After my first game of Universalis I have one question regarding Importance.

On p. 30 (grey box: actions you can do only on your turn) one option is to 'reduce or restore importance for 1 coin per level'.

What's the difference between this and 'removing or restoring a trait for 1 coin per level'?

How can I reduce or restore the importance of a component without removing its traits (except when trying to remove the whole component, which is just paying it off)?

Cay

Well, Importance and Damaging Traits are explained pretty thoroughly from page 44 to 51. But the key difference is simply this.

Importance is how many Coins it will take you to write a component out of the story. You want to kill a character, blow up a building or in some other way remove a Component from future scenes. You pay its Importance and declare it "dead" / "destroyed".

Removing Traits cannot in and of itself eliminate a Component, although it does reduce the Component's Importance at the same time so they are tied together.

Why the seperation? Well, consider this. I have a Component of a "Ferrari", "Cherry Red", "Goes Real Fast", "Picks up Chicks".

Its in an accident and gets totaled. Now I could handle this in a couple of ways. I could eliminate traits...the mangled wreckage no longer goes fast and its chick magnet abilities are now rather dubious. But its still Cherry Red, and its still a Ferrari. Simply being totaled doesn't change its color. So since every Trait and Trait removal must be justified, one would have to come up with a reason why the car was no longer Cherry Red (blackened by smoke perhaps?) to remove that Trait. Ok...but its still a Ferrari...

Point being that if I simply want to remove this Ferrari from the game and not worry about addressing each individual trait, I pay the Importance of 4 and narrate 4 Coins worth of accident wreckage and am done. If on the other hand I want the car to remain in the game, I might simply remove the Traits so that they can later be repaired.

Or if the car had no Traits other than simply 1 Coin "ferrari" but I wanted it to stay in the game so it can be repaired, I'd actually ADD a new trait to it "Mangled Wreck" to represent the accident. This would actually make the car MORE Important. Which is exactly as it should be. If I'd wanted the car removed entirely that same 1 Coin could have done it (Importance of 1). So since I obviously did not want it simply removed, it must be more Important than merely 1 Coin...now its 2.

Helpful?



Tangental to your question but following from the answer:

Now if someone wanted to take the first Ferrari example and simply add a "Mangled Wreck" Trait to it to represent the accident you have an interesting situation. If the "goes real fast" and "Pick up Chicks" Traits are not actually removed first, then technically they are still in play and I could draw upon them in a Complication. Someone else could draw upon the "Mangled Wreck" trait to reduce my dice.

Soooo, the "Mangled Wreck" Trait didn't really completely total the car...the car is still useable, just at a reduced effectiveness...so the Trait actually just had the effect of damaging the car and thus more properly should be called something like "Damaged in an accident". I'd probably Challenge someone trying to use "Mangled Wreck" as a Trait in this case argueing that the Trait should be renamed to something lesser, that the other Traits should be bought off first, or that a Rules Gimmick is required to get the effect of totalling a car for a single Coin.

Thanks for your fast and extensive answer.

I think I understood the way importance and traits are linked together albeit not beeing the same. Your explanation made it much clearer to see.

However it raises two more questions for me:

1) I'll use your 'cherry red' 'ferrari' which 'goes real fast' and 'picks up chicks'. It now has the role of 'ferrari' with 3 traits which make it worth 4 coins = importance 4.
Is it possible to reduce the ferrari's importance to 2 (paying 2 coins) without removing traits or justyifing the loss of traits? Or is reducing importance only intended for eliminating components from game without the necessity of justifying the loss of traits?

2) Now (after an accident) the 'ferrari' is a 'mangled wreck' but it's still 'cherry red'. It doesn' go fast anymore and it itsn't attractive to chicks anymore. It has still the role of 'ferrari' with 2 traits = worth 3 coins = importance 3. Now I want it to be repaired and remove the trait of 'mangled wreck' but restore 'goes real fast' and 'picks up chicks'.
What's now the difference between restoring these traits and restoring it's importance?

Or is importance more of a meta-game term linked to traits?

Still struggling

Cay

Caynreth wrote:

1) I'll use your 'cherry red' 'ferrari' which 'goes real fast' and 'picks up chicks'. It now has the role of 'ferrari' with 3 traits which make it worth 4 coins = importance 4.
Is it possible to reduce the ferrari's importance to 2 (paying 2 coins) without removing traits or justyifing the loss of traits? Or is reducing importance only intended for eliminating components from game without the necessity of justifying the loss of traits?

2) Now (after an accident) the 'ferrari' is a 'mangled wreck' but it's still 'cherry red'. It doesn' go fast anymore and it itsn't attractive to chicks anymore. It has still the role of 'ferrari' with 2 traits = worth 3 coins = importance 3.

Now I want it to be repaired and remove the trait of 'mangled wreck' but restore 'goes real fast' and 'picks up chicks'.
What's now the difference between restoring these traits and restoring it's importance?

Or is importance more of a meta-game term linked to traits?

Quibble: "Ferrari" with 1 Trait ("Cherry Red") Importance of 3.

Ack, yes. Ignore my quibble entirely. First I made a typo, meaning to say " with one Trait Importance of 2", second, I completely missed the addition of the "mangled wreck" Trait which means the original was 100% correct to begin with.

Nothing to see here folks...move along...

*trying not to mock game-designer-quibble* ;)

Yes, that's perfectly clear (at least I hope so).

I'm planing a Universalis session for Saturday with some rule-nit-pickers and I want to be prepared ;D.

I'm planing a Universalis session for Saturday with some rule-nit-pickers and I want to be prepared ;D.

How will he know how to perform his planing? Universalis doesn't have any levels!

(Okay, I'll stop)

Caynreth's New Year's resolutions:

-improve your english
-use a better dictionary
-use a spellchecker
-use female usernames

;-D

Valamir wrote: So is it a rule worth having? Would I write it that way if I were doing it today? Hard to say. I'm tempted to say that I'd skip defining Importance as a seperate entity altogether and simply have a rule that says "at any time you can spend a number of Coins equal to the total value of the Component to eliminate it from the game". But as I say, I'm waffling a bit.

On the history note, Ralph has it right as far as he's put it out there. I too had problems with the whole "dead" Trait thing, really, I just liked the elegance. Actually this is part of a larger metaphysical conundrum. But the important thing is that we both decided that, essentially, you have to "unbuy" the thing.

Given, however, that said thing can be brought back again (call this the "Victor" phenomenon after the character from Days of our Lives who apparently has more lives than a cat), just hitting it with loads of Traits often is enough to simulate the event anyhow. That is, if you give the car Mangled Wreck x5, theoretically it can still enter a Complication, but it'll tend not to be too effective. So just because it can't technically be "written out" it may effectively be that way. It's effectively very little different than buying down the Importance.

What's cool using this method is that the wreck still exists, and that can have meaning (corpses, too). I'm reminded of a movie I saw that was about purchasing the wreck of James Dean's Spider. It may have been totalled, but that didn't seem to affect the car's Cursed x3 Trait.

The point is that if you play fast and loose with it, it'll probably work out fine. If you find that you've come up with some combination or Traits/Importance that seems to have a problem in application, then Challenge it into shape as you see fit. If it's not really a problem, then just keep playing.


People playing Universalis make "mistakes" constantly. Its unavoidable that the rules will get used inappropriately at times just due to human error. When that happens, you have the above two options: use a Challenge to fix it if it's really a problem, or let it ride. It's a feature of the game that errors don't have to be addressed if you don't want to address them, IMO. Which is often the best option for something that's not likely to come back and bite you. That is, if somebody puts "wreck" on the Ferrari, people will get the idea. It only becomes a problem when somebody tries to exploit the loophole - which happens rarely as players understand that the Challenge is there waiting to put them down when they do.

So errors are rarely a problem, IMO. Play conscientiously, but without fear of mistakes. It'll all work out in the end.

Mike

In the spirit of playing conscientiously, if you do end up with a car component that has 'fastx2' and 'wrecked' as traits, and a scene is narated in which the car is used as able transport and someone challenges it, who gets to double their Coins' power? The party claiming fast(x2!) or the party claiming wrecked?

My inclination, and I'm pretty certain that no one will have a problem with handling it this way, is to say both/neither (it doesn't matter) and steer the challenged parties into a complicaiton instead of a challenge through suggestion.

But what would you do?

Chris

Technically by rule on page 28

Any player can attempt to bring a fact into play during a Challenge, but if there is any doubt as to its applicability a majority vote of players can determine it. If a player doesn't agree with the decision, the outcome of the vote itself can be Challenged.