Mike Holmes said:

Mooks exist as an extension of a group. If they die, there's another to take it's place, meaning the source of potential challenge isn't removed. So you can kill mooks with marginal success. Destroying the group of mooks would probably require a complete success, unless it was part of yet a larger group from which it would itself be replaced.

Deer exist only as a criteria of success to hunting. If you kill one, the hunting challenge isn't eliminated. So you can kill deer on a marginal success. A complete success might mean that you'd figured something out about this hunt that made it so that you'd always get deer hunting in this place. In other words, you'd have eliminated the challenge of hunting in this place.

• Act of God - the rain becomes so heavy that nobody thinks it's a good idea to continue.
• Distraction - suddenly the PC notes that his home, with his children inside, is on fire.
• A worse danger appears - a giant is heading towards the duelists.
• The opponent runs away - this is really common. Sensing he's on the ropes, the villain chickens out.

Long and ranty folks. At your own risks ;)

This post really got to me. Since I started reading about RPG theory a few weeks ago, I've been pondering this issues and giving them a lot of thought. I've also grown fond of the interaction with posters on The Forge, yet I find a couple of minor issues which make me take the excellent advice I usually get with a grain of salt.

The first thing that struck me as constructive and intellectual (in the good sense) in John Kim's introduction to what RPG theory is was the notion that "all styles of play are respectable". I've always been at odds with a very modern and very simplistic way of looking at the arts which is basically "anything goe". I believe (and so do many others more instructed than me) that artistic criticism has amongst it's objectives the desire to find out what makes great art. Of course, this means that art not following this guidelines will be called bad art, a complicated point given the eclectic nature of artistic creation.

This duality between criticism and open-mindedness caused me a great deal of intellectual concern until I read Umberto Eco's fantastic "". This book advanced the notion that, while there may be "high level" and "low level" art, one is not always "hungry" for high-level stuff and may indulge in simpler or more complex art depending on the situation. More importantly, one can only deem a work of art as good or bad after analysis. This is a critique of the "comics are for kids", "pop music is crap" and such lines of thought.

When it comes to The Forge, I sometimes believe that the Gamist style of play gets the axe more often than needed. When you consider the essays which put forward the idea that Sim is not a real play style, one ends up getting the impression that only Narr approaches are accepted here.

I do not think that this is a conscious bias. As a matter of fact, The Forge is without doubt the most intellectually stimulating and intellectually rigorous RPG board I've ever been a part of. Still, sometimes the bias shows. I sometimes wish that the most experienced members would make an effort to give Gamist of Sim approaches to their answers, because I truly believe that their much more educated insight could help. As a matter of fact, I sometimes think that a die-hard Narrativist could be an uneducated (this sounds SO snobbish...) Gamist's best advisor.

   

Sorry about the omission! I meant Umberto Eco's fantastic "Apocalypse Postponed"

Hi Christian,

As has been pointed out before- HQ can be played in many different ways due to the non-specificity of the rules.  What it -does not- do well, is create a 1 to 1 causal relationship between the dice rolls and exact outcomes.  If that is what you are seeking, HQ cannot provide it (There's this other game, called RuneQuest, which might fit your bill).  The strength of this is how it CAN support vastly different styles of play, the weakness being that you have to navigate your way to a complete style of play on your own.  Mike has thus far, explained two ways of doing it.

As a group, you have to figure out how to narrate the outcomes in such a way that fits the plausibility of your game.  If it's a contest of me against 1000 mooks, it could be narrated as 3 weeks of guerilla warfare ending when I poison their water supplies, or maybe, I incarnate some aspect of a god and do a Matrix style beatdown on them in the matter of minutes.

If you look on the Heroquest Yahoo group, you'll find the same problem has been addressed several times before, and that in fact, Nar, Sim, whatever, everyone has to do the same thing with HQ, which is figure out if A) stakes override degrees of success, or B) the degrees of success are narrated into the outcome in a plausible fashion.

Chris

Hi Arturo,

I really don't know where you're picking up "Gamism is for kids" or anything like that(links?).  HeroQuest isn't good for gamism, but that doesn't mean gamism isn't valid, it's just recognizing what HQ does and doesn't support well.  The fact is, gamism is generally well supported by like, the biggest game company out there, and the most widely recognized brand name, and generally well understood without theory.  Gamists are having a grand time already, they don't need any advisors- in fact, to a great deal, the functionality of gamist design and play has been a great advisor to Nar design and play!  As far as Sim play here on the Forge, there's been a long history of trying to break it free from a lot of poor play techniques which happened to coincide with many of the games that support Sim.

Chris

Im not saying i want a 1 to 1 causal relation between rolls and outcome. I played RQ for years, its not what i want. I just dont want to come up with a fantastic reason, a deus ex machina, everytime there is no obvious solution for my consequence of contest.

Or did i miss something ? Does this apply to simple contests only ???

You know, if im in a swordfight with ten mooks (talking extended contest here), there is very little explanation how i can eliminate them all with one action. I could try to kill the leader what would lead to the others fleeing in fear. But thats an action i have to state. Not something that happens, just because i rolled a complete victory.

It sems it just doesnt work in an extended contest the way Mike proposes....
You declare every action, augment, bid AP and roll. I dont see a way how in this example mooks can be eliminated all at once, except the player says hes got a way how to try that.

Its a whole different thing in a simple contest:
you state your goal and the ability you choose. Then depending on the outcome, its possible to narrate it in different ways.

Hi Christian,

What is "one action"?  Are you thinking one roll always equals one action in a discrete, one swing of the sword type fashion?  My examples I gave ranged anything from a Matrix brawl to 3 weeks of back and forth cat & mouse- both can be resolved in one roll, whether we're talking a simple contest or as part of a larger extended contest.  Figuring out what the scope of one roll of the dice is going to be depends on you and your group.  HeroQuest doesn't limit rolls to discrete actions, as most other games do.  A single roll could be one sword swing, it could be 3 days' of fighting.

10 mooks, 1 die roll?  It could be:

- 2 days of clever stealth, taking them out, one by one, commando style
- Leading the charge of your own men, who help take them out
- A magic spell that melts them instantly
- Starting a rockslide that wipes them all out
- Cutting through them samurai chambara style in a couple of moments

Plausibility depends on your game and how big the scale is for your conflict.  This applies equally to simple and extended conflicts.  I'm not seeing why you imagine you must come up with anything more fantastic than whatever is appropriate for your game.

Chris

At the risk of seeming like I'm not confident that Chris' answers suffice - because they are very well presented, and correct, IMO - I'll put my own viewpoint in, since it's my ideas that are being discussed.

Christian, I was, in fact, largely refering to simple contests; or at least that's probably the best way to think of it. Which means, actually, that extended contest execution reinforces my idea. That is, with an extended contest there are two ways to handle a large group of opponents. One is to give AP for each and every one of them. The second is to simply give augments for them.

In the first case, you explicitly eliminate foes based on your AP bid and equal to the AP that are lost. Yes you are limited in the number you can take out in one action based on what your starting AP is, but this could theoretically be many each round, depending on the ability levels in question.

With the augmentation example, it's not at all made explicit when enemies should be reduced, one could even deduce that they're never reduced, and that only the one that they're augmenting is reduced. But I think this would be a pretty narrow view of things, and take more effort to explain in narration than it's worth. Actually I think you're hurting yourself just so you can hurt yourself more, here. Rather if I say, "You kill a few of them" what's the harm?

In any case, one round of an extended contest is not equal to one simple contest, a simple contest is equal to one entire extended contest. That is, at the end of a simple contest you have to be able to have the same potential results as the extended contest. The other position is to decide that all contests with more than one foe must be extended contests. And this leads down the road to making extended contests about task resolution rather than conflict resolution. Which the text, at least, tries hard to indicate that it's not (with things, like I've said, like "Automatic success" and "No repeat attempt" rules). Further, even if you interperet it this way, as Chris says, it simply doesn't work well this way.

I regularly resolve conflicts with piles of mooks with one die roll, and that seems to be well indicated in the text as potentially viable. What Chris is trying to show above is that scale has nothing to do with how you run contests in HQ. You can run contests as small-scale as a character repairing a cut in a shirt to entire armies clashing all with simple contests or extentded contests.

The text doesn't speak to this well, and leaves it pretty ambiguous as to when one sort is supposed to be used, and when another is supposed to be used. This is a perfect example of the ambiguity of the text in terms of what it best supports. Yes, you could read it as meaning that only contests that take a long time, or are somehow larger scale, should be run as extended contests. But it's left up to the players. As such, what loads of people have discovered is that the way to descriminate between when to run one or the other is basically when the players feel like they want more drama from the conflict in question. You can use other criteria, but those who do report that the game doesn't work very well, from which we can only deduce that this interpretation is less effective.

Anyhow, you must mean something other than Deus ex Machina here, or you severely misunderstand what we're doing with the system. A true Deus ex Machina means that some other force comes into play (in literal terms a chair is lowered into the Greek play with a character that's a god sitting in it, and they handle everything) and cleans up the problem for you. That would be entirely contradictory to the sort of play that we're trying to produce here. That is, just like as we say that making failures interesting is in part making the character look good in failing, the same is true in victory. If you use a DEM, then you steal the character's glory.

Instead, we put all the credit on the character, and describe in enough detail how they cut through their opponents. Now, as Chris points out, again, this can be as realistic or fantastic as you like. I think that it's odd to say that in a world as fantastic as Glorantha, or the others that we convert to that making a description fantastic is wrong. And I'm not just playing semantic games here. Consider the sources. Legends in Glorantha are all about individuals cutting swaths through opponent armies. In Tolkien, how many goblins do the characters slay? They keep count in more than one place. Even Conan, considered to be the "gritty" sort of fantasy has Conan slaying innumerable foes. I remember one story in which he's trying to escape from this castle and he ends up on a staircase with the bodies piling up high in front of him as they try to get him.

In any case, if you want a really gritty and realistic portrayal of somebody taking out a number of mooks "in one action" check out the scene at the beginning of the movie Yojimbo. One Iaiado maneuver, and three guys are all either killed or maimed, over in the blink of an eye. Does it happen like that in real life? I dunno, never having been in an actual circumstance like that, I can't say. But it seemed plausible enough for me, and with Mifune only an actor (who can say what it would look like with a real life sword-saint).

So, again reiterating what Chris says, I think you can make things are realistic or gritty as you like, and still get the effect you want here.

But all of this is moot, really. Sorry to have had to drag you through the above, but the interesting thing is that there's no mandate to use any of these techniques. That is, when I play, and it's this contest with mooks, even on a complete victory, I don't neccessarily kill any of them. As I've pointed out in the same posts the flexibility that this interpretation gives you means not only that you can kill on marginal victories, but that you don't have to kill on complete victories either. Having the mooks all run off, dispersed, never to reform, satisfies the conditions of a complete victory just as well as killing them all does.

So do whatever you like here that fits the resolution level that's generated. If you think that killing a bunch of nameless hoods is somehow implausible, or that you can't think of how to narrate it well, then by all means don't. Narrate something plausible and well presented.

Barna, the bias is quite conscious, but as Chris said, it's about recognizing good gamism when you see it. In any case, our biases are ours. That is, for my part, I'll go so far as to say that I don't like gamism in RPGs. Because I get tons of it from other games. I think it's interesting that at the Forge Con recently, the game that got more play than any other is a great card game called Jungle Speed (http://www.junglespeed.co.uk/). Yes, that's right, a terrifically gamism sort of game that's all about gloating over the other people at the table. But in no way a RPG. Our bias is, I believe, that we see RPGs as being able to do something that other games can't do, and we like to focus on that.

But that's just our preference, and we're not going to begrudge D&D players their fun becase we like our RPGs to be largely devoid of gamism. Anyhow, you'd begrudge us our predilections, and force us to always consider the gamism side of things? As it turns out, we have done so for HQ, and found it lacking - which in an odd way is one of the reasons we play it. Or at least why I do.

So, yeah, we're figuring out how to run HQ such that the gamism (and simulationism) is absent. Not because we don't like gamism, or don't think that gamism should be in any RPG, but because we find that HQ works best with narrativism, and that if you combine modes of play that this is often problematic for play. RPGs tend to work best when they're only supporting one mode (this may be the part of the theory that you're unaware of).

I have no idea what "super-narrating" is. Never heard the phrase. What we discuss is called narrativism, which, interestingly says nothing about narration whatsoever. It speaks to narrative. The HQ rulebook goes on and on about it being a "talking-game" and being about narration, true. But we can't use that as support for it being supportive of narrativism, because the two things are not at all directly related. In point of fact, I'm personally for less narration in game play most of the time. My play looks a lot more like gamism in terms of how much IC narration occurs. And what narration does occur tends to be third person, as it happens. Like instead of saying "Barkeep, give me a beer, and tell me, do you know anything about the ruins to the north?" in my game you're likely to hear a player say, "My character talks to the barkeep, and tries to get information from him regarding the ruins to the north."

(Aside:
I think that, probably due to my own inadequacies in communicating here, that people get a very stilted idea of what my game play looks like. That it's some crazy whacko style of play that's really detached from what they've experienced. For anyone who thinks that the techniques I expound upon creates something alien, I suggest you come and observe my IRC game which is open to the public (irc.magicstar.net #indie_ooc) every Thursday evening at 8PM US Central Time. I think that you'll find it interesting that it seems pretty "normal." )

What narrativism is about, is giving control of the narrative - the plot - to the players. Gamism is about giving the players the ability to address challenges, Simulationism is about giving the players the ability to make decisions that seem to be part of the reality of the world, and narrativism is about giving players the ability to move the plot forward (usually by making their characters central, and not creating situations that demand certain responses).

Anyhow, if you really want to get into that stuff, you should post more in the theory fora about it. To bring this back to HQ, and this sort of resolution, what HQ allows is for the resolution system to get us past the details of a resolution, and on to the aftermath. That is, instead of figuring out precisely how many people were killed, or even who they were, the system allows us to fast forward to the important (to us) part about the ramifications of having killed those people. In narrativism play, the nature of the resolution itself is not the point of play. Resolutions are important in that they determine the outcome situation from which play will continue. But it's the choice of what conflicts to get into, and how, rather than how they end up, that is the critical part of play.

To put it structurally:

1. Player makes an important decision, let's say, for instance, to have his character attempt to kill a band of bandits who've been plaguing the region. This is the players contribution to play, his creative addition.
2. The resolution system kicks in, and we discover whether or not he was successful in this. He succeeds, and kills a number of them with a marginal victory (note, again, he can't kill them all with a marginal, that would require a complete victory). Note that the player gets to be creative here, again, only insamuch as he gets to display the character's connection to the conflict via aguments. Which is cool, but secondary to the decision-making in 1.
3. The narrator decides from the results that it would be interesting if the bandits staged a counterstrike at the village (-1 for their "hurt"). The villagers demand that the character not fight, as they don't want to raise the ire of the bandits further. This is the narrator's creative contribution to play, setting up situations that require decisions from players.
4. Now the player has a new choice for his character, stay and fight, stay and don't fight, leave? Each of which may lead to new conflicts and contests. In other words, we're back to 1, and the player getting to contribute to play creatively through decisions.

Conflict, not contest. Don't confuse these terms above. Conflict here means where the character has two conflicting interests. Players resolve these by making decisions about what the character does - call this the conflict outcome. Contests are the HQ mechanical procedure that resolve the results of the conflict outcomes in such a way as to allow us to set up more conflicts.

Can you see why we like HQ? It allows us to get to the part of the resolution we want. Not "Did I kill one guy, when others are yet to be killed?" But "What's the outcome of the fight.

Note that, in terms of simulation, even, that this is no less "realistic" than any other RPG abstraction. That is, all RPGs take inputs of some sort, and then have outputs. The level of the inputs and outputs is merely one of scale - how detailed one wants to get. HQ actually allows for tremendous input detail. On the output side, however, it gives only a very vague idea of the results, which I believe is intentional, the intent being to allow the narrator the ability to create a result that ties up the entire contest (so we don't have to violate "no repeat attempts") and to get to the next conflict.

Now, what Chris is so ungently saying with his suggestion to play RQ, is that it may happen that you don't like the idea of the system being used to leap from conflict to conflict this way, and that you may want it to simply resolve, as you say it, "Actions" instead of "Conflict Outcomes" as I'd say it. This is simulationism support. And, Chris' admonition aside, you can try to make HQ do this if you like. It's really Gamism that HQ doesn't do well at all, Simulationism is just very hard with HQ. If you don't mind the vagueness of the outcome side of the HQ resolution procedure, then you can make some headway using it to support simulationism. There's quite a lot of textual support for the game being played this way - if you like, I could provide the argument for it in detail.

I can't speak to the results of playing it this way, as I never have, however. But the reports that I get from play like this seem problematic. For instance you get the "Ranged Combat" problem (see Brand Robbins' article in narrator advice for how to get around it simulationistically). And the Rapier vs Rapier Wit problem. And the magic resistance problem. And several more I'm forgetting because I put them into memory as "problems I don't have with HQ, because I play it to support narrativism."

I don't think that any of these problems is insurmountable, if you want to play this way. But I do think that it's somewhat of an uphill battle. HQ seems, to us at least, like it works best, and with the least amount of interpretation or modification, to support narrativism. That's not saying that you're a fool for wanting to play it with simulationism or even that you shouldn't play this way - that's not for anyone to tell you. It's just a warning of some of the dangers you may face.

And, who knows? Maybe I'm merely projecting my own biases onto the game system, and it actually plays better for simulationism. Maybe this is all propaganda. The only way you can know for sure, is to try it for yourself. To have a real comparison between how it plays with both modes, I'd suggest trying it both ways. But if you're not interested in narrativism, you're not interested. Fine.

But then my advice is not for you. I've always gone out of my way to point out that the interpretations and techniques that I'm presenting are meant to help people produce good narrativism play. If that's not what you want, well, you'll either have to ignore me, or figure out for yourself whether or not the techniques that I'm promulgating will work for the style in which you play. In fact, it would probably be good if somebody who did play successfully that way would stand here on this forum holding up that POV. We used to have one or two people who did here, but I'm afraid that we ran them off with our (my, really), volume of posting on how we like to play.

And that's probably a bad thing, but nothing I can help with. That is, I'm not going to stop expounding on what I've found to be the best way to play HQ for myself, and trying to help other players play this way if they're interested. For one, I think that, since all modes are fun to play in from what I've seen, that people should have no problem with enjoying HQ played using a narrativism agenda. And, for another, I don't see how it stops anyone else from playing simulationism if they want to do so.

Now, if you want help running HQ sim? Well, ask, and you might be surprised at how much I end up helping. But, since it's not my thing, don't expect me to simply start doing it on my own. If you want a discussion of sim HQ play, then you're going to have to drive it yourself in all likelihood.

That said, and I may have been guilty of this in the past, if anyone does start up a sim discussion of HQ, I'll be the first to defend it from "HQ works best with narrativism" attacks.

Mike

Der_Renegat wrote:

Or did i miss something ? Does this apply to simple contests only ???

You know, if im in a swordfight with ten mooks (talking extended contest here), there is very little explanation how i can eliminate them all with one action. I could try to kill the leader what would lead to the others fleeing in fear. But thats an action i have to state. Not something that happens, just because i rolled a complete victory.

Well put, Tim. Put simply an AP bid must match the action stated. So, if you declare an action that can't take out the group, then the bid must be low enough that you will not, if you win. With triple transfers a possibility, that means you have to bid less than one third of what your opponent has left. If you truely can't imagine an action that would end the contest, then you can't bid that high.

Now, that said, I think that the problem here is thinking of an "action" as equal to one swing of a sword or something like "combat systems" have in most games. That's where the real trouble comes in. Given that a player can legitimately bid enough in many cases to put down multiple foes, I think that says that the player can state any action which would make that come true. So the action could be like Tim says. Or it could just be, "Ragnar comes in whirling madly striking at every direction trying to take all the foes out in one terrible flurry." But, truth be told there aren't any time restrictions (as Chris points out), so "Ragnar comes in dodging too and fro between the opponents, keeping them such that he only faces one at a time, and whittles them down carefully one by one taking his time."

An "Action" contains any amount of activity. Yes, this is confounded by the claim that you can go, what is it, 80 yards in one action? But we have examples of actions taking a long time, where you could go a lot longer. It seems to me that it's a question of scale, and what the players and narrator think is interesting. Because the criteria for when to have an extended contest, again, seem to be "when the narrator thinks it would be more fun to have one."

But, again, that's the narrativism interpretation. One could read the whole distance of move, and other things to mean that there's some obvious length to an action which you could force players to adhere to. In that case, you'll probably have to work out how many AP a player can bid based on how many of these sorts of actions it'll take at a minimum to get through a pile of opponents. Again, if they're lending, the answer becomes pretty straightforward (you can only bid one Mook's worth at a time).

Mike

It took me a while to understand whats really going on here.
The longer i have a look at the current discussions (writing adventures), the more i dislike what most people see as: what HQ does best....

Mike asked what i meant with: "super-narrating".
Well i didnt want to use the word narrativism, because i dont know if thats the right term.
I didnt realise that a majority here thinks the way they handle HQ is "high" narrativism. I understand it as an extreme way of narrating roleplay - really too extreme, for my taste !
But that doesnt matter, its just that i wont be able to participate in some of the discussions.

I think there is nothing wrong with railroading, and i think its a lot more exciting than all of this conflictweb stuff.
Also i dont think that players do not decide on anything "important", when theres a plot.
I know a lot of players who dont WANT to decide something "important".

I think what is going on the Forge is that people handle the way they play HQ as a belief system.
For me HQ is a revolutionary game that added so much stuff to the traditional games i played before. Finally relationship has a use. You can really play the character you want. The magicsystem is creative, just like the ability system.
And thats enough for me !
Because thats what i want from this game !

I picked up some things that mostly Mike Homes came up with - it will help me for my taste of gameplay an the rest of the deep theory is not for me.
So thanks a lot for your answers!

best

Christian

It seems to me - I could well be wrong - that you have some very powerful misconceptions about what's going on here, Christian. Or maybe it's just semantic (or even linguistic) problems. Which is probably caused me flailing around trying to describe things using the Forge dialectic. In some cases I simply have no idea what you're trying to say. I feel that we're really not communicating much at all.

But it seems that you're content for that to be the case. So I hesitate to try to clarify things, since you don't seem interested. If I've misread that, then let me know - I feel bad that we're not getting through to each other.

If, in fact, all that's going on here is that we have different styles of play, then I think it should suffice to leave it at that.

Mike

Hi Mike,

i think your analysis is correct:
i had some powerful misconceptions, that are cleared now.

Also i mixed up a lot of subjective impressions without explaining enough.

And it is in parts a semantic problem, because, although i read all the GNS articles on this website, i didnt really understand, that what you are here discussing (and playing) is narrativism.
Or maybe i did understand but i had a more "moderate" view of it. As i said, your vision of narrativism is too extreme for me. I dont wanna play that way. And that was the problem that lead to this thread.

So yes, for me it comes down to different styles of playing.

I think its true, im no longer interested in discussing this, because i realised what and how i want from this game and what not ! For me thats a big win !
But i still would like to read what you have to say, because your posts are always interesting to read !

thanks

Christian

At the risk of belaboring this...

You have a more moderate view of narrativism? See, this is, I think where the misconception is. That is, the techniques and readings that I'm expounding here all start with the same guy who wrote those essays and is the moderator of this forum (generally and specifically), Ron Edwards. The only novel part of what I say is, if anything, in how I present the material. But to be clear:

1. All the stuff about Bangs and relationship maps and such come directly from Ron's game Sorcerer, and specifically designed to promote narrativism.
2. The idea that HQ is a conflict resolution system is Ron's (actually going back to Hero Wars).
3. Ron gave examples, long ago, of how he used these ideas together to play HW as a very functional narrativism supporting engine.

Now, if what you're saying is that Narrativism doesn't need all of this stuff, well, this is also the Ron Edwards who is currently playing D&D in a narrativism fashion (See Actual Play). And the same guy who created the term "Vanilla Narrativism" to explain systems that could support narrativism without really going over the deep edge into experimental design. And he was specifically refering to Sorcerer, and HW here. In fact, he refers to designs like HW and HQ as "Abashedly Narrativism" meaning that they seem to want narrativism, but the ambiguous nature of their texts means that largely they seem mostly to "Stay out of the way" or narrativism instead of actively supporting it.

All of which I agree with, and is part of my analysis in looking at playing HQ. I play HQ in part because it isn't near as radical as other games that support narrativism, and the narrativism produced tends to be subdued. Even with the techniques I use, play seems, in some ways, rather traditional. I can't see anything "extreme" about it at all.

Now, if what you're saying is that all narrativism is an extreme way to play, well, then we're just back to you talking about what your preferences are. I could as easily argue that it is, in fact, your style of play that takes things to extremes, and that narrativism is, by comparison very moderate (in fact just this argument has been made that narrativism is far more accessible to non-gamers than to gamers who are, by their natures, extremists - "Immersion" now that's extreme.)

But I have no interest in making such an argument because I like all forms of play. I think that they're all valid as long as people are enjoying themselves. Further, I think that anybody can have fun in any functional mode of play. Again, I only advocate narrativism for HQ, because they seem to go well together to me.

So why am I bothering here? Well, I find your claim that you don't want to play our way to be problematic. If you'd said, instead, that you tend to prefer techniques that handle things differently, I don't think that I would have a problem. But your rhetoric leads me to believe that you actually dislike the way we play. Which says to me that you're not understanding it. Because while you might prefer to play other ways, I have a hard time believing that you wouldn't have fun in my game. Everybody else does.

This is what gives rise to my thought that you may have a stilted view of how I play from what you've read. Because I think that if you saw how I play, that you'd be very unimpressed by how "extreme" it is in practice. Rather, you'd probably comment that you do many of the same things that I do, you just don't use our funny jargon to explain them.

I could be wrong. Maybe there is something about how we play that would really annoy you. But I rather doubt it. No way to really know unless you check out my game.

Mike

Mike, I think your mention of "funny jargon" is indeed one of the reasons why I believe people "outside" the Forge are reluctant towards GNS and RPG Theory in general. As you say, these techniques, ideas & interpretations may not be as wild & experimental as they sound, but the terminology makes them seem convoluted to some people.

Myself, I´m an engineering student, so creating new words & definitions is practically the only way I know when it comes to dealing with situations. However, a lot of people in different occupations do not have this habit and suspect the jargon & newspeak. Frankly, I cannot blame them. Both my beloved engineering and the humanistic sciences often abuse terminology devoid of content.

In spite of this, one of the things that marvelled me when I started reading RPG theory was exactly that: how things which where vague and ill-defined got a name for once and for all. Even for the most convervative old-time gamer, being able to get across what they mean by having a good "RPG wordset" which is shared with fellow RPGers is a great asset. Fortunately a lot of people with less experimental playstyles (such as yours truly) have realized this vital use of theory.

Perhaps theory articles should give more examples. Lots of them. A lot of times I find myself wondering over the actual game-use of a concept (such as Bangs) until someone gives me an example and it all falls into place. Those Actual Play threads ith the highlighted bangs did wonders for me. But again, I may be biased by my engineering textbook training ;)

Your response belongs more properly in Site Discussion or something. That said, it's an old point, and one that gets made perennially. I'll just say that I think that we don't overly abuse Jargon here (there'll always be individual exceptions of course, but we're only human), and that it's a great boon for the most part. If one wants RPG discussion without jargon, check out RPG.net.

Perhaps theory articles should give more examples. Lots of them.

Sorry for going off-topic so often, I'm still adapting to the boards. I'll try to direct this sort of rambling in Site Discussion.

As for a first draft, that's a cool idea. I'll be GMing my group on the 11th. I'll try to put the results up in Actual Play during that week and try to point out what I think are Bangs, examples of good & bad Scene Framing, etc. Let's hope I got the basic ideas right ;)

Still, I'm not expecting fireworks, considering it's the first time I'm trying this. I've warned my players though, so that they know they are in a "Beta" style for now.

Greetings to the Forge people. I have been lurking this forum for a month, after stumbling on Ben Lehman's Polaris. This month has modified my thoughts on roleplaying games far more than years of practice, and I have started to pass on the new ideas to my gaming friends.

I wanted to react to Mike's comments:

Mike wrote: For anyone who thinks that the techniques I expound upon creates something alien, I suggest you come and observe my IRC game which is open to the public (irc.magicstar.net #indie_ooc) every Thursday evening at 8PM US Central Time. I think that you'll find it interesting that it seems pretty "normal." )

What narrativism is about, is giving control of the narrative - the plot - to the players. Gamism is about giving the players the ability to address challenges, Simulationism is about giving the players the ability to make decisions that seem to be part of the reality of the world, and narrativism is about giving players the ability to move the plot forward (usually by making their characters central, and not creating situations that demand certain responses).

Simulationism is just very hard with HQ. (...) For instance you get the "Ranged Combat" problem (see Brand Robbins' article in narrator advice for how to get around it simulationistically). And the Rapier vs Rapier Wit problem. And the magic resistance problem. And several more I'm forgetting because I put them into memory as "problems I don't have with HQ, because I play it to support narrativism."

I don't think that any of these problems is insurmountable, if you want to play this way. But I do think that it's somewhat of an uphill battle. HQ seems, to us at least, like it works best, and with the least amount of interpretation or modification, to support narrativism.

Hello Alexandre, and welcome to the Forge, from one lurker to another.

You beat me to the punch by asking to see Mike's logs. I was about to ask the same thing, as I really would have liked to participate, but unfortunately they do indeed take place at the worst possible time for us Europeans.

As for misconceptions of what goes on here, those are easy to make. For one thing there is, as has already been mentioned, an interpretative gap between the rules as written and the reading of the system advocated here.
And then there's the whole narrativism thing, which is difficult to understand just from reading about it. When I came across it sounded very different and .. serious, like you had to have an ambition to create high art in play. Well, after much reading and correspondence I have realized that it isn't quite that exclusive. I still can't claim to understand it - my few attempts to utilise the principles have failed miserably for various reasons - but I think I now have a fair grasp of what narrativism is about.

Simulationism is .. a fuzzy concept. My habitual gm-ing style can also best be defined as simulationist, on the one hand because it's certainly neither narrativist nor gamist, but it's also what fits best with I've enjoyed doing, namely exploration of setting. On the other hand, I don't need a 'reality simulator' to do that; I have been more or less convinced that HQ that will serve my purposes better than HARP or RoleMaster, which is what I have used the most.

The Brand Robbins article on ranged combat and extended contests can be found on the HeroQuest web page: http://www.glorantha.com/support/narrator_advice.html

The article is interesting, and it also speaks the example you used. The sniper duel from Enemy at the gates is a good illustration of an extended conflict I think, and it fits even better than you suggests. If you think back to the movie you'll remember that the key to being a good sniper is just as much about Not Being Seen as about being a good shot. And as such the duel between König and Zaitsev is much more a test of will/patience than of marksmanship. By the end of the contest it is actually König who have the upper hand, with Zaitsev pinned down, not knowing where König is. The conflict ends when one of them gets one good shot at the other. How the conclusion to this would be modelled mechanically? I don't know; perhaps with an AP-lend from the character who stood up and attracted König's attention, giving away his position to Zaitsev.

Ramble mode off. Hope I'm making sense.
So long.

Fredrik

Hi Frederik, thanks for the link.

I read Brand's article, and it is very illuminating. Brand does not hesitate to switch the Talents being opposed during an extended context. However for this switch to take place, the party who whishes the switch must place a high bid (to simulate a risky/daring initiative).

Initially I was a bit doubtfull of this solution, since it might provide a loophole for the characters to win all kinds of contests using their pet Talent. So for instance Brand gives the example of Ranulf engaged in a rethorical contest with Jalvera. Severely outdone in its communication skills, he resorts to Seduce(?) her. The move is risky, so requires a high bid, but on the other hand Ranulf's skill is vastly superior to Jalvera's resistance, so he doesn't have second thoughts about it.

My problem is the following: will this character solve all its communication contests in this way? I guess that if a player gets abusive with these tactics one way of solving it would be to give him penalties (like giving him a flaw? like "Chauvinistic Pig Reputation"?)

Nevertheless the result of this way of dealing with things is that it is indeed VERY risky for the advantaged party to go into an extended contest. In a simple contest Jalvera would have easily chastised Ranulf, but in an extended contest anything can happen. Of course simple and extended context have no meaning for the characters, but I expect the players to avoid extended contests like the plague, if they think they might have a favorable position in a contest.

Fredrik wrote:
And then there's the whole narrativism thing (...) - my few attempts to utilise the principles have failed miserably for various reasons - but I think I now have a fair grasp of what narrativism is about.

The sniper duel from Enemy at the gates is a good illustration of an extended conflict I think, and it fits even better than you suggests. If you think back to the movie you'll remember that the key to being a good sniper is just as much about Not Being Seen as about being a good shot. And as such the duel between König and Zaitsev is much more a test of will/patience than of marksmanship.

By the end of the contest it is actually König who have the upper hand, with Zaitsev pinned down, not knowing where König is. The conflict ends when one of them gets one good shot at the other. How the conclusion to this would be modelled mechanically? I don't know; perhaps with an AP-lend from the character who stood up and attracted König's attention, giving away his position to Zaitsev.

OK, I think that this thread has gotten off topic from Christian's original concerns - Christian will tell us for certain.

In any case, there are several topics here that would seem to deserve their own thread. So I've taken the liberty of splitting them off:
Simulationism Concerns - http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=20023.0
Flat Characters - http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=20024.0

I will comment quickly here on the subject of IRC logs. The method of play that we've taken to is to have one window for out of character discussion of things, and one window per ongoing scene (often as many as three). Our current practice is to take the scene narration portions and to cobble them together to form a narrative at the end of the session. These are then stored online. The reason we store these, is not to create a story - I think it makes dread dull reading, personally. That's what the logs look like to me, always, some atrociously authored novel. The reason that I want them available is simply to have a record to refer back to when, inevitably, we forget some detail or event and need to recall it for play. It's been very useful for that.

What it does not do, in any way, is give you almost any idea of how we play. The OOC logs being absent, you can't even see how or when we use the mechanics at all. In fact, I'd argue that, sans being able to link up the OOC logs to the IC logs that, even if you did have that record, you'd hardly be able to make heads or tails of what's going on. Even where IRC logs do exist, I think that experiencing the real time production of them is far more useful in understanding how play goes than even reading them in-line would be.

Further, and I'm probably just a bit shy about this, I simply don't want to put those OOC logs out for everyone to read. They contain a lot of social discourse, and I wouldn't feel comfortable putting them out for everyone to see. Rather, I would worry that making them public would put a damper on the real social comraderie that goes on in the OOC chat. You'd find that much of our OOC chat is about things like who is eating the best snack that night, who gets the non-existent reward for using a meaningful gesture first in play that evening, and who's going to meet with who at the upcoming convention. Personal stuff.

If you drop by to lurk, you'll find that we have a humorous "No Lurker" policy. That doesn't mean you can't be logged into the room, but that, if you are, that, first, you'll be asked to make a character, and, second, that you'll be engaged socially. You don't have to play, but you do have to be somebody we can talk to and get to know. The point is that it's not a public play, but a personal thing that happens between friends. And I'm not going to threaten that vibe at all by posting the OOC logs publicly.

So what I'm saying is that, while it wouldn't be too much additional effort to add the OOC logs to the IC logs, I'm against it at this point. I'm also not sure that there's any use to posting the link to the narration logs. But, in case anyone can get any good out of it, I don't mind people reading them that much (and you could probably find them by searching them up) so: http://random.average-bear.com/ShadowWorld/PhaseTwoSessions

I know that it's difficult to come to watch when our play is occuring in the middle of your night. That said, one of the central characters is currently played sporadically by Christoph Boeck, who plays from Switzerland. So it's obviously not impossible.

Also, my game is not the only one in the world played this way. If you get a chance to play with many Forge members at a convention in Europe, say, you can get the same sort of experience. If you ever happen to be over in the US, contact me, and I'll see if I can't get a demo arranged for you while you're here.

Mike

Hi Mark,

Of course I understand the privacy issues. I was thinking more about publishing a short "sanitized" and approved excerpt just to get the gist of it. You could for instance take the gobelin's battle of the two camps. The one where Okhfeld has to decide between his line of duty and loyality to his lover. I guess a couple of interesting things happened from the point of view of the mechanics (battle, bang, etc).

I read some of the session's in character logs, and I agree with you, it's hard to understand what's going on mechanistically from those accounts. They are nevertheless usefull, as for instance I see that you have a lot more conversation time and less action/exploration events than in my traditional scenarios. This is expected from what we had discussed before on the characters.

Also as expected, I see that the PCs are much more in "charge of themselves" (even though sometimes Isadora seems a bit apathic for a colony leader faced with so many challenges at hand). In my games I keep throwing stuff at the PCs, to keep them busy and tense. I know that if I don't do this, the players will be a bit lost, because they will not know what to do by themselves. I usually frame very well the challenges (big sign: go here!), to avoid straying characters from the plot. Of course the players are active in finding ways to solve the problems they are faced, but not at all on the direction the story should go (except from post mortem feedback conversations).

we have a humorous "No Lurker" policy.

If you ever happen to be over in the US, contact me, and I'll see if I can't get a demo arranged for you while you're here.

If you get a chance to play with many Forge members at a convention in Europe, say, you can get the same sort of experience

Alexandre I posted a reply in another thread here:

Let's let Christian tell us if any of this is germane to his subject before continuing in this thread. Until then, we can always start new subjects.

Mike

Forgot the link: http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=20035.0

And you all wondered how I got such a high post count. ;-)

Mike

Hi,

Also, anyone interested in the earlier discussion about whether we're talking some fringe method of play, or simply another valid way, might want to check out this link:

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=267664

Chris

Hi Mike,

i dont see this thread as MY thread and i think its great, it changed into something thats useful for other people.

best

Christian

That's cool. I just wanted to be sure that there wasn't something that people could say about your topic that they weren't getting a chance to say.

Mike