[Torg] 2 questions: arc vs session awards and cyborgs

[Kansas Jim]

Benn writes:

> 1)  Normally you get awards every session, which include 1-3 
> Possibilities from the GM, plus any subplot cards you have in play.  At 

Technically that award is made at the end of every Act; at least in
my experience Acts don't usually equate nicely to sessions. Sometimes
I've had more than one Act finish per session, other times it's taken
multiple sessions to get through a single Act.

> the end of the arc, you get a much larger award of 6-12 possibilities, 
> plus rewards for things like Glories, Drama cards, etc.
> 
> When you are finished playing the last session of an arc, do you get 
> session awards as well?  Subplot awards?  So far, we have been playing 
> that even on the last session of an arc, we award any possibilities for 
> having subplots in play that session.  Is that correct?

You do get a final subplot award at the end of the adventure. You do not
get an Act award on top of the Adventure award though, that's assumed to
already be included in the Adventure award point total.

> 2)  What's the official rule for when a creature like a Dragon in a tech 
> world or a Cyborg in a magic world tries to use always-on, passive 
> abilities?  How often is that check made, and how does one make that 
> check?  What is the penalty for failing, and how does one "fix" that 
> penalty?

Easy part first; the penalty for failing the contradiction check is
disconnection, same as always. Ditto for fixing it, you need to
reconnect.

As for how often, that can get tricky. The usual rule is to only check
once per Scene and for convenience sake that usually gets done at the
beginning of the Scene. But in some cases it might make more sense to
wait for the first time the passive ability actually gets used in the
Scene. And then it's a matter of figuring out when the disconnection
occurred; it may not make sense for it to always be causing
disconnection at the start of a scene so the GM may want to hold off
on the disconnection and have it happen at some random point during the
Scene instead of right away. For example, a character with cyberlegs
in Core Earth is leaving the group's hotel room to go speak to an NPC.
Instead of having the disconnection occur as soon as he gets up to leave
the hotel room, the GM could have it happen while he's walking down the
street or while he's sitting and talking with the NPC. Having to deal
with the disconnection in those situations would make for more
interesting roleplaying than the character falling on his face in the
privacy of his hotel room. :)

And sometimes a passive ability will get used in an active fashion,
which means that those die rolls also count as contradiction checks.
For example, our cyberlegged character makes a passive check just for
being able to walk around during a scene, but if he pushed his running
during the scene then that would also involve a contradiction check. So
it can happen that it gets checked more than once.

-- 
Kansas Jim, Torg guru (ksjim (at) sdc (dot) org)
Torg website: http://www.sdc.org/~ksjim/index.html