>From: "L.Castellucci" <lightcastle_at_...>
>
>So... how do you handle this? Do you all tend to use situational modifiers
>to
>make leaving the door open an easier sell job than handing over the
>jewlery?
Well, for me, I use situational modifiers as they seem appropriate. And I create resistances as they seem appropriate. One mistake is to always base the resistance on some imagined ability that belongs to the target. Check out the sample resistances table, and you'll see that anybody can resist certain things with a level that's much higher than their implied ability levels would give them. For instance convincing people of things that they're vehemently against is a 5W2, if I recall correctly. You can either view this as some 5W ability with a +20 modifier for them to resist, or just as setting the TN appropriately, whatever. The point is that the resistance to something like this needs to be very high.
So just use the samples and examples, and come up with a TN that makes sense for the contest at hand. Do not imagine that just because it's all the same abilities being used, that the TN is the same for all things. The Romance section of the sample resistances shows distinctly how the escalation goes for these sorts of things.
>Or do you make it that different success levels result in greater help?
>(The
>overall goal is to get the necklace, how much help do you get?)
This is a tortured subject, becuse it seems to me that the rules say one thing, and the examples say another. That is, the rules seem to clearly say that victory means victory and that you get your goal, while the examples seem to imply that you need a certain level of victory to get certain effects. I personally choose to read the examples as having complex goal statements that make them examples of the first principle.
With that readong, success means you get your goal, no matter what level. The level of victory only affects how well you did it, and what the secondary effects might be. Did your contest result in a minor victory to seduce? Well then the target will be at -10% to resist such attempts in the future. If it were a major victory, then it's -50%. A Complete Victory, and they're yours, you never have to roll again.
One thing I take advantage of is the statement that marginal victories tend to include negative effects (and marginal defeats have some positive effects). So if you get a marginal victory to have her open the door, she may agree to do so only if you bring her some rare flowers first. Or, if you get a marginal defeat, that could mean that she doesn't open the door, but tells you where to find somebody else who might do it instead.
Now, that said, there's an implicit problem with this reasoning, which is that a player could state that his charcter's goal is to kill his opponent (pretty common, right), in which case you could argue that he should cause that death on a minor victory. Actually, to be technical, he can only get the guy to dying, he can't even kill him.
Here's how I see this: it means that in no case can any goal statement mean "I remove the source of conflict permanently." If you state that you're trying to kill the opposition, it's the same as saying that you're trying to physically hurt them to accomplish your goals. Such that if you get a Complete Victory, the opponent is now in a state where, if you let them expire (you could choose to save them), they will no longer ever be a physical threat. Or probably any other sort of threat in this case. Complete Victory means that you just don't have to roll against this source of conflict ever again.
This goes to the "hunting deer" example. That is, can you kill a deer with a marginal victory? Yes. Because the source of conflict here is not the individual deer - there'll always be more in the forest. It's whether or not you get food on the table. If you ever to roll a complete victory, then you probably never have to roll again to hunt in this woods. Basically it's no longer an interesting conflict, it's become something that "no self-respecting hero would ever fail at." In fact, if you want to think about it mechanistically, you can think that for every such case that the character has, at some point in the past, rolled a complete victory. Getting dressed in the morning? The character got a complete victory on that when he was about 6 years old. And hasn't needed to roll since.
Yes this is a very "metagame" way of looking at it. But it's consistent, and allows you to accomplish any contest you like without having to apply the rules differently to each situation (like coming up with what each level of victory does differently).
Oh, and keep in mind that the healing resistance for a consequence of a Complete Defeat is only 20W:
"Ragnar goes hunting in the old wood. But something is different today. Normally he would have no problem bringing down any game. But the deer seem to know he's coming today. So you're going to have to roll to see if Ragnar can bring home dinner today...maybe those rumors about trollkin in the forest aren't so exaggerated?"
To say nothing of dead opponents haunting the character - death or any other result of a complete victory can simply be transformative, creating new sources of conflict. In fact, unless you're planning to end the story of this character, then it's good policy to transform most conquered sources of conflict.
Mike
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