Re: Running a gang

From: Alex Ferguson <abf_at_...>
Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2004 18:17:13 +0100


On Wed, Apr 28, 2004 at 08:22:16AM -0700, David Dunham wrote:
> Of course, perhaps my problem was how I let the player heroes
> combine. I figured this was a simple contest, so I had them all
> augment one player's combat ability with their own. This gave
> everyone some sort of contribution, but it didn't seem like all that
> much (since any one person's augment was typically less than +6 --
> far less than the +10-+20 that people can augment themselves).

If you're happy with that level of multiple self-augmentation, why not multiple mutual augmentation?  

> Perhaps I should have used the Mass Effort rules -- this would work
> fine for the NPCs but wouldn't really give the other players scope to
> contribute (except as raw numbers on the Community Support table).

The two could be combined. The point being perhaps that while '103 people' and '100 people and my mates Tom, Dick and Harry' are equivalent in a world/"sim" sense, they're (potentially) different in a story/"narr" one. (Correctness of the use of the terminology in the Edwardsian sense not guaranteed, due to the non-occurrence of 'premise', 'synecdoche', etc.)

There's another issue here regarding "adding" abilities, i.e. ways of mechanically combining ability ratings to take into account both the actual ratings, and the numbers of warm bodies, but that supposes what sort of assumptions you want to make about the nature of the ability scale, much less the desirability of adding a third system to do something we have two systems for already, at least in broadly conceptual sense.

Cheers,
Alex.

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