Teamwork: Assist
I’m not happy with the new assist action, really. Improving position is cool, but the old method of “pay stress and give a bonus die” was nice and fluid in play. I’m leaning towards going back to the old way, with a tweaked stress cost. Here’s the text:
When you assist another player who’s rolling, describe what your character does to help. Take 2 stress and give them +1d to their roll.
What do you think?
My first thought is that it is expensive to help out; I liked it better when it was 2 stress to give yourself +1 die, and 1 to give someone else a die. But, I don’t feel strongly about that. In part it is a question of how often you want it used, and how helpful it is to have allies around.
My second thought is to wonder if it might be helpful to tie assistance to an action roll, so attempting to help could be useful, neutral, or actually a hindrance.
So, would this die be in addition to the 1d you can get from pushing OR a devil’s bargain? I also think it might be useful to specify how many people can take stress to give a die. One? More? As many as want to get stressed out?
Personally I like adding a die better than a position shift.
A little heavy, specially with the new trauma and vice rules.
I much much prefer handing over a dice, whatever the price. As per burning wheel, I love the immersion and engagement that handing over a physical dice as help invokes. As for cost, two Stress seems like a lot, considering helping is behaviour I like to encourage in my games (for the above reasons). I would think sharing in the consequences of a failed or partially failed roll is a sufficient trade off for helping.
Why is there a stress cost at all?
Cause helping someone doing something risky is an stressful ordeal?
2 stress seems like too much, though.
I haven’t played with the v4 rules, but I have tended, when I run, to make assistance into an independent action to improve position or effect, and let everyone talk and talk until they have planned out their actions in order.
I guess that’s not very helpful, ironically.
I haven’t looked at the rules recently, but what about giving a choice like “give a teammate a bonus die but either take 2 stress or erase a segment on a count down clock”
How’s this for an idea on helping? Rather than setting a static stress cost, you could use a resistance roll to determine the cost of helping. It would provide a bit more feedback into the fiction than a static cost as well. You could ask the helping player not only how they are helping, but also what risks they exposing themselves to.
In other words you assign a consequence for helping, and then the helping player may make a resistance roll to avoid those consequences. Meanwhile, the main acting player makes the action roll and resistance as usual.
This might allow other players to contribute, while keeping the risk of adding dice relevant to the fictional positioning ie: risk/cost is proportional to the situation.
Gah, no, a standard resistance roll would make this way too dangerous, IMHO. I’m not really sure about the 2 stress cost either. I kinda like the improved position, but can go either way.
You might be right there Mike Pureka, but its has me thinking… The amount of danger they are exposed to should probably be dependent on their fictional positioning. If a player could put forward a way of helping that exposes them to only a small amount of danger, then that could be represented by them only having to resist lesser consequences (eg. it takes extra time, they suffer lesser harm, their position gets worse momentarily, etc). It may be that they choose the lesser complication over the resistance roll and stress altogether.
Anyway, just thoughts here. Thanks for the chance to think about it and clarify a bit more. I personally also think the original simplicity of just spending stress for +1D is a good approach.
Though right now there’s no difference in potential stress costs for resisting minor consequences vs major consequences. You can still roll really badly and take 5 stress for rolling to resist “stubbed toe” – which means that usually players don’t want to resist minor consequences. Which is pretty much the opposite of the way we would want this to work, where you want to be rolling with minor consequences.
I’ve thought the new stress cost for a bit, and I think the stress cost ties into what you want help to be about. 1 stress to assist to give +1d would probably result in everyone always helping each other. It’s simply more useful to do that than stress yourself. 2 stress means our low-stress crewmates are going to just feel obligated to help out, which kind of makes sense. Just adding fluidity to spending 2 stress and opening up the options to WHERE THE DIE GOES, seems to make sense. I would be really glad to have assist back to the way it was.
The whole pool of stress is 9 deep. Sure, there are times characters will have stress to burn, but clearing it is not automatic or always safe, and you don’t want to get close to full because you can’t know what’s coming next.
If the group can casually spend stress frequently to help each other, maybe they aren’t getting pushed hard enough.
Is that even a problem though? They formed a crew because that’s safer and easier than going solo, and I think it’s great to reinforce that idea by having them expect to help each other a lot.
Automatically charging stress (whether 1 or 2) limits how often this is going to happen in a session. If the cost is 1, then people will feel like they are contributing even outside spotlight time. If the cost is 2, then it is more likely people will save help for more important situations, so that’s a matter of how the game feels and how the designer wants it to feel.
I do think that it is helpful to note whether the cap on people taking stress to lend dice is 1 or 2 or more, and also whether people can declare they are helping after the roll, or if they must declare before the roll.
You know… I could see tying cost to position. Controlled, 1 stress to help. Risky, 2 stress to help. Desperate, if you help then you take a condition or resist it. (But get an experience point?)
Disclaimer:
I don’t know the latest iteration of the “Group Action” rule.
My personal opinion:
The “Assist” action is a bit redundant: in essence, it can be easly considered a specific case of a “Group Action” whose effect describes the result of a single character’s action.
Mechanically speaking, a “Group Action” is already easier (because you take the best roll), so it fits the fictional trigger (helping another character to ease his success).
The “improving position” should be just added as a fictionally-informed option to the “Set up” action.
Two is too steep. But I know we often don’t use the position improving anymore. So the instinct is good, not sure the solution is quite right.
When people go desparate they intend to do it on their big pools shopping for the xp. It’s only when an action is risky that folks want to bump it to controlled. And our games tend to fluctuate between those two (controlled, and desparate) because of that.
Handling it with a group action seems like a really good idea.
1. The helper gets to roll, which feels like doing something.
2. Their skill level matters.
3. The stress cost is variable, but never really bad.
I’m diggin’ it, MisterTia86.
Cool! Glad I could help!
I agree the group action can do what assistants want to do. That keeps the +1d from getting confused with the paying stress or devil’s bargain, too.
Also, we can move the old assist over to a special ability, maybe.
I like that! Seems like a good Spider-like or Slide-like ability (if I’ve understood what the Spider is supposed to be)
One problem I see with this is the leader pays stress for the bad rolls of others. I’ve found that because of this leaders often prefer to roll on their own, unless there are two or more equally skilled characters involved. Generally a bit of a rarity in my groups.
Additionally, as the rules stand leading a group action only allows everyone the same approach roll. This also might discourage creative ways of helping, which would be a shame imo. It’s nice to have a little flourishing help from the whisper distracting your opponent with electroplasm as you skirmish.
About stress:
If the rules as they stand know keep “1 stress per failed roll by other characters” (correct me if I’m wrong, as I said before I don’t know the latest iteration), then I think that’s acceptable because:
– If someone is skilled he doesn’t want unskilled helpers: they’re just a nuisance.
– The probability boost from choosing the result from multiple rolls is a solid advantage, and it’s usually worth the stress risk: better to succeed taking a couple of stress from your comrades than fail alone and risk a Resist roll.
– It’s also a built-in limit to the number of helpers: too many people means less coordination.
About approach:
You’re right. Maybe instead of having Group Action and Assist being the same thing, the Assist action could become an alternative iteration of the Group Action rule, with two key differences:
-You can Assist with any approach.
– The Effect is limited to a single action performed by the Leader.
It may be worth noting that the leader does not have to be the character with the best ability. A character with no rating in the ability at all can lead. The one who leads takes the stress, and all benefit from the best roll even if it wasn’t from the leader.
I think having everyone use the same action on a group action is good. For an example like the whisper using electroplasm during a skirmish, that could be a set up action–that’s different, and designed to allow one kind of action to help another.
Precisely.
About Group Action: I agree that in their standard use (rules as written) the “same action” limitation makes total sense.
However, I think that an Assist action should not have that limitation: for example, if the Whisper wants to help the Lurk manually disarming an electroplasmic device by Attuning, I would accept that.
In my mind, that’s not a Set Up Action, because the Whisper is actually helping the Lurk performing the task, instead of creating some sort of “advantage situation” in preparation of the Lurk action (not to say that’s not option, but that would represent something fictionally different)..
So, just incorporating Assist in the Group Action, as I suggested, would impose an unnecessary fictional constrain
Hence my suggestion to use an “alternate” version of the Group Action to handle Assist.
I still much prefer the whisper handing over a dice and saying whatever they do to help than any of the above. Physically handing over a dice just so nice and simple, and the link between mechanics and fiction is very clean.
Another idea for using (and keeping) helping dice would be: pay one stress to provide a +1D, and accept any consequences of a failed or partially failed roll. So one stress minimum, but you’re risking maybe more stress or consequences if the roll goes bad.
The result at the table hopefully being: rather than everyone rolling at the same time and reading out all their results, you’ve got the players huddled around looking at the one roll, all praying for a good result.
While I appreciate the simiplicity of “1 stress to give +1d” it always felt kinda flat to me and my players (because the helper doesn’t roll). It also has the problem (for me, anyway) of ignoring the skill of the helper and his approach (because it doesn’t matter how you you do it, you’re just gonna give a +1d, no matter what).
Interestingly enough, as a counterpoint, my players really liked it because they felt that they generally got screwed by the dice when they rolled so it was a relief to feel like you were helping without making things worse. And, the dice pools are so small, being able to increase by 1d (sometimes in situations where otherwise it was 2d and take the lowest) was another relief.
So, your mileage may vary.
My group really liked it too. We thought it was a solid rule that was working well. It kept pushing different characters together cooperatively, and kept the stress count ticking gradually. Ymmv, of course. Every group will have their own preferences and play style, but we liked it a lot.
The current rules of improving position with Assist or effect with Set Up meant that players could pick the approach that made the most sense in the fiction or gave the most benefit. Improving position often made more sense and felt more substantial so my players often picked it. Nevertheless, they kinda felt there wasn’t much difference with the different positions, which might have just been the dice, how I was setting consequences, or them still getting a feel for the system.
The current wording of Assist did mean that occasionally the assist itself needed an action roll. Sometimes this slowed things down, piled on more consequences and gave stress. Other times Assist didn’t require any roll, but that didn’t feel like it balanced against when Assisting just made everything worse. The worst bit I think was having to roll for Assist and failing, leading players to feel like they’re falling further down the hole. When they had a series of bad rolls during an info gathering, bad Assist action rolls just compounded that feeling they were getting nowhere and the world would leave them behind.
Obviously, the old rule of paying stress to Assist didn’t have that issue, nor would Group Actions.
I agree 2 stress feels like a lot to pay, whereas 1 stress feels not enough.
Thanks, everyone! This is good feedback. I’ll ponder this some more.
Here’s my current thought:
Assist: Add +1d for 1 stress. Only one person can assist a given roll.
Set-Up: Either adds +1 effect OR improves position, depending on what you’re doing. You pick which benefit your’re going for.
That sounds pretty on-point.
I like it.
That sounds neat.
Cool. I like being able to choose for the set-up action.