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Ability use in our Gumshoes variant
Feb. 27th, 2009 10:54 amGumshoes basically breaks down its skills into Investigative and General Abilities. Investigative Abilities are the sweet part of the system and give an elegant way of handling core clues automatically.
General Abilities are designed to cover physical actions and contests with a strong element of the uncertain. They use a pretty basic system of testing the ability by a 1d6 roll against a difficulty of 2 to 8. Point spends from the general ability pool add to the roll, but deplete your pool and are lost no matter the outcome.
We haven’t been too happy with the way general abilities work in play and have gone back and forth on the best ways to handle them. For Pantellos this is especially important because the game really divides into two spheres: Investigative and Danger. Investigative follows Gumshoes to a T (which is why we choose the system) but the more Danger side we had to decide on a better system.
And for some reason Tarot cards always show up in this group.
So, we basically will have two types of scenes. Investigation and Danger. A scene will be one or the other, player/gm choice. We plan on using something to denote this. Investigative scenes unfold like Gumshoes (though we talked a lot about negative clues). But in a danger scene you narrate based on abilities and then turn over the lesser arcane of the Tarot to determine narrative outcome. Major Arcana can be played to up-the ante. It’s all about asserting reality.
This should work for us, we’ll have to see. Since the characters just touched down in the Congo it won’t be long.
General Abilities are designed to cover physical actions and contests with a strong element of the uncertain. They use a pretty basic system of testing the ability by a 1d6 roll against a difficulty of 2 to 8. Point spends from the general ability pool add to the roll, but deplete your pool and are lost no matter the outcome.
We haven’t been too happy with the way general abilities work in play and have gone back and forth on the best ways to handle them. For Pantellos this is especially important because the game really divides into two spheres: Investigative and Danger. Investigative follows Gumshoes to a T (which is why we choose the system) but the more Danger side we had to decide on a better system.
And for some reason Tarot cards always show up in this group.
So, we basically will have two types of scenes. Investigation and Danger. A scene will be one or the other, player/gm choice. We plan on using something to denote this. Investigative scenes unfold like Gumshoes (though we talked a lot about negative clues). But in a danger scene you narrate based on abilities and then turn over the lesser arcane of the Tarot to determine narrative outcome. Major Arcana can be played to up-the ante. It’s all about asserting reality.
This should work for us, we’ll have to see. Since the characters just touched down in the Congo it won’t be long.
