I have a Vaylen Crime Lord who’s doing the whole evil mastermind thing. With that in mind, I gave him the instinct “Always have an escape plan.” Is that too vague?
In BW, it would never fly. In BE, it might.
What skill would you test for your free roll to have an escape route? If you can think of one, then it’s good. If you can’t, then it’s no good.
In that particular case, some assassins dropped out of the ventilation ducts in my character’s conference room.
We agreed on a Versus Speed test for my dude to get to an escape pod vs. the assassins catching me. They let it go, but there was some grumbling about “instincts should be specific if/then statements”.
Why wouldn’t that just be the normal situation? They can’t just catch you without a test.
Ok, a few questions in that vein, then.
The original test was their Infiltration vs. My Security to get on board my ship. I think we were operating on the assumption that this test alone would be enough. But now that you mention it, a 2nd test would be necessary.
The way we did it, he did the 1 builder to sneak on board, a resources test to make a psychic stunner to knock everybody out on the ship (which, now that I think about, he didn’t establish in a color scene before hand), and then everybody was knocked out except my main dude, who miraculously made the roll. So it’d be a 3rd builder for the vs speed test to try to catch him, eh?
I’m assuming the Will test I had to make to stay conscious is just a freebie. It’s not one of his builders or mine, right?
Ah ha. Infil vs Sec is great, but I don’t think capturing you is the right intent for their task – “sneak aboard his ship unawares.”
Appropriate task for the actual capture is Close Combat or something along those lines.
Your Instinct lets you reframe the test to something more beneficial to your character, “Alway have my escape jet pack on when I’m onboard my ship” (or whatever). So your Instinct interrupts their capture attempt. If you fail to escape, you return to your regularly scheduled Close-Combat-for-abduction roll.
And you don’t have to pay for tests forced by other players.
-L
Chiming in, since I was the player attempting to capture his FoN.
My Infiltrate intent was just to sneak aboard so I could use my evil sleeping device. After everyone but his FoN was asleep, I was perfectly willing to use a Corner Him and Stab Him action, and I had a builder left to do it in. The GM didn’t want to risk getting injured or killed, so he argued that his vague instinct allowed him to change it so I couldn’t get my Close Combat test, and instead he wanted it to be a Vs. Speed.
I called foul because I thought the book made it clear that the instinct needed to give us some clue as to what we would test before the situation actually came up. The way it is worded, I felt it was a little too much like “I get away from any type of bad situation that I don’t want to be in” and not “I test X skill when Y situation arises.”