Quickly jotted notion on an old game...
First I want to be clear that with the following post I'm speaking to the way the system was presented to me. This is no doubt complicated by the fact that during the entire time I was playing, it was being treated as a game in beta rather than a game where the text was the final state of that version of the rules. It's entirely possible that the perceived schitzophrenic nature of the system was due to being exposed to it in numerous stages of development, and that this issue didn't occur in any one version of it. Never the less, it was presented as it was presented, and that can't be changed.
Second I want to be clear that this post is not meant as a slam on the system itself, nor on those who ran it. This is being recorded here as I may at some point return to the system (doubtful as that now seems) and I want to make sure that when I do I have these notes on hand. This represents a different style of GMing/Play than I've seen with it, though it's the way that makes sense to me to run it.
Third I'm posting this very late at night, while running on very little sleep. I don't know how much sense this is making, and will probably edit it in a day or two when I have a chance to reread it. Beyond that it's a concept that's taken me 2 years to actually find a way to express to any great extent, and I wouldn't be surprised to find that I still haven't gotten it quite right.
That being said...
What do the Virtues mean in a game of HotB? Are they skill level? No.
The game is not a task resolution system that a score can tell you whether you'll succeed at a task of a given difficulty, nor where a roll defines success at the task described. It's a narrative resolution system, where the roll determines who gets to say what happened in the conflict. This means that a higher skill level merely grants you a higher probability of getting to say how conflicts in that arena will turn out. This is something that's explained in the text repeatedly, but which occasionally get's forgotten during play (at least it seems to be).
It was after realizing this (a couple years ago at this point) that I came up with an idea of a Swordsman character. One with high Prowess, and perhaps even with a few of the Prowess gifts, or an Aspect based on his swordplay, who would come to each "session" with tales of the great exploits he had recently been engaged in, and of the feats he'd accomplished with his blade. One about whom great stories would come of the battles he'd been involved in during the interim. One who would loose every, single duel he entered into, and in fact every conflict where he drew his blade. The rules, in fact, support exactly this kind of character if a player wishes to play it.
Further the game isn't meant to simulate reality, not by any stretch of the imagination, but rather to simulate a story being told (presumably in opera form). To me this fact lends credence to the notion that the score represents how strongly this Virtue is a part of his or her story. You know the old adage about a hammer and a world of nails? To the character with Beauty 6 (I think this score is possible, if barely), every conflict that matters is tied up in the Virtue of Beauty. It doesn't matter if he's uglier than a swine and has absolutely no sense of taste, he still turns to Beauty as his default solution to the problems presented to him. That's what his high Beauty score represents.
Something that's always bothered me about HotB is that whenever the characters Weakness has been brought up it's always described in terms of "the thing that will be this characters ultimate downfall". But see, based on the model above, which is well supported by the system so far as I can see, that line of thinking effectively says that the thing that isn't a part of your characters story is going to be his downfall. Like saying that Moriarty's downfall will be his love of beautiful things. It doesn't seem to fit right with the rest of the system. With the way that the system seems to treat the Virtues. This clash has frequently led me to point out to the Narrator that I've already selected my characters downfall, and it's right there in the Aspects (I'll circle back to this in a minute). That the weakness, for me at least, represents the kinds of conflict I have no interest in exploring with this character. And yet that notion (I'm not sure where it came from, as it isn't even in the in-game fiction... well, not that I recall at least), has been held to by several people who've GMed it for me.
In the book we are told the story of a woman who enters her Winter years having been plotting up till the last, and finding that her plans haven't come to fruition (something like that). Does this sound like a woman with cunning as a weakness, or one who had a high cunning score, but was undercut by a Compel on an Aspect based in Cunning? And which one sounds like the more holistic (by which I mean to say "taking the whole into consideration rather than just a part") way to handle it?
What all this boils down to is this: If I run this game in the future, I'd want to be very clear with the players that the weakness is the type of conflict they aren't interested in having a say in. The type of conflict that doesn't matter to their characters story. That right there in the compels they get to point to what they want their characters downfall to be. That a high score in a Virtue, even a high number of dice for (some) rolls involving that Virtue, doesn't necessarily translate to a high skill in it, but rather to the level of importance that Virtue has in the characters "Opera". In the end it's just a different way to handle it I suppose, but I suspect it would suit my style of play a bit better than the other way round (yes I do happen to think that it's more fun if you have a relatively strong say in your characters downfall than if you take a passive role and wait for someone else to decide for you what it will be or how it will come about, and no I don't see how you'd get that say if you don't get any narrative control over the conflicts that effect said downfall)
...
You know, now that I've got that down, I suspect that the issue has been one path being followed, while the other was being talked about. Seems like one of my characters actually did fall to his highest virtue, by way of a compel if I recall correctly... Still, if I'm going to keep it straight later I need to have it down in written form to keep this confusion from slipping into a later reading of the text.
Second I want to be clear that this post is not meant as a slam on the system itself, nor on those who ran it. This is being recorded here as I may at some point return to the system (doubtful as that now seems) and I want to make sure that when I do I have these notes on hand. This represents a different style of GMing/Play than I've seen with it, though it's the way that makes sense to me to run it.
Third I'm posting this very late at night, while running on very little sleep. I don't know how much sense this is making, and will probably edit it in a day or two when I have a chance to reread it. Beyond that it's a concept that's taken me 2 years to actually find a way to express to any great extent, and I wouldn't be surprised to find that I still haven't gotten it quite right.
That being said...
What do the Virtues mean in a game of HotB? Are they skill level? No.
The game is not a task resolution system that a score can tell you whether you'll succeed at a task of a given difficulty, nor where a roll defines success at the task described. It's a narrative resolution system, where the roll determines who gets to say what happened in the conflict. This means that a higher skill level merely grants you a higher probability of getting to say how conflicts in that arena will turn out. This is something that's explained in the text repeatedly, but which occasionally get's forgotten during play (at least it seems to be).
It was after realizing this (a couple years ago at this point) that I came up with an idea of a Swordsman character. One with high Prowess, and perhaps even with a few of the Prowess gifts, or an Aspect based on his swordplay, who would come to each "session" with tales of the great exploits he had recently been engaged in, and of the feats he'd accomplished with his blade. One about whom great stories would come of the battles he'd been involved in during the interim. One who would loose every, single duel he entered into, and in fact every conflict where he drew his blade. The rules, in fact, support exactly this kind of character if a player wishes to play it.
Further the game isn't meant to simulate reality, not by any stretch of the imagination, but rather to simulate a story being told (presumably in opera form). To me this fact lends credence to the notion that the score represents how strongly this Virtue is a part of his or her story. You know the old adage about a hammer and a world of nails? To the character with Beauty 6 (I think this score is possible, if barely), every conflict that matters is tied up in the Virtue of Beauty. It doesn't matter if he's uglier than a swine and has absolutely no sense of taste, he still turns to Beauty as his default solution to the problems presented to him. That's what his high Beauty score represents.
Something that's always bothered me about HotB is that whenever the characters Weakness has been brought up it's always described in terms of "the thing that will be this characters ultimate downfall". But see, based on the model above, which is well supported by the system so far as I can see, that line of thinking effectively says that the thing that isn't a part of your characters story is going to be his downfall. Like saying that Moriarty's downfall will be his love of beautiful things. It doesn't seem to fit right with the rest of the system. With the way that the system seems to treat the Virtues. This clash has frequently led me to point out to the Narrator that I've already selected my characters downfall, and it's right there in the Aspects (I'll circle back to this in a minute). That the weakness, for me at least, represents the kinds of conflict I have no interest in exploring with this character. And yet that notion (I'm not sure where it came from, as it isn't even in the in-game fiction... well, not that I recall at least), has been held to by several people who've GMed it for me.
In the book we are told the story of a woman who enters her Winter years having been plotting up till the last, and finding that her plans haven't come to fruition (something like that). Does this sound like a woman with cunning as a weakness, or one who had a high cunning score, but was undercut by a Compel on an Aspect based in Cunning? And which one sounds like the more holistic (by which I mean to say "taking the whole into consideration rather than just a part") way to handle it?
What all this boils down to is this: If I run this game in the future, I'd want to be very clear with the players that the weakness is the type of conflict they aren't interested in having a say in. The type of conflict that doesn't matter to their characters story. That right there in the compels they get to point to what they want their characters downfall to be. That a high score in a Virtue, even a high number of dice for (some) rolls involving that Virtue, doesn't necessarily translate to a high skill in it, but rather to the level of importance that Virtue has in the characters "Opera". In the end it's just a different way to handle it I suppose, but I suspect it would suit my style of play a bit better than the other way round (yes I do happen to think that it's more fun if you have a relatively strong say in your characters downfall than if you take a passive role and wait for someone else to decide for you what it will be or how it will come about, and no I don't see how you'd get that say if you don't get any narrative control over the conflicts that effect said downfall)
...
You know, now that I've got that down, I suspect that the issue has been one path being followed, while the other was being talked about. Seems like one of my characters actually did fall to his highest virtue, by way of a compel if I recall correctly... Still, if I'm going to keep it straight later I need to have it down in written form to keep this confusion from slipping into a later reading of the text.