Coins in support of Facts

[Danny2050]

In the rules about "Using Facts in Challenges" it states that a coin spent in defence of a fact is doubled. This doesn't seem to give any extra weight to defending multiple facts, i.e. 10 coins spent defending one fact and 2 facts being defended by five coins each both add up to 20. Yet in the essay on "Traits, Challenges and Enforcing Story Logic" it suggests that violating multiple traits is harder.

Could you clarify this rule? e.g. If a coin spent defending facts was worth 2 per fact defended then that would definitely make multiple facts cheaper to defend and harder to assault all at once.

Consider: Joe is a) the richest man in town and b) everybody knows it (2 facts)
A player decides that when Joe arrives at a restaurant he can't afford to pay and the manager treats him like a vagrant. That contradicts both facts and so each coin spent in defence would be worth 4 !

Overcoming those facts without the expensive challenge requires better story development. Joe's accountant Simon has been secretly plotting to take over Joe's fortune. When Joe arrives at the restaurant Simon has closed all of Joe's credit accounts and has used his own fortune to bribe the staff at the restaurant to pretend not to know who Joe is.

[Mike Holmes]

I'm not entirely sure what you're getting at, but if you're saying that a coin spent in a challenge in which two facts are brought into evidence, that it's quadrupled, you are correct. Any reading of the rule that coins are somehow "assigned" to facts is incorrect. Coins are intended to "buy off" new facts that contradict old ones. Each fact that is so contradicted doubles the value of all coins so spent.

I'm sure there's a better way to say that, but the rule is that each fact doubles the value of all coins spent to eliminate a fact that contradicts it. Meaning that five facts contradicted by a new fact would mean that one coin spent to challenge the new fact would count as 32 coins for purposes of that challenge.

Note that you still have to spend at least one Coin even if there's a ton of facts...sometimes it's just more fun to let a massive contradiction go.

Mike

[Danny2050]

Ah grasshopper !

So when a coin is used defending 1 or more facts then the value of that coin is 2 to the power of N where N is the number of facts. So massive contradictions could easily be defended against at very little cost.

Gotcha. Thanks Mike.

[Mike Holmes]

Yes, that's always been my intent (there are some rules in Universalis that Ralph and I interperet somewhat differently, it might be interesting to note).

I would also mention, however, that "you can challenge anything" extends to the inclusion of a fact as counting as doubling in a particular case. That is, what limits haphazard citing of facts is that these, too, can be challenged. This could, in theory, get really complicated. In practice, however, it all tends to serve to make challenges rather non-existent. People loathe doing them for several reasons, and so people try not to include things that might get challenged, and the mechanic causes an increase in quality of play without getting used much. Just enough to set standards, and that usually happens enough with the informal part of the challenge without getting to the part where people are throwing coins at each other all the time.

Or so the theory goes. Works in practice for me and others, but there have been exceptions.

Mike