[Torg] Are Orrorsh game mechanics "scary"?

[Kansas Jim]

Steve Crow wrote:

> The Perseverance thing is indeed kind of powerful... when it kicks in. 
> However, there seem to be some odd elements that keep it from kicking in 
> and being powerful at the same time.

I suspect what you're seeing is an attempt at game balance that's not
working exactly as intended. In my games the PCs have usually never
come close to maximizing their Perseverance by the time they reach the
end of an Orrorshan adventure so it's still quite likely that they'll
get hosed by the PoFear. But there were one or two times where they
managed to do well and they weren't so the big final battle was much
more of a cakewalk than it probably should have been. It's a more
difficult balancing act than it appears.

[...]

> Some of this is dependent on distribution of scenes and acts. Needing 24 
> perseverance points to beat that Perverance 20 monster sounds tough, 
> sure. And if I write a 6-act adventure that only hands out an average of 
> 4 PPs per act, the early acts are going to be painful.

I assume you mean Perseverance Points and not Possibility Points?

> But you figure your average adventure is... what? 3-4 acts. By halfway 
> through you're going to have 20 PPs. So your odds of making the roll are 
> better than 50-50. At that point it just boils down to luck. Luck 
> doesn't seem to be contributive to a looming sensation of fear.

I suppose it depends on how good the players are at guesstimating their
Perseverance and the Perseverance DN of the adventure. If they have no
idea what the values are then they're not going to have any idea what
kind of a die roll they need so luck may not appear to be that big of a
factor to them, even if it actually does boil down to luck.

> 3) Marked for Death and Armor Piercing Attack are cool ways to kill PCs. 
> But... if I want to kill PCs, or target a particular PC for death, I can 
> do it in any cosm. If the cosm's miracles/spells/tools/whatever don't 
> let me have it, I'll create one. (Lanala's "Armor-Penetrating Hrockt 
> Spear" miracle, anyone?)

Marked for Death would get most of my players worried when it happened
but I don't think I would go so far as to say it was "scary".

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