Monthly Archives: November 2014

Natural Approaches

Off to Metatopia tomorrow, so here’s a quick one for Fae and other approach based games.

When I use approaches, I may follow the rules as written for the mechanical effect (aspects, boosts, damage etc) but for the fiction, I do something else entirely.

First, I figure out how many approaches are relevant to the roll. It’s rare that they’re all relevant, but usually there’s at least 2 or 3 in play. Like, if the player wants to break someone out of jail, they probably want to be sneaky and careful (or maybe flashy and quick.

If they get a marginal success (0 or 1) then they succeed at whatever approach they took. Each additional step of 2 (so 0–1, 2–3, 4–5 etc) means than they succeeded in one more approach. So if the character rolls sneaky to bust out their friend and rolls a +1, then they succeed and are sneaky, but not careful, so they leave some evidence behind. if they roll a +3, then they’re sneaky AND careful, but it takes a while. if they roll a +4, then they’re sneaky, careful and quick.

I don’t necessarily articulate the mechanics of this because they’re a guideline. Instead, it all comes up in the fiction.

Note that when I do this, then the choice of approach matters insofar as a non-useful approach means your initial success is not going to help much. Let’s say I try to smash and grab my friend out, so I use forceful – even if I succeed with a 0 or 1, I’m not Sneaky OR Careful OR Quick so there are going to be consequences to this approach.

Effectively, it fills a similar niche to the *world 7–9 result, just on slightly more constrained lines.

Anyway, just a trick.

Minor Warlock Tweak

Hmm. Was just looking through the Warlock in a bit more detail and realized something I’d overlooked in the Invocations. Basically, each pact has an invocation which is so awesome that there’s pretty much no reason NOT to take it (Book of Ancient Secrets, Voice of the Chain Master and Thirsting Blade). Not a design choice I’m terribly happy with – it’d be cooler if those were baked into the pacts – but now that I’m aware of it, I may need to revise the Pact of iron to add a similarly “must have” invocation. Arguably, Unyielding Armor of the Void fills that niche, but I put that in just to allow AC to be a bit better at higher levels (and still comparable with mundane equipment).