Can anyone share their experiences with Fortune rolls in practice?
Reading the final version, and I feel like I’m not getting its interaction with the positioning/effect system.
Some examples of where I’m confused.
1) Fortune sample, pg 35, with shooting Bazso Baz. It seems like the 4/5 roll should already determine that it was success with a complication – why does the Fortune roll come into play to determine that the target lives? Doesn’t the 4/5 outcome roll already cover this? This feels like it’s essentially giving the NPC a Resistance roll, which I took to be a unique feature of the PC’s (stress -> push/resist). It seems weird that the player rolled a 4/5 to Hunt the target, and then the target, what, can roll a 6 to live? Or a 1? It seems like the Fortune roll is taking over the resolution mechanic that already got rolled.
2) pg 43, using Fortune to determine the impact of attire? That seems random – it’s not an uncertainty, right? The attire presumably affects a Sway or Consort or Command roll, and should alter effect: it’s not actually uncertain to the players whether his coat is actually a boon or just scoundrel-chic, right? It doesn’t have a mechanical impact /outside/ of those actions, does it? So what’s this Fortune roll do? Is it more like, “this coat’s super… uh, stylish, but I don’t know whether that suits this person’s taste really well, or is a huge turn-off. I’ll roll to see whether this is an advantage or a disadvantage”?
3) pg 66, a suppressed enemy rolling Fortune to see if they maneuver/attack. Again, it seems like if you’re skirmishing with the gang, and they’re suppressed, you’ve turned your actions into controlled and theirs into desperate – right, it’s built in? So again, I don’t get where the built-in positioning mechanism gives over to Fortune.
It seems like the examples that keep coming up in the book are all built-in to P/E, and I wouldn’t have even thought of using fortune for them… except the examples repeatedly call for it.
For the folks who’ve been playtesting for a while, how much do you use Fortune rolls? How much does it interact with P/E?
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I know someone who will have answers for this, I’m just getting a good seat while we wait for them to arrive.
Those examples are pretty weird.
Will Scott I promise I wasn’t cherry-picking; they’re the first handful of examples in the book (as you can tell from the page count).
Tonight I was using them to see whether the guards in a prison broke routine or kept to it. Also whether there were any spare spirit masks around when all the ghosts started to break out of the prison.
The point of the Fortune roll is to leave a potential GM decision up to chance. The GM could just decide “this happens,” but instead says “let’s roll some dice and see if this happens.” (Rehashing information from the book to make sure we’re all on the same page.) It’s just a way of making decisions, which could in turn influence position or effect, but the fortune roll system itself is mostly separate.
1. This one is the Rule of Drama, basically. Arguably, Baz’s roll to survive is also the complication: the PC’s action roll succeeded, so Baz was hit by the bullet, and severely wounded, but “the target might live” is basically another way or saying “reduced effect, plus drama” and seems like a reasonable complication to me. (Since we don’t know what the initial roll was, it’s hard to say)
Since Baz is a major character, giving him a second chance to survive is just a storytelling thing. The GM could decide that he lives, because maybe getting taken out by a sniper feels too easy, but in this example they choose to leave it up to a fortune roll instead. Also, the 4/5 refers to the fortune roll, not the initial hunt roll. So a 4/5 fortune roll is “mixed effect.” A 1-3 would have been “Baz dies,” and a 6 would have been “Baz lives” but the 4/5 means “Baz is alive, but not for long.”
2. Lifestyle affects what a character can afford to wear. The fortune roll determines the quality of his clothing on that particular day, and perhaps also how well other people think of it. Just because a scoundrel with no stashed coin WANTS to have the most stylish clothing doesn’t mean he or she can afford it. So the character could flash back to stealing or otherwise procuring some nice clothing, or you can just make a fortune roll to see what the character can afford. Also, if the character rolls well on the fortune roll, you could count that towards improved position or effect for a sway or consort roll.
3. Not quite, because NPCs don’t have positions, really. And neither does the PC, while they’re suppressing them, because they’re currently acting. If you want to call that a setup action to a skirmish roll by another PC, that makes sense. But the fortune roll in this case is to see how the enemy gang responds to the suppression fire. If they see someone running at them while they’re pinned down, they may decide to run for it, despite being shot at. So the GM could say “this crew is tough / stupid enough to run out into gunfire,” or roll to determine if they move or not.
Edit: misread some stuff and had to update my response to the first example. The 4/5 roll in the book actually refers to the fortune roll, not the hunt roll. Changes a few things, I think.
If the answer to the questions posed in those examples – “How much of a badass is Baszo?” “How awesome are Canter’s clothes?” – is obvious to you then you don’t need to do a fortune roll. Fortune rolls are for when the answer isn’t obvious, which will obviously (heh) vary from group to group.
I agree with Steven Dodds. In my opinion, Fortune Rolls are also a good way to determine the outcome of an action when calling a positione seems weird to you (which may never happen in your group but has happened in mine).
For example, on of my players was trying to remember something he could have read in a particular book (using a Flashback), so I called a Study Fortune Roll to determine how precisely he could remember the information.
With 2, since fortune rolls can determine effect you can use them when the fiction has already determined that something will work, you just don’t know how well it will work. Canter’s jacket is a luxury item – we know for sure it is some quantity of cool. So a fortune roll determines exactly how cool the jacket is.
I found myself using lots of fortune rolls to determine how effective a thing is by itself, absent of how well it is used.