Monday, April 25, 2011

Campaign Notes : Our Second Season (last episodes)

Sylvie and I played the final (and quite climactic) episode of our second season yesterday evening. Here are the two-line blurbs of the last four episodes - see this post and this one for the first nine.

Episode 10: The Walls of Troy
Lady Penelope and her companions never found the Trojan War - but they did have a most interesting trip, complete with temporal phenomena and metaphysical dilemmas...

Episode 11: Phantasmagoria
Summer 1816. Lady Penelope meets Lord Byron, the Shelleys and a few other tormented souls in this dark romantic tale of revenge, melancholy and psychic infestation.

Episode 12: The King and the Land
Lady Penelope returns to the Avalon Project to attend a royal wedding - only to discover that Excalibur, the key to mankind's future, has been stolen by the lords of the Otherworld.

Episode 13: The Sun of Blood
Lady Penelope forges an uneasy alliance with her half-brother Mordred to defeat the power of the Sun of Blood - and prevent the rebirth of their mother, Morgaine the Witch Queen.

Friday, April 8, 2011

House Rule : Shifting the Scales

Once more unto the breach... Here is an addendum / adjustment to my previous post on Conflicts & Story points - more precisely, it is an alternative to the part called "Raising the Stakes", regarding the use of Story points during competitive conflicts.

The main idea behind this modification is to avoid to-and-fro expenses of Story points between the original loser and the original winner of a competitive conflict - a situation which may actually lessen dramatic tension instead of boosting it. So here is a new variant (which really works better in play) :

In a competitive conflict, if the loser has spent Story points to alter the result in his favor, the original winner may decide to shift the scales back in his favour by spending a single Story point (but no more) - and that's it. No further expenditure is allowed beyond this point.

In a reactive conflict, things remain as defined in the original article.

In other words, after any conflict roll (competitive or reactive), each character can only spend Story points once to alter the outcome of the roll; in addition, in a reactive conflict, the defender always has the last word (i.e. if he was the first to spend his Story points because he lost the original conflict, then the attacker cannot spend any point to shift things back in his favour).