This was one of my favourite parts of the new game, even though I was a fan of the old Extended Contests, I still disliked the whole turn taking idea. I even experimented with concurrent contests in the old system, with only moderate success.
It always felt a bit strange to me that the Simple Contest was based around two opposing actions conflicting, and the Extended Contest split these up and fell into a "trading blows" pattern.
It really became a problem when I stopped stating NPCs. To my way of thinking players act and the narrator works out who or what is opposing it, what goal is implied in that resistance, and how high that resistance should be based on any number of factors but mainly story influenced.
Remember that at its core the game system doesn't care if the resisting side has anything called an ability. As a narrator you may stat out NPCs or anything else for that matter, but the rules don't require it, or even advise you to do it.
Powered by hypermail