Question: Should Minor Success/Failure be rititled Normal success/failure?

[Mark Mohrfield]

I’ve noticed on several online discussions that many seem to equate marginal and minor successes/failures with an inconsequential result. I don’t actually believe that myself, but I wonder if part of the problem might simply be the titles “marginal” and “minor”. Does anyone think that if “minor” in particular were replaced with say, “normal” that the players would be more likely to feel that they had in fact gained a substantial victory or failure?

[boztakang]

I’ve been struggling with that for some time, especially in the context of trying to quickly abbreviate contest results while taking notes as I run a game. The proliferation of “m”s is rather troublesome.

You suggestion above just now put me on to the idea of: “marginal”, “normal”, “overwhelming”, “perfect” as levels. Which has the (in my mind) wonderful advantage of being not only reasonably intuitive, but alphabetically sequential in order of intensity, even further reducing potential confusion.

[Jeff Richard]

I’m afraid I’ve internalized Marginal, Minor, Major, Complete entirely too much to change those terms. In contrast, I changed “resistance level” to “difficulty level” as I found that in practice that was how I and players often referred to them. Same thing with changing “Narrator” to “Game Master” – I prefer to use the terms that I find myself actually using.

[Phil Nicholls]

Hi Mark,

The similarity of the terms in HeroQuest does not help to make them stick in the mind. Jeff says that they are here to stay, so you might need another way to look at the results.

I wrote a post on my Tales of a GM blog about this topic:

Totally Yes/No and But, found at http://talesofagm.com/?p=97

The short version is that you treat the levels of success as:

Yes, but
Yes
Yes, and
Yes, totally

As the GM, you can frame your description of the outcome along these starting points, with reference to those phrases.

I hope that this helps
Phil

[Kevin McDonald]

Oooh, I like the ‘yes, X’ formulation! It sounds very useful. I will give it a go in my next game.

-Kevin McD

[Phil Nicholls]

Hi Kevin,

Glad that you like the “Yes, X” formation of response.

HeroQuest Glorantha may have advice on this area, but for now I find it helpful to me when running HQ2.

All the best
Phil

[Alex Ferguson]

Very much agree with boz about the “M’s”. Earlyish in my second long-running HQ game, I finally snapped, and called the first two “narrow” and “solid”, making the abbreviations all unique, and taking care of the “minor just don’t satisfy” issue, which had also niggled at me.

Later, I proudly reported this to Robin, while in Tentacles’ bar, and he said “… why the goodness gracious didn’t you tell us this during playtesting?” Without using the words “goodness” or “gracious”. Alas, my tweaking was much slower-burning: playtesting was right back the start of the first such HQ game. Then again, YG(M/W)V might hold true for G=gamesystem, too.

I do like Phil’s way of glossing the results, though. Very “spirit of improv”! And I think exactly in line with how I tried to interpret them.

[Phil Nicholls]

Hi Everyone,

Thank you for the kind words about my expansion of the HQ results into Yes, X and No, X.

I have been exploring the idea further at Tales of a GM, and combined the graded outcomes with some advice from the game Little Wizards.

The latest expansion of the concept is Yes/No, but Little Wizards. This adds a few narrative options into the HQ hierarchy of outcomes.

I am working on a larger version of this, which we tested for the first time in today’s game and the results were promising.

All the best
Phil

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