The influence rules presented in Dark Epics presents a static system. Each level of influence can be used once, and the the one who spends the most wins. This means two characters with influence 5 cannot attack one another without an assist from another.
The type of modifications usually made by Larp groups is to make each influence provide progressively more points towards actions. A level one influence is one point, a level two influence is three points (2+1), a level three influence is 9 points (3+2+1), up to a level 5 influence being worth 15 points. These sets of rules also allow abilities to be spent as levels of influence, so you can use your 1-5 levels of the politics ability as levels of Political influence. The catch here is that those levels then aren't useful anymore in the game, and those Larp rules have you spend levels of ability for some related bonus in the game. Also, this isn't actually random, but does help to equalize characters in terms of natural ability vs amount of influence.
This leave a dearth of randomness in the rules, which is a staple of RPGs. Dice dice dice.So I wanted to bring that back for our Toulouse game. The obvious thing would be to use disciplines rather than abilities since characters aren't going to be running around doing all sorts of narrative things (so I thought initially). Each dot of a discipline gives you an augment die which can be used for certain actions, and your disciplines can never contribute more than one level towards an action. So now a smaller influence has a chance of defeating a larger influence at some things.
Due to some miscommunication, it became apparent that people were using Abilities to augment as well, which makes since since that's how the Larp rules worked, but that added a lot more randomness to the game. So with the next rules revision, we made a personal action, Manage Influence. You could put your feet on the ground and then use your abilities to augment things. Turns out many people missed this in the rules packet as well.
Which brings us to Alexandria. Since this is a restart, we can right some wrongs here. There's two issues involved: 1) ability augments seem like the sort of thing that should be constantly helpful. Your politics knowledge should always be useful in leveraging your influence, unlike your dominate. 2) I like a 'feet-on-the-ground' action. If you're spending a significant chunk of your personal time ensuring things get done, you should get a hefty bonus but at the same time you should be making a meaningful choice between alternatives. Otherwise it doesn't make sense and you should always get the bonus if its stupid to choose anything else.
I think this has the added bonus of fixing some of the XP issues. In the Toulouse rules, you got bonus XP but I suspect most people spent it almost entirely on disciplines (I know I did). Abilities are cheap, but harder to use when you need a personal action constantly to use them, making them a bit useless. If abilities are a constant, it may be worthwhile to buy 3 dots in Commerce so you can use your Trade influence better.
For the balance, I think abilities could remain a difficulty 8 augment, while disciplines could be only difficulty 6, so they have a stronger chance they'll affect things. With the difficulty being 6 for disciplines, I still think keeping the limit of only allowing a one point bonus from any augments. Otherwise things might quickly spiral out of control, where a level 1 influence can successfully attack a level 5 influence once you add in disciplines, abilities, and some backgrounds.
Since rules generally have a butterfly effect, I think this means that background augments will be universally set at difficulty 7. I'm also kicking around an idea that you get 2-3 (less powerful?) personal actions per turn, rather than just one. Obviously, these aren't entirely preliminary thoughts, but I'm not wedded to this as an option yet. Or at least the details of how the new Manage Influence action should work, and I want to give it a better name (Discipline augment?). If my feeding rules work out, its also possible that you might need to spend blood to activate your disciplines, which would actually be pretty effing cool, though I can see how that might dip into the realm of too much complexity.
The type of modifications usually made by Larp groups is to make each influence provide progressively more points towards actions. A level one influence is one point, a level two influence is three points (2+1), a level three influence is 9 points (3+2+1), up to a level 5 influence being worth 15 points. These sets of rules also allow abilities to be spent as levels of influence, so you can use your 1-5 levels of the politics ability as levels of Political influence. The catch here is that those levels then aren't useful anymore in the game, and those Larp rules have you spend levels of ability for some related bonus in the game. Also, this isn't actually random, but does help to equalize characters in terms of natural ability vs amount of influence.
This leave a dearth of randomness in the rules, which is a staple of RPGs. Dice dice dice.So I wanted to bring that back for our Toulouse game. The obvious thing would be to use disciplines rather than abilities since characters aren't going to be running around doing all sorts of narrative things (so I thought initially). Each dot of a discipline gives you an augment die which can be used for certain actions, and your disciplines can never contribute more than one level towards an action. So now a smaller influence has a chance of defeating a larger influence at some things.
Due to some miscommunication, it became apparent that people were using Abilities to augment as well, which makes since since that's how the Larp rules worked, but that added a lot more randomness to the game. So with the next rules revision, we made a personal action, Manage Influence. You could put your feet on the ground and then use your abilities to augment things. Turns out many people missed this in the rules packet as well.
Which brings us to Alexandria. Since this is a restart, we can right some wrongs here. There's two issues involved: 1) ability augments seem like the sort of thing that should be constantly helpful. Your politics knowledge should always be useful in leveraging your influence, unlike your dominate. 2) I like a 'feet-on-the-ground' action. If you're spending a significant chunk of your personal time ensuring things get done, you should get a hefty bonus but at the same time you should be making a meaningful choice between alternatives. Otherwise it doesn't make sense and you should always get the bonus if its stupid to choose anything else.
I think this has the added bonus of fixing some of the XP issues. In the Toulouse rules, you got bonus XP but I suspect most people spent it almost entirely on disciplines (I know I did). Abilities are cheap, but harder to use when you need a personal action constantly to use them, making them a bit useless. If abilities are a constant, it may be worthwhile to buy 3 dots in Commerce so you can use your Trade influence better.
For the balance, I think abilities could remain a difficulty 8 augment, while disciplines could be only difficulty 6, so they have a stronger chance they'll affect things. With the difficulty being 6 for disciplines, I still think keeping the limit of only allowing a one point bonus from any augments. Otherwise things might quickly spiral out of control, where a level 1 influence can successfully attack a level 5 influence once you add in disciplines, abilities, and some backgrounds.
Since rules generally have a butterfly effect, I think this means that background augments will be universally set at difficulty 7. I'm also kicking around an idea that you get 2-3 (less powerful?) personal actions per turn, rather than just one. Obviously, these aren't entirely preliminary thoughts, but I'm not wedded to this as an option yet. Or at least the details of how the new Manage Influence action should work, and I want to give it a better name (Discipline augment?). If my feeding rules work out, its also possible that you might need to spend blood to activate your disciplines, which would actually be pretty effing cool, though I can see how that might dip into the realm of too much complexity.
I was toying with the idea of limiting augments some by only letting you use an ability, background or discipline to augment a single influence. So even if you have Leadership 5, you can't use it to augment Growth actions in more than one Influence. Not sure how big an impact that would have on the game though. That seems like something that needs a little testing.
ReplyDeleteI do like the idea of more personal actions, I think almost every player did either "Manage Influence", "Learn Ritual" or "Training" in Toulouse. So to let more interesting actions also squeeze in by allowing more personal actions so that you're doing more than just managing influence each turn would be nice.
Right now, I'm thinking abilities get assigned to only one action (i.e. your Leadership 5 can only be applied to a single Grow action) while disciplines can be divided (your Presence can be divided between a couple Grow actions). Still with a restriction that you can only get one point of augment from an ability, one from disciplines, and one from backgrounds per action. So a total of up to 3 points of augment on any one action.
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