Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8697081" data-attributes="member: 42582">Huh?We were all sitting around the table. The player of the starship owner had decided that the starship, with some of the PCs and some of their NPC entourage on board, was going to travel from Zinion to Novus. We resolve the checks for entering jump space etc.Then I frame the scene: Buzz is walking past the sick bay door, and out bursts an Alien. Mayhem ensues. After the Alien has been dealt with, the medical scientist NPC explains to the ship owning PC that her experimentation had got out of control.There's no hiding of anything! There's revelation, which is basically the opposite of hiding. (In Agon, John Harper sets out the cycle of play as reveal the situation, ask questions and build on the answers to drive the game forward towards conflict, and then judge those contests and resolve their outcomes into new situations. That's basically what has happened here: revelation of the Alien, asking questions that established who was where on the ship and what they did to respond to the threat, and then judging the results and resolving things into a new situation, namely, the revelation that the medical scientist NPC is still engaged in risky bioweapons research.)If I had wanted to, I could have framed a different scene, such as the NPC mentioning to the PC the progress she is making on her research with Aliens. But I thought the one I framed was more exciting - in part that's because Traveller has more robust mechanics for resolving a fight with an Alien on a spaceship than for resolving an argument between friends. (That's not to say that Traveller doesn't have social mechanics - it does - but it has "thicker" combat mechanics.)I think you are not understanding how the resolution works.The brother had been mentioned before. As I posted, the player had introduced the brother, possessed by a Balrog, as part of his PC's backstory. Freeing his brother from that possession was a key motivation for the PC. The possession as an explanation for his brother's evil was a key part of the PC's conception of his brother.The player chose to put those things at stake, first by searching the ruined tower, and then by Aura Reading the arrows. And the checks failed, and so the player loses the stakes. And so I narrate that he confirms that his brother made the Black Arrows.I can assure you that that was a surprise, and an unwelcome one.Had the player succeeded on his Aura Reading and learned that the Arrows had been made by an Orc, that would have been interesting (because of how it would have connected to other elements of the established fiction) but not very surprising.</blockquote>

Verification