[Solar System] Conflicts against nothing?
Paul T:
There is a section in the extended conflict chapter of the booklet that describes going into extended conflict... "against nothing". It refers to p. 40, which describes rolling against the opposition of an Effect set up by someone else. However, it says it applies to situations that are not opposed by anything at all--just a regular Ability Check.
In the original TSoY rules, you could only go to extended conflict after a resisted roll (an "opposed check" in Solar System).
I'm a little confused as to how this is supposed to work, and when one would do it.
It sounds like, effectively, you can bypass the negative stakes of an Ability Check by spending a Pool point, and rolling again. This seems kind of lame, from a game standpoint. It totally deflates the risk of a bad roll in an unopposed situation, it seems.
(There is a suggestion for the Story Guide to introduce some real opposition at this point, which is a great suggestion, and the only way I could see this actually working. But I'm pretty sure that won't always be possible.)
So, how do you handle this in your game? What is the intent of that rule?
oliof:
In vanilla TSoY, unopposed ability checks always needed just a marginal result to be successful. In Solar System
The way I read it, conflicts against nothing are generally dissuaded, but it is possible to use Effects as obstacles that are not as easy to overcome as an unopposed ability check.
shadowcourt:
Without having the booklet in front of me, it might be worth making the distinction in my own head between "against nothing" and "against something which isn't a character." For instance, climbing a mountain or piloting a ship through a storm are examples of checks against things which aren't characters, but aren't really against "nothing."
I tend to think of checks "against nothing" as the sort of "knowledge checks" of some games, where you'd be just trying to figure out if you're aware of a fact or have heard of someone famous by making an uncontested Ability check, or a Forgery check where you're trying to create a false document, but aren't in competition against anyone. In those situations, I can see why those checks are pretty boring. In most cases, you're either looking for the degree of Success Level for a check (in the "do I know this?" situation) or are really just establishing an Effect which is going to be contested later. The result of the Forgery roll is good to have, but you need to tuck it in your back pocket until someone gets a hold of your false documents and tries to verify their legitimacy.
Our house rule about "knowledge checks" tends to be "one useful fact per Success Level," so there's some incentive to actually scoring a little better than SL 1, and sometimes some weight to the incentive to spend pool points on a check, or push harder.
Was that what you meant by "checks against nothing", Paul, or did you mean the other scenario, where you're making a check against something which can't really have its own "intention" or will, such as climbing a mountain or fighting a storm?
-shadowcourt (aka Josh)
Paul T:
Precisely what I'm uncomfortable with is the implication that in Solar System (unlike TSoY) a player can go into extended conflict after a simple (unopposed) Ability check.
I'm really not sure how to handle this at the table. It sounds like it's effectively a "spend a Pool point to reroll the dice" rule. I'm attempted to stick with the TSoY rule--only resisted checks can be extended--but I'm sure there's some good reason for why Eero put it there.
What would it look like in play?
Eero Tuovinen:
The sole reason for that rule is logical system flow. It might not be important for others, but then the reason I had so much fun writing the booklet was the premise that I'm only describing my own way to play, not trying for anything more.
One of the first times I played TSoY, several years ago, had us in a situation that proved quite problematic in play. A character tried to get into a city he was barred from by swimming into the harbour. This is an obvious place for an Ability check, but the local aesthetic didn't really allow me to make it an opposed check - certainly I could have, but in truth it was just a man vs. nature thing. So we made a check, which the character failed in. The style of the game was pretty trad, hardline adventure fantasy stuff, so the stakes of that conflict were brutal: either the character'd succeed in his swimming feat or he'd be pulled by the tide out of the harbor waters and into the sea.
Of course the above situation wouldn't happen to me now, but then I was still a bit inexperienced with the rules system. I found it very annoying that one type of conflict has a very strong security net for the characters while another type does not. This at the same time that the system effectively tells you to focus on the character vs. character checks. Why would I, when it actually is much easier to fail in an unopposed situation? That doesn't make any sense to me, so the way I played since then was to be very, very careful to not put up any really significant stakes for unopposed conflicts.
(Note that whether an "unopposed conflict" even exists in TSoY is a matter of interpretation. I choose to interpret that it does, simply because the game is supposed to be an easy entry product for traditional roleplayers. Saying that you actually can't struggle against natural forces would be needlessly limiting. If you disagree, though, then you can just ignore those bits in the SS booklet and never get into the situation I describe above.)
Thus that text in the SS booklet is intended to balance unopposed conflict situations (which do happen in some styles of play; it's possible to antropomorphize them away, but that doesn't work for all genres) with opposed conflicts, making the former genuinely the less dangerous thing. It amounts to exactly what Paul said: the only way for a character to lose an unopposed conflict is to fail the initial check and then not insist on extension; the extended conflict is so easy that the character would have to be under some brutal penalties to not be able to manage that one unopposed success in those conditions. I wouldn't think it at all unreasonable if a group decided to just replace the unopposed extended conflict with the payment of a Pool point and be done with it - those conflicts are that much of a foregone conclusion. I guess it depends on your system aesthetics.
It's notable, however, that the failed check does matter somewhat for the process of the game: you can't create Effects or gain other mechanical roll-over benefits from checks made in extended conflict, so failing that initial check essentially means that you're proceeding with a "zero level success", even if you declare that extended conflict. This means that players have no mechanical reason to declare the extension, only in-fiction motivation, as they can still turn that failure into a gritty, hard-fought victory. This in turn means that you don't need to worry overmuch about the distinction between an unopposed conflict and a simple Ability check - if the player wants to extend, then by definition there's apparently something at stake in the situation, so it's not just an Ability check in preparation for something else. I find this a pretty elegant outcome myself.
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