Backstory Actions, particularly Development

I have a few questions in this area.

1. How do you determine difficulty for Development actions? Seems to me that the more complicated items are very likely to have a higher Character Point cost anyway, so if you're basing it on that, you're taking account of that twice. There's nothing wrong with that, but it makes me wonder if there's a different way.
   
   
2. I am uncertain why you chose to allow only one action per person in Interlude-backstory time. Was it just to simplify things? I think that in my game, Interludes will probably be the primary backstory method, because I'm not really skilled enough to make every session into a one-shot. Some storylines will take several sessions, and often a storyline will end and a new one be started within a session. So I would rather make it so that when the party decides to rest and prepare themselves, that's when it happens - and rarely between sessions, since they are probably in the middle of doing something else. And if Interludes are going to be the primary method of getting backstory actions done, it would be nice if Drive mattered.
   
   My answer to that would be a simple formula, based on the assumption that you can get about 10 hours of work into a day, and the arbitrary decision that a 10-day rest nets you your Drive worth of actions: your number of actions is, rounded down, your maximum drive times your hours rested divided by 100. "Hours rested" follows the 10-hour day thing, so that 6.5 days of resting is 65 hours in the formula. For most cases, the math would be fairly simple: a week of resting nets a 6-drive or 7-drive character 4 actions, an 8-drive character 5, and so on.
   
   I'd like your thoughts on that, though, especially since I don't know the reason for your original decision.
   
   
3. Perhaps part of your reasoning was that if it is so easy to perform actions and develop things, the players can do too much, too fast. (Although it seems contrary to your usual state of mind, which seems to be to limit things as little as possible. If they want to spend a month of in-game time forging weapons, so be it, but they've lost a month... right?) It seems to me that gear development is too fast, if you only need Character Points worth of Result. I know that you are re-tooling gear anyway, so maybe this question has become moot, but I think I would have chosen to do it based on Gear Points or even GP / 2, instead.

Parmeisan wrote:How do you determine difficulty for Development actions? Seems to me that the more complicated items are very likely to have a higher Character Point cost anyway, so if you're basing it on that, you're taking account of that twice. There's nothing wrong with that, but it makes me wonder if there's a different way.

First, Development actions can also apply to non-item Resources (like Contacts or Rank). The Difficulties get set differently depending on what Resource you're talking about.

For item Development, my rule-of-thumb is that Difficulty is based on how easy or hard it is to build something, while Result is how simple or complex it is to build that thing. Many simple things are easy, but not all, and many complex things are hard, but not all. For instance, Armour-Penetrating is a 1 Gear Point/level Feature, but it's tough to make a weapon that will bypass armour, in many cases. Similarly, giving a sword a Broad Advantage is fairly cheap, but it represents making a sword that is a notable step in quality above the average.

To address related points you made at the end of your post: yes, building gear is entirely too easy, especially now with the revised Item Features. I need to adjust that, but I'm not sure how. It won't be based on Gear points, but I may add a multiplier to the Character Point cost. It should be relatively easy to build the things you can build in downtime. It takes a 2 minute montage to make a master-quality sword in the movies, and that's the kind of thing you should be able to do in a backstory action.

Parmeisan wrote:I am uncertain why you chose to allow only one action per person in Interlude-backstory time. Was it just to simplify things?

No, it's to reflect "dramatic time". Downtime is when there's nothing on the characters' plates. They can do what they want. The limit to how much they can do is based on the idea that more motivated characters can get more done in the same time-span.

Interludes, on the other hand, are about "we have some time to prepare now, but things are ticking away." So it's limited to one Action - you can get something done in the time you have, but not everything. Most of the time in an adventure, you're not going to have the time to move into "offscreen time". Remember that a backstory action is "I can do a whole bunch of individual tasks as one action, because they all lead up to one goal". How many goals do people deal with in the middle of an adventure in film or TV?

There's really nothing keeping you from giving people multiple Interludes if the time warrants it. At that point, I'd split the difference between Interlude and Downtime, and give them a fraction of their Drive.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the rules for backstory actions are about how much story space they take up, not how much real time. An Interlude or downtime phase has no set length - it's the space to breathe within an adventure (interlude) or the space between adventures (downtime).

Look at Buffy the Vampire Slayer as an example. Most adventures are a single episode, but some adventures will stretch out over two or three episodes, where the end of one leads into the beginning of the next.

In between episodes, things happen in the life of the characters offscreen. Sometimes, these things have an impact on later adventures, sometimes they don't. And whether they're still dealing with the same storyline is irrelevant to this structure. That's what downtime phases are about.

Sometimes, we have "offscreen" time in the middle of an episode. Three days will pass while the Scoobies prepare (and deal with their own lives). But the time pressure is still on. They may have

Parmeisan wrote:I think that in my game, Interludes will probably be the primary backstory method, because I'm not really skilled enough to make every session into a one-shot. Some storylines will take several sessions, and often a storyline will end and a new one be started within a session.

So I would rather make it so that when the party decides to rest and prepare themselves, that's when it happens - and rarely between sessions, since they are probably in the middle of doing something else. And if Interludes are going to be the primary method of getting backstory actions done, it would be nice if Drive mattered.

But you can handle that with downtimes. In fact, I do it all the time. An adventure is when the action is immediate. After an adventure, the characters can take downtime or not. If they take downtime, they can do things with it. If not, they head off on another adventure immediately. Whether there's an ongoing storyline or not is irrelevant.

And the rules for backstory actions say "between adventures", not "between sessions". In fact, I generally do tabletop downtime phases at the game table, round-robin so that everyone can bounce ideas off of each other and cooperate. Doing backstory actions between sessions is something I only do for LARPs. That's about the format of live-action play, not about the backstory rules.

Parmeisan wrote:My answer to that would be a simple formula, based on the assumption that you can get about 10 hours of work into a day, and the arbitrary decision that a 10-day rest nets you your Drive worth of actions: your number of actions is, rounded down, your maximum drive times your hours rested divided by 100. "Hours rested" follows the 10-hour day thing, so that 6.5 days of resting is 65 hours in the formula. For most cases, the math would be fairly simple: a week of resting nets a 6-drive or 7-drive character 4 actions, an 8-drive character 5, and so on.

I'd like your thoughts on that, though, especially since I don't know the reason for your original decision.

It's workable, if you want to specifically index things to real time. Personally, I hate that. My suggestion would be:
- Time relatively urgent: 1 backstory action each.
- Time short/uncertain: 1/4 Drive.
- Time to prepare: 1/2 Drive.

If you have any more time than that in the midst of an adventure, you're not in the middle of an adventure any more, you're in downtime.

OK, that all makes sense. I wasn't really clear, apparently, on the difference between downtime and interludes. Thanks!

No problem. Thank you for asking (even if I only discovered it months later!). The more I know about how my rules notes are unclear, the more effectively I can write clear rules.