[IAWA] Some minor questions...
Landon Darkwood:
So the one game of IAWA I played was an absolute hit. Probably my favorite night of gaming in at least a year or more.
But I have some procedural questions:
1.) In conflict, when you compare highest dice *after a roll*, it's always read from the highest number showing, not the size, right? So if my d8 comes up a 2, and my d6 comes up a 5, my roll is read as 5, 2.
2.) Does the advantage die always attach to the die of the highest *size*, or the highest *number* after the roll? So if I was rolling an advantage die with the example in #1, and it came up 3, would my roll be 8, 2 or 5, 5?
3.) One conflict we fudged our way through in my game was a case of alcohol poisoning that was self-inflicted by a soldier trying to cope with the aftermath of murdering a woman while possessed by his intelligent shortsword. We decided that really, the most interesting thing to do with that was to have the character struggle against the poisoning itself, to see if he could grit his teeth and stomp out that door to try and make things right, and at what cost. He lost and overcame it with the price of exhaustion (because of course, leaving him in the inn would have been just lame).
Now, the alcohol poisoning is a one-shot deal obstacle - not really worth making it an NPC because it has no sense of agency. I gave it a d6 d6 for the conflict and left it at that. For those rare moments that you do have an obstacle instead of a character as the 'opponent' in a conflict, is there a more 'right' way to handle this?
Darren Hill:
I''m not Vincent, but I've read enough IAWA Q&A threads to know the asnwers to your first two questions.
1. Yes: read in order of result, not dice size.
2. Yes - find the highest roll, then add the advantage die to it.
3. Hmm, that's a tough one. If the woman had stats, I might have done the attack using her stats - it's her memory, lingering. Then again, the guilt itself could have been created as an NPC, and might stalk the NPC - attacking him in future scenes! And maybe, in a Heroquest-like game, and depending how things went, that guilt might have become incarnate - some spirit of rage or shame or despair - to affect other people too.
Darcy Burgess:
What about having the character opposing herself? Different aspects of the personality, and therefore (maybe) different forms?
That could be really rockin.
D
Landon Darkwood:
Quote from: Darren Hill on January 26, 2008, 05:15:34 PM
3. Hmm, that's a tough one. If the woman had stats, I might have done the attack using her stats - it's her memory, lingering. Then again, the guilt itself could have been created as an NPC, and might stalk the NPC - attacking him in future scenes! And maybe, in a Heroquest-like game, and depending how things went, that guilt might have become incarnate - some spirit of rage or shame or despair - to affect other people too.
Man, did I screw up explaining how that went down. S'what happens when I try to be terse.
So, in the opening scene of the game, the soldier loses a conflict with his sword and kills the woman under its influence. The sword is one of my NPCs. The woman was the wife of the tavern owner, and the two of them were having a domestic dispute in the alley next to the tavern. So what you have is the soldier wanting to save the day, and the sword saying, "Screw that. I want woman blood. Go kill for me."
At the end of that conflict, I offer to take no dice from that player, but tell him he has to kill the woman. He adds, "And I leave the sword stuck in the woman's chest, and bust into the now empty tavern still halfway into a possessed stupor and burn it away with alcohol."
And because he's all a hero and stuff, it's not enough for him to be really hung over. He's totally poisoned himself. And in the scenes that follow, his worst enemy on earth tries to nurse him back to health because he needs the soldier's help. That part's not important right now.
Anyway, so, his enemy's off trying to get the sword back (which is way bad 'cause it can possess people to kill), and some random dude may already have his hands on it, and soldier-boy is all like, "I can't have this. I'm leaving, I don't care what state I'm in." And I say, "There is something that can and will oppose that action, but it's not a person. Now what? Look, you pick forms, and I'll do d6 d6 to oppose." And I checked again to make sure this wasn't a dumb move, and everyone agreed it'd have meaning.
So we rolled. And the soldier lost. And got exhausted, vomiting his way out the door (not literally - in the moment it was totally not a funny thing in any sense). And that did have meaning.
I wouldn't have done it any other way in retrospect. But I'm interested in hearing alternate takes on how I could have done it, in case another way sounds better for the future.
Darcy, that's a fine, fine notion on the surface, and I no doubt will steal that and use it somehow. Don't think it would have worked for this situation because there was no internal conflict to speak of. I'd have had trouble intuitively assigning the character's forms to an opposite side. But, I dig that a whole, whole lot.
Lars M. Nielsen:
As I see it, since you only roll the dice if another character can and will oppose you, Hero-guy could just walk out that door if he chose to.
Of course, then Evil-dude could say: "When I was nursing you back to health, I was actually making the poisoning worse. So you aren't going anywhere".
Then dice would roll.
A "Save vs. Alcohol Poisoning" is not what I would do.
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