Doubts for duelling using an Extended Constest

[Web_Weaver]

My problem with the HW Coup de Grace rules was that it left an implied question hanging at the end of every extended contest. Do you want a better result - with an explicit gamble?. This made a very gamist end point to contests and encouraged a gamist approach to the whole extended contest.

i.e. lets aim for a major victory and try for a CdG for a complete victory - how big a bid is that?

Talk about incoherent, Narrativist system with Gamist tendencies for a Simulationist outcome!

[Mike Holmes]

I may have been refering to the wrong HW rule name. I'm not refering to the "parting shot" rule, which said that you could gamble to increase the level of the outcome. I'm talking about where it said somewhere (IIRC) that if you won a physical conflict that you had the right to simply declare that you killed the opponent.

I've lost the HW book, so I may be using the wrong terminologies.

Mike

[Web_Weaver]

The CdG was used to simulate deadly combat, it was a Parting Shot that was declared as deadly on a hurt, injured or dying character.

It was a specialised version of the Parting Shot with essentially the same mechanic.

[Mike Holmes]

Thanks for the clarification.

Mike

[Fredrik S]

A question of killing.
In a previous episode of my Shadow World game I had the two protagonists asked to assassinate a high ranking official opposing a trade treaty. The most important question on how to resolve this in HeroQuest relates directly to this discussion. Let's leave the morality aside for the moment and say the the most important matter here is wether or not they manage to kill this guy. That is the defined goal of the situation, yes? So when the time comes to roll the dice, all success results should mean the minister is dead, because otherwise they will have .. failed. So what do the degrees of success mean? It seems to me that the nuances of the test result should determine wether or not they got away with it. Any result beside complete success would have meant some form of complication, from hot pursuit to being arrest (on a marginal success).

Another question is how to resolve such a mechanically; should I define this whole situation as one simple conflict (or an extended one, though I'd think not) and deal with the details as narration/augments? Hmm.. perhaps. Putting this in writing is helpful in itself. I think I'll do more of this in the future.

As a sidenote, the actual mission ended somewhere between complete and marginal victory. They staged a distraction, snuck into his bedchamber and fought themselves out afterwards. It was a bloody mess, both in result and resolution. The players had fun, but I was not very happy with the execution (no pun intended), system-wise.

Fredrik

[Mike Holmes]

My position, Fredrik, is that these things you will have to determine for you and your group, that there is not a solid answer. But I do have a few notions.

First, is the character being assassinated important to the players. Not important in the game world, or important to the characters...do the players care about what happens to him at all? Or are they more concerned with the assassination success?

If the assassinee is, in fact, some interesting character that they've met before, then perhaps he deserves plot immunity. In which case, the contest largely becomes making the attempt without getting caught themselves. They'll only actually kill the opponent with a Complete Victory. Otherwise engineer events so that he plausibly escapes while the PCs still look cool in the failure (typically the "fate" notion works well here - like Hitler, the victim just happened to go the bathroom when the bomb went off).

If, in fact, the character in question is a throwaway meant merely to provide a target, then I'd argue a marginal should do the trick, success level being about how little trace they left and such. How likely people following up are to be able to catch up with them. That sort of thing.

In all of this consider what's really at stake here from a player POV. Why did they have the characters do the assassination? Is it the Trade Treaty? Why do they want the trade treaty to pass?

Because in terms of the question of scale, that's pretty variable too. Do you think that the players enjoy the sort of detail that goes into breaking into a place, sneaking about, and then making the actual attack? Or would they rather hear you narrate, "The next day, Senator Ragnar doesn't appear, and the Treaty passes. Your employer looks over to you and grins in satisfaction." Either works fine. I recently have been doing negotiations for entire groups to participate in a Hero Quest "off screen." I don't think you have to narrate any of this at all if you don't like.

It's all a question of the player's expectations. Now, that said, you may want to shake up their expectations a bit, and shock them with an extremely abbreviated contest outcome like this, even if they expect more. Just to put the idea in their heads that it's not always neccessary to have a second-by-second description of the action occuring. But once they understand that the scales are maleable, then figure out what they'll like best in this case.

When in doubt, ask the players. "Do you want to play out the assassination in detail, or should we just roll for it as a whole, and narrate the outcome the next day in the senate?" You may be surprised how many players jump at the opportunity to avoid the "dungeon crawl" of the assassination victim's home.

That all said, don't miss an opportunity for a bang here. If you realize that it would be cool to have the character come across a small child looking for a glass of water while the characters are sneaking around, frame to that first. But that's the general rule. Only roll for those stakes that the players are interested in. For some that may be every single step they take. For others, the whole treaty negotiation may be contained in one massive contest that involves not only assassination but political maneuvering, blackmail, etc, etc.

Mike

[Fredrik S]

I was largely writing to clarify my own thoughts on the subject, but thanks anyway. Essentially, the consequenses of a contest are wholly dependent on what or who is the important part of the conflict. In this case, the minister himself really only existed as an 'opposing force' that never had any personal presence in the game. In fact this whole incident had little bearing on the main story, but was something they did as a service to the ambassador in return for future favours, monitary reward and transport to their next destination. (It took place in Reandor, on the way from Silaar to Kaitaine).

Hmm.. there really are a lot of different ways to play this. As you say, what's important is what's at stake for the players, and that has a lot to say for which scale is appropriate. In this case, the important question was wether they got away with it, and wether it helped or hindered them on their way. The political outcome of the assignment was relevant, but incidental. In a way it seems that the most important conflicts are the ones best condenced into single contests, because it's the long term consequences that matter. On the other end of the scale... I've been reading and thinking so much about how to deal with Big, Important Conflicts that I almost lost sight of the other, more basic way of using the system: It is of course perfectly possible to make conflicts as small as need be, to the order of; 'can you pick the lock to the minister's bedchamber - without setting off the alarm'?

Right. I have it now.

Btw; it's funny you should mention the little girl complication, since I have written in 'Keep daughter safe' as one goal of the archmage Andragiir, precisely in case a similar solution should come up.

Fredrik

[Mike Holmes]

Yep, you got it.

On the note about small complications, I'm known as somewhat simmy at times for focusing on what can seem to be kinda trivial stuff. Like, in one case I had a player make a grooming roll for their character prior to said character coming to a social event. This was to display the character, however - to show that a default 6 in grooming wasn't terrible, but that the characters who had it at 17 (petty nobles and such) tend to have a lot more success in these areas. Basically the contest was to contrast the social strata of the characters. Not that I thought of that at the time, but looking back, I can see why I went with the contest.

Mike