Conflicts move my soul

[jeregenest]

I’ve mentioned some discouragement with things lately in Tantaene Animis Caelestibus Irae. Rather than continue to grouse about it, jeffwik, peaseblossom and I got together last night to discuss what was going on. As I’ve been talking a lot about summative evaluation I decided it would be a good idea to post what we did.

Set the Stage

I’m rather lucky that our group is committed to continually improving or play experience. It is an established part of our social contract so its fairly easy to get buy-in to continually trying to make things better.

Select Something You Want to Improve
We have two rather similar issues going on. The first is the matter of communication around conflicts in extended conflicts, what is important here, what is going on and what are the exact ramifications. The second question is are the right abilities and resistances being brought to bear, and even more importantly are they being consistently applied.

Agreeing the conflict of interest. The goal is to make sure everyone is on the same page about what the player or group is trying to achieve by his or her actions in the conflict. We agree what the levels of defeat broadly (complete) broadly equate to. It's not a forked choice, its certainly fuzzy and narrated post-event, but we understand the magnitude of what is happening. In the same way we might set the stakes of whether complete defeat will result in death in a fight.

Understand and map the process

HeroQuest extended contests have the following flow:

• State what you are trying to do


• Figure your starting AP total


• Narrator selects the resistance


• Carry out one or more rounds (this is extended so obviously more than one or we would have done a simple contest)




• State attempted action, ability used, AP bid


• Narrator selects resistance


• Roll and compare results


• Opponent’s turn


• Repeat




• Determine contest consequences

What Do We Want

What is instead happening for us stems from our use of extended contests. We’re using these for two purposes: Rituals and Initiations. Big reality altering, soul shaping events, we don’t tend to use extended contests for stuff that isn’t huge. That is what a simple contest is for. This means that some player actions are just non-contests.

We want conflicts to flow smoothly. To be constructed effectively and for everyone to b on the same page communication wise. I think we have an interesting trust issue. Because we exist in a high trust environment we sometimes trust that the other person understands us. And when we find out they don’t there’s a degree of disappointment (interestingly enough this problem seems indicative to many of m relationships, not just gaming, just ask peaseblossom).

Part of the issue is determining just what an action in a conflict is. Because we’re using extended contests as the framework for big stuff that e all want interlinked, and what we feel extended contests are wonderfully sited for, we often have folks doing things that make great sense but are really color. This basically boils down to a question on what is AP worthy and what does the value of an AP bid mean.

This also brings to home communciation snafus. Its always amazing just how vague a term can be, especially in a fictional shared space.

We need to adapt extended contests to take all of this into account and allow us to use them to advance the narrative. And do so in such a way that builds communication links between the various members of the group.

Change it

A simple change should hopefully fix our issue. We need to codify negotiation around extended contests.



What this basically means is that throughout the extended conflicts we'll refine the individual contests, the appropriate APs that can be spent on a given round, and what abilities we're using. We'll then validate the resistance.

I joked about using a white board, but I'm not so sure I'm not serious.

We still need to get buy in from the other players.

Continue to Improve the Process

At this stage this is just a continued agreement that process improvement works, that we all want this game to succeed and that we’re all willing to work at it.

Comments

pace

[dkoulomzin.livejournal.com]

I think understanding the system is worthwhile, as is agreeing on what the conflicts are/should be. However, one thing that was seriously evident from last session is that sometimes the process can result in the game moving at a snail's pace. It seemed like every roll was preceeded by a five to ten minutes of navel-gazing, and then arithmatic. Can we do something to speed the process up? E.g., can we just say you can't use more than one or two augments? I know that the augments make our character special, but we've come to the point where we're expected to use 10 augments on every roll (since the resistance is often assigned assuming this), and that makes things slow.

I'm actually sort of frustrated with Hero Quest right now. I like the conflict thing, and I like how much stuff goes on the character sheet, but I'm getting annoyed with the math, how noisey my character sheet seems to be, and how difficult it is to make sure that the things that are important to me about my character ACTUALLY have the highest stats. The system is billed as quick, but last session was the slowest gaming I've done since AD&D with miniatures.

I miss diceless.

Re: pace

[jeffwik.livejournal.com]

Pshaw. Four die rolls per person, maybe 45 seconds, at most, I'd guess 25-30 is more common, 25-45 seconds spent per die roll adding up augments, that's only nine to fifteen minutes in toto spent working with the rules. I think the snail's-pace problem came from everyone having to constantly recontextualize, because every PC was doing something very different, with minimal overlap, and we were jumping fairly abruptly from one thing to another and when your PC wasn't the one doing the rolling you had little to do.

Re: pace

[dkoulomzin.livejournal.com]

Don't pshaw me, dude.

Even if the actual math takes less than a minute, its enough of a distraction so that it is itself causing context switching. I think this is a legitimate gripe.

Plus I start to feel all gross and munchkiny when I add more than one or two obvious augments, but I feel obliged to do so or else my skills won't match the opposition. This is a serious issue for me.

Re: pace

[jeregenest.livejournal.com]

Of course its a legitimate gripe.

Can you break down for me the exact problems your having?

[locke61dv.livejournal.com]

So to some extent, is this about more-or-less explicit stake setting at the extended level and then also at the sub-action level?

[jeregenest.livejournal.com]

Well except its not the stake thats in question, the result is up in the air (you get narrative rights from the conflict). Whats really being negotiated is where are the actual conflicts.