9 thoughts on “So “6 coin: A standard score; decent loot.” Whats a standard score to you?”

  2. I find the table on p 42 useful to compare with tangible things

    Monetary values

    1 coin: A full purse of silver pieces. A week’s wages.

    2 coin: A fine weapon. A weekly income for a small business. A fine piece of art. A set of luxury clothes.

    4 coin: A satchel full of silver. A month’s wages.

    6 coin: An exquisite jewel. A heavy burden of silver pieces.

    8 coin: A good monthly take for a small business. A small safe full of coins

    and valuables. A very rare luxury commodity.

    10 coin: Liquidating a significant asset—a carriage and goats, a horse, a deed to a small property.

    So, a standard score should yield an exquisite jewel or something like that. If you a crew is a low level gritty street crew that maybe to much for them to be a standard score.

    Right now I feel like handing out a lot of coin which is ok for me because coin = additional actions = more/better stories

  3. I’m not sure it matters.

    Whatever is a standard score for your group is a standard score.

    If you want criteria, I’d say that it’s a standard score unless:

    – You’re acting against another faction that is significantly higher or lower level

    – You’re trying to achieve something significantly more/less difficulty or ambitious

    – Your score has wide-reaching implications

    So steal ammunition from the army barracks is probably a standard score. It’s against a higher level faction, but you’re attempting something less ambitious. Stealing all the weapons from the army armory is probably more than a standard score, both because of the higher level faction and also because of the wide reaching implications. Stealing all the weapons from all the army armories in the city is certainly more than standard (and probably precedes some other major score that takes place once the army is without most of their arms)

    Same for scores that are less than standard. Convince a Red Sash to rat on their friends? That’s less difficult, and less ambitious. In fact, it’s so much less ambitious that you might include it as part of the preparation of another score, instead of being a score in its own right.

    I generally let the players tell me what is a score vs what is part of a larger score, and split things up as they like. A series of small scores, a handful of standard scores, or one hugely ambitious score doesn’t make much difference to me when I’m running the game, and lets the players control how often they take in-character “breathers” (i.e. post-score downtime.)

  6. Related: my current crew brews up their own scores and then finds a buyer for the item/info they stole. I like to say you can probably get “X” Coin from this faction or “X – 2” from these guys but start to get in good with Y (or an extra Downtime or some other bennie) or you might be able to sell it for “X+2” to this other group, but man will that tick off Z.

    Leaving some of how much a Score is worth to the players can lead to some fun things.

    edit: i.e. it provides additional opportunities to find out what the players are interested in and express what kind of crew they’re running.

  7. I’ll also note that the reward doesn’t always have to exactly match what was in-character done.

    In the sense that – of course, make sure it makes sense in the fiction – but there’s a lot of narrative wiggle room.

    So using my above example, the crew does a massive score to steal all the weaponry from all military armories in the entire city. Cool, right? They succeed. Go them!

    But what reward do they get? You’ve got a LOT of choices, and the “right” one probably depends on what you want for the story, both what the players are trying to achieve, and also what the GM wants to happen to set up for whatever they might be planning.

    Instead of counting “OK, so that’d be five thousand fusils, ten thousand grenades, and…” to calculate the payoff, maybe you just give them six coins or whatever is appropriate for this job, and say “That’s your pay for this job. The NPCs will now fence the weapons” – if it doesn’t seem like that’s enough money, but the job wasn’t large enough to OOCly justify more, then just string it along with another score. So they’ve got their current amount. But they’ll come back next week to collect more money once some of the weapons are fenced – but oh no, the Red Sashes are plotting to seize the weapons from the warehouse, or failing that to burn down the warehouse. Now the players do another score to protect the weapons, and they get their payoff. Another 6 coins or whatever. Even though they aren’t “earning” anything by protecting their warehouse, it still “feels” like they earned 12 coins by fencing off such a large number of weapons, and earning nothing but protecting their goods by defending the warehouse, but OOCly you’re still paying them 6 coins per score.

    And if in doubt, remember they’re part of a crew – I like to assume there’s also NPCs that form their crew, and do other stuff around the place that we don’t bother mentioning. So it’s also easy to handwave “Yeah, your crew made heaps of money! And this coin represents what you kept as spending money for yourselves, the rest goes back into the business.” – that also justifies other rewards, like increased faction status, crew upgrades, cohort wages etc.

    Also maybe stealing all those weapons reduces the army’s faction status – they’re now a weaker faction, because they don’t have as many guns. Maybe there’s a clock for when their replacement guns will arrive and they regain their previous level.

    Or maybe nothing happens to their level, and we just fictionally take it into account (after all, unless there’s a pitched battle, it’s not like they’ll need those particular weapons)

    In other words, you’ve got a lot of “rewards” and “punishments” that the game system allows you to use. They’re different levers. You can use the ones that work best for your game, and fictionally explain it, rather than feeling like there’s a specific right answer.

  8. I put a few minutes of thought into it, and came up with this idea: if you treat the average score as “6 coin”, that would work out to 1 coin per average crew member, plus two fort he crew. Thus, easier jobs would have less coin for the crew, and harder jobs can have more coin for each person.

    I have no idea if this is helpful. I would try to have an equal amount go to each person, unless you want to watch them argue and fight over it. Arguing over money is a great roleplaying opportunity, but lousy for long term relationships.

  9. I/We try to keep it in the spirit of the game…

    The bigger the score, the bigger the consequences. This means it is up to all of us together to figure out how bad we want things to turn out later.

    We have already talked about having “SURPRISE WOW BIG SCORE FOR DUMB JOB” later come back and bite them in the ass. Or, have a hard job ´, which should have paid out big time, turn into almost nothing. With a twist on “Hmm I wonder why, lets look into that”

    It’s all very organic and with the right group it should be in the players hands as much as in the GMs

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