[Torg] Awards

[Kansas Jim]

Benjamin Grant wrote:

[...]

> In Torg, possibilities are obviously key.  An opponent with 30 of them will
> be more of an issue than an opponent with 2.  However, let's say that since
> each PC starts out with 10, a GM decides that each p-rated villain should
> start out with 10.  Or even worse, a GM could say to himself that since the
> villain is a mature character, maybe he has 15, or 20.

If you think it's "even worse" that a mature character might have as
many as 20 P-Points, you must think the many published NPCs who have
more than that in their writeups are the worst things ever!

[...]

> We are employing a simple system that solves ALL of the above.  Here it is:

> In a standard scene, the non-PC side should have a total of X possibilities
> available to them, where X equals the number of possibility rated characters
> on the hero's (PCs and protagonists') side.  In a full dramatic scene (which
> should happen less than once per session at the start of an Arc, once per
> session in the middle, and maybe a couple of times per session near the
> Arc's end), the antagonists' side should get three times that number.

The published rules suggest that the villains' side should have "around
two Possibility points per player character they face" in Dramatic
scenes (Adventure Book, p9). They don't give any advice for Standard
scenes because they say you shouldn't be facing P-Rated opponents in
Standard scenes (ibid).

On the other hand, they made these guidelines based on an assumption of
player behavior that I hardly ever encountered in my games - it says
that PCs should not have to spend more than one P-Point during fights in
Standard scenes and should only spend two P-Points in Dramatic scenes.
Twice that is more like it in my experiences, and that's not counting
the players who would burn through dozens of P-Points every adventure
simply because they refused to accept any failure, a bad or mediocre die
roll always had to be augmented with cards and/or a P-Point!

[...]

> Furthermore, with these limits, you do not have to track the possibilities a
> villain has from scene to scene - no matter how many they had last scene,
> each scene is different and starts off with a fresh batch for the villains.

That I actually find unfair - if Wu Han goes from 10 to 3 P-Points in
Act One after an encounter with the PCs, having him back at 10 PP
when they meet him again in Act Two means all the effort the PCs put
into reducing his PP total in the preceeding Act was for nothing. And
from the PC point of view, if they only earned 1-3 P-Points at the end
of the previous Act, why does Wu Han rate earning 7 PP at the end of
the previous Act?

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