I have a question about loot. The rules as written seem to indicate that you should always gain loot. Is that right?
As an example, my crew decided to go after a Turf – a Fence*. As such, the stated goal was acquiring the fence. Should I then also be awarding them some amount of coin?
It seems like part of the mechanics are tied to the players gaining a certain amount of coin each score – or what? How do you handle that sort of thing?
* This actually required a bit of lateral thinking, because they can’t really go “fight over” a fence. I decided they could win his loyalty by doing something for him, so the score was about going up against the rival faction to get back the dirt they had on him.
Usually, when it’s unclear like this, I ask the players. Sometimes it makes sense that they would have gotten a nominal upfront extortion fee from the claim their seizing. Or maybe the coin represents their first, early profits from the claim. Sometimes, though, you’re right that it just doesn’t make sense for them to earn coin as well. Which is totally fine, as long as everybody’s on the same page.
Also, you’re rationale for how they got the fence to work for them sounds really cool! In general, I think you took the right approach here: think about which faction already controls that claim and in what sense they control it.
I do not take it as written that you will always get loot. In fact, there are many situations (seize a claim, defend) where there’s no specific expectation of reward beyond the mission objective itself. Linked jobs too.
Seizing a claim when it’s a person can mean many things besides persuading another faction’s asset to spurn them for you. It can mean killing or removing a rival’s asset from play and replacing them work your own in a scarce market (a government office, a company manager, a guard from a specific shift).
We had a campaign arc that culminated in three essentially linked jobs: a social job to place assets in a labor union to affect local votes, an assault job to kill people that refused to be swayed or hurt family members enough to make them resign from the union council, and finally a seize turf action to have the remaining puppet reps/intimidated locals vote controlling members of the club into power. (The voter purge was particularly bloody and I urge you to read it at Ben Morgan ‘s excellent library of our active campaigns at ad1066.com).
None of those had a loot reward. There was way more longer game going on.
ad1066.com – A.D.1066 Design Studio – Welcome to Y1K
We are in early stages yet. I guess we haven’t really figured out what the crew is up to yet. That might be it.
It can be very rough going of you don’t get paid.