So I have been thinking about the replies I got from the other two posts and the concerns about the arbitary nature of the GMs interference in the mission. I was trying to resolve how I could make it seem less arbitary and I think I may have a solution, though I am kind of talking out loud here.
Planning
During the planning stage of the game, which may also be timed to keep things tight, the characters decide what events they are going to tackle and how.
The team researches what they want to do but this research will be frustrated by the fact that the databases on 'The Needle' are not complete. Partly due to the apocalypse and other reasons I will make up. Thus they have limited information on each event.
The information is represented mechanically by a pool of points that the players put into different areas in each event. These areas are still up for discussion but will probably be something like:
Security/ Physical: How well protected is the target? How hard is the code to break?
Psychological: How can the target be persuaded? How do we break him?
Political/ Social: can the target be blackmailed? Can we use his friends to make him do what we need to do?
I think there is more needed here.
Anyway, when in an event and confronted with a task of the relevant type, you could spend resources from one of the research areas to either overcome it completely, or add an amount to your skill for free. Haven't decided which.
The idea behind this is it would mechanically reward careful planning, and that the team would come across problems where they expected to a lot of the time i.e. if they hadn't looked at security that much then they will be confronted with lots of security tasks.
What do you think of this as an idea?
Cheers
Iain
The idea has merit I think,
Submitted by Andrew Kenrick on Wed, 07/11/2007 - 12:47.
The idea has merit I think, but it'd have to work fairly seemlessly in play to avoid bogging everything down.
If you haven't done so already, check out John Wick's Wilderness of Mirrors. It has a similarly involved planning stage where the players plan and research, the GM awards them points that can then be spent to overcome obstacles in the game.
For Ordinary Angels I'm setting up cases in a vaguely similar way. The players and the GM collaborate to assign points to Mystery, Adversary and Interrogation, which then get spent by the GM in game to create obstacles and opposition.
Net-Fudging
Submitted by Neil Gow on Wed, 07/11/2007 - 14:09.
I think the same problem could occur here as before. The players plan out their attack on the mission and say, for example and making this up completely number-wise stick 5 points in Security, 10 points in Psychology and 15 points in Political. They reckon the hardest part of the knot is going to be of political nature and with these points they should be equipped to overcome it.
The GM looks down and sees that they are damned right and his scenario is about to dissolve in minutes. He ponders and then shifts the emphasis of the knot to Security. Ha! Players foiled. GM is a bastard (as noted in the rules) and the tension is on.
Oh and that planning mechanic is then made to be a farce, as an aside.
In a game like this where the GM can so easily exercise fiat to bone the players maybe something even more transparent is necessary?
I remember the Netrunner CCG. One player played the runner with their traditional deck. The other player played the Corporation and they laid out the defences, face down, of their data nodes. The players then made runs on the data nodes with the defences already pre-determined. No fudging allowed.
Maybe something like this could be done where the obstacles in the knot could be revealed from a pre-determined place and thus the planning would actually mean something and the 'boning factor' would be drastically reduced?
Neil
Take the King's shilling at http://www.omnihedron.co.uk/dutyandhonour/
Do you know how wilderness
Submitted by Iain McAllister on Wed, 07/11/2007 - 21:24.
Do you know how wilderness works andy?
That is a neat idea Neil. Maybe their could be a mechanical incentive to tackle the more difficult events they know will be more stressful. I will think on that and get back to you.
From what I remember of netrunner, the runner did not now precisely what was going to happen at each ICE but he knew how many there were going to be, and the approximate amount of bits he would need to overcome it.
Maybe the setup could be similar.
Cheers
Iain
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