I was going to try running a Pool adventure, but I was wondering about combat:
-I want to run an epic battle or an extended duel, but it seems that the fight would be over in one round- I mean, the players roll and do a monologue of victory if they win. And that's it. Any ideas how to make a long, exciting battle under these rules?
Also, it seems like there's no real difference if 1 pc is fighting a bunch of people or a party of pcs fighting a bunch of people. I mean, in the party example, a MOV could be "I use my agility and skill to subdue the foes." The other pcs' MOV would be, "Uh, yeah, we help out."
-What's there to stop the pcs from defeating a powerful villain the first time they see him? The official Pool rules say that a MOV can't result in a death unless the gm okays it, but I'm sure pcs could still really mess things up.

If we are talking about anything but Gamist play with an emphasize on winning combats you should be able to assume the players have some sort of desire for flare. Sure, you could mess up the bad guy pretty bad in one fell swoop, but wouldn't it be more fun to make things drag on a bit?

Besides, the GM has some control on how much a player can narrate with his MOV. If she feels that the player has gone far enough, she simply says "stop."

Hello,

I think that two major points might help to clear up the issue.

1) What is really being resolved when you say "a battle"? The battle may simply be a backdrop for far more personal conflicts within it, such as confronting an enemy or saving some bystanders, or anything similar.

Or perhaps if the battle is indeed the issue at hand, nothing is wrong with dividing up certain elements or issues of the battle among the PCs and letting them play out independently. For instance, the roll by one character might decide the overall victory, but the roll by another might decide whether the young prince gets captured.

This point illustrates a larger issue that you should consider: remember, the GM does indeed exercise power over how much space and time a given conflict is going to affect. This is a very important consideration and permits lots of "chopping up" large-scale events like battles into several different rolls.

2) By "major villain" and "extended duel," you are already exercising some GM power that is standard in most role-playing, but explicitly distributed across participants in The Pool.

Basically, the best way to do things is to introduce a wide number of NPCs, many of whom are villainous. If the players take one down quickly, no problem - that could not possibly be the major villain. Let the one whom they do not take down quickly become the main villain.

The Monologues of Victory (and if you're using TQB, of Defeat) will provide anything you could possibly want to establish cool in-game content regarding these characters, both minor and major.

To GM this system, you must give up your plans for extended duels and so forth. Just provide material, not outcomes - let the player do all the duel-extending they want with their Monologues.

One final point: don't forget that you as GM do set a major element of the roll - how many base dice they get to roll. The rules say 1 to 3, although I'll confess that in one or two instances, I've even taken it down to 0, forcing characters to rely only on Traits and wagers for their dice.

Best,
Ron

Hello

Couldn't have put it better than its already been put.

With The Pool you simply can't plan out an adventure like you can with many games. All you can do is come up with cool npcs, cool settings, and cool potential conflicts. Then excercise some clever and/or aggressive scene framing to get the elements into play that you are really wanting to see. The rest is going to be a fully mutual give-and-take between you and the other players. They can and will mess with your plans. Let them. Its a blast.

As far as combat goes, It's been my experience that players will protract a fight scene if they want it to rock. For example, in one game I ran a player was fighting an npc villain and got a Monologue that I probably would have let him use to drop the axe on the baddie, so to speak. Instead, he described some intense, gritty grappling and ended up cutting his opponent above the eyes causing the blood to blind him. Then he turned it back over to me. Clearly, he was interested in the story and not in defeating the GM's plans.

James V. West
www.randomordercreations.com

Well, and hell, to abuse the hackneyed Neitsche quote: "What doesn't kill the villain makes him stronger." Just dissallow the villain's death and narrate his escape. He'll be way meaner when he comes back having replaced his lost arm with a poisonous necromantic tentacle from the Kracken of Lake Shmonginong.

So if you really like that one villain, and can't see relegating him to the status that Ron suggests, James has given you the tools to allow you to continue to make him a menace.

Mike

As far as combat goes, It's been my experience that players will protract a fight scene if they want it to rock. For example, in one game I ran a player was fighting an npc villain and got a Monologue that I probably would have let him use to drop the axe on the baddie, so to speak. Instead, he described some intense, gritty grappling and ended up cutting his opponent above the eyes causing the blood to blind him. Then he turned it back over to me. Clearly, he was interested in the story and not in defeating the GM's plans.

Thanks for the replies everyone.
James [how to run a Pool adventure]: Okay, that clarifies everything. It's GM<->PC interaction with no fixed plot. Great.

I'd like to refer to Clinton's thread:
The Axioms of RPG Design (or, blasting away at the argument)

Since most of my friends are heavily AD&D-based, the choice between a MOV or +2 dice seems to be contradictary. I mean, my friends would definitely choose the +2 and ignore the MOVs.
I think to encourage the MOV, I'll give the MOV and the +2 together. This way my players will be rewarded for stretching fights out.
But I can see how you'd want to stretch out a fight with *everything,* like 1 goblin. I think each encounter would have an importance rating: a single goblin would rate low- pcs should only be able to smack him around for 1-2 rounds, but if I'm trying for the longer fights I suggested earlier, I'll let the fight go for several minutes before asking the pcs to end it.

Are there problems with my reasoning?

Kenway wrote: Are there problems with my reasoning?

Hello,

One thing you have to remember about The Pool, and correct me if I'm wrong, is that The Pool is NOT deciding success or failure like your standard RPG. The Pool is deciding who gets to DECIDE what the outcome is. If your players are constantly taking the +2 dice that means they're turning the outcome of the situation over to the GM. Just keep describing things as getting worse for them until someone takes a Monologue Victory. Eventually they'll catch on.

Jesse

Hey all

"I think to encourage the MOV, I'll give the MOV and the +2 together. This way my players will be rewarded for stretching fights out."

I don't reccomend this. Mike's warning about the heavy gamism slant is right on. If your players are used to gamism and if they've never really tried a narrativist game, then you really can't expect them to "get it" if you allow the system to support the gamist elements first. Keeping the MoV and the +2 dice as a choice of either/or is the better way to go.

Jesse said that getting a successful roll is more about who gets to narrate than it is about winning a conflict. He's right. I think of it this way:

- Get a 1, the ball's in your court. You can narrate or you can get some dice for later. If you opt for dice, the GM will get to decide what happens in the conflict. He can go for something beneficial for you, or he can put the hammer down on your behind (another reason I need to update the game is to clarify this).

- Get no 1s and the ball is the GM's. He can narrate what he wants, but the result should add complication to your situation. That doesn't have to translate into a "critical failure", it just has to increase the tension, up the anty, whatever you choose to call it.

When I wrote the game I was thinking from a somewhat gamist place. During the first re-write I kept throwing in new terminology, thinking there just weren't enough rules there. But there are. It has all it needs. I suggest playing it as-is. Make sure everyone knows that when they cast the dice, they aren't making an Ability Check or anything like it.

I'd also like to chime in there with Mike's statement about the goblin (its good to have support coming from the Universalis team!). Hell yeah. If the goblin fight lasts for an hour of real time, and its a kick-ass scene, then you've accomplished what you set out to do. Have fun, right?

What I like best about MoVs is that they are so unpredictable. That even a lowly goblin guard you threw in on a whim can suddenly become the single most imortant factor in the entire game.

Hope some of this helps.

Mike's Goblin MoV:

So I slap the goblin out of the way and it lands with a fleshy sound on the floor of the cave entrance. I sneer at it as I pass. Suddenly, the goblin pulls at it's chin revealing that it has on a magic mask that conceals it's true nature. As the mask comes off, a bright light surrounds the figure of the goblin and it slowly begins to grow and change shape.

As we stand stunned before this awesome transformation, what seemed to be a lowly Goblin Guard changes into Kheldrok, the emperor's Half-Troll cheif of the March watch, known for his knowledge of matters 'Cloak and Dagger'. "You fool, I await the arrival of the Goblin Hoard Train arriving from the south. The emperor has charged me with obtaining an item of power from the Goblin Cheiftain's magic chest, " relates Kheldrok with anannoyed look on his massive furrrowed brow, "I'll give you to the count of ten to be away from here, lest you spoil my little surprise."

"But Lord Kheldrok," I reply trying to put the burly humanoid at ease, "I didn't know it was you, please, let us offer our services in finding the item you seek."

The torchlight glints off the imposing mail hauberk that Kheldrok wears with giving him the look of a being that has seen, and won many a bloody fight. He seems to be tinking about my proposal. Suddenly from further out at the cave entrance there is the sound of somebody approaching. Many feet, armored in the goblin style.

Etc.

I'd keep rambling on with consequences until the GM made me stop.

Mike

Mike Holmes wrote:
I'd keep rambling on with consequences until the GM made me stop.

Only cuz you asked, and assumeing no one intervenes with Complications and Challenges:

Mike Holmes wrote: Mike's Goblin MoV:

So I slap the goblin out of the way and it lands with a fleshy sound on the floor of the cave entrance. I sneer at it as I pass. Suddenly, the goblin pulls at it's chin revealing that it has on a magic mask that conceals it's true nature. As the mask comes off, a bright light surrounds the figure of the goblin and it slowly begins to grow and change shape.

As we stand stunned before this awesome transformation, what seemed to be a lowly Goblin Guard changes into Kheldrok, the emperor's Half-Troll cheif of the March watch, known for his knowledge of matters 'Cloak and Dagger'.

"You fool, I await the arrival of the Goblin Hoard Train arriving from the south. The emperor has charged me with obtaining an item of power from the Goblin Cheiftain's magic chest, " relates Kheldrok with anannoyed look on his massive furrrowed brow, "I'll give you to the count of ten to be away from here, lest you spoil my little surprise."

"But Lord Kheldrok," I reply trying to put the burly humanoid at ease, "I didn't know it was you, please, let us offer our services in finding the item you seek."

The torchlight glints off the imposing mail hauberk that Kheldrok wears with giving him the look of a being that has seen, and won many a bloody fight. He seems to be tinking about my proposal.

Suddenly from further out at the cave entrance there is the sound of somebody approaching. Many feet, armored in the goblin style.

I have yet to play the pool. But I have a question/concern along the lines of the one that started this theard. It seems to me that at its heart this has nothing to do with combat. The "problem" is that there seems to be few tools for distinguishing the capabilities of various NPCs. That is, I would narrate the "defeat" of a competent opponent in a contest in a different way than I would a lesser opponent. Consider the following quote:

James V. West wrote: ... All you can do is come up with cool npcs, cool settings, and cool potential conflicts. Then excercise some clever and/or aggressive scene framing to get the elements into play that you are really wanting to see ...

Edit: Old Thread Alert! (Didn't notice it was a resurrected thread until just now.) James, split us off?

HMT,

Before playing the Pool it's important to realise that, unlike traditional RPGs, the GM does not control the game. A Pool game belongs to the players. When a player narrates a MoV, he can do *exactly what he wants.* The Pool is the opposite of player limitation; it distributes player empowerment.

You just can't decide ahead of time what's going to happen; mostly because you'll only decide about half of what actually does happen during play.

Pool characters are not defined in terms of their capabilities (although capabilities *can* be an element of character definition). Rather, Pool characters are defined in terms of what the players view as important. Assigning dice to a trait indicates that that trait is important to the player in some way. It's insurance that the trait (whatever story element it represents) can be incorporated into the story.

You wrote:

It seems to be the case that some of the cool aspects of a cool NPC may not have been fully expressed to the players by the time a conflict begins.

True enough Nathan!

That said, and being a Supers genre GM...
another thing you can do as GM, is just let people know all about an NPC prior to narrating a MOV...powers, personality etc. Even their motivation.

In Trollbabe this would be done often before a conflict.

Then let them narrate to their hearts content, fully informed about the NPC. If they find them interesting they will narrate the MOV in such a way as to not take the NPC out of play. I love using MOV's to make successes for my characters also more complicated for them.

If they narrate a quick knockout and capture for that NPC, well then its not an NPC that interests them.

Another really important thing to talk over before Play with a game like Pool or The Questing Beast is the genre conventions.

If its 4 color supers, then they need to know that...no narrating bloody gushing gritty dark combat. No Brooding etc.
Miraculous Villain escapes should be a regular occurrance, even returning from 'apparent death'.

In a gritty modern graphic novel type...the reverse should be true.

Pool/TQB play requires that everybody be on the same page on genre expectations.

This is the obvious straight forward answer to my question:

Bob McNamee wrote: ... another thing you can do as GM, is just let people know all about an NPC prior to narrating a MOV...powers, personality etc. Even their motivation ...

I now realize that I should have revived the old NPCs and GM thread instead of this one.It already contains answers to my first question. I will now proceed to move there.

HMT wrote: I now realize that I should have revived the old NPCs and GM thread instead of this one.It already contains answers to my first question. I will now proceed to move there.