Circles

Scenes are very precious, I get that it’s supposed to feel tight. But circles feels very tight!

In my game, I want an NPC to begin making moves toward a faction - he doesn’t have a relationship in there, so he needs to circle someone up. If the penalty for sympathetic outlook is too much, odds are I’ll need to convince them of some course of action, also. But if I’ve used up my builder circling them up, do I need to wait to the next maneuver to get to the talking part?

Wait… I guess since I’m the GM I can allow an NPC to use two builder scenes. But if players wanted to pull something like this off, they’d have to have player A do the Circling and player B do the Persuasion? (Sounds like this encourages teamwork!)

Hell no! A “scene” is not a roll of the dice! A scene is the RP justification for the roll plus the results of that roll.

And if you need to Persuade a contact, that’s just two builder rolls out of a possible three for the scene.

Oh my god… I know about the narrative justification and results parts, but somehow I had concluded that a Builder scene only contained one roll. wince I’m going to feel like an ass when I get back to my copy of BE. Aaarg!

Michael, dude. Dude.

Also, if you’re the GM you have many cheaty options! Do you have any unspent Relationship points left? Don’t even bother Circling – just make 'em and stick ‘em into the storyline anywhere you want. Like in the middle of the humans’ staff.