Rule interpretation
The Dragon Master:
Number 6 raises a question that has been raised on here recently. Where does it say that if you have 0 dice, you roll one, with your opponent getting an extra die? I never did find that in the main book. Is that an addition by one of the other books? Is it on the wiki somewhere? Some kind of errata?
Neon White:
Dragon Master, I think that rule is not in the main book. I read it here on The Forge somewhere.
Ron, thanks for your time spent in answering all of my questions. Your responses are immensely helpful!
Quote from: Ron Edwards on June 13, 2009, 06:00:20 PM
Answering these questions was a lot of fun.
I'm glad!
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Any attack using Special Damage uses the demon's Power as the score for the roll.
You're absolutely right about Fast. That ability is quite useful if one (including the demon) is using a score which is less than the demon's Power, but completely negated if whatever score being used is equal or higher than that Power. That is on purpose.
Excellent, thanks. That cuts to the heart of the issue and from that angle, all of the rest of your answers to my questions 1 and 2 now fall out naturally.
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2) When an object demon has not conferred its special damage, how does it attack if it doesn't also have range?
This depends to a very great extent upon what sort of object we are talking about and what exactly is supposed to be happening which is described as Special Damage. You'll have to give me a more specific in-game situation. Some object concepts will be much more limited than others in this regard.
I was thinking of the knife example, so your comments below have answered the question. I suppose the key insight here is that problems arise when you take 'colour' too literally and try to bend the system to match it, rather than the other way around.
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Does it carry over into the next round or several?
I'm not entirely sure what this means. Are you thinking in terms of poison steadily affecting a target over time?
This question was actually about an occasion where the knife-object-demon activates its special damage (poison on a blade) after the wielder of the knife has already acted for the round. The question is resolved from your previous answers explaining that either a demon confers its special damage, or it doesn’t. If not conferred, there is no need for the wielder also to ‘hit’ in order for the damage to be applied. The demon does the attacking. It's just a case of working out a way for the colour to match the system.
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Is the damage done based on the wielder's stamina or the special damage, or both (successes on one rolled into the next roll?) How can they do so if the rolls are simultaneous at the start of the round?
I hope you can see that the founding assumption of your later questions in this section - which is to say, that the poison is somehow dependent upon the wielder successfully hitting - is incorrect, making most of your concerns unnecessary.
Precisely! And I’m delighted to have it cleared up!
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3) Do successes in defense from a previous round always give bonuses to an action in the following round? Does this affect initiative too? (I suspect it is only when the new action is directly relevant to the success-generating action from last round.)
Let me clarify one thing - bonuses from successful rolls affect the character's next roll, regardless of whether that roll is later in the current round or in the following round.
Ok, that's the bit I was missing. For some reason I had confused 'next roll' and 'next action' in my thinking.
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I also need to clarify something which I think you know, that the "initiative" roll in Sorcerer is precisely the same as the attack roll.
Yes, after reading all about Fast and Initiative, this comes through loud and clear.
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This "initiative" talk is hurting my head a little bit ... it's not an initiative roll. Those are the action rolls, what the characters are doing. I know you probably know that.
Apologies! It’s just shorthand to make the distinction between the dice as applied to the action and the dice as applied to order of acting. So far, the only reason I have encountered for the two to be different is where characters are using Fast. We have several of those in the fight scene in question and so it has been relevant to our discussions.
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6) If a character has taken damage in a previous round, his next action may be at enough penalty dice to give him zero or negative dice pool for his next action. I understand that zero is the minimum, and so in a contested action one would normally add one die to both the wounded character's dice pool, plus also that of the person acting against them (please confirm this understanding). How exactly does this work in a combat situation where multiple characters are attacking that same wounded character - do they all get +1 die to their attack?
I'll start with your second sentence: your understanding of that issue is exactly right. To answer your last question, we have to presume that although the character has penalized to zero, they did not take enough damage at once to knock them out of acting at all. All right, given all that, then yes, all the attackers would get the +1 bonus. Sucks, huh?
People who wonder how several player-characters could possibly defeat a single, powerful opponent should be taking notes.
Thanks, this is exactly the situation I was thinking of. One character gets in a lucky shot, perhaps with non-lethal special damage (which can inflict an insane amount of temporary damage), the bad-guy staggers for a moment from the blow, and then everyone else jumps in to take advantage of his distraction.
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8) Do roleplaying bonuses, prior successes and other currency-related bonuses add to the single die available for passive defense? If so, then for a low stamina character, the bonuses could easily make him always prefer to always suck-up an attack rather than abort to carry out an active defense.
Yes they do apply! However, your "easily" does not correspond to my usage of the bonus dice rules. Insincere and uninteresting attempts to gain bonus dice should not be honored. (see Role-playing bonus dice, Bonus dice questions, and [Sorcerer] The cold and bloody northland for help with this). And if the stated actions are consistently sincere and interesting across many scenes and actions and sessions, then you should not only be awarding bonus dice to this player (and yes, helping his character survive, or at least permitting better odds), you should also be buying him or her beer and possibly offering sexual favours.
Ok thanks, I'll read through the threads. I'm expecting to find out that my players and I need to up our game in this regard. Given it is just a test scene, we haven't been working the drama as hard as we might have. Probably my fault for not putting enough at stake.
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I hope you can see that the concept of the "round" is actually not as important as the concept of "next roll" for temporary bonuses and penalties of all kinds. Hey, I found this thread: How long do rollover bonuses last?.
I'll read the thread, however I definitely take your point here.
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I hope all of this helped! Let me know.
Most certainly and I was pleasantly surprised to find responses posted overnight! I may have a few more questions for you / the forums as time goes on. I may need some help refining some aspects of the definition of humanity in the game.
Actually, I do have one more question right now, though not related to Sorcerer rules. Where on The Forge is the appropriate place to post a message looking for other players? I am based in London now and, with my gaming group back in Australia, I'm looking for one or two others to try out Sorcerer face-to-face.
Thanks again for the time taken,
Adam
Ron Edwards:
Hi Adam!
You wrote,
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For some reason I had confused 'next roll' and 'next action' in my thinking.
I suggest that this still needs a bit of further dissection.
As I see it, the issue lies with the term "action." In the text, when it says "next action," it is referring literally to the next roll. So next roll and next action are exactly the same thing.
I think you might be thinking of "action" more in a wargame sense, in which the word is a game term referring to the formally-stated attempt that every character must go into a round with. I'm using it instead in a literalist sense, which is to say, the next time you have to roll, that's your character's next action. In that sense, the formally stated "going into the round now" action is a subset only.
Does that help, or make sense?
Best, Ron
Neon White:
I believe I understand the sense in which you are using 'action'.
When I said 'next action' I was thinking (mistakenly, it now seems) that an aborted action is not actually an action. When a character makes their roll for the round, this establishes the order in which they act relative to others. This roll also uses up any penalty dice and benefits from any relevant previous successes.
I was getting confused about what happens if the character needs to defend before he completes his intended action. Drawing out my wrong thinking a little further, I was thinking that his choices are:
a) abort the intended action, in which case the next actual 'action' for the character is an active defence; or
b) sucked up, in which case the next action is a passive defence (which again may be considered an action or not an action).
That's what I was thinking, however based on your comments earlier, it's all a lot clearer (and simpler) than I was trying to make it.
It is easy (for me at least) to get tied up in language here and I think things are much simplified by thinking about anything giving rise to a roll as an 'action'. It doesn't matter whether it is successful, completed, interrupted, etc. There is sufficient conflict to require a roll, the character is doing something. It's an action and any dice bonuses or penalties are carried over.
Sound about right to you?
adam
Ron Edwards:
Perfect.
Here you are, slashing left and right as you close in - but oh shit, he's faster and plants a foot into your gut - you totally give up on the slashing and do your best to stop your forward momentum to either avoid the worst of the kick or maybe even force it to miss.
Or finish it differently - you go "Huhhh!" and eat the power of the kick as best you can on short notice, doing your utmost to slash the bastard anyway.
In either case, your next roll following your initial "gonna slash him" roll is an action of its own.
All of which is only to add some color to your perfectly correct statements.
Best, Ron
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