A straightforward question:
Can circles be rolled for an interstitial scene, at no cost? That is, the roll does not count as part of a conflict/building scene.
Or if forced to make a circles roll I must use part of my building scene budget to circle him up and then have the interstitial scene?
This is contingent upon the unreachable (without circles) character in the interstitial being unimportant to the game. Likewise, if you want to address your legions from the reviewing stand and then later personally lead a platoon-level team to capture several enemy leaders, you just do your color scene and then circle up the LT.
If the interstitial deals with a significant, otherwise unreachable character, it may in fact be a building scene instead of an interstitial. If you’re calling up a gang leader to persuade him to help you out, you’re looking at a builder: Circles to find him, Persuasion or something to talk him into it, Resources or whatever to make the payoff. You could split that if you want to roll circles, call him, arrange a meet, then cut to something else and do the meet scene later.
I think Devin covers all the angles.
It’s as I suspected, but I couldn’t help but ask in an attempt to make my scene economy stretch out further. Thanks Devin and Luke!
And just in case people were wondering: I was trying to get to some spies and infiltrators that had been part of a successful Assess in a previous maneuver, to obtain all the juicy information they uncovered. I was saving my builder for a conflict, so I wanted to know if circling up the spies would cost me that conflict scene.
Eh, I’d say recovery of the data is covered as part of the successful Assess… That would be a legit interstitial. I mean, if your spies get the info and then are killed on the way out, or go into hiding, or all decide to leave behind their wicked lives and learn to play the bongos while growing spider-infested trustafarian dreads, that’s not much of an Assess, is it? The data need to reach your hands to matter.
Might need rolls if these spies had a special mission aside from the general Assessing, though. If they were supposed to find out the location of the Forged Lord’s elephant barn so as to hold his favorite elephant hostage, say, while the other teams did recon and force assessment and so on, then that’s not necessarily resolved by the Assess.
Could prolly squeeze it into a builder even there, though. You circled them up last week, so this week just roll something for them to exfiltrate (inconspicuous or infiltration prolly), then get the report, then roll Security Rigging to get in and Infiltration (with a fork for Pachyderm-wise, of course) to get out.
Again, notice that the line drawn is between a report on something that’s already wrapped, mechanically, and something that has future mechanical import.
Nice distinction, I think that will help in the future.
So to sum it up:
[ul]
[li]Interstitials are for exchanging information, not for acquiring new information (new to the game, not the characters).
[/li][li]Interstitial scenes can only be done with relationships, unless a building roll is taken to circle a character up.
[/li][li]If you’re trying to affect the setting, then you’ve upgraded to a building scene and aren’t in an interstitial anymore.
[/li][/ul]
We’re actually playing the Fires over Omac scenario. The players start out having successfully completed an Assess maneuver. All the information regarding that successful Assess is that the spies and infiltrators have found a weakness in the Baron’s plans.
Being new to the game, I wasn’t sure if that’s the extent of the results of a successful Assess: you can now take action; the spies and infiltrators are color.
Or if being successful gains you some advantage for the Take Action, like for example: the spies and infiltrators discover that the OPRC complex is woefully undefended or that the tether is vulnerable to sabotage. In the latter case I was thinking I could circle them up and talk to them in an interstitial to get the juicy details.
But now I’ve drifted from my original question into infection mechanics and the like, which aren’t the focus of the scenario. 
[/ul]Yeah, that’s it. Interstitial = talky talky, that’s it. No weaseling extra rolls. In some cases, I’ve suckered my players into using/blowing their one Conflict by ratcheting up an interstitial so hot that they were chomping at the bit to bodyslam my GMFON with a DOW.[/li]
What a great game. I’m so ready to run it again.
p.