Does anyone have any comments on how to handle who has narrative rights in HeroQuest?

I ask as a result of some of the comments made in the thread 'Some magic questions, among others'. There are posts in the thread that alude to the players narrating the outcome of a contest. But I dont recall seeing this issue tackled in the HeroQuest book.

In our HeroWars/Quest play we assumed the old RuneQuest default that the GM narrates the whole world and the players just describe what their characters do.

Before waiting for the new HeroQuest rules to be released we experimented by using The Pool for a month. This was yet another eye-opener for me. I enjoyed turning the narrative over to the players to explain what had happened when they won a contest. And I enjoyed it when they narrated new facts into the story forcing me to improvise off in a new direction.

As a result I would like to give the players scope to contibute to the narrative now we are playing HeroQuest again.
But The Pool is just too flexible for the sort of games we tend to play in our HeroQuest campaign
(and if I want to run a completely improvisational episode we can always use The Pool again for an evening or two).
So I feel like I'd benefit from some structure that would help me know to what extent to do this
and something that would let them know how much creative freedom they have.

I dont want to discuss rules variants in this thread. I want to sort out:

What are the HeroQuest narration rights as she is writ (in case I have failed to spot that its already explained).
How people handle letting players narrate or otherwise contribute.
What approaches seem practical.



This is how we do it at the moment:

The GM knows the rough background of the story. Sometimes its only a few ideas, sometimes more.
The GM describes the world to the players to the extent that their characters are aware of it.
The players describe what their characters try to do.
The GM dictates modifiers etc based on what he knows about the npcs and the setting.
If the players succeed or fail the GM describes the result. The players may pipe up and say what they think happens and the GM may include this or not. They probably get listened to less when they have failed.
Its the GM that makes up NPC; decides when the cavalry arrive; decides what complete defeat of success mean; lets his favourite NPCs live to fight another day; etc.
The players dont have any 'rights' over narration at all. They can say what they want to achieve and roll for it and probably get what they want. But they cant actually say whats happened.



I suspect this is how most HeroQuest groups play. Cos we've always done it like that.

(If you read this and say to your self 'yeah, so...'. Then can I suggest you read The Pool carefully, then take a couple of hours out from your next session to run a quick game of it. Use your normal campaign setting if you have one. See whats different about play. Then reconsider.)

Hi Nick,

There are brief mentions in how the level of success "helps the narrator determine the outcome" or something along those lines. In other words, it's set at the default assumption of most groups that the GM narrates, all the time.

You might want to check out the Scene Request rules and Goals and Conflict rules of Trollbabe. They've got a lot of heft to them that I can see being applied very effectively to HQ play.

Chris

Hi Nick,

Check out the thread Stance is still not power for some good foundation thinking about this.

I prefer to keep these three concepts very distinct from one another.

1. Who organizes and "cues" what happens.

2. Who determines what happens.

3. Who describes (narrates) what happens.

They aren't the same things, and the order presented above doesn't have to be the order in which they happen.

At first, I thought you were asking about #3, which is a neat question and has a lot of implications ... but then the second half of your post seems to be more about #2, especially in terms of Director Stance (bringing stuff external to player-characters into "action").

So I'm a little confused about just what you're asking, and especially in terms of Extended Conquests. After all, if I donate 20 APs to my buddy who just hit 0 APs in the middle of an exchange, and if I say, "I toss him my sword!", that's both #2 and #3, and that kind of behavior is implied pretty strongly in the Hero Quest rules, I think.

Another example: a character rolls a Follower ability to bring the follower-character into the scene ("he shows up!"). Outside the rules as written? "Obviously" inside them for anyone who thinks about it? Logical extension of the rules but not addressed by them?

What do you think?

Best,
Ron

Ron Edwards wrote: Hi Nick,
So I'm a little confused about just what you're asking, and especially in terms of Extended Conquests. After all, if I donate 20 APs to my buddy who just hit 0 APs in the middle of an exchange, and if I say, "I toss him my sword!", that's both #2 and #3, and that kind of behavior is implied pretty strongly in the Hero Quest rules, I think.

Nicolas Crost wrote:
But suppose a player would upon a victory (in an extended contest) say: "Well, I disarm my opponent" (thereby explaining the enemies loss of 5 AP). What about that? From that point on the enemy has lost his +3 bonus to his swordfighting skill. So supposing the narrator didn´t really want the player to do that, is this where the buck stops? Could the narrator go: "No, you didn´t!"?

simon_hibbs wrote:

Nicolas Crost wrote:
But suppose a player would upon a victory (in an extended contest) say: "Well, I disarm my opponent" (thereby explaining the enemies loss of 5 AP). What about that? From that point on the enemy has lost his +3 bonus to his swordfighting skill. So supposing the narrator didn´t really want the player to do that, is this where the buck stops? Could the narrator go: "No, you didn´t!"?

If the player wanted to disarm his opponent, that should be in the statement of what they wanted to do that round, which might affect the ability they are using or the ability their opponent might use to defend.

I don't think HeroQuest doesn't have narative rules of the kind you're talking about.

Simon Hibbs

Nicolas Crost wrote:
But suppose a player would upon a victory (in an extended contest) say: "Well, I disarm my opponent" (thereby explaining the enemies loss of 5 AP). What about that? From that point on the enemy has lost his +3 bonus to his swordfighting skill. ... Could the narrator go: "No, you didn´t!"?

Hi Nick!

Here's my thinking: that when we talk about "narration" there's a danger of missing what's really being discussed. The example I used to use a lot is of a player making a series of successful rolls when his character strikes a broo with a mace in RuneQuest. It really doesn't matter whether the player or the GM says, "His head flies apart in a pulpy spray of bones, blood, and brains!" The dice told us all that, and we're just talking to get the event firmly established in the imaginative space.

Whereas it seems to me that you are talking more about authority over what happens in that space, and who has it when - especially relative to dice outcomes (before, during, after). The #1 (plain old saying "what happened" with no possible controversy is important, though, due to the brute fact that someone has to do it, whether it's always the same person, shared among persons, or traded around among persons.

Your list ...

Extended contests are not just about AP gain and loss.
They are also about the change in circumstances since these effect what skills are appropriate and what modifiers apply from then on.
This is true for other sorts of contests too.
We base decisions about what modifiers and skills are appropriate on what is 'established fact'.
What has been narrated is part of what establishes these facts.

I just want to address the disarming example, explaining how that is intended to be run in HeroQuest for the purposes of comparison with more narativist methods.

KingOfFarPoint wrote:
I suspect in the above example the GM would want to know that the opponent was going to be disarmed on a success before agreeing on the skills, modifiers and (if relevant) the AP bid.

My experience in playtest was that a more collaborative effort between player and narrator is what Greg and Robin themselves preferred, and obviously recommend in the rules. The chapter on Narrating stresses cooperative storytelling, though HeroQuest does not insist that this style is the sole valid one and it can be played quite easily in the more traditional vein wherein the narrator makes all the important rulings. Certainly that works best where players are unfamiliar with a more narrativist style of play, but it can be easily abandoned when that unfamiliarity (hopefully) fades.

RaconteurX wrote: The chapter on Narrating stresses cooperative storytelling, though HeroQuest does not insist that this style is the sole valid one and it can be played quite easily in the more traditional vein wherein the narrator makes all the important rulings.

Damn good points, Rac & Simon. My own experiences jibe fully with yours.

Best,
Ron

One thing I plan to do henceforward, an idea borrowed from Fred Hicks' and Rob Donoghue's marvelous Fantastic Adventures in Tabletop Entertainment (aka FATE) is award Hero Points whenever I call a hero's flaw into play during an adventure. This encourages players to consider flaws as valid, indeed worthwhile, abilities. Every good hero needs a flaw, but players often need a reason above and beyond the demands of deathless art (to use an old Ken Rolston phrase). :)