Heropoints for the Narrator

[sebastianz]

Sometimes when running and a contest comes up, after the dice have hit the table, I have a certain notion to spend a heropoint. But at the same time, I feel like it would be cheating. Oh, the rules state that a narrator may give some NPCs heropoints of their own, if they are important enough. Seems like they never are. I mean, as narrator I usually set the resistance, so using heropoints seems like changing the level of the resistance by a mastery.
Somewhere I read the term Villainy points as a sort of heropoints for NPCs. That term just intrigued me. So I have dreamed up a "new" reward system. I intend to give every player a pool of points to give out during play to other players, rewarding them instantly. The narrator also gets a pool. Now, my idea is that the players can reward the narrator, as well. If they like the portrayal of a certain NPC or something like that, they can give the narrator a point to use with that NPC. Hopefully, this will accomplish several things:
1. Give the narrator some heropoints, but not arbitrarily chosen by himself. Rather bound to player interest.
2. Show interest of players in certain NPCs. If they give a point for an NPC, reason could be that they have taken an interest in this character.
3. Teach them that the game is not about winning. After all, every point given to an NPC is one less point for PCs.

I am pretty set to try this out, but would like to hear what you think about it. Does this idea have some merit? Has anyone a similar system? Any other thoughts?

Sebastian.

[Mike Holmes]

In a startling case of convergent evolution, I just instituted a system whereby when players are in contests they get points that they must immediately give out as HP to reward other players. In one case, a player wanted to give me a reward for, as it happens, playing a PC with an absent player. The first thing I thought was, "Aha, now I have a HP that I can use to bump with this NPC." But then I thought..."Wait, it's JB's character...maybe the HP belongs to the character? And not me?"

That's how we ruled in the end. That the HP is available to whoever plays the PC. I usually think of HP as a player resource...when one character leaves play, for instance, I usually allow the player to transfer any unused HP to their play of the next character (and back, if the old character comes back). But in this particular case, the HP will reside with the character, given that credit is due to both the player for making an entertaining character, and to me for playing him well enough to get the reward.

Interesting.

Mike

[Lamorak33]

Hi

I remain to be convinced. I have certainly spent Hero Points for major NPC's in the past. Its always been interesting when the player knows the NPC has some to spend. However this is only dramatically interesting when it is a Major NPC, IMO. Hero Points are part of what sets a Hero apart from the so called normal folks, even clan warriors. I see no reason to depart from the rules in this situation.

What interests me is why you would want to spend hero points on 'mooks'?

Best regards
Rob

[sebastianz]

Rob, that seems to be a misunderstanding. I did not make it clear, but of course I refer only to heropoints for major antagonists, not mooks. I cannot see this system work with mooks. After all it requires interest in the NPC on the side of the players. Now, if they like some unimportant NPC that much, that they want to give a point for it, than that probably makes this NPC a major NPC, though. Certainly depending on the situation.

Its always been interesting when the player knows the NPC has some to spend.

I take it that you announce to your players that this character has heropoints right when it becomes important? Or does it come as a surprise to them?

Mike, could you explain your system a bit more? It sounds interesting and I think you metioned it as an idea in an earlier thread. How does it work, what does it facilitate, did it realize the hopes you had for it?
So, if you see HPs as a player resource, are you saying, that you do not use HPs for NPCs?

Sebastian.

[Web_Weaver]

My main note of caution would be:

3. Teach them that the game is not about winning. After all, every point given to an NPC is one less point for PCs.

For a start, the phrase "not about winning" is a vague one, but here I take it to mean:

"Each individual conflict can be equally interesting, win or loose it, and indeed may be more fun for the players if the character looses." (Depending on CA this could be a win for the group.)

If you are seeking to push this idea strongly to your players then HP for the narrator may send a mixed message, as it could inadvertently stress to the players that there are some conflicts that you have a vested interest in. This in turn can encourage players to more directly oppose you in such conflicts.

I believe your aim is to stress the fun in helping the Narrator make conflicts more of a challenge, but I think you would be best served in setting the challenge yourself, framing it as meaningful conflict, and not emphasising the Player V Narrator context.

Another related context for this would be in how HP bumping effects the narration. I have had a situation where a player's HP bump actually resulted in a worse position for the character, as I see HP as a player tool. (Note I don't mean bumping down).

Example:

Situation: Urvar (NPC) holds a personal grudge against Angelos (PC) due the fact he limps due to wound inflicted by him.

Narrator: Urvar is running for political office and is expousing his views to a small group at a party.

Player: Angelos is going to openly refer to the wounding incident as unfortunate, with the aim of making him relinquish his grudge in public, as Angelos just wants to resolve the whole issue.

System: Minor victory

Narrator: Urvar appears to be embarrassed but does not wish to engage in that debate here.

Player / System: What happens if I spend a HP?

Narrator / System: On a Major Victory, he gets angry and says "any personal grudges we may have are not relevent here" he then gets embarrassed and walks out.

Player / System: OK I spend the point.

I have broken the rules as written by not reflecting the character goal, but instead I chose the player goal, which had more going for it in terms of future conflict. I checked first with the player though, as when bumping occurs it is the player who chooses, and it is up to him if the resulting narration matches his expectations. 

The point here is the player was fishing for a better angle on the unresolved issue, and by bumping he is getting what he wanted.

As HP are already used in this less concrete manner then I don't see the need to wield them myself. In theory terms I am using the HP expenditure to negotiate plot authority with the player.

[sebastianz]

Thanks, Jamie. You are definitely right, that the phrase "not about winning" is vague. I meant it in the way you paraphrase it, though. To be honest, it is the weakest argument for this reward system. What prompted my posting were points 1 and 2. #3 seemed to follow right in track.

If you are seeking to push this idea strongly to your players then HP for the narrator may send a mixed message, as it could inadvertently stress to the players that there are some conflicts that you have a vested interest in. This in turn can encourage players to more directly oppose you in such conflicts.

You know, I am indeed of the opinion that there are conflicts where one side or the other has a vested interest in and wants to "win" it. Not all conflicts, mind, but "important" ones. And this is fully legitimate. Why would we have different levels of abilities or heropoints, otherwise?

I have broken the rules as written by not reflecting the character goal, but instead I chose the player goal, which had more going for it in terms of future conflict. I checked first with the player though, as when bumping occurs it is the player who chooses, and it is up to him if the resulting narration matches his expectation.

You see, a character has no goal of its own. It is always the player which attributes goals to a character. So you ignored the stated goal to realize a different goal. This second goal was one that the player liked better. In fact you only helped the player articulating the goal he liked best, presumably. Who cares about a characters goal? It doesn't even figure in here.

Your last sentence

As HP are already used in this less concrete manner then I don't see the need to wield them myself. In theory terms I am using the HP expenditure to negotiate plot authority with the player.

is what interests me most in this context. One problem I see with it, though. If the player would have sticked with his original goal, that is resolving this issue with Urvar, than your narration would have invalidated his heropoint. You noted above that you see a heropoint as a player tool. But then the same point cannot be a tool for the narrator.
I rather think your example is a good point for narrator heropoints. You framed the major victory of the player in a way that was much more interesting than the minor victory and rightly so. But it could be just the opposite situation. The resistance scores a minor victory but it is not satisfying. The player cannot help as he can only bump up and probably would not bump down. But with a heropoint you as a narrator could turn that minor victory into a major victory making it count. Additionally, that can only happen with an NPC that the players care about, that's why they gave out that heropoint in the first place. Note, by the way, that I do not say that a minor victory could not be fun. Only that there can be situations when it is not satisfying.

Thanks
Sebastian.

[GB Steve]

Mortal Coil's power tokens are pretty much the same as Hero Points. The GM gets a stack of these for all his characters based on the number of players and the power level of the game.

This works pretty well although some of my players might disagree. The reason is that I've got twice as many as any individual so I can always outspend them on a contest. In practice, I always tell them up front if I'm going to spend on an outcome and this means they don't spend theirs in a bidding war they would lose. Of course they could call my bluff and after a few bidding wars I'd be out of tokens.

So I've been using my stack to enforce results that I consider interesting.

[Web_Weaver]

At the risk of talking past each other, (based on our broad agreement on issue #3), I am mainly concerned with how behaviours are encouraged and how certain patterns can be carried over from one instance to another.

If you do agree, please take my points as not applicable to you but worth pointing out in this debate as a thing not to do.

Absolutely, wishing to win a contest is often a behaviour that suits the circumstances, but I think you will agree, winning in HQ is not about beating the narrator. By wielding a competitive tool, a narrator can encourage competitive views to take hold.

I have seen narrators say "OK if you use a HP so do I!" as a way of asserting a result that they are happy with. This behaviour not only encourages tit-for-tat competition, it implies that HPs are competitive currency, and moves HP expenditure away from meaningful drama into abstract system mechanics. This behaviour is often excused as "making it a challenge", which confuses difficulty, or bad things happening, with drama.

But, from your response, it seems you already use negotiation as a tool to heighten conflict and emphasise drama so you would clearly not be wielding HP in the competitive manner I highlight.

As you point out with 1 & 2, there can be more dramatically meaningful reasons to wield HP, and by giving the players the say on which situations apply, you are encouraging a clearer understanding of when these could be interesting, and creating a feedback loop to inform your own choices.

I always find that when players start to respect, or like the "bad guys" the game is far more enjoyable, so incorporating a reward system that allows investment in NPCs, good or bad, would be rewarding with the right group.

[sebastianz]

That's it, Jamie.

Perfect paraphrase of what I wanted to say in my first post. Thanks very much.

Hi, Steve.

I am not familiar with Mortal Coil. I point you to Jamie's post above as a reply. He summarizes my thinking pretty well.

Sebastian.

[sebastianz]

Hi, Steve.

After some further thought I'd like to give a longer response to your post. At first, it sounded very much like a power struggle between the GM and the players. That irritated me a bit as I think it was pretty obvious that I have no inclination in this direction. But then I noticed something else, though I am not sure you wanted to imply it. Again, I am not familiar with Mortal Coil, so I may misread things.
The statement you made sounds like there is no bidding war between you and your players. If you spend on a contest, they refrain from spending their points. I don't know what happens, if they declare that they spend tokens, in case that you did no declaration up front. But it would at least be a statement that this thing is worth to them a certain amount of tokens. There seems to be an agreement at your game, to respect the spending of tokens of the other side. This, certainly, is something that can have a part in HQ, as well.

But I think, Mortal Coil's power tokens work differently enough. For one, you can only spend heropoints after you have rolled. So how could you tell up front that you will spend one? You could, of course, say that you are willing to do so and this comes pretty close to what you do. But there is a much more fundamental difference. You may only ever spend one point on a specific roll. Therefore, there is no bidding war possible in HQ. One side can get an advantage through a heropoint and the other side can at maximum offset that advantage, bringing things back to the status quo. So if anything like a bidding war is going on, it needs lots of rolls probably stretching over several contests. That given, heropoints are much more a tool to highlight player interest and to allow fine tuning of contest consequences. This function I also interpreted in your post.
Heropoints, if spent by the narrator, have that same function. They serve to show my fine tuning of outcome. A player can spend a heropoint as well, meaning it as a statement that they have an interest in leaving things as they are through the dice. This is a neat feature of heropoints. But I only want to invoke it for NPCs that matter to the players. And to find out which these are, I simply want to utilize the reward mechanism, combining it with other parts.

Let me know, if I misinterpreted your post

Sebastian.

[Mike Holmes]

Wow, lots of good discussion here.

I think that Steve's evidence with Mortal Coil is good in support of the idea that the GM with HP may, in fact, give the player the wrong idea in certain circumstances. I do think you have to be careful with that. If you're players are already on the "we don't need to win" agenda, then I think it's non-problematic. But if, in fact, you're talking about getting players who are unused to playing that way to play that way, then I think that it can send a wrong message.

That's not to say you can't get around this either with some system tweaks, or just with some extra work. Just that it's potentially problematic.

Important point: while a character doesn't produce a goal on it's own, that's not the same as saying that we can't attribute a goal to the character. What's more important, is that the player can have a goal for the outcome that's completely divergent from that of the character. That is, the character will rarely want to lose, but the player will often find this to be the most interesting outcome.

This is all related to my article about making failure interesting.

Yes, some players completely marry their own goals to those that they feel the character has. But this isn't neccessary. In comiserating with any fictional character with whom one identifies - a protagonist - one does want the protagonist to win. But what he wants even more than that is for the winning to be meaningful somehow. Which means often times that in setting up ultimate victories, there must be some losses along the way. So, yes, the ratings are to a small extent about "winning" in that they say, "I put forward this rating, because we are rooting for the charactet to win." But then sometimes when a defeat comes up that could become a victory, we fail to spend the HP on it because, "This failure is cool, and when I spend the HP to win later, it'll be that much more interesting."

People get stuck in the notion that just because we root for the protagonist - or for our PC - that we can't also get behind the system and player working together to create interesting moments of defeat for the character. The two are not mutually exclusive.


So, all that said, in following up on Sebastian's request, here's what I do in play. First of all, to date I don't think I've ever used a HP to bump an opponent's roll. Not once ever. So that answers one question above. In Mortal Coil and such games, each player has a limited amount of resources, and hopefully the system gives a good amount to each participant to assure that the outcomes are good for all (let's not get into a debate of the effectiveness of these other systems). In HQ, it says that the narrator is allowed to use them when he likes under certain circumstances, but not being limited in their use in any way, I think that the narrator isn't being constrained very well. Which means that, even if he's well intended, and even if he's right to bump in a certain circumstance - meaning that the result is much more interesting if he does - that it'll seem arbitrary if/when he does. Why in this place, and not in this other? If there's no cap on spending, then why should the narrator be critical.

Note that I'm not saying that a narrator can't do this. Merely that if he does so while limited, everybody will sense that a call is being made on criteria, and everybody will be satisfied with it.

That's why, when the point was given to me in the case in question, I said OK. This was a case where a limited resource was being handed out systematically. The expenditure of which is the player saying, "You did well before, so we trust you to bump once in the future at some relevant time."

To be clear, the circumstance was a confusing one where I happened to be playing another player's hero. But if players want to give me HP while playing other characters, I don't see why they shouldn't. I haven't made this explicit in the current system, but I will do so in the future.

There is, however, a difference between the narrator and the other players, in that the players are mechanically constrained in terms of how many characters they can control (it's actually more than one with followers). The narrator, on the other hand, controls as many as he likes. So, as a reward for a player will usually indicate something about good play of some character he controls, it will have to be used in support of that character. With the narrator, though the reward is going to him, and is at his option to use, it's going to have been given for some particular portrayal.

That's important, because I want such rewards to indicate that the player liked something about the character in question (when that's the case). To that extent, I intend to attach the HP to the character in question played when the reward was recieved. If there's some question as to which portrayal is being rewarded, the player can simply be asked to specify. In this way, a player can make a clear indication that he'd like to see a particular NPC back in play in future scenes.

That said, occasionally the reward will be for no particular character, but, say, for some neat narration of a resolution, mook action, or just world description or whatever. In these cases where no specific NPC can be named, the HP will go into a global pool for the narrator to use.

So, to sum up my current reward system:

- After victory level is determined in any contest, the player of the character involved gets one HP if the character scored any victory, and two if the result was a tie (unless a reroll is called for) or failure.
- These HP must be given immediately to other players as rewards for their play. The player with the character in the contest does not retain them, but must give them away (or lose them).
- These HP can be given to the narrator (as another player), in which case the player specifies the NPC to whom he wishes to attach the HP. Or the player can specify no character, in which case the HP go into a global pool of HP for the narrator to use.

Pretty simple, overall. As for the reasoning for the system, I wanted some way to assign HP as rewards between players, ala Fan Mail in PTA. But, again, I wanted the resource to be limited, and to promote certain sorts of player behavior. What I hope this promotes, first, is players getting into contests, so they can get the points to reward other players. But I didn't want to directly award HP to the player in the contest, because that always seems weird to me (I don't like players spending HP to get HP, or getting more HP for not spending HP, etc). So, with this system, the player gets a reward that's unrelated to his ability to win contests - that reward being the ability to reward another player.

By enabling the HP to link to a particular character, this gives the rewarding player a way to indicate that he wants to see more from that particular character.

Anyhow, since the rewards to the narrator will be limited in number, and he gets them the same way that the other players get them, this should hopefully indicate to the players that the narrator is just another player in this particular, and that any expenditures he's making are for the same reasons - to make the outcomes more interesting, not to work against the other players.

Those are my reasons. So far in limited play, it's worked out fine. But, then, the group I'm playing with seems to do fine with character failure already. So I'm not sure how great a test it's been.

Mike

[GB Steve]

After some further thought I'd like to give a longer response to your post. At first, it sounded very much like a power struggle between the GM and the players. That irritated me a bit as I think it was pretty obvious that I have no inclination in this direction. But then I noticed something else, though I am not sure you wanted to imply it. Again, I am not familiar with Mortal Coil, so I may misread things.
The statement you made sounds like there is no bidding war between you and your players. If you spend on a contest, they refrain from spending their points. I don't know what happens, if they declare that they spend tokens, in case that you did no declaration up front. But it would at least be a statement that this thing is worth to them a certain amount of tokens. There seems to be an agreement at your game, to respect the spending of tokens of the other side. This, certainly, is something that can have a part in HQ, as well.

I think there are subtle differences between what I did and a bidding war.

I see the use of powertokens as an indication by the player or GM that the conflict is very important and that the outcome means a lot to either party. One of the stated aims of the GM is to make the game focus on the issues at hand, the players' passions but also whatever is stated in the theme document which in our case said "No good will ever come of this" - relating to the long term effects of magic use. I think I may have done it differently in another game, but in this one I used my leverage to push for what I considered to be interesting outcomes in the the theme of the game.

So for example, a PC used magic to interrogate a corpse. The magic document defined this as a conflict in which the player had to pry the information from the corpse but also defend against the spirit's attempt to impose a passion on the PC. So, naturally, I went for handing over the info and piled on the passion. When the player decided to resist, I said that I would spend tokens to force them to adopt the passion. They could have still spent their tokens and I would have spent mine but they chose not to. I suppose some concerted effort on the part of the players could have forced me to spend most of my tokens early on but they didn't take this attitude.

On the other hand, one player spent five tokens to avoid being injured in a conflict and I didn't put any up against him.

But I think, Mortal Coil's power tokens work differently enough. For one, you can only spend heropoints after you have rolled. So how could you tell up front that you will spend one? You could, of course, say that you are willing to do so and this comes pretty close to what you do. But there is a much more fundamental difference. You may only ever spend one point on a specific roll. Therefore, there is no bidding war possible in HQ. One side can get an advantage through a heropoint and the other side can at maximum offset that advantage, bringing things back to the status quo. So if anything like a bidding war is going on, it needs lots of rolls probably stretching over several contests. That given, heropoints are much more a tool to highlight player interest and to allow fine tuning of contest consequences. This function I also interpreted in your post.
Heropoints, if spent by the narrator, have that same function. They serve to show my fine tuning of outcome. A player can spend a heropoint as well, meaning it as a statement that they have an interest in leaving things as they are through the dice. This is a neat feature of heropoints. But I only want to invoke it for NPCs that matter to the players. And to find out which these are, I simply want to utilize the reward mechanism, combining it with other parts.

In MC you can spend your tokens whenever you like. Usually this occurs after the reveal because there is nothing to be gained by spending them up front. Given this, I think our MC use of power tokens was rather similar to HQ because they were only ever spent in a block. There was no spending war as such.