>Robin Laws's answer was admittedly not perfect (7 AP might not be
>appropriate for games with multiple masteries), but it does offer a
>tradeoff: should I try to hurt my opponent, or go for victory by
>reducing his AP?
Can't you trade in multiples of seven to get more wounds? Maybe I'm mistaken, but it seems to me that if you just trade in a proportional amount of AP to starting AP that the overall effect is the same. In fact, if I allow the players to choose as many multiples as they like it adds even more choices to larger conflicts. Do I go with all AP loss? All Skill loss? Some combination in between?
Of course I'd consider Multiple Hurts to all be one big hurt. So if you did 21 AP and declared that three Hurts, I'd call it a single big -3 Hurt. Which, presumably, is proportional to the amount bid, which is roughly proportional to starting AP, which is roughly proportional to the Ability being used. That is, presumably a -3 delivered has the same overall effect as a -1 for a contest at less masteries.
Seems balanced to me.
> >If you want to explicitly injure an opponent (instead of the default
> >playing to win and not caring too much either way about whether the
> >opponent gets hurt in the process), you describe action and stake APs
> >as normal. As always, the AP bid must be appropriate to the action,
> >and so could be as low as 1AP for firing an arrow up to 40AP to leap
> >onto the head of a dinosaur and plunge your sword into its eye.
> >
> >If you lose, you take the normal result from the extended contest
> >table. If you win, opponent gains a new ability, at value X/2, X, 2X
> >or 3X, depending on level of victory.
>
>So is this in place of taking the AP? I bid 10 AP to Wound, and if I
>lose, I'm out 10 AP, but if I win, my opponent has a temporary
>(negative) augment? Is this cumulative (i.e. if I do it again, I can
>add another 10 to the foe's "Wounded" ability)?
I believe, David, that he's said clearly that each wound would be separately recorded as ability (Flaw). Then the largest would, in general be augmented by the smaller. Hence, if I have an arm wound listed as Arm Gash 14, and a Body Blow 8, that 8 augments the 14 to 15 making the overall augment a -2. This is pure genius, IMO (and not just because all of my designs work that way :-) ).
What's really cool is that you can apply Wounds as negative augments in the same way that any other Ability is used. That is, if you were running with the above wounds, I'd say that the Body Blow was the primary negative Ability being augmented by the arm wound. So 8 goes to 9, and there's only a -1 overall - the arm is having no effect on the running (unless the GM wants to roll for it, which becomes an interesting option).
Instead of multiple systems for resording, Abilities and Hurts, you only have one system that the players have to understand. Basically, Hurts are simplified Abilities that only display the negative augment. Why not just use the same system for everything? The recording, contrary to what another poster said, is the same - you still have to record every hurt you take. And when recording as Abilities, you automatically include more detail than just "Hurt", which is cool. So I'm not seeing a downside to this.
As I mentioned a lot of my personal designs are heading in this direction (inspired a lot by the game Donjon). The idea is that Aiblities produce other Abilities. In the case of Conflict you're trying to add negative Abilities to the opponent. The converse supposition is fascinating. It says that if your contest is to create a house, then the outcome will be proportional to the Ability used. So if I have Carpenter 5w, then I could create a House 5w in theory. Like wounds, money, followers, this house would be ephemeral until cemented with a HP. Depending on how you play, you can either start at 13 and work up to the total 5w potential of the house, or get it right off when it's complete. I'd probably use something like the Community Support table to determine the actual level of the Ability produced - meaning that you need a complete success to get 100% of the old Ability in the new Ability.
Basically, the idea is that Abilities can be used to give the in-game rationale for how things are created. I'm assuming that the much anticipated magic item creation rules will be something like this. If not, then I'm glad that I've had this forum to get the idea out there. Basically, characters can only make Items as powerful as they are. Note how this works with Rituals and Community support, however. With a lot of bonuses, a person can make items a lot more powerful than they are. Again, I'll leave it to individual GMs to figure out at what level or cost an item can be cemented at (the Fetish table comes to mind).
I think that this sort of idea really leverages off of the currency mechanic implicit in the HQ system, and I think demands further investigation.
Mike
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