A few questions from our last session :
– before a score, the PC wanted to do some preparations: they gathered informations, and wanted to “prepare” stuffs (go see contacts, arrange things).. I directly cut through the score but we were wondering. Can the PC do a few gather information rolls, or only one? When do you choose to cut the action and trigger the engagement roll? When they’re not directly planning in ooc or rp conversations, but actually doing things, do you cut or do you let them? There is a blur boundary between freeplay and the score. Some of my PC were like “ok you cut it off but we could made lots of stuff before”. Struggling with that.
– When you’re at war, your hold becomes weak. When the war finishes, does the hold becomes strong again, or do you have to pay Rep for it?
– does anyone could tell me which episode of RollPlay or the Bloodletters is about the engagement roll (not only the first one in the ballroom, just want to see how John deals with engagement rolls)
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– Does it help them get a detail for a score? Then they can do it. Does it *not* do that? Cut them off. From a mechanical perspective, maybe it helps to tell them that it doesn’t help them succeed in the score, since it doesn’t affect the engagement roll at all, and all more preparation does is use up their resources on eventualities. “Use up their resources, you say?” Yes! Doing stuff is dangerous. Make their useless info-gathering activities action rolls, with consequences that they have to suck up or resist, such as heat, or the target getting wind of their plans.
– It’s automatic; the hold reduction is “temporary” in the rules, which seems to suggest that it vanishes once the war is over.
True, thanks for your insight.
Gathering information is a fortune roll, so it does not use resources. Maybe we can consider the first gathering information is a fortune roll, the others aren’t? How people deal with that?
“If it’s common knowledge, the GM will simply answer your questions. If there’s an obstacle to the discovery of the answer, an action roll is called for. If it’s not common knowledge but there’s no obstacle, a simple fortune roll determines the quality of the information you gather.” (pg. 36)
It mainly depends on the presence of an obstacle, but I often handle it like this, yes – first GI is free, subsequent ones have some kind of obstacle. Also, you probably know this, but don’t let them gather information again the same way – if they don’t change their approach, they don’t get anything more. When they do change their approach, you have a justification for the presence of some kind of obstacle.
Jakob Oesinghaus Good answers. Always go back to the fiction. How much can the PCs reasonably expect to find out without putting themselves in danger?
In our games, we like to have a bit of context when doing a job, so I run a round of gather info/preparation rolls, usually one for each character that’s involved. This is also where the PCs’ friends and contacts most often come into play.
That being said, all of this could also be handled just as well with flashbacks.
I always say that the Engagement Roll is the safety valve for the GM to say “alright, that’s enough planning, here we go”, but a little planning isn’t bad.
I have the opposite thing happen in which the moment the crew has the barest whiff of a score the players all get pumped and we go straight into the engagement and talk a bit more if they realise they need a little more info to establish a detail. But the game honestly handles that really well.
Jakob Oesinghaus is right, you should consider honestly what might be between the characters and the info they want. More often than not information at least comes at a price. And action rolls in freeplay have consequences and so end up burning harm and stress that might be needed in a score so the choice to be more informed but drained and battered going into a score is a reasonable one. I think you should only worry about it if they are trying to plan too much rather which can be different to getting a lot of info and context.
Have a conversation with them when things draw out that it might be more interesting and fun to move the game along. Help guide the pace but don’t shut them down for the sake of honouring the mechanics if they are having fun. The rules also note that the engagement roll abstacts the planning and starting situation but you don’t have to use it if you have already established the fiction and find yourselves in the thick of a score having missing the moment it would have made sense to roll engagement. Honour the fiction and move along.
In general, since the players have access to flashbacks, the GM can’t cut them off prematurely. If the score starts “too soon” for a player, they can jump backwards and do a thing — often a more useful thing, since they’ll have more info about their actual challenges once the score begins.
Some players take a while to adapt to this style. A few never do.