No Strife spend limit for encounters?

[Klaus_Welten]

I just noticed that the Antagonist's spend caps are quest- and NPC-based only, but there's no actual limit on how much total Strife he can spend in a given encounter. So, what stops the Antagonist from creating a maxed-out NPC and then putting 20 of them into a given battle, making it impossibile for the heroes to win?

[Darren Hill]

So, what stops the Antagonist from creating a maxed-out NPC and then putting 20 of them into a given battle, making it impossibile for the heroes to win?

Um, you want the players to play again, don't you?

Seriously, Strife is really just a pacing mechanism - it gives you an idea of how many resources you can draw on over the whole quest. But you have to use your judgement as the GM to decide exactly how much of it you should use in a given encounter, in the same way you have to judge what you're going to present the players with in any other game.

It's not unusual to end a quest with some (or a lot of) Strife unspent - that's probably the norm, actually.

[John Harper]

The Antagonist can do that, yeah. But then she only gets 2d6 to roll against the heroes when they come up with a plan of action to kill all of those NPCs without a fight. Or if they try to sneak around those nasty NPCs during the night. Or any other clever plan.

Also, even assuming the 20 NPCs kick the PC's butts in that one battle, the Antagonist won't have any Strife left to spend during the rest of the quest, leading to a series of easy rolls. Not that this is a bad thing! When the Antagonist spends lots of Strife and makes things hard on the PCs, they tend to band together. When things are easier, the heroes compete more intensely with each other. Both of those are good.