Emily asks: “Can the players work together on challenges against others?”
Good question! My instincts are to say “Yes”, and further, let them work together on actions which can be challenged. So, to use a cliche fantasy example:
GM: “The goblins beat you up, take away your weapons, and put you in chains, dragging you away to their camp.”
Player 1: “Challenge 3!”
Player 2: “Yeah, I’ll put 2 points towards that as well.”
Player 3: “Challenge 2 as well!”
So the GM has a choice (assuming, for simplicity’s sake, no relevant qualities): pay out 7 point to the players to have their characters captured, or get 7 points total from the players, and their characters resist.
It strikes me that this could work the other way, too. Characters helping each other to [i]overcome[/i] challenges. So, for example:
Player 1: “I slay the Dragon!”
GM: “Challenge 8!”
Player 1: “Crap. That’s… kind of high.”
Player 2: “I’ll put forth 2 points for that.” (narrates how his character helps)
Player 3: “Me too!” (ditto)
Player 1: “Okay, that’s more affordable.”
This does give players who are working together a distinct advantage over players who are by themselves (such as a typical adversarial GM), but the way the game works, that advantage will quickly be nullified after being used a few times: in order to “buy out” a person, you need to at least double their point total each time. (IE, a challenge 8 when they have 7 points will overpower them, but leave them with 15 points, and you with 8 points less, so buying them out next time will be quite a bit trickier, probably)
The tricky bit here is that, if the challenge still ends up getting rejected, do you give points to the players who offered to help? Maybe once they commit themselves to helping they’re automatically part of the challenge, so once player 2 says “I’ll put forth 2 points to that”, then they HAVE to put forth 2 points for that if the other 6 points are taken care of, but if they aren’t, they get to claim at least 2 of the points from the challenger if it ends up being accepted.
Actually, figuring out how Qualities, as they currently stand, DO interact with collaboration “payouts” might be important. If I don’t want qualities to “stack”, should multiple players each get one quality? Or do I limit it to one per side (presumably, the player who actually declared the action, or challenge, in the first place, gets ‘dibs’ on use of their Qualities, if that’s the case.) Hmmm.
Tags: the starflower throne
September 2, 2009 at 2:31 pm |
Does the GM start with more points now? They’ll need more to counter the players especially if they can work together.
Seems like you need to pay out to helpers. Otherwise the helped player gets too big of an advantage.
September 2, 2009 at 9:07 pm |
Well, keep in mind: the initial set-up is a lot more ripe for PC competition, so it isn’t quite as much “the group versus the GM” as some games, and even if it did turn out that way anyway…
Let’s say there’s 4 players, who would have a total of 28 points, and the GM, who has 7.
The GM does something the players, as a group, really want to oppose, so they challenge 8. The GM, obviously, accepts the challenge. Now he’s got 15 points, and they’ve got (collectively) 20 points. They can afford to “buy out” the GM only one more time, and if they do, the GM will have 31 points, and the PCs will have an average of one point each.