> I believe there's really a very good reason for not
> nesting extended
> contests: the bookkeeping quagmire. This gets back
> to our original
> question, after a fashion: How do you shift goals
> during a conflict
> without creating nested extended contests? To be
> honest, this isn't a
> problem I've had to deal with in a game, and I don't
> have a clear answer on it, either.
The only times I've hit it, I've been doing chained simple, not extended, and that's much less of a problem.
Let's see: if "the party" are working their way towards Goal A, and one of their number is interrupted (by the phone, an attacking troll, or whatever), you'd probably separate that person from the main contest, remove their augments or AP from the pool, and run that contest separately (and in parallel). So in my example, if I and a friend were cooking a meal, and the phone went, I might leave him in charge of the kitchen while I answered the phone: he then has to cope without the recipe that only exists in my head.
Can we do something similar here, where the abilities being applied to the additional goal happen to belong to the same person? If those abilities were being used towards Goal A in the first place, then yes. (I can't use my "talk to other cook" ability at the same time as my "talk down phone" one). If not, I'm less sure what to do. Run two parallel contests, both with a "multi-tasking" modifier, perhaps?
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