[In A Wicked Age ...] Particular strengths accumulating through the stories
Ron Edwards:
Hi Michael,
As with Shawn's post, your particular strength list is simply exciting to read as such and instantly highlights themes and all manner of stuff about the setting. As a minor addition, since I live in the Chicago area, it's especially fun to imagine what's going on in your group's story.
Anyway, starting with the last point first, about Unique, you ask "what's the story behind it," and there isn't any story, merely the way we utilized the rule and find satisfying. We didn't think of Unique or any other option for particular strengths as being necessarily tied to specific kinds of game content. I mean, upon making a given particular strength, then yes, then obviously the options chosen become integrated with the fictional nature of that particular strength, but we didn't see it as going the other way 'round. When Julie defined Animating the Inanimate as Unique to her character Jila, then that particular strength became simply Unique, no matter what else it is. Jila is now defined as a kind of Daedalus character, and that's that. As you can see from the above posts, we even read the rule as being pretty strict, for Jila always and forever, although above, Vincent clarified certain rules applications that provide some wiggle room.
I'm not arguing for or against either what we did or how you describe it. I'm merely talking about what we did, with zero interest in debating the rules. Just in case.
I've also been very generous to NPCs regarding Broad, naming two of their forms as you can see from my lists above. So in our game, when an NPC has a Broad particular strength, they do indeed get the extra die a lot. I had the impression that NPCs are a tad under-powered after play gets going for a while, although that was probably influenced by my error in not giving new NPC particular strengths Significance 2 (as we just saw in your thread [IaWA] NPCs After Chapter 2). Sadly, I even forgot to apply the real rule in our latest session when I should have known better.
Best, Ron
Michael Loy:
Yeah, I used to live up in Chicago - it's been fun going back into my memory for concrete details.
We haven't gotten far enough along to really explore this theory, but I suspect that NPCs get their main advantage from being able to take damage a little more readily. Players have to worry about how their characters will be looking next session ... they can always refresh their character sheet, but that requires forgoing an advance. An NPC has no real reason to back down, and the Owe List rules ensure that they'll fairly often have a slight dice advantage over the PCs, so I've been speculating that the PCs wouldn't get too overpowering. I haven't been there in play, though.
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