I’d love some feedback on my approach to entanglements.
At the end of a score, I’ll roll the entanglement and then have the group immediately resolve it. Sometimes this means the crew makes a hard choice, other times it comes down to a roll.
Example: I rolled a Reprisals and Ulf Ironborn kidnapped a friend of the crew and was holding him ransom. The crew decided to “fight back” by rescuing the kidnapped friend and I had one character make a desperate action roll.
Some questions:
1) Does this feel like the right way of handling this type of entanglement?
2) Would it make sense to have them roll Tier (or relative tier) instead?
2) Since it’s outside a score, should the player be able to push themselves, get help, or make a group roll?
3) Should they be able to use any left over armor from the group roll?
4) Should they be able to resist consequences?
1. Rolling entanglements is part of downtime when you spring the entanglement is not limited to downtime. Say the players roll unquiet dead for their entanglement. Now at any point you want downtime in a score whenever you can spring up the ghost of someone out to get them for some fictionally appropriate reason. Maybe it’s been following them and they haven’t seen it for a while. Maybe it sought out their other enemies to ally with against the players. Then they need to resolve it because it’s just like any other problem. Heck maybe they even run away from it then and the literal looming spectre exists over the campaign.
2. For what? Resolution? Nah. Tier isn’t relevant anywhere I can think of.
3. Action rolls are made when the player faces a significant consequence or obstacle to overcome. Any time the player makes an action roll they can push themselves get help devils bargain etc. This works for anything. If the player has something they want to do for downtime and you think there’s an obstacle for them to get to before the downtime roll they should make action rolls to see if they can overcome the hurdle to get to their goal.
4. Meh. If they need load out the scope of what they’re doing may have grown to being a full fledged score and that’s okay. One of the pc’s allies is captured by a gang and they wanna break them out? That’s the next “score” depending on how tough the fortifications are. Give them the whole shebang, engagement roll pick a new load out etc. And again this goes along with not limiting things to just downtime.
5. You can’t resist the entanglement itself unless it’s one that says you(can “interrogation” let’s the player resist). Otherwise resisting is for enemy actions or immediate consequences to partial/failed rolls.
Im with Chris McDonald here in all points: I handle that freestyle or asks the players how they want to handle it: Single Roll? If it feels appriopriate for everbody, fine. Full score (with group actions, flashbacks, etc.) to solve it, fine. Pulling out an entanglement at the most inconvinient time ( – evil GM mode -) to spice up the story, fine.
I don’t even think it’s about evil GM mode it’s about the fiction. A great example of this is the Bloodletters campaign John runs and if you watch the last few episodes (I forget which one exactly) there’s one where he explains a good bit of the behind the curtain plot stuff that’s been going on with Silver’s ghost looking for allies manipulating multiple factions and interfering with the crew setting up clocks and projects here and there. And it ended up just setting up a really great row of dominoes that were interesting. But if the story had had space where one of the characters was living on their own and vulnerable it could have just as easily been interesting to see a ghost assault them at home and possess them when they were alone.
It’s fiction first right? Read your entanglement and think about everything that’s happened so far, all the npcs and factions affected by player actions, all the devils bargains partial success consequences and greater world stuff going on. Be comfortable with the idea of writing down the entanglement and then checking your notes or whatever to really find the most interesting fictionally appropriate thing. In this case you even have 2 simultaneous groups to pull from, the entanglement for one group could even be something caused by the other group 5 weeks ago.