This was our third session since we converted our ongoing campaign from D&D to HeroQuest. (The first and second sessions of this scenario were solos for Lucy.) Both Lucy and Apari’s player have played in the game from the beginning, about a year ago. We’d previously all played in another GM’s Sim-Gamist D&D group together.

Lucy was enthusiastic right away, both about HeroQuest and about the narr tools I’m beginning to learn to use, and we’ve confirmed this in play: we like this system and this style. Apari’s player said he expected to have less fun without D&D, but was in favour of converting anyway because us becoming enthusiastic again about the game was more important to him than dice rolling and combat tactics.

I’ve had some surprises this session: one difficult moment (that I hope we resolved) and a lot of ongoing good stuff with Lucy, and many little surprises from Apari’s player. I’d be grateful for any comments from people on why things were working (or not, in one case). Lucy, I’m relying on you chiming in, of course. :)


An oath, a duel and one difficult question

Lucy, Katrin’s player, had played solo the two previous sessions. This session, in her share of just over three hours of play Lucy continued to define Katrin at breathtaking speed. In rapid succession:

- Katrin allied with another Dornish Lord, Roland, and swore an oath of loyalty to him as the “King of Dorns”;
- on her way out of the council room fought and lost a duel against a widely reputed, misogynistic swordsman (Olec) when he provoked her over rank; and
- had no answer ready for Roland’s son Reifels, when he asked her in secret to help him reunite all Dorns under a single banner by going on a heroquest with him – as his wife. (Katrin is planning to marry a minor noble, Tam.)


This time round I used three of my prepared bangs for Lucy. They worked well I think – almost too well in one case, which I’ll be getting to in a moment. The straightforward good bits first. Lucy is a wonderful player to be throwing things at, she’ll come up with ideas and things to say and do and is now asking to frame scenes, which is wonderful. She’s also getting to a point where she asserts herself and our style.


The most interrupted oath in history

When Apari’s player, still used to party play and Gamist assumptions, asked to come in on the scene in which Katrin was swearing her oath, it was evident that he thought Lucy was making a tactical error. He tried to help her by having Apari barge in on the scene, interrupt the oath and draw Katrin aside to have a “conversation”; and very briefly, Lucy faltered. What was she overlooking?

So I suggested that this was a scene in a story and not a wargame and that it was up to her – go ahead with the oath, refuse to swear it, say she needed time to consult with her friend the Envoy Apari or to sleep on it or whatever else she wanted Katrin to do. And Lucy nodded and told Apari’s player that she didn’t have time for Apari right now and would talk to him later, and went on with the oath.

Only to realise as the next sentence of the oath was being read out for her that Roland was dubbing himself “King of Dorns”. She stopped again and wondered OOC whether she (Lucy) ought to be doing this. Again there was a strong, momentary vibe of “how am I supposed to win this one?” Don’t worry about the right thing to do, I suggested, think about what you want Katrin to be doing. We talked briefly about scenes and what makes a cool story (and that sometimes making a decision that looks like the "wrong" one can be best). Apari’s player watched in silence, confused but highly entertained, as Katrin completed her oath to Roland, “King of Dorns”.


A heated duel

And then came the moment when it all went wrong. Well, very nearly.

One thing I’d been finding psychologically difficult was to present a PC with a contest that they likely couldn’t win. Stomp a PC? Help! I knew this kind of thing works in a story. I understood that if used right it would add a tremendous dimension to our game. But to actually use it? Me?

As early as in a thread of a month or two ago, Mike had been joking that Lucy was more than ready to be stomped. Lucy, not joking, had agreed. So now, with more than a little advice from Mike, I introduced Olec: a nasty, boorish women-hater, a minor ambitious noble, very, very good in a swordfight.

Olec was just finishing his own oath to Roland when Katrin came in, at the start of the scene. He hated her very visibly from the instant they were introduced, and by the time Katrin joined the alliance with Roland he’d already shot several snide remarks at her. As Katrin leaves the council chamber, Olec jostles her to force her to yield and let him go through the door first. “I am senior, I took my oath first.” Katrin refuses to budge to someone of lesser birth, much less nasty Olec. A brief, mutually boneheaded exchange, and the two of them head outside to fight this out.

We decide what the scene looks like: a small, square courtyard, people coming to watch from the gallery above, the two Dorns striding out alone into the falling snow. Lucy happily works out her target number and looks at me expectantly. Apari meanwhile has made a wager against Roland. Apari’s player is 100% certain that Katrin can only win that fight. I don’t realise that Lucy is thinking the same thing until I tell her what Olec’s target number is.

Her face falls. She says to me (oh thank gods, she says it!), “This isn’t fun at all.”

Then she thinks for a moment and says, “How is this going to be fun if I lose?” And we talk for a bit. I honestly don’t remember a word of what we said, only that I was doing my damnedest to take this seriously and to re-establish trust. I think we worked it out. I think we rolled dice only after we were in the same boat again, and were creating the rest of the scene together. Lucy rolls well, almost (but not quite) good enough to have won this contest with a bump from a hero point. Minor defeat, which isn’t much of a defeat even.

So now Katrin is established as someone who will fight for her rank. She has a nasty cut down the left side of her face and knows that “friendly” duel or no, Olec was going to maim her and take her eye out if he could (but failed because she fought much better than he expected). And Lucy has asked for a permanent scar.


What was I doing right, what was I doing wrong? Not sure. A couple of factors I think contributed:

I wasn’t aware of it at the time (and I hadn’t originally planned it as a jostle at the door, or I might have noticed), but the way Olec provoked Katrin presented Lucy with only two obvious choices: yield rank to Olec and let him go through first, or claim rank herself. There were ways of stepping around it, but Katrin hadn’t really established herself as a step-around kind of character.

I went in at the deep end with Olec. I wasn’t only preparing a stomping, I was using an NPC I was sure Lucy (not just Katrin) was going to hate.

Then also Apari’s player, who hadn’t been in on our previous two sessions, brought with him old assumptions about winning=fun. Perhaps this made winning feel more important again for the moment. Apari betting on Katrin certainly appeared to reinforce that aspect (and he was betting something Katrin – and Lucy would have loved to win, more on that when I talk about Apari’s player below). Perhaps when Apari shrugged Olec’s reputation off and concluded that I must be setting Olec up to be punished, that communicated itself to Lucy. (If so I wasn‘t aware of it.)


On the plus side, Lucy and I have long established a basis of trust and more recently a basis for communicating on scenes and style (also we’ve become friends). Dunno what we’d have done but for that.

Did it work out in the end? I believe so, although I’m waiting for more feedback from Lucy. (Ahem. Lucy? Please say something? :) )


Bangbangbang...

Three bangs in not much more than three scenes for Katrin. It made for a rather breathless pacing. On balance this may have been either a good or a bad thing. It felt like the right thing to do at the time and now we have a ton of complications to play off of in the next session, which is nice. But perhaps letting some air in between bangs, so to speak, would have led to other/similar/additional complications and would have been better overall.

On the other hand I felt I needed to drive the pace a lot more than before with Apari's player at the table. He started out with a strong urge to "bring the party back together" and hang out with Katrin. He had no reason for doing this, I think he just expected this to have to occur to restore the "natural state of things". When the PCs met, they exchanged a few words but nothing happened - fair enough for a change of pace, but those scenes ran dry quickly. So I kept throwing scenes and bangs at Katrin and offering scenes to Apari in quick succession. A minor point and one that I expect to sort itself out as we all get used to framing ahead to the interesting stuff.



Small Steps, Big Leaps, and Winning

Apari’s player is getting used to the new style in leaps and bounds.

This is a collection of snapshots, I can’t really tell what I’m contributing (or failing to contribute), other than having changed to a game system that suits me better than D&D did. Maybe there’s a pattern someone else can see. Or maybe it's just what happens when players click with a new style, I dunno.

Apari’s player was playing in the HeroQuest version of our game for the first time. It could have been slow, but what with the ideas the player brought to the table, our negotiations to bring his character onto the map, and actually playing a bit, I now have tons of material to play off of. Here’s what we established:
- Apari, acting as envoy for the Aradiel, High Queen of wood elves, extended a formal offer of military and magical support to Lord Roland and acknowledged him as King of Dorns – provided that Roland can prove to him that “he is able to do something”. Roland has promised to take Apari on a raid against orcs the next day;
- even though his instructions from the wood elves say that the snow elves have betrayed the cause and fallen to the Enemy and Roland has confirmed this, Apari is planning to talk to the snow elves to find out what is really going on;
- he has promised Roland to try and get information out of a snow elf Roland’s mean captured;
- meanwhile he has enlisted Reifels’s aid in researching the “Tear of Healing” that he’s trying to find to bring his dead wife and unborn children back;
- when Reifels suggested that Apari make sure that the wood elves’ offer of alliance is extended to “the King of Dorns” rather than with Roland in person, Apari declined, saying that Roland appeared to be king currently and that in these times of war the Dorns needed a warlord, not a “man of peace” (alluding to the fact that as intelligent and learned Reifels may be, his arm is crippled);
- and even though Apari is an elite dagger fighter, he ran away from some orcs rushing him and subsequently surrendered to a bunch of furious Dorns rather than use his daggers (the daggers that killed his wife).


I’d been worrying about how my first HQ session with him would go. I like him a lot, both as a person and as a player, and I thought he would enjoy some aspects of the new game, but he’d been so very sceptical about changing away from D&D. His character (mage) had been a channeler in D&D, but he hated magic in HeroQuest, so we ended up completely re-inventing his character for the new system. He concentrated all his points in a very few abilities to make a character who’d be almost unbeatable at a very narrow selection of things - especially two-dagger fighting. Then he went away travelling without having played yet.

For this session, he arrived at my table not only all hyped to play, but also with a big chunk of backstory he wanted me to hear. He had thought of an explanation why his character doesn’t do magic anymore and is now an elite dagger fighter instead. The biggest surprise (for me): his backstory ends with Apari unwilling to use his daggers! His best ability, and the player (who describes himself as a “powergamer”) wants to play with not using it.
Long story short, Apari was an elite assassin among jungle elves, and killed his wife by mistake with his daggers – and then called out, fought and killed her sister after she admitted that she’d set the whole thing up to win Apari for herself. Now the ghosts of his wife and sister are talking to him and keep carrying those daggers after him. He’s taken relationships to both dead women, and after the session he asked to increase the rating of the relationship to his wife "because Apari could never refuse her anything".

Wonderful stuff for me to play with. I’ve talked with him a bit and I do think he'll be happy for me to use it. I only wish I’d had the presence of mind and confidence to lock onto this stuff right away – but I’ll be using it next time we play.

He worked with me on ideas to get his character on Katrin's current R-map. He trusted me with framing him into scenes, to the point of agreeing for Apari to have been captured and locked up by mistake. We played the capture scene in a flashback, his first chance to not-use his shiny new daggers. He understood right away that he could ask for Apari to come into Katrin’s scenes, and did. And when Katrin was confronted with Reifels’s proposal to marry her, his timing for having Apari knock on Reifels’s door was brilliant.

True, he was looking for signs of winning in Katrin’s scenes (and was trying to help her win at first), but he says he had great fun watching the show even though she didn’t win all the time. He also didn’t take Katrin’s fight with Olec seriously because “that wasn't a fight to the death.” But in Apari’s scenes I didn’t feel that he was trying to “win” at all. Instead he was grasping opportunities to introduce cool stuff, like when he told Reifels that a scholar wouldn’t be a suitable king in war times, or when he demanded proof of military strength from Roland, or let Roland know that the wood elves were sending him, a jungle elf, only because they thought this was a high-risk mission and they considered him expendable. Not to mention that he bet on Katrin in his wager with Roland; the winner of that wager would have custody of the captured snow elf. (Well, this last bit was about winning at least partly; the player didn’t dream that Katrin could lose this one.)


On the whole I haven't been as good as I'd have liked in setting up bangs for him - but thinking back that was not so different with Lucy in the first session. I have much more material to work with now and am getting a better feel for him, which makes me a lot more confident and should be good for the game.

Hmm, lots to comment on here.

Apart from the one rather unpleasant moment that Kerstin mentioned, I had enormous fun. That's the first thing.

StalkingBlue wrote: Lucy is a wonderful player to be throwing things at, she’ll come up with ideas and things to say and do and is now asking to frame scenes, which is wonderful. She’s also getting to a point where she asserts herself and our style.

randomling wrote: That's a really interesting comment, because often - especially at "bang" moments - my first reaction is "I don't know what to do!" I think this is partly lack of confidence and partly Gamist need-to-win conditioning, which is still pretty strong sometimes.

She's already made a serious enemy among King Roland's ranks in the form of Olec, Roland's senior general, the guy she dueled with. I actually hope this will come up in the future, it'll be interesting.

*nods* It makes sense, and I like the idea of trying to figure out how defeat would make things cooler. I'll put that into practise. Like I said at the session, it seems to me that Katrin is kind of on a downward slide, heading towards the middle of her story (which should be rock bottom). Then she climbs out the other side, with any luck. It's what we find out about her on the way that makes it cool.

I love that we had a real cliffhanger ending for Katrin, too - the biggest bang of the session left unresolved, waiting for a decision. I'm trying to figure out cool ways the story could go on the back of both decisions, and what it says about Katrin and about theme each way. (I'm not playing before I play, I promise, and I won't decide before next session - just thinking about options.)

And yes, I really think Olec should stick around as an enemy person. I might even think about spending a Hero Point or two on a relationship to him, depending on how the rest of the scenario plays out.

The last three sessions have all been enormous fun, but also massive learning curves for me. I'm still worrying more than I want to about winning and losing, but I think that the more we play and the more we talk about it, the better I'm getting. I do find it hard to step away from Katrin too, at times - then again, most of the pleasure I derived from RPGs pre-HeroQuest was from intense actor-stance moments, so I guess I'm quite invested in staying with her in some ways.

It's such fun learning, though!

I think that the key to players deciding it is okay to lose, is to establish a situation where losing is as interesting as winning, both advance the story. A really good example of this came up in Farandar's story in Red Cow the other week:

Quick summary: Farandar is in love with a girl from the Split Waters clan. Marriage between the two clans is taboo as they have been feuding on-and-off for years. The Split Waters warband attacked the player's homestead, seeking to avenge past wrongs. In the confusion of the battle, and literal 'fog of war' Farandar sought out his lover, and convinced her to join him in his clan where he would marry her. The defenders beat of the attack, but not without loss of face to Farandar's father. When Farandar approached his father, still smarting, he rejected his relationship with a woman 'of our enemies'. Approaching instead his grandfather and the chief he was further rejected and told the marriage would not be allowed. Interestingly the player, Erik, didn't spend any hero points on the contests to convince his family to allow him to wed. I think this was because Erik could see that either way: love affirmed or love denied, the story got more interesting. Indeed I suspect that Erik felt that being rejected, losing the contest, heralded a more interesting and tragic development to the plot than winning.

So I think that is the key to encouraging players to accept defeat is to establish a situation where the player can see that the consequences of failure are as interesting, if not more interesting than failure.

I'm glad I got to this after others had already commented, because I'd have been tempted to make remarks too soon if I'd seen it sooner.

Lucy, I helped Kerstin come up with that TN. Practically set it myself. And I've been encouraging her to do this to your character. And I think that it worked perfectly. And I'll tell you why I think that.

First and foremost, it sounds like it turned out fine. I think it's going to turn into some good story stuff later. But I think that there are more important advantages to what happened. Everybody has been focusing on only one aspect of why stomping is a good thing, the story advantages. But that's just one of the two reasons I listed repeatedly to Kerstin as for why stomping is important. I kept reiterating it, but she seemed to ignore it. Stomping gives the player an idea of scale.

That is, Lucy, are you now more aware of your character's relative level of ability in the world? That there are people who may have abilities that are way beyond your character's ability level? Even with HP? That's actually, IMO, the most important reason to do the stomp. Do you now have a better sense of the overall scale of ability that's out there?

Actually it's not even really scale. It's to show that the world is rather objectively set in terms of the power level of the beings that you're going to meet, and that they're not being set just so that your character can win. See, in D&D the DM is supposed to do their darndest to make sure that the challenges that come up are difficult, but that eventually the PCs should probably win if the players think a little. Basically it's no fun if you die even 50% of the time in D&D, so you have to make each encounter objectively weaker than the PCs.

The problem with the D&D mode of play is that from a story POV, it's just not very dramatic to be fighting weaker foes all the time. In fiction characters do fight against odds that they can't beat, and only win sometimes. That's supposed to be an ironic statement. But what HQ does is to give you HP, meaning that you do have a chance against otherwise unbeatable odds. But HQ also does something that other games do not - it allows you to go up against those unbeatable odds and lose, just like in fiction, and not end up losing your character.

In fact, in HQ losing means your character gets more stats. Negative stats, yes, but stats. And HQ is more about what stats you have than how high they are (or whether or not they're positive or negative).

So the objective overall is to show you that your character, does not have the plot immunity that HP deliver in D&D. In D&D if you found out that the character you were up against was much higher level and had more HP, you could probably flee or something before the end of the contest. HP serve to make sure that the player has the ability to opt out, and that against weaker opponents that fluke die rolls don't cause failures.

This is something else that you're going to have to be ready for in HQ. At some point, some stableboy is going to get into a brawl with your character and kick her ass. That is, the HQ system is decidedly random in giving advantage to the underdog. You came close to having your character beat what we worked out as "one of the most feared swordsmen" around. In fiction the superior individual often loses for the sake of drama, and this happens in HQ all the time. You're character is going to lose for various reasons.

Right now, the problem with what happened is that you're probably feeling like your character's ability to kick ass has been brought into question. But consider that on the same scale she's got an advantage over green swordsmen that's just as large as Olec had over your character. She's somewhere in between in ability level, and given that ability is like a pyramid with less and less people near the top, that means that she's in a pretty elite group. Maybe one in 100 can beat her. It's just that only 1 in 10000 can beat Olec (Regularly; again, Olec can even be beaten by the tinhorns on a really bad day).

This is the model that HQ provides. It's not the "always win unless you mess up" model of D&D, and now you know that. Note the importance of that "mess up" part. Did you do anything wrong in your choices of how to fight Olec? I'm guessing that it was a simple contest. So you got out your augments, and you rolled the dice, and you lost. As a player you did the right thing in playing to what your character would do in this case, what was interesting to you to have her do. So you get applause here, the loss doesn't reflect on you.

I have to mention at this point that the idea that you shouldn't be concerned with winning and losing is incorrect in a technical sense. It's often put that way, but it's misleading. Your character is a protagonist, and just like one in a book, you should want your character to win. You should be rooting for your character when they're up against big odds. And you should be a little dissapointed when he fails. From that POV, I think you're reactions are perfect, Lucy. Don't worry that you're not "thinking right" about it or something, you're doing great.

What is different about the mode is that you shouldn't be concerned with trying to win as a player. That is you should have your character do stupidly daring things if that's what's dramatic. Your goal is to have your character do that thing which seems most interesting to you to do. And, again, you're doing perfectly there. The problem that "It's not about winning" tries to address is that if you play in all cases as a player trying to have the character win, that won't work in HQ. Not the least of which reason is that you can't do much of anything to ensure a win for your character (unlike, say, D&D).

So you can't feel bad about your personal performance as a player. The other option of why you felt bad about it is that you may feel, again, that this made your character less of a protagonist. Well, here you might actually have some complaint, but I'll need more details:


• Did Kerstin make you feel as though your character was a 1 in 100 getting beaten by a 1 in 10000? That is, she didn't make your character look weak or incompetent, did she? This was a fight between a master swordsman, and a master's master. It should have been something like Westly beating Inigo Montoya (I hope you recognize the Princess Bride reference) in that they both should have seemed excellent, and that the bad guy won despite your character's excellence.

Did the narration convey that? I mean, even if your character was humiliated in front of other characters in-game, she should have seemed really cool in her loss to we the audience. If Kerstin didn't accomplish this, then realize that it's a skill that few GMs have down pat, and she's learning.

But consider your fear before the event - was it really that you were going to lose the contest or that you were going to lose as a player or that your character's cool was going to be taken away? Obviously you didn't lose the character, did she lose her coolness?

• Did Kerstin convey how tough Olec was in relation to your character? I actually suggested a giant to her to stomp your character, and though I may have sounded facetious, the advantage of a giant is that the player will ask "How tall?" and you can respond, "Large 10W2". This way the player has it put into instant perspective for them.

Did it happen that she said, "one of the best" and you thought, "Hey, Katrin's one of the best, too"? That is, somehow before you got into the fight it sounds like you got the impression that you were going to have a higher target number. Did Kerstin fail to try to impress upon you how tough he was? I'm thinking maybe so.

There are a number of things she could have done. She could have put it in perspective with something like, "Your character is good, but not nearly at his level of ability." Or she could have simply told you what his ability level was, perhaps in general terms, "He's like a master's master, or about in the 3 mastery range before augments."

The point is that it's just possible that Kerstin did a little railroading. That is, personally I don't think it's railroading to manipulate the situation to where a character has to face some really nasty challenge. But it is railroading to not give the player information that they might have had in making a decision. Again, with the giant, its obvious. With the NPC in this case, perhaps less obvious. Again, that's not to say that I don't think that it's kosher to hit a character with a 4w10 rockslide out of the blue, I think it is. It's just not kosher to say, "Here comes a little rockslide which might not hurt you - what do you do?"

So was it, perhaps that you felt that you'd not really been given enough information on the situation to make the right decision for the character? I mean, would it have been different if you'd known the TN, and then perhaps decided to go after him anyhow?


Anyhow, if it's not that your character was made to look bad, or that you didn't get to control something that you felt was really something you'd have enjoyed having control over, then the only thing that I can guess is that these are leftover feelings from your previous mode of play. In which case stomping was really a good idea because now the issues are out in the open, and you have a better sense of what the game in question delivers. Your character has some plot immunity in the form of HP that you can choose to spend here and there. But largely they'll have times when they fail, and this is a natural part of how the game system gives you substance from which to build plot.

Consider this - is your character really pissed at Olec? So much so that she'd consider assassinating him? Let's say she tried to do so. It's be a contest between her sword skill and his "sense ambush" at 6, or perhaps some sensory ability improve moded down to 8 or so...would be no problem at all for her to kill him. See Olec, despite his one high ability rating has no plot immunity either. All we know is that in a straight up duel, that right now Katrin is unable to defeat him. So an implicit question has been asked to you right now about Katrin - is she so stuck on her honor that she'd kill a man who besmirched it? Or does honor for her mean not doing something so foul?

Actually the situation asks a plethora of questions revolving around her damaged honor. Can she, perhaps, find another way of defeating Olec? Charisma? Actually Olec would be good to have on her side - can she overcome her hatred of him to get him on her side? Lots of questions. The simplest of which is whether or not she'll be able to get some practice in and someday come back and clean his clock.

This is key, really. Contests like this should set up more conflict. Which I think this one has. Katrin's just got more to think about now than she did before.

Anyhow, that's my story, and I'm sticking to it. :-)

Here's a question for you - you actually asked to have your character be defeated at some point in previous posts. What were you thinking in terms of that? Would it have been better to have lost to someone about her own ability level? That's hard to engineer; with HP it's very likely that you'll win if you want to.

A couple more things, did you spend a HP to bump from Major to Minor? If so, I'd suggest asking for the point back and taking the Major penalty. Keep in mind it's only for doing things with that arm, really, or where the wound would affect other things - not to every action you can take. Second, it's just more fun. The HP isn't swinging things to a win here, so why not take the worse wound, and get that much more angry about it? Feel that much more vinidication when you get him back for it or whatever. Again, you really can't worry about winning (she might stomp you again, for instance), so the mechanical difference isn't really worth ameliorating.

As for your reaction to the bangs, Kerstin is right, that's perfect. Once you've made a decision about what she's going to do, does it then feel cool to have worked through it, and decided something about the character? If you really don't see a good solution, then try to go with the ambivalent solution. That is, it might be more fun to play the character not sure what to do. As in the current cliffhanger. Maybe she can put off the decision with Riefels for the moment, which leaves the question hanging over play for a while. That's a fine response if you can manage it.

Mike

Hi,

I think any issues the group might have during play are rather minor and easy to solve as long as you collective keep up that communication. Being willing to stop for a moment and discuss how to handle things is a great way to keep things from getting weird or negative. I think this is where Illusionist play can fall apart because stopping play for discussion around the table if often seen as "failing" or "bad roleplaying".

Sounds like you guys are doing fine :)

Chris