Draw Steel General Thread [+]

[overgeeked]

That is an interesting twist to negotiations. Thanks.

 

[Weiley31]

For those who have it, is Illrigger its own class or is it a variant of the Censor?

 

[gnarlygninja]

The Illrigger only exists in 5th edition at the moment. I don't think they've decided if it will be its own class or a subclass of Censor when/if they make one. But if you had someone who wanted to play one the Censor is close enough.

 

[zakael19]

Here's an example from the demo adventure Road to Brockhurst:

Spoiler

View attachment 413528

Interest 1 means that Gogellwyc starts out fairly unlikely to help. If they can get him to 2, he will point out an alternate route, and at 3 or higher he'll allow them through his territory (at a cost at 3). Patience 5 means the PCs have a fair amount of opportunities to argue their case – this is almost certainly an artifact of this being a demo adventure, as a neutral character would normally start at Interest 2 and Patience 3. Impression 3 puts Gogellwyc on the same level as a "cult leader, locally known mage, noble lord" – if a PC can match that, they will get an edge on persuasion rolls (none of the pregens do).

Are there guidelines for how players can discover/clarify the Motivations/Pitfalls?

 

[gnarlygninja]

Are there guidelines for how players can discover/clarify the Motivations/Pitfalls?

They're baked into the negotiation rules. You can just ask an NPC about their motivation, but they might not want to tell you. In that case, or to discover pitfalls, a hero makes a Reason, Intuition, or Presence test. On a tier 1, you learn nothing and reduce the NPC patience by 1. Tier 2 gains you nothing and on a tier 3 you learn a Motivation or a Pitfall. You can't do it again until someone makes an argument or the negotiation ends.

 

[zakael19]

They're baked into the negotiation rules. You can just ask an NPC about their motivation, but they might not want to tell you. In that case, or to discover pitfalls, a hero makes a Reason, Intuition, or Presence test. On a tier 1, you learn nothing and reduce the NPC patience by 1. Tier 2 gains you nothing and on a tier 3 you learn a Motivation or a Pitfall. You can't do it again until someone makes an argument or the negotiation ends.

Id wish for a little more vs a "you get nothing" but that's easy enough to work around! Very good stuff.

 

[dbm]

That mechanism sounds very similar to how interpersonal scenes will be handled in The Broken Empires. I wonder if they are both drawing inspiration from a similar source (The One Ring was a stated influence for TBE).

 

[overgeeked]

They're baked into the negotiation rules. You can just ask an NPC about their motivation, but they might not want to tell you. In that case, or to discover pitfalls, a hero makes a Reason, Intuition, or Presence test. On a tier 1, you learn nothing and reduce the NPC patience by 1. Tier 2 gains you nothing and on a tier 3 you learn a Motivation or a Pitfall. You can't do it again until someone makes an argument or the negotiation ends.

In one of the videos I watched there was mention of also researching NPCs to discover their motivations/pitfalls. Is that in the book, too?

 

[Zaukrie]

Unless I missed something, this is it:

Outside of Negotiation
While the heroes can discover an NPC’s motivations or pitfalls through
tests made during negotiation, they can employ other methods of
investigating motivations or pitfalls before negotiation. Research or a
little reconnaissance (for instance, reading the NPC’s diary or talking to
their closest friends) can reveal quite a bit about a person!

 

[gnarlygninja]

That's all I found too, but glancing at the Downtime section (I have no experience with these rules at all, there wasn't time for them in the adventures I ran) it doesn't seem like it would be very hard to use some of these to find a motivation.