[Torg] Awards

[Kansas Jim]

Dominick Riesland wrote:

> 2009/2/22 Benjamin Grant <benn at 4efix.com>:

>> How many possibility awards do you see given out in general?  (Assuming that
>> I am not the only person in a regular weekly torg game or three.)

> For me, usual award: 2-3 base, plus subplots as needed. This is per
> Act, not per session. There is a fundamental difference. I have seen
> an act take three sessions, as people bumble or step their way through
> it, whereas I have also seen an entire four-act adventure end in a
> single session. These generate different award schemes. But per act is
> the normal timing.

That has been my experience as well. Sometimes the players were on fire
and we zipped through several Acts in one night. Sometimes they didn't
have a clue, spent way too much time on out-of-character chatter, and/or
they just got screwed over by their dice and cards and it took more than
one session to get through a single Act.

[Benn asked in a later post:]

> What about subplots, like Romance or Person Stake?

They get the award for that at the end of an Act like usual.

[...]

>> If putting in the card manipulation effort, it would not surprise me to see
>> two Glories a session occur with four players – maybe even with three.  (Of
>> course, this requires significant card grinding, and also means not having
>> the cards/resources available for other things like rescuing the princess…)
>> With four player (let's say) and two glories per session, that's 6 extra
>> possibilities per player per session.
> 
> Whoa! That's nowhere even close to reality (no pun intended). Yes,
> there is significant card grinding involved, but there aren't as many
> chances for that as one would think. One or two Standard encounters
> with card play, plus maybe three or four scenes worth of discarding
> one card to get an additional card (or more, if someone burns Presence
> or Action to improve a charm attempt, or maybe using Second Chance on
> a failed lockpicking roll), and you might be able to assemble one
> "perfect" hand.

I cannot recall anyone in my games using card grinding to get a hand
like that, three Hero/Dramas and a Glory. I did have people who would
grind through things to build a killer hand, but most of my players
tended to go for short-term satisfaction and if they had to choose
between keeping a Glory card and something like a Hero or Drama they
would keep the Hero/Drama and toss the Glory card. They probably
figured that as long as someone else in the party kept a Glory card or 
got one later on then they could always trade something for it should
they later on be in a position where they could use it.

[...]

> before the end of the Arc, it's time for legal intervention. Remember
> that villains can counter Possibilities spent on roll-agains. So that
> "automatic" Glory is no longer guaranteed. By limiting the number of

Yes, I've had major villains on more than one occasion kill a Glory
attempt by countering their P-Point and/or Hero/Drama cards.

And about half the time the group would use Master Plans and trades to
recover the used Hero/Drama cards and try again the next round. :)

[...]

> In reality, I have never seen more than 3 Glory results in a single
> adventure, and that one specifically said that if a certain result
> took place, it counted as a Glory result regardless of the die rolls
> or cards involved.

I think I may have had three Glory results in a single adventure once
or twice, but it involved a lot more card grinding than usual on the
part of the players. Truthfully, even one Glory result tended to be an
unusual occurrence with my groups, multiples were special events.

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