Versus player action on a ongoing task

[dpolan (David)]

Hello,

Yesterday was our 19th session of our BW campaign and, on the last scene, some player interaction occurred when both players wanted to reach the same orb (that was about 10 meters up on the air).

Player A charged with their character into their enemies (two animated statues inside a huge room), when the other (Player B) stayed back. Played A intent was to kill their oponent (statue A), resolved through a simple martial test (he succeeded).

While Player A was charging into battle, Player B transformed himself into an eagle and started flying to the orb (that was floating on the top of the room, out of reach for a normal character). The issue is that Player A also wanted to take the orb, but was inside a battle with two oponents.

Would you let Player A to roll something like a linked test of Speed + Agility + Sword to react to Player B (the eagle) actions? (and then let Player B response on some way).

As we are not using something like Fight! on this scene, the initiative, duration and order of execution of the actions is kind of blurry, so I resolved it on a Dungeon World manner, asking the fiction if the eagle was fast enough for Player A to react (no).

Maybe the main question is, can one player interrupt a ongoing simple Martial Conflict for doing another action? (with penalties or oportunity attacks, for example)

Sorry for the long explaination, but we did not encounter this kind of situation before and was a bit of problematic end of session with both players arguing who should o shouldn’t act.

Kind regards

[Gnosego (Quincy)]

Do we know how long it takes to transform into an eagle in your setting? I imagine you’re using the Art Magic rules, which I am not as familiar with, so I don’t know how casting times works in that case.

The Falcon Skin spell, though, has a casting time of 12 Actions. That falls into a range of about as long as a Fight! exchange (or three).

So, using that as a baseline, I would say that those tests take as long as each other. I might be a bit cheeky and let whoever had the most successes over their individual Ob get an extra die to their follow-up race – Working Quickly and all.

And, of course, how the hell is your ground-bound warrior going to get to the orb? He’s not gonna jump, 10 meters, surely. If he doesn’t have a good answer to that, there’s no test. If he does have a good answer, it’s probably gonna be at a disadvantage or two against bird-man, eh?