STAGING TIPS - RESEARCH

The need to find information often crops up as an issue in roleplaying scenarios, especially in modern horror games. However, while the results of research can often be dramatic, the in play process of carrying out that research can be something of a let-down. It is often dismissed with a single die roll and a brief summary of the research findings. Which is rather boring... to try to alleviate this, I've written up some suggestions on how to make research a little more interesting - and perhaps even dramatic - in actual play.

1. HOW DIFFICULT IS THIS RESEARCH?

This depends on two things. Firstly, how obscure the subject that the heroes are trying to look up is. Secondly, how difficult you - the narrator - want to make it. A useful guideline, though, would be:

• Too Easy (e.g., "Vampires are vulnerable to stakes") - Automatic success
• Routine (e.g., "Vampires are unnaturally strong") - 15 to 5W
• Hard (e.g., "Hey! Dracula can turn to mist") - up to 15W
• Difficult (e.g., "Who are those skanky vampire chicks with Dracula?") - up to 5W2
• Obscure (e.g., "Where is Dracula keeping his coffin at the moment?") - up to 15W2
• Really Obscure (e.g., "What was the name of Dracula's dog?") - up to 5W3

When setting the Difficulty of a research problem in play, you should also, however, consider the narrative importance of the information for which the heroes are searching. If the information at question is vital to the progress of your game, you may want to consider ignoring the real "difficulty" in finding out this information. In such a situation, the real issue at stake in any Contest is not the research problem as such, but other issues which might surround it. See "What if I want to give them the information anyway?", below for further details.

2. RESEARCH IN ACTION

How does research work in "action" terms? We usually see one of two things:

1. Non-Dramatic Research - Everybody decides to look something up, then we cut to them describing what they've found out. In HeroQuest terms, this is just a Simple Contest - all handled in a single roll, possibly with some augments. Indeed, it might not even require a roll at all if the narrator decides that the research task at hand is that easy.
2. Dramatic Research - Often shown as a montage of people leafing through books, frowning, taking notes, etc. To simulate this, we can easily make the research the focus of an Extended Contest.

But how do we actually do this in play?

Goals and Opposition

A lot of the tone will be set by the "opposition" to the research. There's a few things you can use here. You can just roll the Resistance of the research (see above). However, you can make things a little more interesting by giving the research problem abilities, almost as if it were an NPC in it's own right, which the narrator can use to "attack" the heroes. These abilities might even be things that are only tangentially related to the actual research problem. For example:

Time pressure - a Not Much Time Left ability, which the researcher might have to resist with abilities such as Calm Under Pressure, Well-Organised, etc. Alternatively, if something nasty is running amok in town while the heroes are trying to research a way to stop it, you might "attack" their coolness or determination to finish the research properly with the big nasty's ability to damage the town. The researchers might get penalties if they are impulsive, reckless or have over-active consciences, for example.

Distractions - school work, domestic chores, social life, etc. The researcher would resist with abilities that would either let him resolve the distraction quickly or to avoid it entirely.

A useful staging tip for those heroes who aren't much good at research is to have them act against the "distractions" from a difficult research problem rather than the research problem itself. In examples above, the Slayer might actually be fighting the big nasty while other heroes are doing research, or the heroes might be using their Well-Organised, Calm, etc. to give disturbances the brush-off - this is much more interesting for their players than just relegating them to giving augments to the better researchers or having them knocked out of the contest early by a high Resistance problem.

Advantage Point Bids

What does it mean to make a high AP bid when you're trying to research something? After all, it's not like you're putting yourself in danger of anything other than a particularly nasty paper cut...
What you need to bear in mind is that a high AP bid is something that puts you in danger of not achieving your goal if it doesn't come off. In research terms, this might mean that you decide to ignore a particular set of books because you "know" there won't be anything in them, or that you choose to skim through books extremely quickly or randomly in the hope of finding some information quickly instead of searching more methodically. Examples of AP bids might be:

• Cautious Bid (3-5 AP): "I'll check the shelves to see if there are any books on vampires"
• Normal Bid (up to 1/3 of AP): "I'll go through the books carefully, looking for references to Dracula or Vlad Tepes"
• Determined Bid (up to 3/4 of AP): "I make some strong coffee and stay up all night studying the Summers Diaries and Calmet's 'Treatise on Vampires and Revenants'"
• Reckless Bid (all AP): "I don't care about those old books! I'm just taking 'Dracula' with me and looking stuff up on the way to the graveyard..."

Describing the Results of Actions

As each researcher takes their action, don't describe exactly what they find out - we won't know this until the final results of the contest are known (see above). Instead, describe the sort of things we see researchers going through in cinema and television programmes:

• The Researcher(s) Lose AP - they're getting nowhere; the words seem to swim before their eyes; all the books that look promising are written in languages they don't understand; too much time is going past; they can't stop thinking about tomorrow's Geography test/date/band practice; they'd be able to make more progres if people wouldn't keep stopping them to ask how they're getting on; they've just spent three hours looking up the wrong vampire; you've just knocked over a jar of ink onto the papers you're looking through; the books you need to get through are very badly organised and laid out; etc.
  
  
• The Researcher(s) Gain AP - they've just found what looks to be an excellent source; it's in Aramaic, but fortunately you have an English-Aramaic dictionary; "oh, look! pictures..." ; the books you've chosen are well-written and you can get through them quickly; you have the library all to yourself with no interruptions; etc.

3. VICTORY AND DEFEAT - OR, WHAT DO THE HEROES DISCOVER?

The level of victory or defeat tells us how much the researcher(s) have discovered about the topic that they are researching:

• Complete or Major Victory - The heroes find out almost everything; the Narrator might let them have a bonus on their actions against whatever/whoever they were researching. Regardless, they now know all its secrets/weaknesses.
• Marginal or Minor Victory - The heroes find some useful information - by no means everything, but at least the basics.
• Marginal or Minor Defeat - No useful information is found.
• Major or Complete Defeat - Not only is no useful information found, but the heroes have found something that is actually (perhaps even dangerously) wrong. The heroes may come to believe that vampires are repelled by macaroni cheese, for example.

However, you should consider whether or not the issue at stake is really whether or not the heroes find the information that they were looking for...

4. WHAT IF I WANT TO GIVE THEM THE INFORMATION ANYWAY?

So what happens if the PCs are researching a bit of information that you definitely wanted to give them. Perhaps it's the vital clue to lead them to the climax of the episide. Would you really hold back this crucial plot element because of a bad roll or two? No, I didn't think so... The simple solution to this is to let them off without rolling, but that's not very dramatic. Surely we can try something else?

What you can do instead is to change the contest, so that failure means they still get the information, but there's another problem. The greater the level of defeat, the bigger the problem:

• Marginal Defeat - The information contains minor red herrings.
• Minor Defeat - The heroes miss their senior prom because they spent all night in the library, or take so long to find the information they're looking for that they have little or no time to make preparations based on their findings.
• Major Defeat - One of the heroes is injured by a falling encyclopaedia, or suffers a particularly painful bout of writer's cramp.
• Complete Defeat - The library burns down while they're doing the research.

The goal of the contest has therefore changed from "find the information" to "find the information before/without/as well as/despite some other thing" - this means that, however badly they do, they still get the information.