I’m on my first brush with the rules. This might be an RTFM situation, but I’d appreciate even a short answer or a page reference. (“TFM” is pretty huge.)
The players and GM choose a Maneuver, which affects disposition, and theoretically guides the role-play for that maneuver through a bunch of scenes.
But let’s say the players select a maneuver, role terribly during all their building scenes and conflicts, and establish nothing of benefit. Then they roll the maneuver, and get a great result. How do the two relate to each other?
Apologies for providing no page reference but TFM does discuss the scene/maneuver disconnect to some degree and Luke and others have amplified that in various forum posts. I think the general idea is that there are things happening outside of the scenes you play and even beyond your character’s control that are influencing the results of the maneuver. I haven’t played all that much (six-seven maneuvers so far, I think) but haven’t run across a situation where the narrative didn’t sort of auto-magically suggest itself. The four or five bright people gathered around your table can usually figure out something that makes sense pretty quickly.
M
That actually makes sense to me — it rather reminds me of Asimov’s Foundation books, much like the rest of Burning Empires. Sometimes the correct course of action in those books is to do NOTHING, and nothing you could have done would have mattered.
Lol. Funny you should mention that. The Vaylen FoN in the Game I’m running just bought a Seldoncorp cliodynamics co-processor for her psychohistory lab.
M
The only interconnect between Infection and scenes are as follows:
Flak, Gambit, Inundate, and Take Action require the calling side to engage in a conflict as part of the maneuver. (Page 429)
Assess, Conserve, Go to Ground, and Pin require the calling side to engage in a building scene as part of the manuver. (Page 429)
Maneuver Roller - The character who “played the most prominent role” in the maneuver scenes rolls the maneuver dice. Yes this does mean you can end up with someone rolling the maneuver unskilled. (Page 430)
Help in Maneuvers - For the PCs, you can only help the primary roller if you helped that character at some point during the maneuver proper. For NPCs, they just need to be present in a scene together. (Page 430)
And that’s it. There’s a few other limitations about what skills and forks are allowed, but basically everything else is totally separate between the macro and micro games.
