Mundane Contests

[Mike Holmes]

Ocassionally I'll do a contest for something less than earthshaking, or even exciting. To use an example that I've refered to before, once I had the heroes make rolls for a grooming augment, before a party. Since few of them had grooming, they mostly had to use a 6, with some augments. So most chose for their variable augment TN, 5 or 10 for a +1 or +2. The results were humorous, and the augments did get used later that night at the party.

Should the "no self-respecting hero" clause of the Automatic Success rule render these contests null and void? Or can this be "protagonizing" in giving the characters a human face?

Thoughts?

Mike

[Brand_Robins]

Things like this are very often a matter of situation and social contract.

I know some groups who would spend lots of time on a grooming situation, gleefully playing up every angle and aspect, because such things are right up their ally. I know that I once ran a Buffy game in which the players at one point spent almost a full hour working out what costumes they were going to wear and why and to upstage whom... and they would have gone longer if I hadn't explained to them that they were making me want to kill myself.

In a situation like that mundane rolls make perfect sense. They give mechanical support and weight to something the players obviously care about, allowing them to have a game consequence of mesurable proportions.

For a more standard Brand game, it would depend a lot on situation and character. If, for example, you wanted to make my uncouth Heortling devotee of Odayla roll to groom himself properly for a meeting with a Lunar dignitary, I'd understand why. It's a challange for that character, and would give me a chance to express how his Lunar hating self deals with this unfamiliar situation.  The chance of failure is real, and failure or success can say something real about the character.

OTOH, if I'm playing my suave Zorroesque Lunar lady, and am going to meet a Lunar of equal station to ask for a favor, making me roll my grooming would probably just irk me because this is not something that should be difficult for the character, nor is it something new or siginifcant, and there shouldn't really be a chance that the character would fail to wear the right dress. (Note, this is different than me choosing to roll it as a variable augment.)

So really, what I'm saying is that the "self respecting hero" is a situational clause.

[Mike Holmes]

So really, what I'm saying is that the "self respecting hero" is a situational clause.

And that's how I treat it. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that I actually bend it to "doesn't matter to making a protagonist of the hero." Meaning that I don't roll for things with big chances of failure sometimes, if they don't matter to the character's story. For example, if the story is about the character getting revenge, and he has to travel to a point where he can attempt to do so, and there's a geographical obstacle in the way with a well documented resistance... I still won't make him roll, unless I feel it would be dramatic if he failed.

Whereas your Odaylan character (in fact, I'm thinking this might have been Josh's game now where there was an Odaylan - a Sylilan in fact, too, who had to roll for grooming) I completely agree with in terms of how it displays the character.

So I think we agree.

Do other's have a problem with this, however? Am I bending the clause all out of shape? Manipulating it in a way it wasn't designed for?

Mike