[Solar System] Conflicts against nothing?
Eero Tuovinen:
Hey, I like that notion about pegging the resistance in extended conflict to the level of Harm the conflict threatened in the first place. Pretty elegant. One could then rule that an unopposed conflict with no Harm stakes is an automatic win with no mechanical benefits - rolling a "failure" in a non-harming situation just means that you get more or less what you wanted in the fiction, but can't gain bonus dice or an Effect or whatever from the check. Very dangerous situations with Harm pegged at 4+ would be potentially rather difficult to win in extended conflict this way, but them's the breaks. If I made extensive use of high-level Effects as conflict resistance, I'd put in some small rules bits to allow characters some options for overcoming them anyway.
As for statting up natural phenomena as characters, some folks are very fond of it, and it works mechanically. It's just not suitable for all genres. I could totally do it in a Glorantha game, but for Near and many other places that sort of anthropomorphism wouldn't feel right. I would have to be constantly discussing what the sea "wants" and how it "lets you go" or "changes intent to wash you to the shore", which all would be rather strange in a setting where inanimate things do not have spirits.
shadowcourt:
I like where some of this conversation is going, certainly, but it leaves me wondering about the very nature of unopposed conflict that triggers the extended one.
I'm interested in this specifically because it impacts how I might handle some of the Pere-di-Fey/pirates rules set that I've been playing with recently, where storms and similar weather issues are probably going to have a real impact.
Would you say that the check to handle a ship in a storm is always, essentially, an uncontested check? So that even an SL 1 is sufficient? How do you handle the increased severity of a more powerful storm, then? Via penalty dice?
Or would you do better to treat any storm as an Effect from the start, which has a rating to beat to safely navigate through? If it's an Effect, is the rating of it determined effectively arbitrarily by the Storyguide (based on how tough he wants it to be for a group to eke by unscathed), or would it be worth rating storms by their severity (from Mediocre to Master) and having the Storyguide roll to set the Effect strength?
I have a lot of different ideas about how best to build the system around this, but little certainty.
-shadowcourt (aka Josh)
Eero Tuovinen:
Well, my philosophical approach would be to always have resisting a storm be uncontested, unless the storm were caused by somebody or the storm were a person or the storm were just background for a race with somebody, etc. I would only use an Effect if there were a character somewhere who caused that Effect to be put into place: for example, if somebody mislead me and my ship and therefore that storm represents the abuse of my trust. This is really just a philosophical principle: all resistance to winning conflicts in Solar System comes from Abilities (Effect come from Abilities, for instance), which in turn come from personalized characters having experience invested into Abilities. Thus any conflict is between intentions powered up by Keys (or initial character generation, I guess), which in turn ensures that it is not possible to have your players' characters be seriously resisted by anything that is not inherently dramatic or able to be interpreted as such. So it's a sort of story hygiene issue for me; I'll never accidentally start a difficult conflict that can't be interpreted thematically if I don't have the tools for it, such as arbitrary Effects floating around.
So yeah, penalty dice for the storm. If you really wanted to, you could give yourself a permission to use more than two penalty dice for a really bad storm, perhaps... but I think it'd be better to find the human drama in the storm and structure such scenes around it: is the storm scene about the captain's leadership abilities? Have him conflict with his crew then, perhaps? Stakes of the conflict, to see whether the crew or the ship/captain takes the Harm brought upon them by the storm? Another approach would be to define a different non-conflict rules procedure for battling the elements... or it could be a different type of conflict procedure, perhaps. I have some vague notion of paying Pool points to overcome natural difficulties... something like a "5-point storm", and you have the option to take Harm or perhaps make a simple Ability check to bypass or reduce the payment... so the storm is still "hard", but it's not a conflict, but something else. A complication, if you will.
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