"Bound" Debt

[Matthew Glover]

In a couple of other threads there's been some talk about schisms and debt and stuff and it triggered a question that I've had in the back of my mind for a while now.

In my games, this is how we do it:   When you split dice, you physically place a die onto your debt chip.  I believe we got the impression from the flash demo or the example chapter from the book.  Both do it this way.  We've considered that particular die "bound" to that debt chip (thanks go to Zamiel for the term).  The dice on my debt chips are "my" dice.  If I want to schism, I take my debt chips and the dice that are sitting on them.  I can't take your debt chips or the dice on them.  However, if I have to roll down a die because I'm overdrawn I roll down the highest die on any of my allied sides, not just the highest die on my chips.

Like I said, that's how we've always done it.  In the back of my mind, I've somehow started to think that this may not be correct.  I'm not sure where I got the impression, whether it came from something in the book or something in a thread here, but I've started to think it may be supposed to work like this:

Dice are not bound to Debt.  Placing a die on a debt chip is a handy way of making sure that you have no more dice than debt, but is nothing more.  When you schism, you may take whichever dice you like from the original side to your new side.

This is supposition, and I'm asking for clarification from Tony.  Speculation from everybody else, especially stuff like "Oh, we do it completely differently, like this," is also welcome, though.  I love hearing how other people interpret stuff and their rationales for it.

[Hans]

This is supposition, and I'm asking for clarification from Tony. Speculation from everybody else, especially stuff like "Oh, we do it completely differently, like this," is also welcome, though. I love hearing how other people interpret stuff and their rationales for it.

I think Tony may have answered this here.  Other than that, I can only say that in our group we have comtemplated both ways ("bound" and "unbound") and as a house rule, chosen to go with "bound" because our (limited) experience is that "unbound" just makes schism-based tactics too powerful.

[TonyLB]

The rules don't do the whole "stack dice on debt" thing.

I'm a bit perplexed by this whole issue.  Schisming almost never comes up in our play.  I'm going to have to take a close look at the strategies laid out in some of the other threads on this subject, and see if I'm missing something.

[Matthew Glover]

The rules don't do the whole "stack dice on debt" thing.

I'm a bit perplexed by this whole issue.  Schisming almost never comes up in our play.  I'm going to have to take a close look at the strategies laid out in some of the other threads on this subject, and see if I'm missing something.

The rules don't say anything about stacking dice on debt, but the pictures of conflict cards with dice and debt chips distinctly show dice stacked on debt.   Both in the example of play chapter (on pages 49-51, 56-57, 60-61, and 63) and the flash demo. 

Schisming doesn't really come up in our play often either, but I want to make sure I understand this properly and have a rules clarification that I can cite when I steal all of somebody's 5's and leave them with 1's.  :D

[Kai_lord]

The rules don't say anything about stacking dice on debt, but the pictures of conflict cards with dice and debt chips distinctly show dice stacked on debt.   Both in the example of play chapter (on pages 49-51, 56-57, 60-61, and 63) and the flash demo. 

Schisming doesn't really come up in our play often either, but I want to make sure I understand this properly and have a rules clarification that I can cite when I steal all of somebody's 5's and leave them with 1's.  :D

Likewise - when I been working on my capesbot, I assumed that dice are bound to chips.

[Zamiel]

Dice are not bound to Debt.  Placing a die on a debt chip is a handy way of making sure that you have no more dice than debt, but is nothing more.  When you schism, you may take whichever dice you like from the original side to your new side.

I think that a study of the text and Tony's reaction below pretty much solidify the issue in terms of "die are not bound." I used the term "reify" pretty deliberately in my previous post, as an act of making material the act of associating sufficient Debt with dice, but trying not to imply more. We all (me included, before I started really thinking about it), have associated that reification with possession, when that association is definitely not textual.

From an object schema point of view, the object of the Scene contains Conflicts. Conflicts contain Sides. Sides have two collections attached, one of which is the Debt tokens staked on that Side (and its a collection because each token does have an owner attached, a Player, for allocation once the Conflict resolves) and a collection of d6. One of the validation rules for the Side says there can never be more than one d6 unless there is an equal or greater number of Debt staked. And that's it; textually, by specification, there is no implicit connection between the dice and the Debt staked.

(Yes, I can effortlessly switch between litcrit and OOP. I think of it as a curse.)

Discussions like this are times I wish I had a nice shared whiteboard to draw inheritance and relationship diagrams on. :)

[Matthew Glover]

I originally thought that splitting this question into a new thread would make it easier to address as a discrete issue, but now I'm having to cut back and forth to the prior threads working on this simultaneously and I'm confusing myself.  Next time I'm just going to stick with the original thread(s).

I agree, it seems fairly concrete that Unbound Dice are the gospel according to the rules-as-written.  However, it seems like that's not even how Tony himself does it, instead going by an unstated Bound Dice houserule.  With that established (in this thread and elsewhere) I'll shut up here and move back to the original thread to discuss the actual ramifications in a practical example sense.