Grinding gears - linked tests and Circles whiffs

Yeah, it’s certainly better to have someone you’ve already introduced be the person in the action (and I think I recall reading that in the rules somewhere). Unless you want to introduce a new PC (maybe to avoid an emnity) there is no good reason why the same security officer you burned up in earlier scenes to interrogate a FON won’t be the same one scanning for worms later on. Even un-named background characters add depth to the game when they show up again. I guess it’s a familiarity thing. Soon enough characters will be having interstital scenes with these characters :slight_smile:

You guys are giving good advice, but I don’t want to do this by feel. We’ve got this lovely mechanic with precise procedures – X Obstacle gives you Y type of contact, roll Z times to make him/her a Relationship – and then there seems to be a “whatever feels right” handwave over how long the contact actually hangs around. That’s rather like having beautifully detailed rules for hand-to-hand combat and then a one-line note in the GM advice that s/he should have the monsters run away whenever it feels “realistic” for them to do so (which is actually in at least one edition of D&D, I think): Why did we have all this sophisticated procedure if we’re going to fudge something crucial about the final effect?

I’m a Forge-head, yes, but of a very particular kind. I know all about “say yes or roll dice,” but I’ve been trained to think of a game in terms of an economy, in which you don’t get something for nothing: at least, nothing that has mechanical impact should be introduced based on unstructured, intuitive decisionmaking. You see this very strongly with Tony Lower-Basch’s Capes, but also with Universalis, Prime Time Adventures, and even with Vincent “say yes or roll dice” Baker’s Dogs in the Vinyard, where the GM has a specific procedure to build the town (i.e. scenario) and, effectively, a budget to build his NPCs.

I’m a card-carrying member of the “I haven’t played this game society”, but I’ve role-played a lot in my time, and I don’t care how many mechanics you have going on, ultimately you’re not doing much more than telling a story as a group. In Traveller, there were incredibly detailed combat mechanics, but everything between the firefights was basically winging it. BE has mechanics to deal with more of the in-between stuff (so it’s mechanically more thorough than Traveller), but it can’t cover everything. At some point you’re going to have to let the mechanics go and do some old-fashioned storytelling.

fwiw

Chris

Heh. All four games I mentioned above have an enclosed economy – anything that has mechanical significance comes from some rule or some earlier game-mechanical event, never from “well, the GM (or the players) think this should be a +1.”

Sydney - when your player make a Circles roll, they’re stating an intent - which you also use to calculate the obstacle. The resultant contact stays around as long as that intent lasts. Your player can use another mechanic like the DoW to make them stay around for some other duration, but that will cost them a conflict scene. Otherwise, they have to Circle the guy up again in a later Builder.

Where’s the handwave?

Errr, but there’s nothing in the Circles chapter about increasing or decreasing the Obstacle depending on how long-term or short-term your intent is. Not in the table, not in the text. And remember, I don’t want to wing it. I want a procedure I can follow that reliably produces good play. (And don’t tell me there’s no such thing; all rules are simply explicit procedure, and all “roleplaying skills” are simply implicit procedure).

The duration of Resources effects is very clear: you buy it, it stays around indefinitely (until someone destroys it or whatever). The duration of combat effects is very clear: you hit someone important enough to bother figuring out what happened to them after the fight, you go to Anatomy of Injury.

The duration of Circles effects is not clear: Once I’ve Circle’d someone up, but before I’ve made him/her a Relationship, does each Circles roll get me help on one roll from that character? Help for one scene? Help for one session? If my intent can change that duration, what’s the baseline, and how do I scale the Obstacle up or down from that accordingly?

I agree with you, Syd: This is also my instinctive position when it comes to rules. But seriously, you can look at the whole underlying theme of the rules and suss out what’s happening when the die roll is made.

A Circles test is a conflict resolution roll just like everything else in the game. The stakes aren’t the dude, it’s what that dude will accomplish for you (or what problems that dude will cause for you in the future). Some tasks take more narrative time than others to accomplish, and some tasks don’t have a designated conclusion.

IMO if you want the Ob to reflect the duration of the Circled character’s presence, I think the rules’ intention is to fold Loyalty into the stakes you’re rolling for. And/or require a Resources pre-test, particularly if you’re Circling from outside your lifepaths.

But yeah, I agree: This is all as fuzzy as the dice in my El Camino. For grins, let’s not forget the total lack of discussion on the difference between Circling up a lone gunman and Circling up a whole company of mercenaries (or Sodalis or Anvil or whatever).

p.

Okay, that formulation makes a lot of sense. I still want my Obstacle guidelines, though!

It’s actually not too bad Circling up a military unit, though: As I understand from the rulebook and the forums, you Circle up the commander, who comes with the appropriate equipment and minions. The difference betwen Circling up one grunt and Circling up a general is a bunch of Obstacle increases reflecting higher status and rarer occupation. So that’s actually in the rules, if you squint a little.

Why should there be? You find someone, persuade them to do what you need, and they go away again. Done. All the necessary obstacles are built into the table on p.348. Again, what, specifically, is not covered by that table?

Can you give us an example of a Circles test in your game that caused you this lingering anxiety?

So…you’re okay adjudicating what’s “appropriate” in terms of a merc squad’s firepower but you’re not okay adjudicating what’s “appropriate” for their duration of service?

In my group, the question of equipment is what we’re (still!) stumbling on. Mostly the players are cool with assuming troops are armed with non-surprising baseline gear within their tech index, but God help me the day I try to cash in on the Anvil Lord’s “smattering of Iron” (or however it’s worded). :rolleyes:

p.

Oh, I’d love to have hard guidelines for “appropriate equipment” as well, but having immersed myself in the military tech-fetishist aspects of the game (just poke around the “Tech Burner” or “General Questions” fora), I feel pretty confident on that.

Specific Circles rolls that we made:

Lord-Pirate Sebastian (Eric) Circled up a fellow piratical Hammer Lord to help him track down the Vaylen smugglers. He succeeded, barely – but because he hadn’t set his Obstacle that high (for good reason), the minor character he got had only exponent 3 skills. So the Circles roll ended up netting him a whopping +1D from the minor character’s Helping Die; in hindsight, I should’ve awarded the +1D advantage die for having another Hammer Lord’s ships along, but even so that would only have been +2D total.

Anvil Lord Roland (Tony) tried to get a Propagandist (i.e. someone with actual propaganda skill) with a Building roll and failed.
Psychologist-Courtesan Freya (Jen) tried to Circle up some servants who had gossip about someone she was investigating and failed.
In both these cases, I decided not to invoke the Emnity Clause because nobody saw much point: The players wanted specific mechanical boosts from the characters they were Circling and had no interest in spending more Building Scene rolls, let alone a Conflict Scene, beating someone into cooperation. In hindsight I should have used these failures to introduce minor characters who would say “no!” in an entertaining way, even if the players didn’t want to pursue it further, to take the sting of whiffing away.
I’m not sure about having those minor characters come back to bite the protagonists later, though, because that moves into the realm of punishing people for Circles failures in a way that’d make them reluctant to try in the first place, in the same way that the +1 Ob for failed Linked Tests is a big disincentive for trying those.

Deck Chief Iduna (Kate), law enforcement officer/smuggler, found a rival to frame for an embarassing Vaylen-led attack on her hanger bay. (No one wanted to let the secret slip that the worms were on the planet, so they had to find a patsy). This Circles roll was a big part of the players’ plan for the Maneuver, with lots of Helping Dice and Linked Tests tossed around, and when Iduna succeeded, I roleplaying a little interlude between her and the rival that made him so thoroughly obnoxious that everyone was rooting for him to get framed and fired/executed/tortured.
I’m not sure what I would’ve done if they’d failed this roll. Enmity Clause doesn’t make much sense when you’re [i]trying[/i[] to find an enemy; probably I’d have invoked it anyway and interpreted it as him actually taking a swing/shot at her (one-roll ICASHITF combat), but either way I’d have let the frame-up proceed, which seems to make the roll merely about the price of success rather than about whether you succeed or fail.

Looking back across these rolls, it’s clear what I failed to do for the ones that bombed, succeed or fail, was roleplay it out and come up with a fun little character sketch for the minor character. But we were trying to deal with our slow pace by making Building Scenes run fast, as a rule, and the Circles rolls we didn’t roleplay through were always the middle roll of a Building Scene, intended to serve some greater purpose; roleplaying around with them a lot might’ve felt like a detour or even a derailment of play. The Circles roll that we really played up, by contrast, was the final roll of a Builder and the result of a lot of planning, so it seemed worthwhile to make something of them.

Any interest in discussing some alternative ways to play out these whiffed rolls? Some ideas pop to mind immediately.

p.

Paul, absolutely, fire away with suggestions.

I would have provided a seemingly pliable and very competent propagandist to work for them, befriend them and become extremely useful. Did I mention he’s Vaylen?

Psychologist-Courtesan Freya (Jen) tried to Circle up some servants who had gossip about someone she was investigating and failed.

I would have provided servants who were sympathetic to Freya but were being blackmailed by the person she’s investigating. They feel for Freya, but they’ll feed her misinformation rather than stick their necks out for her.

In both these cases, I decided not to invoke the Emnity Clause because nobody saw much point: The players wanted specific mechanical boosts from the characters they were Circling and had no interest in spending more Building Scene rolls, let alone a Conflict Scene, beating someone into cooperation. In hindsight I should have used these failures to introduce minor characters who would say “no!” in an entertaining way, even if the players didn’t want to pursue it further, to take the sting of whiffing away.
I’m not sure about having those minor characters come back to bite the protagonists later, though, because that moves into the realm of punishing people for Circles failures in a way that’d make them reluctant to try in the first place, in the same way that the +1 Ob for failed Linked Tests is a big disincentive for trying those.

Failed Circles tests are not punishment! They are consequences. They are conflict that drives story forward! Look, the players know they made the roll and failed. And they know that these people are inimical to them somehow. But they don’t know how. The players know something their characters don’t. It creates dramatic tension.

These are useful ideas. Keep 'em coming.

Hrrm. But the question is, can they use the Propagandist’s high-exponent propaganda skill for a roll or not?

Okay, cool. I don’t want to be presumptuous. Also, I totally get that it’s a million times easier to armchair-quarterback outside the urgency of real-time play.

This one sounds okay. I guess this is getting back to the issues we already discussed up in your “that didn’t work” thread: Circled characters are more than mechanical advantages. Sounds like that’s all the player wanted, though, so I don’t know how else you could have improved on this one.

I think it has a lot to do with what Roland’s intention behind the propagadist’s job is. Some failed roll ideas:
[ul]
[li]You get a badass propagandist but, naturally, (s)he’s a Vaylen. She does the job but, in the course of receiving her job orders, also learns all kinds of useful stuff about Roland’s plans.[/li][li]You get an incompetent propagandist. He struggles through the job, creating a trail of chaos as he works. He’s not working “for the enemy” but he sure as shit causes endless trouble. At least one big controversy comes out in the media shortly after the propaganda campaign ends.[/li][li]You get the propagandist you were rolling for, who then does the job according to spec. Later, after Roland doesn’t give her appropriate accolades for a job well done, she goes out of her way to propagandize against him. Possibly in a future scene; in this case, I’d keep the character in my pocket as a future asset I could Circle up with a GMFoN.[/ul]

[/li]
[ul]
[li]Servant delivers completely wrong gossip. Or, whatever gossip Jen was shopping for turns out to be precisely incorrect…making it forever “untrue” in narrative terms.[/li][li]Servant delivers correct gossip, then reports this to her Vaylen masters.[/li][li]Servant delivers correct gossip, then reveals his complicity to the media.[/ul]

Two thoughts:

  1. My favorite Enmity Clause NPCs actually say yes now, and then muck things up later. Which relates to …

  2. I think your players’ a-ha moment may come when they see their failure generate more awesome, rather than their failure generate, you know, a sense of failure.

Enmity Clause when you’re trying to find an enemy: I gotta run now, but I have a couple ideas.

p.

If you say yes, of course they can. That doesn’t prevent him from making footage of their creation of said propaganda to set up unrest about the mind control coming from the government. Or using his inside position to learn their plans and counter them.

This is also your answer to the question of how long a Circled character stays around. Once the players Circle up a character, he stays around for the stated intent. That’s up to what they stated as the Intent.

But once he or she comes into existence, that character is the GM’s to play. The GM can bring him in or usher him out at will (so long as the Intent has been fulfilled in the case of a successful Circles roll), whenever he wants. If the players want the character again, you have the option of saying “Yes.” Or you can require them to roll. Your call. And you may bring the character back whenever you want, even if the players don’t ask for him.

Circles always creates a character for the GM to play. The result of the Circles roll determines the character’s disposition. Consider it a creative constraint on how you use the character. The more constraint the players place upon you, the harder the Obstacle of the roll. The less constraint, the lower the Obstacle. In the case of a failed roll, the power reverts to the GM with full force. The only constraint in that case is that the character must be working against the PC’s interests in some way.

In our Lisgren game, the Anvil Lord failed a very easy Circles test during the first maneuver. He was trying to Circle up some stormtroopers to kidnap some families of an opposing faction. Cool. Except he failed. Did I cock block him and say, “No stormtroopers available right now, Lord. I’m sorry, but we can’t go commit this descpicable act.”? Hell no! I gave him the stormtroopers all right. Fucking company of Vaylen stormtroopers. They ended up being one of the scariest things in the game. They kidnapped those families and brought them in for interrogation, just as ordered. They tortured and interrogated them, as ordered. They were even prepared to execute the hostages at one point. But in the end, they didn’t. Instead, I capped the whole exercise off – which took place across many maneuvers – by hulling the hostages during a color scene.

And then, in the last maneuver, the FON Vaylen child convinced the Hammer Lord’s son to run away from his tyrranical mother. And the young scion ran right into the arms of the Vaylen stormtroopers. You should have seen the look on Jonathan and Matt’s faces! Shock, horror and elation all at once. Those simple stormtroopers were villains.

Failed Circles rolls build drama. They entangle the two sides.

In another instance, I failed a Circles roll to find a freaking contractor. A contractor! Matt and Jon clamoured for the Enmity Clause. So the freaking contractor sold me out! He ended up contacting them and giving them the plans for the bugs I was going to install at their space port comm hub. Bastard!

From your examples:
Piratical Hammer Lord to help: Why not just use the Knowledge condition and track down a Hammer Lord who knows where the smugglers are? What was so important about finding them that you had to make two rolls to do it: a Circles test and then presumably some other test? One roll could have taken care of it, and then exponent would have been irrelevant.

Anvil Lord to Circle up Propagandist: GAHHH! A golden opportunity gone. Why WOULDN’T YOU put a Vaylen in Tony’s camp? A Vaylen Propagandist even?! It doesn’t get much better than that. He’ll work with the Anvil Lord as ordered, but start feeding his side all the counter propaganda or limitless other cool options!!

Psychologist to Circle up a rumor-monger: Again, why not have a character appear and feed her misinformation or misdirection? Or have word of her maneuverings reach the ears of her real enemies? Your characters do have enemies they are fighting against, right?

Deck Chief Looking for Vaylen: If she failed that in my game… She would have found someone who threatened to out her as a filthy worm lover! Let the blackmail commense!

Those are not punishments or roadblocks. Those are the types of twists and turns necessary for the game to work! Who are you going to betray if you don’t have a shifting skein of alliances and enemies to work with?!

-L

OMG, the above examples from Thor, Paul, and Luke are priceless. Thanks guys! I’m really going to used those failed Circles rolls to great effect now! :wink:

Because this is all sounding so familiar (are you sure you weren’t in my first game, Syd?), I’m going to say all the issues in your thread come down to your players’ attitude toward the broader concept of “failure.” I think they’re going to fall into one of two camps:

Players who will do everything in their power to succeed; and

Players who are okay with failing so long as the failure is fun and interesting.

I think you can successfully move them from the first camp into the second camp, but it’s a trust thing. The players have to trust that failure isn’t punishment, it’s just the story going a different direction. In a perfect world, the new story direction means they get their BITs challenged all over again, which earns them more Artha, yadda yadda.

Players in camp one (probably highly tactical players) would rather end up with a void – no harm, no foul – in the event of a failure. They tried something, it didn’t work out, no consequences. They’re so afraid of GM’s abusing the failure that they’d rather nothing at all happens, even if that means never taking any chances.

p.