>From: Philippe Sigaud <sigaud_at_...>
>
>Mike or Roderick will probably say the rules say that anyway :)
>Considering the jungle/temple as a horde...
I think that's true (you could count up the points for each ant...). But either way works. You don't really know how many beasties they're going to come across. So set the AP at a level that's equal to what you feel the overall difficulty of the contest is about.
That said, the players can probably stack up their AP under a leader as well. Or is there only one player hero involved in each of these?
One thing to keep in mind is that the logic of AP bids dictates that you look not only at the bidder's AP, but the target's. That is, let's say you have a situation where you have a 200 AP forest against a 30 AP character. The current round is the forest coming up against the character with some beastie that would, on it's own, have only 30 AP. Let's say that the beastie is going all out for the kill - by the chart in the book, you could bid 200 AP. Or even a relatively conservative 100 AP. Certainly 65 AP. But that ignores that you don't want the player to win the contest if he wins the round - there's still more to go. Instead you should look at whether or not it's enough to take out the character. 15 AP is enough to do that with a good enough roll. 30 AP for really dangerous stuff. 60 AP is for where any slip-up will end the extended contest. 91 AP is for when even a minor slip-up will mean death or other permanent alteration of the target.
Use these as a guideline instead, until the AP of the forest gets low enough to be comparable. This way a really good win against the beastie won't end the overall extended contest right there.
Put another way, a forest's beastie going all out, isn't the same as the forest going all out. The forest bidding 200 AP would be it showing the character a shortcut that he could take, but he has to overcome the pygmies, ants, man-eating plants, rope-bridge, and all of it all at once. Or something like that.
Note that you can do that (in the Mummy Returns there's one jungle scene that's like that, which could be considered one round. But if you really want to shortcut things that way, just make it a simple contest. And afterward prompt the players to narrate:
"Whew, that was a rough trip. The ants were bad enough, but when the pygmies came at us, I thought we were done for."
"Yeah. What really got to me, however, was being poisoned. Good thing Ragnar figured out a cure for that when we got past the rope bridge. And good thing we were able to hold on to that when it collapsed, and could climb up!"
"You have to be kidding, what about the giant python that grabbed me?"
That can give you all the same color, while allowing you to move on much more quickly. Only do an extended conflict if you want the escalating tension that you get from actually seeing the action progress.
>Do you tend to give ratings beforehand, or just note some possible
>attack/parry and go with it?
I don't think it hurts to list some ideas for ability levels before hand, if that makes you more comfortable. But I also think that it's unneccessary, and that winging it can produce just as good results. So I advocate doing less work here. I mean, what if they decide to use their potion of flight to get over the jungle? Sure you can have the pygmies shoot at them, but is that the same TN? And the rope bride is right out of the picture.
Again, situation changes. Like in a fight with swords where one player disarms the other one round. Well that player can't then very well say that he attacks with his sword (he can use swordsmanship ability with a big improv penalty, but...). The same thing is true for any extended contest. You can't tell up front what the players are going to do, so planning things out can leave you with a lot of unused material. When doing a fight EC, you don't plan out certain maneuvers, do you? You could, certainly, but it's simply not neccessary.
>I guess I'll list your ideas, decide on a beginning AP total and let it
>ride that way. I'll determine ratings and AP bets on the fly.
Cool. I'm sure you'll do it justice. Can you post the results when done, so we can see what problems you might have run into, or what worked especially well?
Mike
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