Players Choosing Simple or Extended Contests

[Christopher Kubasik]

On another thread, a tangent started up about this topic. I thought I’d set up a thread explicitly about it.
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I originally wrote:
As a side note, this is one of those tricky things about HeroQuest — the art of when to use a Simple or Extended contest.
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The rules (HQ:G) say “Climactic moments of action, suspense or heightened drama, are resolved with extended contests.” This phrasing suggests that it is the GM deciding which moments fall under those categories. This can be a trap, since the GM “knows” the relative value of certain moments against other moments in the balance of the big picture he is holding in his head. And since he knows these things, he might assume is assessment is both true objectively and for the Players.
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The problem is that the Players often have their own sense of what is important or not important, what they value and don’t value, and what is suspenseful and full of heightened drama. And if those expectations are cut short it really can be frustrating for the Players.
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I’m not saying this is an easy call. In fact, I’m saying the opposite. I’m simply saying that one more way that HeroQuest is going to be different from Runequest is that the investment of the Players into what matters to the session and story is a far bigger deal in HQ than in RQ. And the GM needs to be always trying to get the pulse on that.
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And then Erik in the other thread replied:
A quick observation about simple and extended contests; our group always allows a player to “escalate” a simple contest to an extended, if the player feels this is important. I have a feeling that this is actually mentioned somewhere in the rules as an option, but can’t remember off the top of my head where. It’s a rule that works really well, though, and makes you as player become invested in the story that you want to tell.
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“A quick observation about simple and extended contests; our group always allows a player to “escalate” a simple contest to an extended, if the player feels this is important. I have a feeling that this is actually mentioned somewhere in the rules as an option, but can’t remember off the top of my head where. It’s a rule that works really well, though, and makes you as player become invested in the story that you want to tell.”
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And now I’m saying I agree with this suggestion completely.
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What I love about his point of view is that it gives a Player (or Players) at the table a chance to stake a claim about their investment in what is happening in the story. When a Player says, “This matters to me. I want an extended content,” everyone sits up a bit different. No one might have known yet the circumstances mattered that much to the Player. And maybe the Player didn’t even know until a contest was on the line! In either case, no people do know. And because they know, now the Players and (especially) the GM can find out why the Player cares so much and feed that beast more with more incidents, characters, and choices in the future.

[Bohemond]

That’s a good point. I had a player actually give up on HQ after one session because he expect a fight to be an Extended contest and I treated it as a Simple contest. Granted, that was an extreme reaction, but it made me aware of that problem. So I like the idea of letting a player have a voice in this.

[Bohemond]

Oops! You were responding to my comment on a different thread. Sorry to be redundant.

[Christopher Kubasik]

No problem, Bohemond.

Here’s the story you told that started this conversation, so others can see it:

“Another player, a long-time Glorantha fan, was totally willing to convert his character but then got really unhappy in the first scenario. They encountered a older Storm Bull who was a washed-up drunk; a chaos-worshipper in his clan had intentionally given him free booze as a way to ruin him so he wouldn’t be able to rally the clan against him. The same chaos-worshipper engineered a fight between the PC and the drunk Storm Bull, to get him killed. The Player was expecting a big dramatic fight, and got REALLY mad when I ran it as a Simple contest.”

[Jeff Richard]

FWIW, I also tell players something like “I intend to do this as a Simple/Extended Contest, unless you would prefer it to be Extended/Simple.”If the players want to roll more dice I let them.
I also regularly say stuff like, “Do you want to roll dice for this or is everyone fine with me just narrating this through.”

My goal as a GM is to make sure the players are enjoying themselves. If that means just letting the players know how I plan to run a contest but give them the option of doing it differently, that just makes it easier.

[Christopher Kubasik]

I’ve been making my way through HeroQuest: Glorantha since I bought it last week and just came across this on p. 102:
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“In an improvised story created with the collaboration of your players, it may not always be easy to gauge the weight to grant to a conflict resolution. Ideally, neither you nor the players know exactly where the story is headed. Sometimes you’ll know instinctively which method to use, but when in doubt, the following general rule is your first resort:
“The degree of emotional investment the players have in a conflict determines the complexity of the resolution method used to resolve it.“
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So, there it is.

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