Post by cassusaevum on Jan 19, 2020 0:25:09 GMT -5
Problem Statement: As written (and after reviewing the failure rules) I still find the Dramatic Tasks a bit too swingy for building tension, particularly for a group activity. The ability to count each raise as a success skews too hard towards easy victories; the fact that a regular failure on a club ends the task in failure for the entire group skews too hard the other way.
Goal: Modify Dramatic Tasks such that the "swinginess" curve is flattened a bit on both sides, making the tasks more likely to come down to the wire while enhancing the tension.
Dramatic Tasks
Feedback is welcome if anyone thinks the above is unworkable or too far away from what a Dramatic Task is supposed to be.
Goal: Modify Dramatic Tasks such that the "swinginess" curve is flattened a bit on both sides, making the tasks more likely to come down to the wire while enhancing the tension.
Dramatic Tasks
- All players should be dealt Action Cards (Duh! This was a stupid oversight on my part.)
- Clubs are still Complications. A simple failure on a Complication no longer results in the Dramatic Task failing outright. Instead, a simple failure on a Complication results in the loss of 1 success token (provided any have been earned at that point).
- A Dramatic Failure on a Complication results in the failure of the Dramatic Task. This is a "Fail Forward" in the sense that it is intended to create an interesting (as opposed to game-ending) wrinkle in the over-arching story. It's important that everyone is willing to "lean in" to the narrative in these cases.
- A Dramatic Failure at any other time results in the loss of a Success Token (provided any are in play) as well as the increasing of any additional mechanical counters (like the Alert Level) assuming any of those are in play. I considered having all Dramatic Failures result in automatic failure of the task, but if the players are making 12 rolls (if the task were to go the distance) in dramatic tasks and the chance of any roll being a Dramatic Failure is around 1 in 48 (assuming d8 skills on average), that would mean every Dramatic Task would have a 25% of failure from rolling snake eyes. That seems a little too high...
- Each individual roll is limited to 1 Success and 1 Raise (additional Raises have no further effect). This guarantees that a "standard" task requires at least 2 rounds to complete. I know this takes a bit of the fun out of a really high roll, but there is precedent within the system, so I don't think it's breaking the spirit of the game.
- If a task is "completed" mid-round, the round will still be finished. However, the Task itself cannot be failed (even via Dramatic Failure or loss of success tokens). The completion of the round is to let everyone play out their turn and to set the tenor of the completion of the task (which may have negative consequences, like the damage to the ship's engines). Of course, players can simply choose not to take an action if they don't have anything else to add to the story at that point.
- Sometimes additional mechanics (like the Alarm Level) will be introduced. This will not happen all the time, but these fall into the general bucket of "situational modifiers."
- For simplicity's sake, we will apply these same rules to both Individual and Group tasks (even though I think the rules as written are much more workable for individual tasks).
Feedback is welcome if anyone thinks the above is unworkable or too far away from what a Dramatic Task is supposed to be.
