Question for yall and especially John Harper. If a player does something REALLY dumb say for example swan dive off a 1000 foot cliff, would a resistance roll to not die even make sense in such an extreme circumstance? I’m torn on keeping faithful to what written and my desire for realistic consequences.
Question for yall and especially John Harper.
Question for yall and especially John Harper.
Crazy random happenstance could save them. That’s part of what you get by being a PC. Allow for it but make it clear that they’ll be out of commission and possibly able to be snagged by whoever led to them thinking swan diving off a 1000 ft cliff was the best plan. Maybe suggest considering some other PC options too.
The PC will take 4th level injury. If he takes resistance roll, he will get 3rd level injury and become incapacitated. He fell into some bushes or river, and maybe someone has found him and rescue his life before it was too late. After all, the scoundrels have odd lucks.
The two golden rules:
1) when in doubt, ask the player
2) fiction first
In other words, a character can survive basically everything, but it’s in the responsibility of the player to narrate an explanation. And the GM can totally ask for details if he thinks the player just wants to be cocky 🙂
In a broken world with demons and ancient magic, I can totally see someone plummeting into a dark chasm and vanishing into shadowy mists without his body ever found.
Only to later emerge again with a trauma and no memory of surviving.
I think Jörg Mintel has it. It sounds daft to act in such a way, so ask the player what they think will happen first.
It depends on the tone of the game. If you and your players want more realistic consequences, go for it. Part of the game is hashing out these kinds of questions. Check out the Judgement Calls section on page 6.
For starters, I’d ask, what is the PC trying to accomplish by swan diving? What is the situation around them? Are they trying to catch a ledge? Are they trying to dive into water? And they can make an appropriate action roll for that, and then resist the consequence.
As GM, you have final say on the consequences of a situation (and remember one of your goals is to Portray the fictional world honestly). If the consequence is level 4 harm, that can also manifest different ways. The base consequence could be fatal harm (“You break your neck and die”), maybe a resist can reduce it to permanent harm (“Your hand is forever smashed by the rock”). Or maybe they can reduce it down to level 3 Harm- that’s exactly the sort of tone question you answer in play.
If you really want a more down to earth experience, check out the Uncertain Resistance variant in Changing the Game, where the PC might not resist at all.
People have miraculously survived skydiving accidents where they fell 10,000 feet or more. I know you’re not really asking about falling specifically, but my point is that one in a million lucky breaks do happen, and that’s what “scoundrel’s luck” (aka spending stress) is all about. Set up your fatal harm and other consequences as established, but don’t take away your players tools for handling it. To paraphrase the book, they’ve got enough things stacked against them already.
As long as you set up the consequences before they act and the player agrees, you’re good.
I think fatal/permanent/multiple injuries aren’t unreasonable though. 😉
Mechanically you can resist a consequence the gm described, or in special cases a side effect (like from using quicksilver). For example you could get through off a cliff as part as an action consequence if it was desparate, you could resist it say at the last moment you caught the ledge.
The doesnt give the players licence to turn around and describe something and avoid all ramifacations. If it was me in one of games I’d ask the play what their they are trying to do. If the answer is catch a ledge so Im unseen, or even land somewhere soft or in water. I be like you probably should make soflme kind of prowess role at desparate limited, even then the scale of it may make it have no effect. However if they said no I land perfectly at the bottom Id be like you know that you would suffer level five harm if you did that due to your legs shooting through your chest and out your shoulders right?
I don’t understand why you would need a resistance roll if the player decided to take a swan dive as an action?
It’s an action not a reaction, so surely you should change the focus over to what they want to achieve? If they fail that, yes they might get a consequence and that would probably be harm. But if they succeed and did not accept a horribly mangled devils bargain then obviously the character had a plan to survive it (even if the player doesn’t yet). so it’s the player’s responsibility to craft that fiction for the rest of the group.
A player has to tell you how he resists in order to make a resistance roll. If the player is going to fall 1000 feet and has an appropriate way to resist that consequence then he can do it. If he can’t tell you how he’s going to resist, then he can’t.
I don’t remember if it’s in the book anymore, but at one point there was an example with a giant meteorite crashing into Doskvol. The players can’t resist the meteorite hitting the city, because they have no way to prevent that from happening (unless they do! Sounds like you’ll need a campaign for that, or at least a whole bunch of flashbacks). They may be able to resist the consequence of dying because of the meteorite however, if they can tell you how they do it.