Under pressure

[Rob Lang]

Another off-the-cuff use of scarcity last night was for burning lucidity when under pressure.

The situation was that there were reanimated being attracted by a military communications truck. For weeks they'd been gathering at the truck (powered by solar) and there were thousands of them milling around. We have a massive rock festival in Reading, so we're all very aware of what that's like. The team headed over to see why the zombies were congregating. They climbed from roof to roof (quite easy in suburban Reading as the gaps between rooftops are normally just a few feet) to get close the hospital which was the epicentre.

I wanted to give them a risk of voluntarily surrounding themselves with thousands of reanimates - one fall from the roof would mean game over. That's stressful. To show that, I started everyone on a D12 and a 1 meant they would lose 1 lucidity. The more terrifying it got, the smaller the die they'd roll. I gave plenty of warning and option to turn back.

Where this came in really useful was that Aggro (sniper player) saw that there were military reanimates running the show and they were armed. I told him in private. He then had the choice: tell the rest of the team (and force a die reduction and roll) or keep it secret. He chose to keep it secret, so rolled himself. A similar case happened a bit later with another player. Half the group knew, the other half probably would have guessed but the characters didn't know. They found out when running into close combat.

I liked this system. Some lucidity was lost and the die reduction go to the point (d8) where things were looking touch-and-go. Byrn started with the lowest lucidity and lost a bit more (but used AP at the end of the session to buy back some) - I think he got down to the magic 5.

All in all, I liked it as an application of the scarcity system but I will be using sparingly. It was an extreme circumstance that caused them to roll.

[Chainsaw Aardvark]

Thanks for all the feedback. I may need to replace the vehicles book with a tome of "Things Rob has prototyped for me".

As stated many times before, I don't like taking control out of the players hands and prefer to let them react to the situation. Pretending to be scared is as much the part of the show as acting heroic. I've tried to make spending mental points lucrative enough to make people spend them, rather than force the issue.

This will be making it into the GM's optional rule section, however. Much like tracking ammunition calibers/types rather than just reloads, its an option for those who want more horror and less survival.

With this many different variations on the scarcity mechanic, its rather amazing to realize I only added the mechanic in full after something like five years. Ammunition tracking was always this way, but I might need to give you co-author credit for the other ways of using it.

Its certainly nice to see your game is still running. I thought you had stopped a few weeks ago to start on your ICAR fleet setting. If there is something pertinent to your game that needs a blog post soon, let me know.

[Rob Lang]

Your welcome to all rules ideas! The scarcity mechanic is really very good. It feels right. When the players pick up the next dice down on the scale, they know that things just got worse but there is still a chance. And that's important. For lucidity and deadening, they do burn through a lot of it - and then are forced to rest or spend AP. Which is cool. I encourage them to make use of it.

We did pause for a few weeks while people went on holiday, then some illness in the group, then my work got in the way. It was just a bunch of real life stuff. We'll probably keep going until either: one of my players has a baby (at which point we need a new group), they run out of things to do (not going to happen), it stops being fun (unlikely).