Tough decisions and fair missions

The GM’s turn seems great at keeping the pace high… and it seems the GM has a lot of power to push the players through a whole adventure. I imagine this power has to be used very responsibly?

For example, imagine a PC with a belief like, “I must protect my uncle, despite his treachery to Lockhaven.” It seems it would be bad form to send the players on a mission to assassinate the uncle, however dramatic, because there’s no way for them to spend a check during the mission to convince teammates to disobey orders and smuggle the uncle into exile.

If the the PCs were all in agreement, that’s easier, they could just propose kidnapping him as an alternate approach to the ‘uncle obstacle’. But it seems that tough choices like this are fertile ground for a bit of entertaining intra-team strife.

Is pulling something like this off a matter of timing? If Gwendolyn said at the end of the GM’s turn, “Welcome back, rest up for your next mission because it’s a biggie, you’ve got to take out Uncle Badric.” That way, the players could spend checks arguing right away.

It seems a general principle is that missions must be consistent with the PCs beliefs.

Have there been any discoveries like this during playtesting about how to use missions … fairly?

What about bailing on a mission halfway through? (“This snow will be the death of us. We’re sick to the last mouse, and Pico and Wesley are injured besides. Forget this damned badger, I say! Let’s turn back to Lockhaven and try again in the spring.”)

“I must protect my uncle, despite his treachery to Lockhaven” seems more like a Goal than a Belief, given its very specific applicability. I’d encourage the player to think a little bit about the larger-scale idea behind that belief and re-write it accordingly. (“Everyone deserves a second chance.” “Even the worst mouse deserves the guard’s protection.”)

If it was written as a Goal instead, well, players write their goals after the mission has been given, so the player is making his/her own stumbling block in that case. If that’s what they want, let them have it!

And here I thought this thread was stillborn!

I appreciate your comments, but really the belief was crafted to illustrate my question, not to be a good belief in its own right. The key bit of my post that I was particularly looking for feedback on was the next sentence:

It seems it would be bad form to send the players on a mission to assassinate the uncle, however dramatic, because there’s no way for them to spend a check during the mission to convince teammates to disobey orders and smuggle the uncle into exile.

If they bail on a mission, fine… hit them with something else instead on the way back…

Smuggling the uncle shouldn’t require a check; it should be the other PC’s as mission obstacle for that mission. Let them do the DoW amongst themselves.

I used Saxon as an Obstacle for Nola and Folker; they thus became obstacle for him; this was because Nola and Folker picked a compromise in a DoW (which he’d opted out of) that violated his belief. They got to treat him as an obstacle. They wound up compromising with him, too.

The big complaint my wife has is not being allowed to heal others during the GM Turn without spending checks; her character, Nola, is built as a healer.

In general, I let the players have 1 “preparations” roll of some kind per obstacle, excluding healing (however, it may include finding food if they are not yet hungry). This is usually used to get a weapon, at the risk of a complication or condition (usually a condition). We’re usually running 1.5 to 2 hours for GM phase, and 0.5 to 1 hour for player phase, tho’ last night (sunday; it’s still monday for me as I write) we had one player phase run 1.5 hours due to a total of 10 checks and lots of narrative. (Our sessions run 6-8 hours, and 2-4 missions; we adjudicate Belief, Instinct, MVP, Workhorse, and Embodiment after mission 2 and again at end of evening; Goal after each player turn. Mission 3 is effectively start of session 2…

My playtest group did something similar, although we handled it with what were basically linked tests to break up high-Obstacle challenges into smaller, discrete tasks. During their beetle cattle-drive, for example, one mouse blazed the trail, one mouse made some harnesses, and the third mouse helped the fourth on the Insect Husbandry role. I lowered the Husbandry Ob depending on if the first two mice were successful in what they were doing.

Did we go outside of the rules with this, or did other groups do similar things?

This reminds me of how Conflict is used for journeys, using those different skills as relevant to different actions.

See Complex Obstacles on page 92 of the book. We frequently used this when we played, as a middle-ground between basic tests and full-blown Conflicts.