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Major Arcana and Minor Indiscretions |
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Newsletter April 14th, 2007</TBODY> |
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<TBODY>Wade Lahoda |
Head Storyteller storyteller@saskatoonbynight.com or 477-0145 |
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Narrators: Allan Schnell & James Nobel |
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The official Saskatoon by Night webpage can be found at www.saskatoonbynight.com
Next Game Saturday, May 12th, downtime submissions due Saturday, April 21st
Narrators – Al Schnell and James Nobel
Al and James have agreed to act as Narrators for me, and that necessitates and explanation of what the role of a Narrator consists. Narrators are players who know the rules well enough (and the Storyteller’s particular take on said rules) to act as general rule adjudicators – settling disputes and helping folks figure out how their powers work. They also help me by keeping an eye on what happens at the game so that I can have a little bit more insight into how things work. Some things that Narrators are not: Narrators don’t manage or produce plots – this is why they still play characters, because they’re just as much in the dark about the inner workings as everyone else. Narrators thus can adjudicate scenes between players, but can’t “run” scenes that are primarily about interacting with or investigating the larger world. Narrators generally won’t play NPCs. Importantly, Narrators have no authority in any scene that involves their character or their character’s interests – I trust my Narrators to be good judges, but if you are ever uncomfortable about a Narrator’s involvement in a scene on such grounds, you are within your rights to ask that the Storyteller adjudicate instead – neither the Narrator nor the Storyteller will take offense at such. That all being said, Narrators can be a great resource for you, the player, when you have general rules questions, issues, or things that need resolution and the Storyteller is not available.
Character sheet check
I should have a print-out of everyone’s character sheet available at the desk tonight. Please look it over and make sure that it matches what you have. If our versions differ, be sure to speak to me so we can sort things out. Also, on your downtime sheet it should list all the Complications I have on record for your character – if it isn’t listed there, it means that one way or another it hasn’t made its way into my records, and you should speak to me and remedy that.
House Rules up on the webpage
There is now a set of house rules, including some spell errata, up on the Saskatoon by Night webpage. Please check them out. It also includes pretty much a complete, re-written spellcasting section so those of you who don’t own Mage can see what we’re all referencing. Several details of spell-casting have been clarified, simplified or changed, so I encourage people to reference the House Rules version instead of in the book, as if it isn’t in the House Rules I likely won’t be using it. If you have any thoughts on how to make things more clear/concise, feel free to suggest them. Also, I’ve set aside space for a rules FAQ on the webpage – let me know what questions I should answer in there. There will usually be a copy of the Resolution and Spellcasting sections of the House Rules at the desk for you to look through, but because they’re rather more bulky than I’d prefer I’m not printing off copies for everyone to take home just yet.
Downtime change – Minimum successes, and cautious actions…
I am considering doing the following for downtime: You are guaranteed to have a minimum number of successes equal to one for every full dice in the downtime action. For instance, if you’ve put 15 dice into an action – the odds say you’ll probably roll around five successes, but since you’ve got at least 12 dice in the pool you’ll be guaranteed to get no less than two successes. There is a downside to this, however – if you need to rely on the minimum(i.e.: you don’t roll at least one success for every 6 dice), the action will be complicated or in some way potentially twisted. You might get the information you were seeking – but part of it will be a lie. Or maybe you succeed on your action, or alert people you don’t want alerted to the fact that you were doing it. You can choose to negate this possibility by choosing not to take the “automatic minimum” – in short, you are performing the action cautiously. This creates a new parameter you can put into your downtime – if you want to perform an action cautiously, just say so when you submit it. I like this idea, so unless I hear huge outcry it will be implemented for the next round of downtime actions. It means you’ll generally get fewer actions that completely fail, but you might end up getting some more “interesting” results sometimes.
Potential Rules Change - Initiative
Rolling for Initiative at the start of every action scene tends to really slow things down. A proposed change to the Initiative system is simply this – for most standard scenes, initiative is not rolled; characters simply act in order of their Initiative scores. The one time Initiative would be rolled is if two characters are taking dramatically important competing actions – for instance, if one character is diving to cover the magical McGuffin with his body, and the other is trying to shoot the McGuffin, they might roll Initiative for that one set of actions to see which goes off first (and then the rest of the scene is run just off static initiative scores). In short, Initiative is only randomized when something dramatic is at stake – most of the time people just go by their base scores. Let me know what you think.
In Character Venue – Albert Community Center
This Gathering is being held at the Albert Community Center. What you see is what you get, assume everything is IC. Please remains on the 2nd floor of the venue – there are other events taking place elsewhere, and it would be rude to interrupt them.