Post by cassusaevum on Jan 23, 2020 21:55:05 GMT -5
I like SWADE. It's solved a lot of the issues I had with previous editions of Savage Worlds and it's expanded on some nice mechanical and narrative tools. I'm still feeling my way around some of those rules and tweaking them to adapt to my running style. After much noodling, this is how I'm going to try to incorporate some of the things I've been playing with going forward. They're all sort of different flavors of Skill Challenges, with varying degrees of complexity, structure, and narrative.
Dramatic Tasks will be used in situations where a single character is performing the "dramatic" action. This might be in conjunction with combat (R2 unlocking a security door while the Han and Leia try and hold off Stormtroopers) or it might be an "elapsed time" kind of scene (when Dug needed to hack into the data core during the hyperspace journey). These types of tasks will use the standard Dramatic Task rules. I'm not a huge fan of the group dramatic task implementation, so we'll be reserving the rules-as-written for solo tasks.
For group tasks, we'll either use Quick Encounters or my somewhat expanded Dramatic Encounters as defined below.
Quick Encounters feel very much like 4e Skill Challenges to me (and that's not a bad thing). We'll use various implementations of Quick Encounters when the narrative is more loosely defined and the entire party is involved. This might include things like investigations or politicking. I see this working particularly well when the individual party members are pursuing different aspects of a goal on their own (e.g. if the party is split up).
Dramatic Encounters will be used as a more structured version of a Quick Encounter. This is similar to the "Staged Encounters" in SWADE, but I think the implementation is different enough to spell out.
Dramatic Encounters
Dramatic Encounters require obtaining a certain number of success tokens in a certain number of rounds. The number of tokens and rounds will vary depending on the complexity of the Encounter at hand. Structurally, Dramatic Encounters will work as follows:
Dramatic Tasks will be used in situations where a single character is performing the "dramatic" action. This might be in conjunction with combat (R2 unlocking a security door while the Han and Leia try and hold off Stormtroopers) or it might be an "elapsed time" kind of scene (when Dug needed to hack into the data core during the hyperspace journey). These types of tasks will use the standard Dramatic Task rules. I'm not a huge fan of the group dramatic task implementation, so we'll be reserving the rules-as-written for solo tasks.
For group tasks, we'll either use Quick Encounters or my somewhat expanded Dramatic Encounters as defined below.
Quick Encounters feel very much like 4e Skill Challenges to me (and that's not a bad thing). We'll use various implementations of Quick Encounters when the narrative is more loosely defined and the entire party is involved. This might include things like investigations or politicking. I see this working particularly well when the individual party members are pursuing different aspects of a goal on their own (e.g. if the party is split up).
Dramatic Encounters will be used as a more structured version of a Quick Encounter. This is similar to the "Staged Encounters" in SWADE, but I think the implementation is different enough to spell out.
Dramatic Encounters
Dramatic Encounters require obtaining a certain number of success tokens in a certain number of rounds. The number of tokens and rounds will vary depending on the complexity of the Encounter at hand. Structurally, Dramatic Encounters will work as follows:
- Deal Action Cards and act in Initiative Order.
- Clubs are Complications. 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 Encounter. 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.
- Each individual roll is limited to 1 Success and 1 Raise (additional Raises have no further effect).
- 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."