@inthemanual that's often how it goes in any fight where nobody has a reason to do anything other than stand beside their target and punch 'em.
there's a conflict we had in a doctor who game between myself, @trogdor and @BESW, where The Master (the villain, if you're not in the known about that part of doctor who) brought us into a room where there was (a) a brain-altering device on one side of the room with one of the characters imprisoned in it, with (b) with the master on another platform using it (c) with the override levers on another platform. this gave us reasons to be in more places than just "beside The Master, punching him".
@doppelspooker I have the impression that GW has GM-fiat levels of difficulty when it forces you to do more or less rolls in order to achieve something. I was thinking to the 16 HP dragon story, you can't just deal damage to the dragon, you need to manoeuver aroound to reach its weak points before - and that introduces more points of failure.
It seemed like a conflict at the time. Some guys were looking for a member of the group, the group was jumpy and thought they were threatening, so they wanted to fight them.
I also wanted to have some kind of conflict in the first couple games, because we were trying to transition from DnD into Fate, and some people really liked DnD for optimization and combat
it's taken me a while to figure it out, but i generally just don't use conflicts for physical confrontations unless they seem genuinely worth the effort.
entire fights can be resolved with a simple opposed dice roll, or a contest or a challenge.
taking out every guard around an army station can be a single overcome roll of Stealth vs a difficulty of 5. (for every guard. one roll.)
everyone knows that the perimeter guards are always chumps :D
@doppelspooker What do you get out of simplifying it to a single roll? Why choose to do that instead of describing each one as a separate challenge? They could each even have their own, slightly unique environment, providing different aspects that could be used to make the players lives more interesting
@inthemanual I don't want to spend five hours going through each individual perimeter guard when I only have three hours to play. They are not important. We don't care about them. Have you seen a movie about a stealth infiltration which focused on each, individual, every single one of the 50 guards being taken out, or did the sneaky character just go off saying "i'll take care of it" and come back later as a body falls on the ground saying "okay they're gone"?
fate empowers us to zoom in to the extent things are interesting, or remain zoomed out to the extent they're not really at all.
i play fate so that i can do things other than spend 95% of my time in ultimately meaningless combats with meaningless opponents that aren't worth the time they take; it's why i'm not playing D&D.
@inthemanual i agree, and they're montages so we can move past them in under a minute and move on to the more exciting stuff.
on a tie: they take out the guards, but make too much noise and they know it's only a matter of time until one of the bodies are found -- the group is free of guards, but that's only going to last for a minute at most before the place goes on high alert.
on a fail - they get discovered and the alarms are set off. they may still take out most of the perimeter guards.
on a HUGE fail (like, by -3 or more) - they not only don't take out the guards, they get caught by them and held hostage.
or alternately, on a tie they get the guards taken out, but they have to leave something valuable behind -- they use up all their ammo, or all their knives, or some part of their gear is unavailable for the rest of this mission.
since they're failing at an overcome they can also succeed at serious cost, which could mean taking so long they'll be unavailable for a couple of scenes and they signal the group to go ahead without them. or, they took a wound while taking out one particularly tenacious guard (mild/medium consequence), or they accidentally picked up some of their own hallucinogenic neurotoxin so they'll be a bit loopy for a while (also a consequence). stuff like that.
@doppelspooker Unfortunately, it's hard to narrate something as awesome as the spiral staircase scene in IP man. Better leave that sort of scenes to movies
@Zachiel it's still possible to narrate awesome scenes reflecting how a challenge or roll unfolded, and our fellow players' imaginations can do the rest of the work.
And different stories even. If the infiltration of the Evil base is the whole story for the night, you can spend a lot more time on taking out guards and figuring your way inside.
I'm influenced by the fact that 4 hours is a very long session for our group, mind. Most of ours are 2-3 hours at most of actual effective game time.
@inthemanual I agree with that. If the whole session is about simply getting into the base (and not also doing what you're doing in there, and then getting back out), it's worthwhile zooming in on individual guards.
@doppelspooker ours are 4 on average, 5-6 is long, I don't think we've had one go less than 3
@doppelspooker Maybe not even all of them, but just key ones. You can montage the mooks but zoom in on the gatekeeper, the captain, etc.
I also got the impression that conflicts can be relatively long in Fate, since it seems like there's quite a bit of stress you can take compared to what you can dish
@inthemanual Yep, conflicts we've run with just one opponent have taken half an hour minimum.
I tend to use Avatar: the Last Airbender's handling as my rule of thumb for when to use a Conflict and when to not, when representing a physical fight.
@inthemanual In Avatar, there was a lot of fighting. However most of the time, it just came down to this: the protagonists want to do something, or get somewhere, or accomplish some goal. Other people want to stop them, and are willing to physically interpose themselves between the protagonists and their objective, and use violence, to stop the protagonists. The protagonists use the minimum amount of force to move past them, whatever that means -- subdue, evade, etc.
In those situations, there's a goal more important than "beat this guy up" -- so they're not going to waste more time or energy than necessary.
On the other hand, sometimes, a fight is deeply personal. It's an Agni-kai, or someone is crazy and needs to go down. The stakes of the fight are entirely that both sides want the other side to be taken out of the picture -- what that means varies (one side might want the other imprisoned, the other is out for blood) but the point is neither side is done until the other side is finished.
This is the only kind of fight I'd model with conflicts.
All the others aren't important enough for that level of zoom. They might be important, they're just not important enough.
And the goals make the end-condition of "keep beating each other up until a side concedes or is taken out" more difficult to manage in the other, softer scenarios.
@inthemanual Well, bear in mind that escaping, or getting defeated but not quite as poorly as could've happened, is a thing that could happen.
In the very first episode, Zuko conceded by opting to let the avalanche imprison his ship.
In the fight beneath the Earth Kingdom, with Zuko and Azula vs Aang and Katara, Aang pushed it too hard, didn't concede, and instead got taken out -- and Azula used the opportunity to narrate "Aang dies." Katara concedes, flees with Aang's body, and pulls off a major trick to bring him back.
@inthemanual He was fighting Aang, who was trying to get away but couldn't because they were surrounded by snow and there was nowhere to go.
(actually, sorry, that's not the first episode -- that's like, episode three or four or something.)
@inthemanual (also, sorry, i think around this point in the conversation i was coming on way too strongly about the issue -- it must've brought up some bad memories or something.)
@doppelspooker No worries. I understood what you were saying, and the tone wasn't offensive.
Would anyone be interested in helping me understand the rules by playing? perhaps running some kinda one-shot? not time sensitive at all, I'm not planning to use the system til february.
@Maximillian Lan Tzu the Romantic Poet's experiments with heart-based lightning bending were extremely short lived (having only conducted one) but everyone learned a lot of important lessons from them.
D&D 5e clarification: I noticed that Commoner NPCs (for example, peasants) have a +2 to-hit with clubs. That's the same prof. bonus as a 1st level Fighter. Meaning a peasant can hold his own against a 1st level Fighter if both are armed with clubs. Does that seem right? Shouldn't a Commoner at the very least have a +0 to-hit?
@RobertF Fighters not only get better bonuses (prof and str or dex modifier), but with better weapons. That club is nothing compared to a good ol' greatsword.
@RobertF Robert, most fighters will have a strength higher than 10 (a commoner's strength) and thus add +2 proficiency to strength modifier. Likewise, commoners do not typically have armor, while a fighter will tend to have armor and perhaps a shield. Then the club is 1d4, while a short sword, spear, Warhammer, or longsword or battle axe has 1d6 (first 2) or 1d8 (last 3) ... + damage bonus from strength.
@BESW @doppelspooker I got it! The problem of Magic being super difficult (which is correct) but not yielding mechanically advantageous gains (because of the conflation of difficulty and effectiveness). I need to state that all magickal effects, when successful, gain Weapon:2, Armour:2 or an extra free invoke (on top of normal mechanical effects)
@trogdor yeah :) i'm not sure what made it chaotic... i think there were a couple of deathbots? But it looked like it'd be hard to take down the master, so we decided to hack the equipment and reverse the polarity instead.
@doppelspooker The Master was plugged into the system and draining the Doctor's regenerations. Stopping the machine was more important than stopping the Master, because he was just standing there laughing while the machine did its work.
So the team divided into "turning off the machine" and "getting the Doctor out of the machine," figuring either would stop the process and not knowing which would be easier, with a couple people on the side keeping the Cybermen away from the first two teams.
The idea that digital copies of a book are “free money” for a publisher needs to die. They take resources to create properly, and they _must_ make money because print sales and profits are lagging. Every budget I make needs digital income, especially early in the book’s cycle.
Yeah, the previous session was the one where Leela stabbed the Doctor at the behest of the Nestene Consciousness, which was being influenced by the Meta-Crisis Donna-Doctor as part of his plot to get the Doctor to bring the TARDIS to Pete's World.
It was surprisingly successful in a solidly Classic-Doctor-Who-y way considering how little the group as a whole knew about Doctor Who in general and Classic Who in particular.
