Gamism in Balazar

[Mandrake]

I've got the impression that the general character of this board leans towards the narrative agenda

As stated elsewhere, I run a (previously) combat centric gamist campaign set in Balazar using the Griffin Mountain campaign pack as a base which I though I'd post an overview of as an indication of what drives some of my posts.

Basic premise is that a triumvirate of particularly nasty Lunars are attempting to harness the power contained within Vivamort's castle and harness it to their own ends by using it to create an undead army from the poor defenseless primatives.

The player characters have been aprised of the situation both by a mysterious humakti who is working behind the scenes to try to prevent it as well as by one of the characters shamanic mentors who has told them that they are "Guardians of the Land"

A large portion of the campaign to date has involved defending the players defending themselves against escalating levels of attack by agents of the 3 bad guys whilst seeking weapons (both physical and otherwise) to help them in the final battle they know is coming.

When we restart, they will, I hope, be getting proactive rather than reactive, which may lead to a slight change in style, but it will remain gamist driven, both because I prefer to run that way and also because we still enjoy a good scrap.

If anyone is interested, I can post more

[Harshax]

I too am primarily a gamist by nature, although I am seeing lots of situations where I bend toward narrativism without completely giving up my gamist roots and leanings.

As to your campaign, I'd love to hear more.  If you're willing, I'd love to see some mechanics in action (examples).  Of course, if you think this would detract too much from your descriptions, or too time consuming, I'd completely understand.

Game on!

[Mike Holmes]

I just want to make a few quick clarifications and make a comment.

First, by "Narrative Agenda" I'm guessing you mean Narrativism. The HQ book talks about it being a Narrative game, but by that they're simply talking about the fact that they prefer the game to be about narrating more than about talking about the rules. In point of fact, people like myself who prefer more Narrativism in play often prefer less narration. Narration and narrative are not the same thing, and Narrativism is a complex subject.

In any case, the bias towards narrativism here is from me and several other posters here. But there are other people with other preferences too. What we "Narrativists" would say is that we find it odd that you'd want to use HQ for gamism, since it doesn't seem to do it well at all. In fact, so much so, that if you're having fun with HQ, that, quite possibly, you're misidentifying a desire for combat or the like in play with Gamism.

But that may all be fodder for another thread, if you're interested in discussing it at all. For this thread, I, at least, would be interested in hearing how play is going. For instance, what do you think is the part of play that players get the most charge out of doing? That is, where do you see them getting most excited about their own input into what's going on? Can you give an example of such?

Mike

[Mandrake]

I've not actually run my campagn since we moved from HW to HQ, I've had a fair amount of time out of the group for one reason or another.

I didn't have much of a choice about using HW rules but if the new RQ can provide the same heroic level of magic as HQ I may consider moving.

That said, whilst HQ isn't the best system for gamism, it does work.

I'll try and flesh this out a bit more at the weekend when I have more time, but some of the notablr things to date:

A quest by a hunter character for a mythic weapon
The aquisition of a legendary hero's weapon by an Elmali (see the spear in my edges thread)
Assorted other "loot" of varying power levels
A focus on character improvement in readiness for the final battle

[Mike Holmes]

So, do I understand correctly that you're a RQ gamer from long ago, and you're playing these games because they are what currently is published to support Glorantha? That it's more Glorantha that's important to you than what system is supporting it?

It's true that any system can support gamism in the sense that gamism can be about your approach to a situation, the GM rewarding sound thinking with easier contest rolls and such. Two problems with this, however. First, players tend to play "cowardly," because that's what gets rewarded. Heroics become bad tactics. Second, given that HQ supports things like heroics, you may tend to get mixed up play. For instance (and this is just an example of the overall larger potential problem, not a specific problem), one player might charge into a fight recklessly, knowing that he's likely to fail, but that his character is unlikely to die. The other players, looking to have their characters win at the overall situation may see this as bad play (often attacking the problem from a plausibility standpoint - "That's crazy, no sane person would charge under these circumstances!")

Did you find that you had these problems when playing HW? Or was everyone just comfortably playing gamism with everyone else?

It may be that the new RQ will work better for you. But I hate to lose people from the player base of HQ. Have you ever considered coming over to the dark side (AKA narrativism)? No reason you can't do both.

Mike

[Mandrake]

I would have made a nice lengthy reply to this over the weekend but as the site was down, that didn't happen. I'll put it off til I have some time on my hands as it will take a while and won't be on of my usual 5 min lunch time posts

[Mandrake]

Got busy with my son coming back from one of his summer holidays. I'm also now thinking about using the same premise for a more narrative style PBM campaign so I'm going to have to be careful about what examples I post..

[Mandrake]

It's actually proving quite difficult to seperate out examples  that don't impact the plot, perhaps because those are the ones that stick in the memory best.

One thing I do remember, we had a short player session one time, what I did at the time was to use the "elsewhere effect" prevelant in the elder wilds to send the characters on the loot hunt.

Almost every combat situation has involved an extended contest, we all enjoy long drag out fights, although I think the way they are portrayed will changed when I resume again.

We had 1 battle against a scorpion queen that essentially had the majority of the characters fighting and loosing to give the character with the best chance of winning the advantage of multuple attacker mods to inflict enough wounds that the rest of the characters could hurt it. Came down to a race between them getting the scorp queen wounded enough that they could pile in and kill it and the scorp queen killing them. I'd probably run the contest a little differently now.