Attacks with friendly fire.

[Eviltoon]

The dam leak was sprung on him!

Bwa ha ha ha!

Oh, I slay me.

(Also, I am sorry for that damn dam pun.)

[siebharinn]

Were you expecting a dam burst when you put the scene together? Or did they just spring that on you?

Sprung it, it wasn't a scene distinction going in or anything.
(It's all theoretical, but yeah.)

Gotcha. That's one of those things that seems to me to have pretty far range effects. Like flooded towns and the like. Seems like a pretty strong argument in favor of something like the SHRA.

I ran a game this last week that had Graviton attempting to steal the fuel cores from a nuclear reactor. One of the heroes ran in and cut through the crane lines that were holding up the core, causing it fall back into the support machinery and be essentially destroyed. Another example where stopping the bad guys probably caused more harm than good.

If you're running Civil War, make sure those events get plastered across the news, complete with the heroes names and pictures. The don't deserve as much hate as Nitro and the New Warriors post-Stamford, but there ought to be some angst.

[Supplanter]

There's always a narrative. The continuation in which the player-hero's stunt with the water has an insignificant effect beyond her intention of splashing hell out of the villain is one possible narrative. The continuation in which it washes everybody in different directions, which is kind of amusing but soon dealt with, is another possible narrative. The continuation in which the flood surges horribly out of control and destroys Johnstown again is a third possible narrative. The question is how we, together at the table, will decide which narrative becomes real. There's no use saying its up to THE narrative to choose among all the narratives.

Jim

I'm not certain that anyone's saying that, Jim. Which poster--and which post--are you responding to here?

Definitely you, sir! Among possible others.

This later post is a pretty direct illustration of what I meant:

What happens to Black Widow & Bucky?

This is what I mean when I say narrative before mechanics. They take stress too, of course. I don't care what the rules would or should say happens. If it's crystal clear what the narrative says happens, that's what happens. You're in a bus that rolls over, you're almost certainly taking stress, area attack or no, friendly character or no.

I'm obviously not going to come to your house and stop you from playing this way, or even try to join your online game and harsh your mellow. But this strikes me as flatly contrary to the spirit of MHRP as I know and love it. It also doesn't have anything to do with "narrative" as opposed to mechanics.

There's a story in which a bus rolls over and Black Widow and/or Bucky take some kind of setback from that happening, described in terms of physical harm.

There's a story in which a bus rolls over and Black Widow and Bucky shrug it off because they are just that amazing thanks to all that super-spy training and performance enhancement, and maybe it's just their lucky day.

Either one of those can be The Narrative. The question remains, who says which how? Heck, by your own admission - "you're almost certainly taking stress" - it's an uncertain outcome. MHRP gives us a way to determine, together, which possible uncertain outcome gets to be the story, right now. Use the system and see what happens. Your alternative is that you unilaterally declare the system irrelevant to the question, and just apply stress dice to the heroes on your own say-so.

This doesn't show more respect for narrative as such than using the system to figure out what happens next. It shows more respect for your specific wishes and judgments vice other ways of figuring out how the story should go.

Now, I played Amber DRPG for years, so I'm familiar with games that rely on an all-powerful GM as arbiter of a game's esthetic and as court of first and last resort. I can even get into that kind of game now and then. I just don't think that paradigm accords with the spirit of Marvel Heroic Roleplaying. MHRP is full of constraints on the Watcher's sway over the course of play. By rule you must roll your dice in the open and make your result available for inspection. By rule you must spend a doom die of appropriate size to let a villain go out of her proper order in a turn, or Split/Rejoin the Party. By rule, if the players are winning when you happen to spend 2D12 to end a scene, you narrate the outcome as a victory for the players. By rule the player has absolute sway over whether to use her chosen distinction positively or negatively on this roll, every roll. It's not even an accident that the GM role is named for a canon character who is severely hemmed in by law and convention regarding just how much he may interfere with the course of events. It's certainly no accident that the name for the GM isn't any flavor of "Storyteller." By rule the doom pool represents, as you all were insisting to me just last week, the potential for things to go wrong for the heroes. And I think you'll look in vain for any version of White Wolf's Rule Zero in the game text.

There's just no way I can read practically anybody's use of the phrase "narrative precedes mechanics" on this forum as saying anything but, My taste comes first. Then the rules. But the rules for this game are the means by which all of us, together, make the story of our chosen heroes together. They aren't an alternative to "narrative," they're narrative's engine.


Jim

[Doc Hydrogen]

By the rules... There's no precise mechanic for friendly fire. There's no mechanic explicitly for threatening innocent bystanders. There are no rules for chases or escaping. No rules for disasters. No rules for knocking down a water tower with people on top of it... On and on and on. MHR relies on the Watcher to determine which existing rules to apply to a given situation, rather than listing hundreds of specific rules for each possible situation. A generous reading of that lack of specific rules could be seen as trusting the Watcher with fewer, more broadly applicable rules. A less generous reading would be that the game is incomplete.

In games of this nature you start with the narrative and what makes sense, then you rely on the Watcher to make a decision as to which rule best suits the situation, and in the best of these games--such as MHR--there are often several that could apply. So, you're still back to the old saw of GM fiat no matter which way you slice it.

Here you start with the story and decide which rules to use. Take the example of Storm whipping up some dust. Depending on the story implications involved, temporary vs long lasting, is it to hurt her enemies vs help her friends? That same thing could be a stunt, an asset, a complication, a resource, or simply an attack. What determines which it will be? The player, based on the story they want to tell. Narrative first, mechanics second. That's all it's ever meant, at least how I use it.

I'm sorry that the phrase seems to seriously raise your hackles, but it's shorthand for games of this nature, and I don't think you're adding anything by railing against it. Please don't read that as you're not contributing, you clearly are--and helping quite a few people understand the game better, myself included--but this almost crusade against a phrase seems more than a bit silly.

ETA: The converse is also true. If you don't have the doom dice to pay for something that should happen in the game, do you still have it happen or not? If you'd still have it happen, that's narrative before mechanics; if you don't have it happen because you don't have the doom dice, that's mechanics before narrative.

[Supplanter]

I'm sorry that the phrase seems to seriously raise your hackles, but it's shorthand for games of this nature, and I don't think you're adding anything by railing against it. Please don't read that as you're not contributing, you clearly are--and helping quite a few people understand the game better, myself included--but this almost crusade against a phrase seems more than a bit silly.

I'm sure there is at least something to this! More on the rest once I reach the other side of some serious prescription pain medication. (The need for which is not occasioned by this thread. Not even remotely!)


Jim

[Grimmshade]

In games of this nature you start with the narrative and what makes sense, then you rely on the Watcher to make a decision as to which rule best suits the situation, and in the best of these games--such as MHR--there are often several that could apply. So, you're still back to the old saw of GM fiat no matter which way you slice it.

I think we have a pretty similar take on the game Doc, we just come at it from slightly different angles. One of the biggest things that made me say "Finally!" when playtesting MHR was the fact that it was narrative guided, with the mechanics informing the narrative, but not replacing it. This feels like a must for any game emulating all the crazy stuff that happens in comics.

I love the simple set of few all encompassing rules, rather than the overwhelming number of small complex rules covering every situation.

When I say in my original topic that these friendly fire situations make the rules "stutter" a bit, I am mostly talking about how it at times causes a pause at the gaming table while I go "hmmmm... how to rule this."
(Which is the exact reason for posting this topic, to get a broader sense of ideas in my head for when these situations arise. I really like how many different "solutions" we are seeing!)

Right ow I am thinking its a total judgement call based on severity of the situation, ranging anywhere from a new Scene Distinction or complication, all the way to an emergent large scale threat.

[blaster219]

Been thinking about this on and off. Specifically the dam example. What I might do if I was the watcher would be two things:

1. Create a "Compromised Structure" scene complication. Perhaps with a value equal to the effect die the player uses to affect his target. Spending a doom die to do this. If I don't have a die large enough, then the value of the comp is equal to the die I spend instead.
2. Create a large scale threat whose width would probably be about 5 or 6 and whose hieght would represent how much water the dam was holding back. d6 for a small reservoir, d8 for a large one, d10 for one that's a considerable size

Each time the LST gets to act, it can't do anything whilst the complication is at d12 or less. Except to try and step up the complication that is. Once the dam is complicated out, it bursts and the LST can flood and attack any hero/villain/bystander downstream indiscriminately.

This would give the heroes time to patch the dam in some way (basically removing the complication)

[alai]

There's just no way I can read practically anybody's use of the phrase "narrative precedes mechanics" on this forum as saying anything but, My taste comes first. Then the rules. But the rules for this game are the means by which all of us, together, make the story of our chosen heroes together. They aren't an alternative to "narrative," they're narrative's engine.

I'm broadly in sympathy with Jim (and I think Babel, if he's not averse to his position being lumped in with?) here.

A player's action is, in essence, a proposed narration. If the Watcher is going to re-narrate a player's "I'm awesomesauce and that cool!" action as "Reckless disregard, a hazard to his teammates, counterproductive to the mission objectives, collateral damage on two legs, a tramp, a drunk and an unfit mother. Would not breed from this officer," it's generally going to be handy to transactionalise that in mechanical terms. So with the suggested options in terms of Doom Pool play, you're on pretty safe ground.

I think the idea of treating "friendly fire" as an unintended area attack (or as with the "bringing the roof down" example in the other thread, an AA with "bonus" targets), is also an attractive one, because it both allows for a certain amount of pre-resolution negotiation ("OK, you can have a D6 and an effect on everyone in the immediate area, at no extra charge..." "Mulligan!"), and because it's allowing the possibility of it all going as brilliantly as the player had in mind (if all concerned roll accordingly).

Adding in additional negative consequences on a purely extra-mechanical basis should always be an option, but it should also always merit a moment's second thought. It's in a sense relying on "Watcher capital", and insofar as it differs from the table consensus, is potentially expending it. In the spirit of allowing a possibility of success-as-intended, I wonder if something like adding extra D4s to the pool for especially... cowbowish actions would be a somewhat more idiomatic (if equally extra-mechanical) approach than simply adding after-the-fact additional bad consequences.

[kirezemog]

Adding in additional negative consequences on a purely extra-mechanical basis should always be an option, but it should also always merit a moment's second thought. It's in a sense relying on "Watcher capital", and insofar as it differs from the table consensus, is potentially expending it. In the spirit of allowing a possibility of success-as-intended, I wonder if something like adding extra D4s to the pool for especially... cowbowish actions would be a somewhat more idiomatic (if equally extra-mechanical) approach than simply adding after-the-fact additional bad consequences.

Because the Doom Pool is so different and a little abstract in it's nature, I have to sometimes take a step back and look at what they are going for so I can better understand the balance.

So, here is my newest idea with area attacks. If the attacker rolls an opportunity, they can be activated free by the reacting side to apply a D6 effect of the same stress or complication type against a target of their choosing. The attacker gains a PP if this happens.

Here is my rational. If you, as the Watcher, activate an opportunity by the player, you give them a PP, and you gain a D6 into the Doom Pool. If you spend a D6 on a roll, you can keep an add'l effect die. So, combine those ideas and get my idea above. Basically you gain a D6 by activating the opportunity, and spending it right away to keep an effect die on this attack (even though it isn't your attack, but it makes narrative sense) and you have "friendly fire".

[kirezemog]

As an addendum, when building a character, you can make the choice to have a selective area attack. With the simple add on of spending 1pp you can negate this ability of the watcher.