I'd like to add a comment about how I have run augments for this sort of contest (bearing in mind my house rule of "only the best augment counts"). I felt that the downside of augments first, leading to one big die-roll was that it made the die-roll too much of a focus and it was absolutely clear what the odds were before the roll was made. Also, becasue you need a big advantage to assure victory there is a tendency for a safety first approach to getting every last ounce of augment out of any available skill. My solution was to reverse the process - contest first followed by augment attempts. This does have a tendency to turn the resolution into a version of the "bad news I fell out of plane, good news I landed on a haystack, bad news it had a pitchfork in it" game but means you just do roll and if you need a +10 augment to recover the situation then you need to try for that level of augment.
I think it works OK for this sort of large scale enterprise where the details of the encounter are not clear in the first place; less well for for a "normal" action where preperation is part of the narrative.
Keith
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