Post by Martin Nerurkar in Overhauled Power Rules comments

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Thanks for the test and the detailed writeup! I'll try to reply to your points below. Also sorry for the long delay in getting back to you. The best route for quick feedback is the Discord (http://www.discordgg/nowhereprophet)

1. Maximum Power Pool?

No. Whenever a resource is added, more power-tokens a put into the city. And vice versa.

2. Initial Tokens?

The idea is that the city starts with a resource and two power tokens. Then one of these tokens is moved to the leading faction as they are in control of that resource.

3. Gaining Power?

Well, when a faction gains power they can take ANY NUMBER of tokens from ANY SOURCE. So you could take one power token from the remaining resource. Or one from another faction. Or both. A small sidenote that tokens that are not on the map (but on a faction instead) are still considered to be "in the city".

5. Tokens on resources?

Tokens on resources symbolize power potential that is present in the city but not leveraged by anyone. It is meant to be vague on purpose to allow for a wide variety of interpretations that suit your story.

Feedback on your map

I love the impression pictures you put on there. I think that's a great way of making even a simple map seem a lot more alive!

Also it seems like you only had the initial power token on the faction from the step during founding. And I'm a bit confused about the one token free-floating in the district there.

The idea is that:

- Adding resources adds power tokens to the city

- Factions gaining or losing power redistribute these power tokens

imperatorobscura4 years ago(+1)

No worries about the delay, I was away from itch.io for a good while anyway. Literally checking for the first time right now, haha! Thanks for the detailed reply as well.

Okay interesting, so with regards to gaining power, it seems a need to think a little more abstract and not be afraid to give a faction a whole slew of tokens if the fiction seems to indicate they might have taken a boatload of power. So rather than taking it only from another faction, I could also have them take full control of a resource. It's possible I could put them "in power" without taking a single token from another faction, if there are enough available.

With regards to the free-floating token, basically what happened is a resource was lost and I wasn't sure what to do with the token that was left on it, haha! I decided to kind of leave it sitting there as a nebulous "power up for grabs", but it never did really sit well with me.

Thanks again for the deep reply, but one final question! Given your summary... Would you say a game should aim to have all the potential power in the city tied up with factions (give or take a few)?

I get the feeling overall that the main mistake I've been making with my approach is I've been a bit too tentative with power distribution, waiting for the game to tell me exactly how many tokens to allocate and assuming "one token" when it didn't. It feels like I need to be a bit more liberal with factions acquiring power.

Martin Nerurkar4 years ago

There's no specific aim for how you should distribute your power tokens. They are an indicator of the dynamics of a power struggle but save for a few events that refer to the "leading faction" they have little mechanical bearing, so you are free to deal with them as you wish. It's just important to note that gaining / losing power may move more than one power token.

Also as a note: when a resource is removed, 2 power tokens need to be removed from the city as well. Probably from the resource on the map but also from factions, if some had been moved off.