Advanced Challenges

 

Not all challenges are as straightforward as 21 Challenges and Versus Challenges. Some challanges will need to be adjusted for inherent difficult, some challenges will require mutliple people coordinating their efforts, and some challenges may have other constraints.

Adjustments

Not all challenges are equivalently difficult, and not all contexts in which challenges are performed are necessarily fair. Swimming twenty meters across a slowly moving stream is Easy, but swimming the same distance across a raging white water rapid of freezing glacial meltwater is significantly less so. Similarly, tracking an enemy who is trying to conceal their tracks across a grassland is easier than doing so across the same grassland in a torrential downpour during a cattle migration.

Whenever a player rolls a 21 Challenge or a Versus Challenge, the Director should assess the relative difficulty of the challenge, and consult the table below. If the Director determines the player's roll should be adjusted, they must notify the player of any adjustment necessary before they roll. Many challenges can be rolled without adjustment, but it is perfectly normal and common to issue adjustments in the +3 to -3 range. The Director should always consider the consequences carefully, and discuss the likeliness of success with the players before issuing adjustments more extreme than this.

Note that when assigning adjustments in Versus Challenges, the Director should only assign the bonus or the penalty to one side. Something that is Difficult for the player, necessitating an adjustment of -3, could just as easily be considered Easy for their opponent, necessitating an adjustment of +3... but it is not BOTH of those things. While the Director can assign the necessary adjustment to either the party in a vsC, as a general rule, the adjustment should be made to the roll of the person who initiates the challenge

Resolve

A character's Resolve Derivative represents their ability to commit intensely to an action. Any time a player needs to roll a Versus Challenge or a 21 Challenge, they can choose to spend Resolve to focus their effort. For each point of Resolve invested, the player can roll an additional d4 and add it to the 2d10 they roll for their Challenge. For example, if the player chooses to invest 4 points of Resolve, they roll 2d10+4d4, which will generate a result between 6-36, with an average of 21, instead of a result between 2-20 with an average of 11. In other words, their odds of success will be improved dramatically. You may not spend Resolve to improve the effectiveness of rest and recovery, or when using the Meditation skill.

Investing Resolve must be declared before rolling the dice. You can't wait until you roll the dice and realize you failed your Challenge by 1 and then declare you want to spend a point of Resolve. Also, while Resolve must be spent to make any untrained attempt to use a skill, you do not gain +1d4 to your roll for spending this Resolve, and you may not expend additional Resolve when making Untrained Attempts.

Note that with the Luck skill, you have another way to invest Resolve. Note also that some Perks allow you to roll certain skills as though you have invested a point of Resolve. Finally, there are some skills that require to to spend a point of Resolve simply to use them - in these cases, you do not roll a d4 in addition to your 2d10 (unless you also choose to invest Resolve normally).

Untrained Attempts

In order to even attempt the untrained use of a skill, it must first be a skill you have the pre-requistites for. For example, the Disguise skill is an Apprentice level skill on the Entertainment table, requiring you to be 15+ years of age, to have a Social Attribute of 10+, and to have at least 3 Skills from the Entertainment Skill Field at a level of 11 or higher.

If you meet the pre-requisites, you may then spend a point of Resolve to make an untrained attempt to use a skill. This expenditure of Resolve does not add a bonus to your roll, and you may not spend additional Resolve to improve your chances.

Untrained attempts are performed by taking one half the value of the reference Attribute and then subtracting the difficulty modifier for the skill. For example, Disguise is a Soci (-3) skill, so attempting to Disguise yourself without the skill means rolling a 21C using half of your Social, minus three. If your Social is 13, this means you roll a 21C at (13/2)-3 = 4, meaning you will need to roll a 17 or higher to succeed.

Note that you may never make an untrained attempt to cast a spell (however, the Invoke skill can allow you to cast spells you do not know, and you can make an untrained attempt to use the Invoke skill). Note also that the Overconfident perk (which is granted to all members of the human species) modifies the rules for untrained attempts slightly.

Combined Effort

Sometimes it will be appropriate for characters to combine their effort in order to improve their chances of succeeding a challenge. For example, perhaps the characters want to follow a suspicious contact through a crowded marketplace to the location of a secret meeting, but rolling a single Versus Challenge using the Tailing skill against the cunning target is likely to result in failure.

In this case, working together should not mean each character rolls a vsC, as this will only result in an increased likelihood of being detected and alerting their target. Instead, the characters can combine their efforts to increase their chances of success through a coordinated tail.

When combining effort, one character is designated to roll the Challenge (usually the one with the highest skill), with any other characters who have the skill also contributing. Players whose charatcers are contributing each add a bonus to the 21C of the player rolling the Challenge based on their level of skill.

Requirements and Constraints

Some challenges may have minimum requirements, or imposed constraints, in order to even be attempted. For example, a 500 kg stone slab blocking the entrance to a tomb cannot be moved by one person, no matter how strong they are and no matter how well they roll (leaving aside application of the Great Feat skill).

In these cases, the Director should define the minimum requirements and constraints and state them explicitly. Preparing a royal banquet may require a minimum of five people with the Chef skill, or moving the above mentioned stone slab may require a combined strength of 60, distributed over a maximum of 5 individuals due to the confined space. Additionally there may be time and/or cost constraints; a royal banquet cannot be prepared in 30 minutes, and will demand the finest ingredients.

If the requirements are not met, the players simply cannot attempt the challenge.

Once the requirements and constraints are met, the implicated characters use their combined effort to complete the challenge as defined above.

Complex Challenges

Most challenges are straightforward, but sometimes the players want to do something complex or involved that does not neatly correspond to a predefined skill.

For example, maybe the players want to build a makeshift raft in order to travel down a river. A complex challenge such as this brings the rules for requirements and constraints together with the rules for combined effort.

First, the Director should define the requirements and constraints; building the raft requires a minimum of two people with relevant skills, at least one of whom must have either the Survival skill or the Carpentry skill.

Next the Director solicit the players to propose why specific skills they have are relevant to the challenge. After each player makes their case, perhaps the Director agrees that characters with Boating, Mechanics or Engineering can help in designing the craft, characters with Naturalist or Forestry can help locate and gather the best materials, and characters with Knots can help lash the gathered wood together. Each character can only make one contribution regardless of how many relevant skills they have.

Finally, the complex challenge is resolved as a combined effort as defined above.

Degrees of Success and Failure

Unlike most Challenges, which generally should be resolved to success or failure, complex challenges are sometimes more nuanced. A failure to prepare a royal banquet does not result in no banquet at all, it results in an unsatisfactory banquet. A failure to build a raft does not leave the characters empty handed, rather it leaves them with a raft that is unsafe for use.

In general, with complex challenges, ordinary failures or significant (but less than critical) successes should typically result in bonuses or penalties applied to subsequent contexts.

For example, the diplomatic discussions that follow an unsatisfactory royal banquet might be rolled at a penalty, and boating rolls to navigate a shoddily constructed raft down river should be more difficult, and the consequences of failures of those more targetted rolls should be more severe.