Making Background More Concrete, except for Influence

I mentioned this at the end of the Feeding rules post, but I'd like to ensure that backgrounds are concrete entities in general. You don't pay XP for them, so there's an expectation that they'll be able to grow or be destroyed. Also they could use some clarity on how they augment things and what they can do when they're not augmenting.

With that in mind, I think backgrounds can have a generic augment difficulty of 7. Between disciplines and abilities. This makes backgrounds useful. Unlike abilities, however, it is somewhat dangerous to be relying on your backgrounds all the time. Retainers are loyal, but if discovered by a rival they can be harassed, incapacitated, imprisoned, or worse. Allies might help you achieve a goal, but they will necessarily know of your actions and may request favors in return. When Resources are thrown around, it is hard to conceal what you are doing. Mentors may not always grant favors, and may also request favors or loyalty in return. Many thanks to J. for arguing with me about some of these a month or two ago. I think it'll make the game better.

Randomness and the Great Augment Swap

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.