TSOY Keys in HQ

[CCW]

OK.  I just got a copy of The Shadow of Yesterday and as I am with many other aspects of this excellent game, I'm enchanted by the Key system.  For those who haven't read the game, Keys are a mechanic that lets players choose the circumstances in which their characters gain experience.  For example, you might have the Key of Conscience, which would earn you experience points every time you help the weak.

I wonder if I could use this sytsem with Heroquest; while I've never had any real problems with the HQ experience system, it sometimes seems a bit arbitrary.  It would be nice to have an experience system with tighter parameters that also gives control to the players.

One problem is that the number of experience points awarded in TSoY, if ported directly into HQ would result in much faster rates of advancement, even if, like me, you award hero points per session rather than per (the rather elusive) adventure.  I'd like to aim for about 5 or 6 HP a session and I get the feeling from the rules that in TSoY you're expected to gain something closer to 10-15 xp.  I'd propose dividing number of XPs by 2.5 (rounded to 2 or 3, to get whole numbers)to get number of HP.  Anytime only one XP would be awarded in TSoY, one HP per session could be awarded in HQ.

Thus the TSoY Key of Conscience:

Your character has a soft spot for those weaker than their opponents. Gain 1 XP every time your character helps someone who cannot help themselves. Gain 2 XP every time your character defends someone with might who is in danger and cannot save themselves. Gain 5 XP every time your character takes someone in an unfortunate situation and changes their life to where they can help themselves.

would become the HQ Key of Conscience:

Your character has a soft spot for those weaker than their opponents. Gain 1 HP per session in which your character helps someone who cannot help themselves. Gain 1 HP every time your character defends someone with might who is in danger and cannot save themselves. Gain 2 XP every time your character takes someone in an unfortunate situation and changes their life to where they can help themselves.

Buying off a key would earn you 5 HP

Now the trickier part of converting Keys to HQ is deciding how many characters get and how they can get more or replace ones that have been bought off.  I welcome ideas here.  One possibility is to tie them to keywords: one Key per keyword, spend 5 or 10 HP to replace one that's been bought off.  Another option is to add keys only on a saga timescale: one Key a year perhaps.

What do y'all think?  Will this finally make that "Goals" line on the character sheet meaningful, or am I merely succumbing to the temptation to play all cool games at the same time, in the same campaign?

Charles

[Brand_Robins]

I don't know how necessary this is, but I like it anyway.

My initial temptation is to make keys an ability, just like everything else. You get HP from your key at a rate that you'd get for an augment for a normal action (1/10th), as if it was a secret for a big action (1/4th), and equal to the rating if you buy it off. You can increase your keys with HP, just as with anything else.

So, you have Key of the Revolutionary 17 -- revolution is important to you, but not overwhelmingly so. You get 2 HP for injuring the group that you are rebelling against, 4 HP for hitting them with a major blow, and 17 for destroying them and ending the key. (And yes, 17 is a lot -- but it shouldn't happen that often, and a 17 won't just let you buy another key at 17 if it hasn't been important to the game yet and you assume keys start at 13 -- 1 point to buy a 13 and 10 to raise it by 4 at one go, and then double for not being on screen is 22 points.... however if you stage it over a couple sessions of building your new key up you could do it more easily.)

If the Revolution becomes more important to you then you can pump points into it and get more XP. My only issue with that is that it may be easier and more rewarding to have lots of little keys than to get big keys. Of course if you say that you can use keys as augments for normal actions as well that could go right away.

You could limit keys, especially if you have hopping spaz characters, but I don't know if it is strictly necessary. If they're priced so that having them gives you about as much benefit as they cost, or just a bit more, then people should still focus their HP on other skills and only put them in Keys where they are important.

Of course, another possibility is to let characters pick their keys for a story from their normal relationships or personality traits. Give it a bit more fleshing out, and then go with it -- that trait will be one of the things that gives you Xp this cycle. Want to have the Key of the Revolutionary for this story? Well take your Hatred of the Lunar Empire right there and put an asterisk beside it. Bang, it's a Key. You then give the players a number of key choices based on how spread or narrow you want their focus to be and how much Xp you want them to gain (three might be a good base number), and of you go. Then it becomes something between a TSOY Key and a Dust Devil's Devil.

[Clinton R. Nixon]

Brand just blew my mind. That Hero Point idea is awesome.

[CCW]

Thanks Brand,  connecting the Keys concept to HQ abilities was the missing link.  And, as you say, all this fussing around isn't necessary, but it might be fun to try. A couple of questions...

Wouldn't a player often choose something that had already become important to the game as a replacement Key: "I have just slain the evil overlord and now I'll take his son as my own" (Key of Revolutionary becomes Key of the Guardian and only 11 HP spent).  Maybe the cost to raise a Key could be 2 points a rank.

My only issue with that is that it may be easier and more rewarding to have lots of little keys than to get big keys. Of course if you say that you can use keys as augments for normal actions as well that could go right away.

This is also a worry of mine and I don't quite understand how letting Keys augment things changes it.  It's often more cost effective to have lots of little augments too. What am I missing?

Your second idea sounds really good though.  I think you play with more clearly defined cycles than I do, but I see no reason someone couldn't change to a new key any time it made sense (like when the first Key is resolved).  Players wouldn't get the biggest hero point boost for just changing Keys though, they'd have to actively go against the key, just as in TSOY, and not take it again.

Clinton, what did you like about the idea? which version blew your mind more colourfully?

Charles

[Mike Holmes]

Hmmm. First, Brand's rate is simply too high. I mean, I like it mechanically, but you're going to end up with mega-powerful characters after two sessions. What I'd do is to say that you get one tenth what Brand is saying. Or, put another way, one HP is purchased with ten EXP generated from the system using Brand's version for EXP instead of HP. I think that would work about right. You could tweak this rate just as it is tweakable in TSOY to come up with the right rate for your game. A HP, then, is an "advance" from TSOY. Which works about right.

Second, I'd limit Keys just like in TSOY. That is, you have to pay EXP to get them. Rather, in this version, it costs one HP (however many EXP that costs) to make a key. So you start with 3 HP (and the build points in theory) to make keys from, and can assign them as you like. When you "buy off" a key, going against the ability, you get the 17 EXP or whatever, convert ten EXP to one HP, and can buy another key (marked with an asterisk as Brand says) with it, just like in TSOY. Or, if that's too quick, make keys cost 3 or 6 HP like powerful magic does.

Mike

[Brand_Robins]

Mike is dead on about XP/HP in normal rates of HQ play being to high under my model.

Of course, I usually give about quintuple the normal amount of HP in my HQ games -- as I don't run games that last long enough for the PCs to become "playas" through normal progression and have players that like to hit a high level of competence/power inside the scope of the games -- so that explains why my head was where it was.

However, I worry that they'd be too low under yours Mike. Doesn't TSOY assume 10 to 15 xp per session from Keys? So wouldn't that come out to 1 HP per session with your system? Now I know not everyone gives out 15ish HP the way I do, but 1.5 seems way too low.

Edit: Actually finished the post.

[Mike Holmes]

Well, I'm working from the one session of actual play of TSOY that I had in which the players each racked up about 20 EXP, I'd guess (at least one had a lot more, I'm pretty sure). And that was under the assumption that they only got 10 EXP for a buyoff. In your system, they'd get as many as 25 or 30 at a time or more later in play for a buyoff.

Now that was a oneshot, and I was angling to try to have people do buyoffs. I also set the advance rate at 5 EXP to make things really roll along. So, again, what I might do is lower the HP cost to 5 EXP. If, with buyoffs, and the higher rates for gaining EXP in general, that comes out to 1.5 times the normal rate of 20 or so, that would mean about 6HP per session. Sounds about right to me.

Sounds very much like a playtest issue to me. Want to come back to IRC and run Thomas through a session or two like this, Brand? :-)

Mike

[Brand_Robins]

Sounds very much like a playtest issue to me. Want to come back to IRC and run Thomas through a session or two like this, Brand? :-)

I'd love to. What nights are you folk playing these days?

[Mike Holmes]

I've responded in PM to the play idea.

As for the system, does the 5EXP rate seem right to you? Or should we try something else?

Mike

[CCW]

Mike, Brand,

It seems a shame to introduce a new layer of experience points to HQ.  Less aesthetically pleasing somehow, not to mention something else to keep track of.

What about 1 HP across the board (invariable) for injuring the ruling group, or whathaveyou (something that'd earn you 2 or 3 XP in TSOY), the augment amount (10%) for major blows, and 1/4 for buy-off.

Wouldn't this result in fairly good numbers (to be seen through playtesting, I guess)?

Charles Wotton

[Mandacaru]

This whole idea is great. I had thought of posting a question about making goals abilities and had noted the TSOY key thing but hadn't made the connection.

My question is how does this relate to the idea of defeats being interesting? That is, concretizing the goals as keys is a good idea, but then you will end up with the players trying to "win" rather than get into tricky situations which are relevant to their goals and which they'd be happy to "lose" as it adds a new layer to this theme. Example: at the moment of delivering the final blow to the Revolution, the character's great love interest turns out to be a revolutionary, leading to a major defeat.

You could take the level of defeat or victory as an indicator of HP/XP or whatever it is. The important thing is that they get into such a situation, whatever the outcome. It might even promote futile desperate efforts which are bound to fail but are romantic and inspiring nevertheless.

Sam.

p.s. I feel bad posting here and not elsewhere, but it's a half-hour break from work and my lack of intellectual understanding of the issue may indicate the presently clogged up nature of my brain.

[Brand_Robins]

My question is how does this relate to the idea of defeats being interesting? That is, concretizing the goals as keys is a good idea, but then you will end up with the players trying to "win" rather than get into tricky situations which are relevant to their goals and which they'd be happy to "lose" as it adds a new layer to this theme.

You could get that, however I don't think it's essential. The way TSOY keys are (usually) set up you don't get the XP for winning, you get the XP for engaging and pushing the story. You'll get your XP for jumping into the revolution whether you win or not. Same goes for buying them off -- a total victory could get you to the point where you can buy off on a win, but a total defeat could let you buy off on a lose. It doesn't matter if your revolution kicks the Lunars out of Satar or destroys your whole clan, so long as you give it your all.

And hey, if you get your Key of the Revlolution and Key of Unrequited Love going (as you did in your example) you might end finishing off in one climatic scene of grand Blood Opera style.

[Bryan_T]

Somehow having both keys and the hero goals sounds redundant to me, and not in a good way.  Almost certainly the one that was being mechanically rewarded--keys--is apt to predominate over the the one merely stated--the hero's goals.

Now, a system to make the hero's goals mechanically important sounds just fine :)  The question then is do you essentially replace the goal with a key (or keys), or do you somehow tie the keys to the hero goal?

Note that on a less formal level, as a player I'm reasonably trusting of narrators to reward heroes for chasing their goals.  I'd not want a rigid system that let you game the rules rather than actually use narrator judgement.  But at the same time, having some system in place is apt to emphasize the importance of chasing your goals.

So I guess really here I have questions:

- keys in addition to, augmenting, or replacing hero goals?
- how do you balance the mechanical reward versus narrator judgement?

--Bryan

[Mike Holmes]

On Sam's point. Some of the keys are stated as conditions of success. The key of Vengeance says, for instance, "Gain 1 XP every time your character hurts a member of that group or a lackey of that person..." Not "tries to hurt" but does. But Brand is right in that the general rule is that the motive comes up in play, or the character attempts something in play (successful or not). I think some of the keys are just worded ambiguously. Given the overal principle, I think that the real way to do this with HQ is to simply make the award whenever the ability is used, even as an augment. That, of course, requires it to be appropriate to the situation as ruled by the narrator.

Thus if you make "Loves Whashername" a key, you don't have to define the nature of the key, it's just whenever that's appropriate to play and gets used.

Bryan - well, I've always thought that the fact that goals don't have mechanical rules behind them linking them to HP was a problem. It's amazing how quickly players lose sight of their goals sometimes in HQ, because there's no mechanical rule. I think that's what we're doing here, actually.

I mean a player could, in theory list goals, and then not have any abilities related to those goals, but that would seem very odd to me. The players will, choose keys that will propell them towards their goals. In fact, I think with this you could simply eliminate goals, as they would become redundant, yes. Or keep the goals as a way to make a larger verbal statement about why the selected keys are selected. You could simply say that the narrator can rule out a payout if the use does not apply towards a goal. Which would simply result in the two things co-inciding. That is, the player would select his Vengeful personality trait to go along with his goal to, "Get revenge against Lord Voldemort."

Mike

[Brand_Robins]

- keys in addition to, augmenting, or replacing hero goals?
- how do you balance the mechanical reward versus narrator judgement?

Mike got the first one pretty well, I think: they're augmenting. Your keys should be tied to your goals, as your keys are what move the character forward. Really, they are a mechanical tie to link goals and abilities through XP/HP.

For the second, in TSOY, you don't. Players who have keys give themselves XP when they meet the requirements of their key. XP is no longer the sole province of the narrator, it is something that anyone can gain by doing the things important to their character. It's a step farther into the shared power aspects of Forgite-nar, breaking down the idea that the GM decides when the game was good enough to give you rewards.

Of course in TSOY you also have key scenes, which PCs don't have to take part in, but which they get an XP reward if they do so, so narrator given XP isn't completely gone.