HeroQuest 2 - Off the path again!

I have been putting a lot of thought into HQ2 in the last couple of years, but I haven't played it anywhere near as much. Partly for health reasons and partly due to becoming very disillusioned with it as a game.

The Reason for this disillusionment is partly the published material. There has been a stubborn pattern in HW/HQ, which naturally leaves my preferred style of play in the minority.

It first happened with HW, the style of play advocated in the rule book had a clear focus on using the conflict systems provided. It was all about Conflict Resolution and story logic. It promised a style of play that wasn't hindered by the complex world of Glorantha, but instead used its inherent narrative potential as a springboard for your own games.

Then the Gloranthan material started to emerge. The rule books themselves contained some of this material, in fact the main part was even available online as part of the free preview. This material, focused on examples of how the game could be used with the cults in the setting and didn't seem to detract too much from the core. The cults just felt like examples of how to use the new system. Extra rules crept in for bezerkers and undead almost unnoticed.

The next material to be published was a strange hybrid, it was partly a continuation of the examples in the core books and partly a reassertion of the setting as king. This was subtle, and in many ways to be expected. Glorantha has a long publishing history and the material has gone out of print on a regular basis, such that a new Glorantha RPG was expected to reproduce this material.

The problem was the presentation of this new material was old school in disguise. It had all the trappings of a new revolutionary RPG, but it kept drifting from a game that allowed grabby situation to emerge to a game that suggested that the key to providing the situation was all about building situation from the world up using rules. For the best part of two decades RuneQuest had followed this logic. Make the world a real and vivid place and integrate the rules at this level, and slowly build up into situation.

An example of this was the new presentation of key NPCs as a funky cool looking map of relationships to followers and community. It looked good, it had lots of complex information presented in a new and easy to understand way and it emphasised the idea that everyone was part of a community and that relationships were reciprocal. 

The GM could use this to help create grabby player character focused situation, but there was a strong emphasis on situating characters within the rigid structures of cult and community obligations. This was technically a retreat back into old school ground up play. It felt right and useful for players used to RuneQuest, which was full of details of cult oblations expressed in percentages, and limits on how high a skill could progress based on such things.

It felt very wrong to me, I couldn't express it clearly, but it felt like a betrayal of the freedom presented in the core rules. The problem was that if you talked to anyone involved in the presentation of this material it became a discussion about how no man is an island, and that there was a clear social expectation that you spent 30% of your time in cult based activities. It was more about not getting something for free, and ensuring players understood their character's social situation.

It was about 'realism'. It was impossible to explain to a wider community trained in RQ that it was equally possible to have stories that acknowledged relationships and maintained a very real sense of setting without having to worry about this kind of detail. The HW character sheet had a space for relationships and an abstract number, it didn't need extra details like percentages of time working for the cult. The type of story emergent from the grabby situations implied by the character creation system and the way the rules interacted with them wasn't about this kind of detail. This game didn't rely on gritty realistic modelling of a world.

This was just the beginning of bringing in rules disguised as setting. Before long we had a massively detailed write-up of Orlanth and Ernalda, which placed a great emphasis on exactly how a person in the world interacted with the cult and what was required to enter the structure and move within it. Again this was a bid for detailed 'realism'. It was a description of how Glorantha worked, and it equally missed the point. Yet again it was setting/rules built from the ground up, yet again it provided no real enhancement to grabby situation based on character concepts.

Overall, the experience of character creation was initially a highly creative process full of situation and relationships that felt natural and grabby redolent with heroic action. But then, the process slowly became about fleshing out the interaction with a 'realistic world' slowly and effectively tying down and stifling the character concept.

By the time we got to HeroQuest we had this institutionalised into the rules. Now, character creation was all about using templates that provided this background. The creative process of character creation was still there, but the detail was sneaking in through the keywords relating to community and cults. Even these played lip-service to a dynamic style by each template containing a number of reasons to have left home, but as soon as the character started to be fleshed out in magical terms it became a process of situating the character into a social structure with requirements and obligations.

It was like writing a detective novel and making a high percentage of the story all about the tedious paperwork and the drudgery of detailed investigation and limiting legal advice, in the interest of realism.

HQ was also guilty of messing with the core mechanics as well. It changed Simple Contests, which originally were a straight forward expression of Conflict Resolution with no distractions, into a detailed exploration of the conflict through augments. After all if the character sheet has all of this rich detail, which often amounted to a page worth of skills extrapolated from multiple sources, then you may as well find a way of using them within a conflict. So now instead of a Simple Contest focusing on a goal with the skill selection being a mixture of character emphasis and colour, it became a detailed list of skills employed, often with a complex narration to justify the augment choices. This not only missed the point of Simple Contests, it started an emphasis on front loading the narration. Effectively killing the strength of the core mechanics. 

As an interesting side effect, augments became so ingrained into the mechanics there was a collective amnesia regards the HW rules. Everyone forgot that you were not allowed to augment simple contests before. Most of the community was convinced that augments made things better anyway.

For a number of political reasons some of the changes made to HQ were reversed for HQ2. Augments were effectively turned into a discrete contest, detailed lists of sub-cults and magics were de-emphasised, for all the world it looked like things were moving back in the right direction. Back towards dynamic character and situation focused play. But then the drift began again. 

At least this time I was expecting it, and I even managed to slip a few bids for freedom into the game text itself. But before we knew it there was bottom up world building baked into the game world through yet more subtle mechanics. The cult requirements again have their expression in limiting player characters, but at least this time it isn't done by forcing detail onto the character sheet. Now it is about naturally behaving like the gods through runic affinity. The added rules for runes include behaviour and personality guidelines complete with advice for imposing these by the narrator. All in the interests of 'realism' and ignoring the fact that the system encourages exploration of these issues without the need for such guidelines. 

The creeping in of bottom up world design is hardly surprising in a game designed primarily for an established world that evolved from a traditional RPG. But it is really f*%king annoying for someone like myself that continually sees the promise of the rules system. The dangling carrot of  a truly dramatic and character centric game within a wonderfully realised world, ideal for grabby situation. That carrot is just there, but there is this almost invisible 'stick and rope' of added rules and subtle world building concerns keeping the carrot out of reach unless you are prepared to forge your own path.

Why Scope and Stakes cloud Conflict Resolution

My reason for posting these ideas on Conflict Resolution is that many definitions of the term seem to focus on the scope and or stakes of the conflict, see for instance Vincent Baker:

In conflict resolution, what's at stake is why you're doing the task. "I crack the safe!" "Why?" "Hopefully to get the dirt on the supervillain!" What's at stake is: do you get the dirt on the supervillain?

or this Glossary:

A Forge term for a resolution mechanic which depends on the abstract higher-level conflict, rather than on the component tasks within that conflict.

as opposed to the The Forge Glossary (which still clouds the issue by contrasting 'components'):

A Technique in which the mechanisms of play focus on conflicts of interest, rather than on the component tasks within that conflict.

or the far more succinct definition by Tim Kleinert:

Conflict Resolution is when the dice decide whether a character/player's interest is realized, most often in contrast with another character/player's opposing interest.

In my opinion the key is in assigning opposing interests. Where confusion has arisen is in ideas of scope and stakes, seeing conflict resolution as deciding on the outcome of the overall conflict as opposed to the individual tasks in the conflict, and using the question 'why' to decide on the scope and stakes, in the process de-emphasising the clash of interests.

Where this becomes most apparent is in games like our two earlier examples Dogs in the Vineyard and HeroQuest. Both attempt to define the contest using conflict resolution and then allow the contest to be broken down into individual actions.

I would argue, just because these games focus on the individual actions, this does not mean that they move towards task resolution. The conflicts are still defined in a context of conflicting interests, and outcomes of individual rolls are interpreted within the overall conflict.

Both of these games can confuse players more used to task resolution, because component actions can easily be misinterpreted as tasks. If you fall into this trap in HeroQuest, you find yourself playing a game of point scoring which feels like a sub-game removed from the conflict at hand, and in Dogs, you end up playing a competitive dice game which becomes a battle over the stakes, instead of a conflict over the importance of the stakes to the characters or players.

Conflict Resolution and Agendas

I will discuss the javelin example again in order to illustrate Conflict Resolution as I have defined it in my previous post.

There is no other character involved, so there is no inherent conflict. I think there are three possible options, an external conflict (with the elements or the world), an internal conflict (with himself), or an internalised external contest (with his non-present father).

The Forge Glossary suggests that the world should be seen as having interests even if abstracted, so the external conflict could be the breeze attempting to push the javelin away or the target itself appearing small distant and un-hittable.

An internal conflict needs to contain a conflict of interest, part of the character must either have an interest in failure (he wants to miss because he is uncomfortable with the symbolic patricide), or contain a potential for failure that can be abstracted as an interest(he has never managed to hit this target before and so his own doubt seeks to cause him to miss).

The non-present character option is a kind of internal conflict asserted upon the character by external forces. So we might have our character remembering his fathers scolding dialogue which serves to make him miss. We could use his fathers disapproval skills here even though he is not actively using it here and now.

In any of these cases it is necessary for the opposing agenda to actively oppose the character during the mechanical resolution so that we can decide on the outcome. So in HeroQuest we would have the resistance be the opposing interest in order to have two dice to compare, and in Dogs in the Vineyard we would use the Demonic Influence as the opposing dice pool.

Deemphasising the ‘Why’ of Conflict Resolution

I have been concerned for some months about the categories of Conflict and Task Resolution.

The problem is in how the ideas have been explained. It is common to break them down into Task = What and Conflict = Why, which I don't believe is a correct interpretation.

It is probably better to define them thus:

Task resolution is concerned with the individual action that a character is performing and deciding whether that action is successful.

Conflict resolution is concerned with a character's interests in opposition to, or at least interacting with other interests, leading to a description of the resulting outworking of that clash.

This is not a new definition and is broadly in line with the Forge glossary which emphasises “conflicts of interest”.

The idea that the difference is in the 'what' and 'why' seems to be born from the concept of agenda taking a central role in the latter, but an over emphasis of this as the key difference leads to all kinds of confusion. The key difference is in how the GM defines the opposition.

Lets think of a really simple example, target practice with a javelin.

Task resolution simply requires the player to roll his javelin skill to determine if he is successful. He could have a reason and it could be emphasised heavily in the narration but that reason does not inform anything at the mechanical level.

Conflict resolution needs an opponent, we could abstract an opponent as the physics of the universe having a conflicting agenda that reflects the difficulty of the shot, or we could take the current context of the action to determine the opponent.

They may appear similar take this example that appears to fall between the two:

Player: I throw my javelin at the target.
GM: OK, but why are you even doing this now?
Player: To let out my frustration with my father!
GM: OK, so you visualise the target as your father and throw your javelin, make the roll.
Player: I get a critical!
GM: The javelin sails straight at the centre of the target and impales itself deeply with a satisfying thud, and you have to put all of your strength into pulling it out again leaving you exhausted but relived of frustration.

I would argue that this is task resolution. Yes we have a why, and yes we even have an idea of the opposing force, but there is no actual mechanical opposition, we only resolved the task at the mechanical level. I think this kind of example illuminates a current confusion inherent in the What/Why definitions and the current state of Task/Conflict theroy.