Post by Sarah Nibs in Rules Questions and Clarifications

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Suppose the goblins are in a room and there's a trap that just triggered which fairly rapidly flips the room upside down. We're talking about a trap that wasn't foreshadowed here, so best practice is to tell the players that the room is flipping and look to them to see what they do next.

Let's say one of the players says something like "we run and jump on the wall as it rotates and get up as fast as we can and run and jump on the next wall which is I guess the ceiling as it's about to become the floor!"

Is this how you'd adjudicate?

Definitely a roll. Next in marching order rolls, or cedes their position, or gives their die to someone who's already gone.

Action: everyone does the running stuff
Danger: stuff falls out of packs/hands and goes flying and gets broken
Harm: yes; everyone gets exhausted

If Action is failed, then everyone gets injured (is this way too harsh?). If Action is progress, then... one wall? Seems lame, they'll just try again, but maybe that's intended. Danger would be less and maybe no harm and maybe action failure after the second is just exhaustion.

Sarah Nibs5 years ago(+1)

In particular, if the roll looks good, what would you do on failure or progress? Condition, or "now you're tumbling to the (new) ground, what do you do?", or something else... actually I don't care too much what you _would_ do, more what might someone do that's _not_ good practice. Like maybe give-a-condition isn't really kosher.

Narrative Dynamics5 years ago

Follow-up about progress, I think there are two ways to handle this:

Is there a reasonable way you could describe one goblin setting up another? If so, then that's what progress is. They improve position but someone else needs to address the problem (good idea or roll).

Instead, I tend to take all-or-nothing rolls like this as good context to shift positioning down to Bad (unless they are really well-prepared for it). In a bad position, actions are binary (1-4 is failure, 5-6 is success) so you don't have to worry about what 'progress' would look like.

Narrative Dynamics5 years ago

This is a vicious trap, so obviously I like it a lot. Here's what I would

Action: Everyone makes it to the new "floor"
Danger: The gear in everyone's hands is dropped and it damaged.

Make it clear that if they don't succeed the action, they will fall and end up injured. I would definitely not add harm to this roll, since the only way they are getting hurt is if they don't succeed.

itch.io

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