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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8382550" data-attributes="member: 16814">Here's a thing, though, if the current threat is desperate, then the opportunity to affect it was not trivial, but similarly hard.  A situation that can is desperate is one that is very fraught, and not easily overcome (ie, even a 4-5 will result in some nasty consequence).  So, yes, having opportunity is definitely a factor, but the idea that you had easy or moderate opportunity to sidestep a desperate threat is one that doesn't jive with the fiction established.  This guy is a serious threat coming down the stairs, so it would not have been anything but an elaborate action to neutralize it beforehand.  I guess a way to look at it is like this:  it's established that the guy coming down the stairs is a serious threat.  He's going to be a threat because he's a serious defender of the cult and has the tools/abilities to do that.  Getting to this kind of serious threat isn't going to be a routine easy task, it's going to have been a serious and complex effort.  We could flashback it, sure, and that flashback could establish all manner of helpful things, but saying that it would have been an easy or moderate effort is arguing with the fact that this person is, right now, a highly dangerous threat -- the fiction isn't aligning at all.Again, no, by the time we were at that point in the score, there wasn't any flashback available to either the acolytes or the hymnals -- the established fiction precluded both.  The idea that you just have to flashback further seems odd to me, and makes me think that you're not establishing fiction strongly during the freeplay/information gathering phase.  We had investigated the church, made our decision, and started things.  One of the things established was that the cult has a small following that was deeply devoted, and we didn't get any ins there.  This meant that this was off the table for flashbacks -- we couldn't rewrite that and say that one of the members wasn't devoted or that there were more laity available because the fiction was already constrained.Oh, trust me, we play very hard. I'm chuckling thinking about the antics and crazy stuff we get up to.  At one point, while trying to take down a rival gang with a seriously hard leader (Ulf Ironborn, in fact), my character had infiltrated the bottom of the fortified building the gang had hunkered down into (we had to root them out for reasons) with a nice and nasty bomb with the intent to plant it and bug out.  But, turns out there was an innocent there, and I got to find out if my character was okay with that.  He wasn't.  So, we got to a moment where I took the bomb out and threw it into the room while taking refuge behind the bar, using my "emergency" (a flashback from another player) blast plate hidden in the bottom of the crate I brought in to shield the innocent.  Crazy awesome, rolled a 5, blew the hell out of the gang so only Ulf was left upstairs, ventilated the entire bottom floor, saved the civilian, and promptly stressed out on my resist roll as I was blown out into a canal.  This is how I got my trauma of reckless.Actually, this is another good point.  There wasn't a good flashback out for this.  My fellow player managed to get in a "I slid a reinforced plate into the bottom of the chest in case it was needed," but that was about all that could have been done because I went 100% off-plan and did something reckless in the moment.  This isn't something that easily gets done in a flashback because it's violating the fiction being set down.  In the fiction, I went radically off plan and did something wholly unexpected.  The flashback for the plate was great, because it fit that character's drive to protect friends.  Their roll wasn't great, so it only protected one, and I choose the civilian.  But we couldn't have just flashbacked an entire plan where I was supposed to throw the bomb because we had already established the plan in the fiction through play.  Flashbacks are limited here.And, this kinda goes to why I find your example of going off plan in your heist and then just handing your main role off to a flashback to rub the wrong way -- this seems to violate the fiction you've put down already.  Essentially, you chose to ignore your own fiction as established and leveraged a flashback to solve the problem but then said that it was the flashback that let you ignore the fiction.  Kinda goes in a circle, there.Failing scores is something that should always be on the table.  If it's not, if you don't feel it's a possibility, then I think this is another pointer towards the GM easing off the gas a bit.  Some of our scores I'm not sure of, and many times during play I've thought, "how in hell are we gonna pull this off now?"  So far, we've gotten lucky.  Ish.  We've had a few scores where we didn't get exactly what we wanted.Oh, and I also wanted to ask another question -- how many things from your scores start clocks after the score?  This is another one of those feedbacks that's not so easy to catch, but if you do stuff and it makes sense someone would do something about that, a clock should start.  For example, we got tied up with the cult because we took some turf -- an ancient gate to the Deathlands -- off of some other folks, but it's very nearby the cult who had an interest in it and this was established during our info gathering for that score (a negotiation that went well for us).  So, after we took it, the cult started a clock to take it away from us, the new owners.  The very score I'm using as an example was because we were trying to shut down that clock.  Right now, glancing at my tracking sheet, we have a ton of clocks we have to pay attention to, and they're all either creating scores and establishing fiction for those scores and/or direct results from even successful scores.  Turns out crime pisses people off, who knew?</blockquote>

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