"Blood and Sand" at Toronto's Pandemonium [HeroQue

[epweissengruber]

Context:
Saturday afternoon game slot at Toronto's Pandemonium 23 convention.

Inspiration- Gladiator, the movie, for invoving characters in both fight scenes and intrigue
- R.H Howard, for the blood and guts
- Fritz Leiber (for his fun descriptions of swordplay and his psycho-sexual treatment of magic)

Summary:
              A fun but truncated demo session of the HeroQuest rules that succeeded in demonstrating three aspects of the system that I desired to highlight: capacity to generate both graphically detailed and emotion-laden combat, the system's capacity to handle player story input, and the ease with which all of HeroQuest's resolution mechanics (including Extended Group contests) can be made clear to roleplaying neophytes.

Setting Up the Scenario:
   Note to gamers – when meeting a group of strangers, you would be surprised how effective greeting all the others, shaking hands with them, and learning their names can be in creating a functional play group.  I appeared to be the only narrator who did this during the whole convention.  The players seemed surprised by the gesture but were put at ease quickly.  I think that this common  gesture of sociability put the neophyte player at ease.

Scenario:
   The title was "Blood and Sand."  Each player had to select a character from a pool of gladiators who had one common trait: they had all been betrayed by someone they trusted and all of them had some overriding goal that they wished to accomplish.  The temple guardian wanted to tear out the throat of a Lunar noble with her teeth, the Agimor wanted to publicly demonstrate his people's ability to defeat Chaos, the Western knight wanted to aid a virtuous woman, etc.  

Kickers
I gave each of the characters a Kicker that explained how they had ended up in the pit and presented them with a decision.  No one picked my character based on Gladiator's Maximus, but he was my favourite.  A Lunar officer had been betrayed, disgraced, and widowed.  Today in the pit, however, he saw the man who betrayed him sitting in the stands watching the action -- and on his arm was the officer's "dead" wife!  The player would have been encouraged to find some way out of the pit OR to draw his oppressor into the pit.

Related to each Kicker was an "Overriding Passion."  To demonstrate the link between character and action, I gave each character some powerful feeling, relationship, or goal.  These were then translated into Personality Traits or Relationships.  I was hoping that by stealing a page from Riddle of Steel I could encourage the characters to relate their actions to their characters' desires.  They needed no prompting.  Once David saw that his temple guard wished, before her death, to rip out the throat of a Lunar aristocrat with her bare teeth, he wasted no time figuring out a situation where his character would get the +5 augment to her TN that the Passion would provide.

All of the players used their Kickers and Passions as starting places for making decisions about their characters.

Player Input:
   Once the players had selected a character, they then had to choose a patron who would approach the player with an offer: carry out task X, and receive freedom and help in accomplishing their goal.  I made it clear that the players did not have to accept this offer.  They would be compelled to fight again in the pit but would still be able to accomplish their aims.  All of them elected to go with the patron who they thought would be fun to work with.

The experienced roleplayers hesitated for maybe ½ a second but went with it.  The newbie seemed thrilled that she could have a hand in deciding the nature of the story in which she was going to participate.  She had no idea that this was the way RPG's were supposed to work.  When I told her that her character could be male or female as she wished, she kept the character female.  The others seemed amused by the idea of a shape-changing bisexual were-puma but she seemed delighted by the fact that this odditiy had place in the story.  I think she might have been anxious about doing something "wrong" or "weird," but seemed enthused by the fact that her off-the cuff suggestions were taken seriously.

At the start of the session I made it clear that this was a demo session and very flexible.  I said we could kill far out beasts for two hours or get a story going.  All of them elected to go for story, most vocally the female player who had never gamed before.

The first 90 minutes or so were taken up with establishing the situation and undertaking the first encounter between the characters – fighting for their lives in the gladiator pits of Furthest.

The patrons included a discontented general's loyal son who wanted to help his father get rid of his old wife and make way for his new bride, a conquered Esrolian queen. There was a widow who wished to facilitate her husband's ghost's revenge against the brother who murdered him.  The Esrolian queen's daughter wanted to eliminate the current regent of the kingdom of Tarsh so that her mother could re-establish her kingdom.  The regent wanted to maintain power and eliminate the Esrolian queen's daughter.

All of these patrons are players in the regional politics of Tarsh.  All of the players were Gloranthan newbies.  I did have a complicated relationship map on display but I made it clear that they had to wade into the intricacies of Tarsh politics only as far as it would help them get what they want.  They were more interested in hooking up with interesting characters than they were in choosing the setting-appropriate ally.  They made "wrong" choices but ones that made sense for their characters.

Note: roleplayers coming by to look at the bulletin board with my relationship map pinned to it walked by with stunned looks.  Considering that the other tables were decorated with giant spider, plush dragons, and giant robots, I regard being able to confuse the passersby as an noteable achievement.

Player/Narrator Interaction:
   I had to stay on my toes because I was stimulated and challenged by the choices made by the players.  In preparation, I had antagonisms and factions marked out on the relationship map, so I was able to make up intrigues and plots pretty quickly.  The trick was to resist the temptation to get all of the characters in the same place while still entwining all of their stories.  One group were out to get the mother of the discontented young man.  The mother had engaged in a sexual dalliance with a female Puma person but had then given her over to the gladiator pits.  The Puma person was played by the female neophyte (let's call her Kate).  Kate had persuaded two other players that the decadent Tarsh noblewoman was the kind of person with whom they shared antipathy.  They were busy infiltrating the noblewoman's estate while two others were slipping into the royal palace of Furthest aided by the ghost.  Lastly, the temple guardian was squaring off against a dinosaur being ridden by the prince regent.  The companions of the ghost and the temple guardian were almost certain to affect each other physically, but I was briefly at a loss as to how Kate's group would feed into the action.

I quickly though up a way for the Puma person and her companions to become engaged with the action.  The noblewoman would be copulating with a chaos demon, and her son would be there as well.  The two of them were creating a homunculus tainted by incest, a taint that the prince regent shared.  At some point the ghost would take on his brother, Tarsh's mad king Moirades, and the chaotic homunculus would take on the regent, Pharandaros.   Kate would then have to make a decision – would she have her character slay the woman who betrayed her, or let the magico-sexual ritual continue to its consummation.  

Note: there is no way the CHARACTER would be aware of what was taking place.  Kate, the PLAYER would be making a choice that would affect the agendas of other players.  I had been trying to come up with a way of foregrounding the difference between Narrativist play and the received wisdom about not letting player knowledge contaminate in-character action.  The players gave me an opportunity to do so.  

But I ran out of time before I could bring events to their constructed conclusion.      

Extended Group Contests and Player Participation:
I was out to prove that HQ could create exciting combat as was not just a rules-lite "soap opera" game.  And it worked.
- the d20/roll under a target number system was easily understood
- the simple contest system of contested rolls took a little more time to teach
- the AP/bid system did leave them scratching their head at first, but they exploited it for all its worth once they grokked it.

Player Reactions:- David is an experienced GM and player and a very inventive soul.  So he used his character's personality traits in an attempt to shake the confidence of the Retarius and Myrmydon who faced her.  Coming from some acquaintance with the Simple Contest System, he thought that this would be a all-or-nothing situation.  I explained to him that he had announced that his overall goal for the contest was to slay his character's opponents with her axe, so reduced it to a smaller bid.

- Larry played a Western Knight up against characters I called "Bat Slaves," tough fighters armed with batwing polearms and batwing shuriken.  He took one out with a colossal bid, and his AP total shot up an astounding amount.  He didn't understand how defeating one opponent could help him in the next phases of the contest until I set the scene for him: imagine your character setting up for a mighty swing, slashing the abdomen of his opponent, and ending his spinning attack with a 180 degree rotation, coming to face his next opponent with a viscera-coated blade and his foe crumpling to his feet in the background.  He got it.

-The Puma person, having no chance to use her ambush attacks, fared less well and was actually pinned by a trident.  The temple guardian had smoked one of her foes and left the other wounded.  Having banked up AP's, David was at a loss as to what to do.  I just said, what could you do to help.  David said, "Well, I guess she could throw some axes over the Puma person.  She is on the ground, right?"  So I told him to lend some of those surplus AP's to Kate's character.  At the same time, a Vingan spearwoman made a semi-successful AP lend that allowed Kate to make another big bid.  She turned the tables on her two foemen (I had the net-slinger serve as a Follower to the swordsman).  

It took an hour, but it was an hour of description and decision making, not dice rolling.

Blood, Guts, and HeroQuest:
   I did not allow Kate to narrate the outcome.  She might have come up with a better resolution of the action than I did.  She got into the spirit of describing the results of AP bids, and coming up with clever use of abilities to achieve her overall aim of eviscerating her opponent in a very showy way.  But she seemed to balk at the idea of narrating the outcome of other characters' actions, although they had only loaned her the AP and it was up to her to determine what to do with them.
   I tied it all up as follows: While the Puma person was on the ground, a spinning axe took of the arm of the net-man who had pinned her to the ground.  The Vingan's spear caught the foot of the swordsman who was menacing her life.  Her opponent immobilized and free from the net of her armless opponent, she was then able to tear at the midsection of her foe with feline savagery.  The crowd roared its approval.

Issues With the Context:
There was a heavy RPGA presence at the con.  It was hard for any non-D&D game to get noticed.  I only had my players because 2 of the GMs they had looked for were no-shows.  I got lucky because I had a combination of roleplayers experienced with games other than D&D and an enthusiastic newbie who wanted to participate in the kind of fun that she had seen her friends having.  I don't know if players used to the competitive tournament style of the RPGA would have been as open.

Postscript:
The players created a three-way tie when they voted on the best player.  They were David, Kate, and the player of the Vingan.  In other words, the players who had contributed the most details to the long combat scene and ideas for the different secret missions were the ones who achieved the greatest admiration.  I gave Kate the copy of the HeroQuest rulebook donated by SJ Games and Issaries.