As a GM, I might have a problem with one of my players pulling a “But wait! The Kerrn faction can take over the Anvil in the event of a strike”. Obviously there’s a judgement there – the merchant league clause is less unlikely, and I have the advantage of having the Imperial Steward on Team Evil. And I think everyone’s understanding of the setting is that the Kerrn are a disenfranchised minority. But still…I think I’d expect the player to “make” that law before they went to court, or the Anvil HQ, or whatever, to act on it.
On the unfairness: If I declare something as color, it only costs me a sliver of an otherwise unlimited color scene. There’s no internal budget to a color scene, the way there is in a building scene. In the building scene, I have three chances to make something real/noncolor in the game. In a color scene, I can describe stuff to my heart’s content until the GM or a player says “no.”
The unfairness comes in with the other player having to use up one of his three building opportunities to eliminate something I created for nothing. Understanding this was further complicated by a bad example in the book, but now that we’ve talked through it I feel more strongly than ever that color trumps color, and to keep your color from getting trumped you’d better use up some of your limited building resources to make it untrumpable.
I respectfully have to disagree with your interpretation that saying “no” to the other player’s color pistol triggers a roll. It clearly does not in the example about color tech: knocking away the pistol is fundamentally the same as saying “no,” and it didn’t take a roll to do it. The pistol has no mechanical effect on the game 'til it gets burned.
A light just went off in my head.
I’m still disagreeing with your interpretation but now I’m thinking about the mechanical effect thing. I’m not sure if a “law” has any sort of mechanical effect at all, other than setting a Ob for a Law roll or as a linked test or FoRK into a DoW. I’m going to try and focus on in-game mechanical effects being what you’re burning. That might work, conceptually, for us.
Anyway, back to the color trumping color thing (which probably deserves its own thread). My feeling is that the scene economy rules aren’t quite as airtight as they might have appeared in playtest. Abzu himself acknowledges there’s at least one bad example in the book, and it sure sounds like he plays the game following slightly different house-rules than what’s in print.
The notion of having a budget of building rolls you can sprinkle, as needed (except in color scenes?), throughout the entire maneuver isn’t actually addressed or supported in the rules-as-written. It would change the scene economy quite a lot to make that explicit, and would simplify these discussions: Did you have a building roll left this maneuver? If so, you could burn up your pistol in response to the assassin knocking it away.
It raises other questions as well, again probably better suited to another thread. Can you “bank” unspent Builders? If the GM says “yes” without making you roll for it, but it was during a “building scene”, does that count as a banked Builder roll? And so on.
p.
