This is a question the boys and I were puzzling over last week, as we waited for our orders at Lu-Lu’s Noodles to arrive:
When can a GM “call for a test”? Everyone (including the GM), gets 3 voluntary tests each maneuver. But, in the let it ride rules, for example, the GM cannot “call for a test of the same ability every time they get an itch”. When, exactly, can the GM call for tests? In conventional rpg’s, this is obvious… the GM’s making the story, and uses tests whenever he thinks it’s appropriate as part of his toolkit. In BE, it’s not so obvious because rolls are such a limited commodity.
So the question and the example:
Question: what latitude does the GM have (in the traditional rpg sense), to impose tests on the players… and on his own characters?
Example: We haven’t managed to get the local wildlife into the game at all. They just haven’t had a good way of coming into play. I used a color scene to have one of my guys drop color “alien attractors” over one of the players’ archeological dig sites to set up an attack by the aliens later on, but that seemed like a lot of work for what I wanted to be a random attack by a pack of wandering aliens. It would add color to the game and make achieving the player’s goal more interesting.
-Chris