Thoughts and questions as I prep the opening scenario/campaign. Any help is appreciated.
*Hold – I feel like I’m missing something here. Is there any reason to ever go to a “Strong” hold? You would go to a Firm hold to avoid getting knocked back a Tier during War, but there’s no benefit or reason to go to the highest Hold setting instead of just advancing a Tier, is there?
*The dueling clocks between the Red Sashes and Lampblacks (and race clocks in general) – I’ve been playing a lot of Numenera/Strange of late, and so maybe I’m thinking too much of that. It feels like almost all the die rolling could be done by the PC’s, and so I’m wondering – once the PC’s decide to back side X in a race clock scenario, how does side Y not simply fail?
To phrase another way, the PC’s back the Lampblacks and spend time, effort, and sessions to advance the Lampblacks in their goal of destroying the Red Sashes. So, session one, the Lampblacks tick off like 3 spokes on their clock, but the Red Sashes have no PC’s backing them and thus get nothing?
What am I missing that makes the second clock useful?
The Red Sashes don’t need PCs backing them to make progress. The GM takes actions for NPC factions and advances their clocks as appropriate (NPC Downtime, p 20).
So the GM can advance the Red Sashes’ clock as they wish, depending on what the Red Sashes are doing. For example, in my game, after the Red Sashes took a licking from the PC-Lampblacks alliance, I decided they made a deal with Ulf Ironborn to join the war, and gave the Sashes a couple of ticks on their clock (and created a project clock for Ulf to Seize Crow’s Foot).
I’m a little bit iffy on strong hold myself. I think I would require a faction to spend one tier of hold to tier up – this makes being at Strong Hold useful, because you’ll still be at Firm after tiering up, whereas if you Tiered up from Firm hold you’d be in a vulnerable Weak Hold position after advancing.
Edit: Also, being at Strong hold means you’re functionally at Firm hold when at War, which is useful, if not super exciting.
Mike Pureka That’s an interesting take on it. I’d been debating making them rank up thru all three Hold positions to get to the next tier, but I like the “It costs 1 Hold to rise in Tier”. That make Strong worthwhile.
Yeah, Mike, I like that a lot. I’ll consider that change.
John Harper
I’m pretty fond of that little brainstorm, but it DOES have the net result of making tiering up slower, since you effectively need to “advance” twice to go up a tier. Whether that is actually undesirable or not is a whole different question. The obvious fix of just reducing the amount of required rep doesn’t really work, IMHO, because of the way Turf works, if you reduce the Rep requirements much, you end up with tiering up being trivial due to having a bunch of “everlasting” rep from Turf.
Yeah, it does slow down that process quite a bit. Not really a bad thing, IMO.
John Harper
I’m inclined to agree. Things can get quite rapid once the gang has enough turf.
Hell, I’d been debating slowing rep gain to 1+ the difference in gang tier. ie, if you go after a tier 3 gang and you’re tier 1, you get 3 rep. If you were tier 3 as well, you only get 1 rep. (everyone expects you to hit at your weight class).
But I haven’t really played yet, so I’m not sure if the speed of advancement will really need to be tweaked like that.