[Solar] But what about the Space Battles?
Eero Tuovinen:
I recommend doing the NPC with high pools from soldiers in one of two ways:
Just give the NPC a high Pool and explain it as coming from his soldier supporters. Don't build complexity into where it will not be supported.Build real crunch that can be used by the players, too.
In this case, the reason I recommend capping the Pool is that the Secret gets unbalanced otherwise. Requiring an Ability check requires an Ability investment, which helps balance it. If you want more soldiers, pile on more Secrets:
Secret of the Commander
Whenever the character is commanding extras with Leadership, double the number of extras affected for the purposes of any of those Leadership Secrets in this thread. Cost: 1 Vigor per Leadership check
Or build a hard limit into the Secret and make it cumulative:
Secret of the Squad
The character has five extras in his squad. Get this Secret several times if you want more.
Secret of the Company
The character has something like a hundred men with him, more than enough for most situations. If a situation is just an issue of piling enough men on a problem, the opponent doesn't necessarily even have the leverage for conflict - the company of soldiers just automatically wins if you try to face them head on. Requirements: Secret of the Squad x3
Even with this, you need to answer a difficult question concerning your local crunch landscape: is it a problem if characters can temporarily access limitless Pool in certain fictional situations? If it is, you need to put in some limits to this "1 soldier = 1 Pool" thing. Don't break the crunch related to that by allowing unlimited Pool from a big army if you don't want the resulting consequences.
For the refreshment scenes, the ones I suggested include conditions that allow for social situations - nights at port for the crew and that sort of thing. You're of course right in that it's not as social as the default refreshments, but then I'm not that certain if a ship needs to get those. It's a ship, not a character, and certainly not a protagonist, however character-like its statistics are. Perhaps doing refreshment scenes that are all about how the ship can't be out haring in space will help shift attention to the characters on the ship for a scene or two, forcing the captain of the ship to work with his own assets for a change.
As for wikies, I have big liking for both Random and Clinton's own tsoy-wiki at tsoy.crngames.com. I recommend either of those for putting up your stuff in a refined form. Perhaps Clinton's wiki is slightly more logical, as it's dedicated to TSoY and it wouldn't hurt for somebody to get brave and put up their stuff.
oliof:
Actually, I like that Operations can be flying and weapons, too. Allows for Secret of Operations Override (base flying/fighting on ops control) and other nice stuff. But it's your game (-:
Simon JB:
Thanks for all the input, again, both of you!
I think I'll go with the soldier pool based on abilitiy roll, and break the 1 pool=1 soldier thing, which was never necessary from the beginning. So the fiction will decide the number of soldiers, if an exact number is needed at all since bandits and stuff will mostly just be "a bunch", and the leadership roll will determine how good use the commander can put his soldiers to.
A balance thing: since this is just like a regular effect, is the logic about it that having taken a secret about it relieves you of the pool cost to establish the effect? And would your Secret of the Commander still be balanced, if it actually doubled the effect at the cost of one pool? Should it be two pool? I'd very much like to use it.
As you can probably tell, in this case I'd prefer to build real crunch for the SGCs, rather than just calling numbers.
Harald, I think I'll go for Electronics for now. You would just use Secret of Auxiliary Systems and the like to use Electronics pool for flying and shooting and the other nice stuff you suggest.
About the wikiness, don't you think it would be better to put new stuff like this somewhere under a Solar System heading? Looking forward, I think that's what future players that start from the Arkenstone publications are going to look for, either they play in Near or not. In that perspective I think Random might be the best, under a new Solar heading. What do you think?
Eero Tuovinen:
A Secret that allows you to effectively have a free Effect is pretty well balanced, I think. Like so:
Secret of Equipment (a thing)
The character has an useful tool. You can create and preserve one free Effect related to it.
So it's just the same thing in different words:
Secret of Squad
The character has a bunch of men who do what he tells them to. One Effect related to them (probably created with Leadership (I)) is free to create and preserve.
Note that a character could easily take this Secret several times to get multiple free Effects. And, to make it more flexible:
Secret of the Commander
The character can use men under his command more effectively. When ordering his men around, the character can choose to use a related Effect instead of his own Ability check in conflict. In addition, when he has the time to maintain his troop, he can reroll a related Effect with a Leadership (I) check for free: make a Leadership (I) check, burn the original Effect value for bonus dice, and the result becomes the new Effect value.
As for the wiki thing, I haven't really thought of it that much. I don't personally mind putting stuff up in Clinton's wiki as long as he doesn't mind - he can always change its name to "Solar System wiki" if that becomes an issue. But a new page at Random is fine with me, too. Basically I think that whoever wants to present material or act as a nexus for gathering material together should choose the media he's comfortable with.
oliof:
I second the motion for the tsoy wiki.
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