I think it'd be a rare moment with this group where everyone absolutely agreed that their point went to the same person.

I think that's where group dynamic comes into play.  I run games for my younger brother and his friends.  They're very energetic, but less mature.  Even though I'm astounded at the great ideas they come up with, they don't as easily invest themselves in each other's characters.  Many of the techniques we use in this group wouldn't work as readily in theirs.  When I do introduce some of the techniques that I've found to work with my longtime crew to my brother's friends, they seem to go with it, but the ideas don't sink in quickly.  I think that's mostly due to age (they're all in their mid to late teens) and maturity.  On the other hand, gaming with my brother's friends is always fresh.  The ideas just pour out of them.

Hopefully Matt will post his version of the events of session three and four of the Fields of Freedom game soon.  I'll save my comments on specific events for then.

[Mike Holmes]

Yeah, I think Matt took it seriously enough that we understood it was important to him, so we treated him with the respect he's earned as a pal and give his wishes some weight.  Also, we really wanted a cool, tight game. In order for there to be a chance in hell of that happening, you have to go in with a certain mindset. IOW, we take responsibility for our own fun. No, we do not have a SC written down. I think everyone would have rolled many an eye at someone posting 'rules of conduct' or some other type of socially reinforcing document. We're good enough friends that if someone has a beef, they can have it addressed.

You're missing the answer that I'm looking for, here. I get that Matt is taking it seriously, and that you're all playing this way because of your respect for him. But, OK, you didn't have a piece of paper. How was this communicated? What I'm looking for was how it was that you all got the idea that he was serious. Was it some change in his expressions? Did he say something? If so, what?

I'm trying to get at the very specific "how" this came about. It's easy to say, "we just decided" but that never happens. There has to be communication first for the change to happen. I'm looking for that communication.

I believe that Matt is playing to his target audience. Who gives a crap what my character believes, or what Ton's character believes? That's just a piece of paper, easily changed or discarded. What doesn't change so much is *us*, the players.  He's playing to different facets of *our* personalities.  Very clever.

Very cool answer. Now, presumably he's not having implausible things happen, right? That is, everything that's going on has some relevance to the characters, not just to the players, no? Given that, how is it that what's a plausible issue for the character ends up being so interesting to the players? Is it co-incidence? Or is something else going on?

Again, what did he do that made them better? Was it better characterization? Or was there something about the composition of the NPCs that made them seem interesting to what was going on?

All of the above, really. It never seemed that his NPCs were 3 dimensional before. Now, they have a breath of life to them.

OK, but, again, digging a bit deeper, was it all characterization? That is, was it simply that Matt improved his acting skills, and was portraying the characters in a more lifelike way? Or was there something about what the NPCs were about that made them so lifelike?

The trust factor was pretty high.  It didn't seem a risk for us to engage in his scenarios. We couldn't get it wrong or screw it up. We didn't worry much about 'Matt's good time.' We focused on 'Our good time'. (Our includes Mr. Snyder.)  An important shift in our group, I believe.

Spectacular answer. What was it that was different this time that caused this to happen? Was it the dedication to playing per #1 above? Was it just all the time you've spent together? Did the setting or system have anything to do with it?

I have to ask. What did he say? Why was it such a shocker? Again, how did he know it would be. Anyone can make up a surprise, "There's an earthquake, and the tower begins to fall!" But whether or not it's engaging has more to do than it just being a surprise. What did he use that existed already to make this statement a real shocker?

Because he knows us, he knew what would pull at our strings...note, I say *our strings* not the characters. Who cares about the characters when it comes to planning a whammie scene? It's not the character who reacts, it's the player! ;)

Yer not going to tell me, are ya? What it was that Matt said? Too personal? I'm really curious as to the actual in-game event. Just waiting for Matt to lay it out?

And, again, how is it that the information laid out was both plausible, and still engaging at the same time? What's the linking element that causes this to be possible?

I think we should have the option open because simply closing it off implies that we don't have the maturity to pick 'the best scene'. Immaturity is not an issue with this group.

I think I've just been called immature! ;-)

I'm not for a moment questioning whether any of you are mature, or honest, or pure of heart or whatever - AFAICT, you're all perfect people. Still, Game Theory tells us that conflict of interest is not a good idea. I'm just not seeing the advantage to the additional option. Anyhow, it's a small point that I've blown out of all proportion, and I'm sure it'll work out either way.

Mike