(SWHQ) How would you run this as an extended contest?

[Mandacaru]

...and what Kerstin said (all good, but then that's Londoners for you) brings us back to a central point: once the conflict is resolved, it stays resolved. No last swings from the ground, no desperate attempts to escape. (The get-out there is spending HP of course.)

As long as you and the players have this in the forefront of your mind as you get towards rolling the dice (preferably with at least a vague idea of what failure means), then you are making for a good, dramatic contest and can steer away from the tit-for-tat stuff.

Sam.

[soviet]

OK; we played again last week and this is what happened...

I'd been really nervous building up to this session because of how badly I'd thought the last session had gone. I was quite concerned that another bad session might kill off any enthusiasm for 'this new-fangled game that isn't dnd'. Interestingly, the player of the hacker character told me that he'd enjoyed last session, and I got that impression from the jedi's player as well, so the BAD SESSION feeling I'd got last time may not have been quite as true as I'd thought it was.

I also had a bit of a chat with my players about the last session and explained a bit about interesting defeats, stating goals not tasks, and tried to encourage them to contribute to the narration. In fact, with almost every contest / exchange I did this session, I had a quick brainstorm with the players beforehand where we sketched out some possible victories and defeats. I think they were a bit bemused at first but they took to it quite well after some prompting. I'm trying to get them to narrate each others failures so they can really stitch each other up and I can sit back and enjoy it!  

In play I was intercutting between these two threads:


The Riot

After a quick recap we get into the rioting crowd 'replay'. This went OK, but I couldn't quite seem to translate the vague but cool scene I had in my head into something fleshed out enough for play. The players also seemed a little short of inspiration here so rather than stretch things out into an extended contest we just did it as a simple contest so we could move on. So, the Jedi appealed for calm, augmented by the hacker who used his Logical and Spout Technical Jargon to feed them some technobabble about how it was much safer in the armoured freighter than in those vulnerable little escape pods. Despite all this they lost, so the crowd kind of surged and went for the pods anyway.

We did a couple more simple contests later on as the jedi rescued an alien child from being trampled (but is now stuck with her as he can't find any matching alien parents), and the hacker climbed up on a table and fired into the air to try and scare the crowd into submission. Yeah, a repeated attempt essentially, but it seemed to work well enough in the scene so we did it anyway. He failed despite a fairly low resistance, so the pods started launching. He also ducked a thrown bottle and recognised the culprit as the xenoarchaeologist he'd spoken to earlier (potentially interesting confrontation later).

Later, as the battle outside reached its peak, the power started to drain and the pods stopped being able to launch. The hacker realised the pirates had hacked into the ships computer and were going to shut down the shields next. He decided to oppose that so we did it as an extended contest. I started to become concerned about 'nesting' contests so I bid high to get a decisive result quickly; the PC got a very good success so it was all over in one round. We interpreted this as the PC now having access to the pirate ships computer. Meanwhile the jedi took advantage of the power loss in the pods to Force suggestion an end to the riot (finally!).


The Space Battle

I decided to do the space combat as a single extended contest with 2 sides - the Eisenstein (objective: escape from the pirates and get to an inhabited sector) and the Pirates (objective: disable and capture the Eisenstein). The pirates consisted of two separate raiders and one 'horde' of 3 fighters. I figured out the APs of both sides and ran a single round of the contest with low bids to set the scene and help explain the system to them. The PCs would then enter the contest as a 3rd side depending on what they wanted to do.

Cue the players. To try and be as transparent as possible with the system I gave them a list of all the stats and abilities of the pirate ships and the Eisenstein (both players have Identify Ship etc and come from this sector so I hand-waved any dice roll). They thought for a bit and said their objective was to try and drive off the raiders and capture one of their ships if possible.

They had quite a good idea for a first action where they managed to launch a deserted shuttle as a decoy, and transmitted a Force suggestion that some important (ie valuable!) potential hostage was escaping on it. I thought this was cool but would mess up their APs bigtime, so rather than punish them for their idea I did it as an out of sequence Simple Contest. They got a Major Victory, so I ruled that the wing of pirate fighters are out of the fight for a few rounds as they pursue their new quarry .

Their first proper action was to drift behind the raiders all stealthed up and, augmented by the pilot, the gunner would fire his Ion Cannons at one of them. We calculated APs for each player (based off one player's piloting skills and the other player's gunnery skills) and then pooled them into one total. I think they quite liked this enforced teamwork thing; they moved over to sit next to each other and started plotting together whenever the scene switched. They bid 20 AP, we discussed possible failure / AP loss consequences (ie they could drift too close, alert the raiders too soon, and get shot up), and they got a 2x transfer. I ruled they took out one ship and the other ship got frazzled by the EMP backwash and is now vulnerable.

Calculating the APs and explaining the system has taken a while, however, and my other players (the jedi and the hacker) were starting to look a bit left out. I had been intercutting between the riot and the space battle but the space stuff was taking up more time, so I gave the jedi and hacker players control of the Eisenstein. They loved this, and they were soon plotting and conspiring just like the other two. They decided to try and shake the remaining raider out of their blind spot and put it out in the open, which I treated as a variable augment (possible failure: they lose ground and the raider is now out of sight). They succeeded and got a +4 to next round's shooting.

The remaining Raider made a low bid and moved up towards the front of the ship ready to fire a boarding pod, opposed by the PC pilot's dogfighting skill as he is right on his tail. Then the Eisenstein's defence turret took its shot, augmented from last round, and whiffed big time. I interpreted the AP transfer as the shot going wild and forcing the Wraith to take evasive action, so the raider could get safely into position to fire its boarding pod. Then the PC hacker used his access to the pirate ships computer to disable its engines, and the other PCs swooped in to finish it off with an EM pulse from their Ion Cannons.



So in conclusion, this was a really good session and I think everyone enjoyed it. The players plan went more or less perfectly, partly because they spent a couple of HP each on bumps, so the only thing that went wrong from my point of view was everything was over so quickly! The big space battle was basically over in just two rounds, so I never got the opportunity to use some of the cool stuff I had prepped. Still, we have plenty of interesting things to explore next session: What will the jedi do with the (secretly force sensitive) alien orphan? What will he do when he realises that the bigot from session 2 is trapped in one of the unlaunched escape pods... and only he knows about it? What will the hacker do about the man who threw a bottle at him in the riot? What will the pilot and gunner do with their captured pirates? What will the other pirates do when they return to the scene? And will the players take the time to rescue the escaped rioters when more pirates are on the way? Without really planning it we seem to have ended up with some interesting bangs here.

Despite my doubts beforehand, the Extended Contest rules actually worked very well in practice. Although this session was dominated by a battle just like it would have been with dnd, HQ really made it work. I found the AP gains, losses and transfers were a great spur to everyone's imaginations and we were riffing off each other to create an exciting, dynamic scene rather than the blank dice rolling we sometimes get in dnd. And I know that with more practice these scenes will get much better and much quicker, as well. In all, I think we really broke through a barrier here; everything certainly 'clicked' into place for me and I'm now looking forward to (rather than partly dreading) the next session.

Thanks very much to everyone who contributed to this thread!

soviet