Continuing my flurry of posts as my group and I get more and more invested…
Reviewing my housekeeping notes for tonight’s game, I just remembered that we’ve been struggling with Effect.
Setting Position is pretty straightforward. We’ve found it to be pretty clear when something is Desperate, versus Risky, versus Controlled. And setting Effect is usually similarly simple — This guy is heavily armored, so you only have limited effect stabbing him. On a limited effect success, we make a clock — You manage to wound him, but he’s still up.
We’ve run into a few actions where effect feels muddier though. The big one last session involved picking a lock, beyond which was a storeroom full of valuables — the target of the score. The target was a couple tiers higher than them, and it made sense that the lock would be better quality because of the valuables behind the door. So we set the roll: Risky (due to it being a moderately trafficked hall) Tinker with Limited Effect (even taking his fine lockpicks into account, this lock was at least a tier higher than him in quality).
But then when he rolled a 6, I found myself stumped. He succeeded without complication, but what the heck does limited effect look like when picking a lock? Making a clock to pick a single lock doesn’t seem interesting, and it also doesn’t make much sense that he only “kind of” picked it. Since it was a straight success, I didn’t want to give him a consequence (takes longer, breaks his picks, etc.).
In the end we kind of hand-waved it and let the door swing open, but it felt a little anticlimactic — besides the getaway, that was their last big obstacle in the score, and we all wound up feeling like it was easier than it should have been.
What am I missing? Is this just not a situation we should have applied limited effect to? Or is there an interesting and meaningful way to describe limited effect in what should be a fairly binary action (you pick the lock, or you don’t… right?)
So, a couple of things.
Since a straight success is rare and rolls are usually taxing on the players somehow, I don’t usually use clocks for moment-to-moment stuff. Rolls are to heavy to have multiple for fighting a dude or picking a lock.
In this case, you could have started a clock, but I agree, “kinda” picking the lock is a bit weak. I would have down graded the position because of the Tier difference (that’s one hell of a lock; these guards don’t fuck around, etc). I often forget about Tier difference, and I really shouldn’t.
Unless the scope of the action is a continuous variable, I generally always set the effect as Standard. IE: you do it. Alternatively, I set it to Limited, as in: here is what I feel you can plausibly do with that roll so I’ve limited the scope to this specific outcome. If you want more, you gotta figure out how to increase the effect.
The rare time (in my experience, those sixes are rare as hell, regardless of the dice pool’s size) that a player rolls a 6, I just play up their skills and good fortune.
In your example, what I would have done would be: Normally this would be Risky, but between the Sparkcraft lock and the veteran guards, this is Desperate with Standard Effect. … 6! Who said newer was better? These designs are so complex, securing them against all possible exploits is impossible. The designers rely on their newness and complexity to defeat attackers, not their infallibility. You were drinking with those kids from Sparkwright Tower the other night and they were bitching about how electro-couplers can’t get wet. A little spit and the whole thing come apart…
I’ve actually had a similar issue and realized that usually the solution here is that it should be a clock. Or you might split it into two rolls: one to get the lock tumbler positioned such that it can be
picked and one for the actual unlocking.
More generally, I think you dive into the fiction: okay, you you have reduced effect because they’re higher Tier. But what does that actually mean, concretely, in the fiction. What does a Tier IV lock look like. And then you talk for a bit are like yeah, okay, it’s got this two part mechanism, so it’s gonna take two rolls. It’s definitely hard to remember to do this, but I think it’s how it’s supposed to work.
I’ve used a clock in exactly that circumstance. Limited effect means only one tick on the clock, whereas standard is two ticks, great three. Of course, if there’s little time pressure, then a clock is not that interesting.
I think there are ways to make picking a lock with limited effect make sense and be interesting but in this case it might require framing the scene with that in mind or getting comfortable with adding complications we didn’t see previously (“you think you’ve got this lock figured out but, surprise, it’s taking a while and you hear footsteps coming your way”)
Ah, these make sense. The consensus seems to be, largely, that a clock would have been fine, and also that narrative context could have made for a more interesting outcome on limited effect.
I had just described it as a damn fine lock, robust and secure… but going into a little more detail (how is it robust and secure? what makes it better than other locks?) would have made the scene make more sense. Instead of limited effect, multiple checks (effectively a clock) might have been more effective… I sometimes forget in the moment that a clock doesn’t need to be just a clock. A 4-clock could still easily represent multiple discrete obstacles within the lock, rather than just just “lock progress”.
Narrative framing seems like it would’ve been useful too — rather than just letting the scene leading up to the lock ride, I could have introduced a new complication as part of the lock (i.e. a time constraint, footsteps, etc.).
It also seems like, if I was intent on making it limited effect while not having a clock, I should have spelled out the potential outcomes more clearly before the roll. “This lock is way better than anything you’ve come across so far. If you roll tinker, it’ll have limited effect — if you succeed, you’ll have gained access to the internal mechanisms, but then I think you’ll still need to finesse the tumblers.”
A lock with special properties beyond just being a good lock would have been more interesting too. Instead of limited effect, maybe a desperate position because of the false tumbler that triggers an alarm if it’s bumped…
Thanks guys!
Also, overall, I wouldn’t worry about “the end of that heist felt too easy.” Each heist need not stand alone, in my mind. The heists taken together will even out. Sometimes one will be ridiculous and everything will go wrong, and maybe the next time they had a good plan and the obstacles that emerged were dealt with masterfully. There’s no need to tweak them all towards feeling like they are the same difficulty. Maybe the challenge at the end of the heist wasn’t satisfying–but then they consider the loot and there’s a twist or a catch there, combined with an entanglement roll, that keeps them from feeling too triumphant.
Andrew Shields I think we were unsatisfied less because it was easy (poor word choice on my part in the initial post), and more because it felt like we glossed over something that should have presented more of an obstacle. There was all this narrative tension as they neared their objective, and then it all just fizzled out without a satisfying release.
Last night’s session went incredibly well though! We actually ran into another situation where limited effect felt appropriate — there was a secret auction occurring at the ball, and those invited to the auction were given rings made of bone in advance. Rather than using guards, the host of the auction installed a special electroplasmic lock on the door. The lock was attuned to those bone rings, basically making it a fantasy keycard system.
When our lurk approached the lock, I described it in detail, and spelled out what limited effect would mean here. This is definitely something extraordinarily rare, and he’s probably only heard of this kind of lock. We decided to put a clock into action — 4 segments. He first tinkered with it, which allowed him to mark a segment and study the lock more closely. To mark his progress, I described how he found the small chip of bone within the device — he then knew what sort of material it was attuned to, and (with the help of our Hound’s eyes) he was able to spot someone back in the ballroom who was wearing a bone ring. A crit on Finesse later, he’d deftly slipped the ring off her finger and made his way back to the lock.
I also would’ve allowed a wreck/attune/finesse or another tinker roll to complete the clock at the expense of more time, but it worked out to be a wonderfully interesting situation. By describing the “how” of the clock, I was able to give the Lurk some in-fiction clues to move forward.
That’s awesome
Glad to see this discussion. I searched for “limited effect” here after struggling mentally with the exact same concept. The book talks several times about Tier influencing security systems/locks and gives Lurks fine lockpicks, which all implies that limited effect on B&E is definitely supposed to be a thing in the game, but it’s sometimes hard to interpret exactly what that means in a given situation. Some good food for thought here.
Glad it helped, Lukas Myhan! My group runs into the specific lock example more often than most, I think — our Lurk chose Frake the Locksmith as his friendly contact, and a lot of his background is tied to Frake mentoring him as a kid. It seems like we have at least one lock a session to let him refer back to his background and show off a bit.
I’ve been trying to think of other situations that might be similarly tricky to think about in terms of limited effect. Picking a lock is troublesome (or was more so, before all this great advice) because it’s a binary problem — ultimately, either you pick it, or you don’t.
One such situation could be anything where it’s a feat of athletics… Say you have a character with harm that reduces his effect to Limited. If he’s trying to jump across a gap to evade a Bluecoat pursuit, my initial inclination would have been to say that short of a crit, he probably can’t. It’s not like he can “kind of” jump across…
Using the advice everyone gave above, I think now I’d probably say that on a success, he can jump across and just be clinging to the edge on the other side — he’d need to make another check to scramble up and get his footing. The “reward” of a success on limited effect would basically just be better fictional positioning — he’ll have successfully put the gap between him and the Bluecoats. Now he just needs to climb up and start running again before they can open fire…
What ‘complications’ or ‘reduced effect’ (or even harm?) would you use in the lockpicking situation?