I ran the first session of a new campaign last night, and wanted to check I was applying the rules appropriately.
The crew had decided to assassinate Baszo Baz in their first meeting, by having previously poisoned a bottle of his favourite whisky. They knew that Wiszer, their own gang leader, would also drink from that bottle when Baszo and Wiszer toasted the claimed alliance between them.
Cue a flashback to the Leech preparing an antidote to the poison in the whisky, taking 1 stress to perform the complex operation. He rolled a 4-5 result, so I said that the antidote batch was poor quality and gave the player a choice: go with that possibly-ineffective dose (“complication”), or risk his own health brewing up another batch (“take harm”).
The Leech decided to brew another batch, took harm in the form of a hacking cough, then rolled to resist the harm and ended up taking a couple of points of stress instead.
Was that all going according to the rules, and best practice in applying them?
* Stress to allow the flashback?
* Allowing the flashback at all?
* Giving the player a choice about the fallout of a partial success?
* Allowing the player to roll to resist the harm they’d elected to take?
(Interestingly, the Leech player hesitated a bit about how do deal with his partial failure. “I don’t know what sort of character this is,” he said. I think we all know about more about that character now.)
Sounds reasonable and in line with what I’ve read about other play throughs and what I’ve done myself.
All of what you describe is fine! What I describe below is what I might have done differently, but my understanding of the rules isn’t perfect either:
* I typically don’t charge stress for a flashback if it’s something the Thieves might reasonably have anticipated and have had enough time to arrange. In this case, since they knew they were poisoning the whiskey and knew Wiszer would share the toast, that seems like plenty of time. But: that’s 0 stress vs. 1 stress, so I wouldn’t (heh) stress charging the player for this flashback.
* Typically, when a roll triggers a consequence (success with a consequence on 4-5; just a consequence on 1-3), I’ll tell the players “okay, here’s the consequence, but you can resist with stress to mitigate or avoid it.” In this instance, it looks like you let the player mitigate the consequence (reduced effect of the antidote) with harm, which is pretty harsh! But: far be it from me to tell you how mean to be to your players!
John Perich Thanks for the comments. The “complication or harm” bit was me offering the player the choice of what fallout they wanted from the roll, not a case of mitigating a complication with harm. “This batch isn’t good. You can use it, in which case Wiszer will take harm; or you can keep working on it, but you will take harm. What do you do?”
Gotcha. That’s an elegant little dilemma! Now I get your player’s comment about “not knowing what sort of character this is.”
Yep, that’s all correct. Nicely done.