Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 9753870" data-attributes="member: 177">Let me see if I can articulate it.  Leaving out the specifics of Draw Steel's dice mechanics, since I'd be porting it to some other system anyway...For any negotiation, an NPC has two stats, Interest and Patience, rated 0 to 5, representing how much they want to help, and and how much they want to keep negotiating, respectively.  The players can present an argument, and roll - on a good result, Interest and/or Patience may increase.  On a failed roll, one, the other, or both may go down. If either drops to zero, the negotiation ends, and the PCs don't get what they want.The PCs can stop negotiating at any time - they get the result based off the NPCs interest at the point they stop. If they drive the Interest up to 5 and stop there, they get the best possible deal.  If they stop when Interest is only 1, they get what they want, but in limited form, with great limitations or costs.There's a list of possible Motivations for the NPC (the playtest came with 12: Benevolence, Discovery, Freedom, Greed, higher Authority, Justice, Legacy, Peace, Power, Protection, Revelry, and Vengeance. One can imagine others.)  An NPC has at least two Motivations - if you make an argument that touches on that motivation, you get an improved outcome for that roll.  The NPC also has at least one Pitfall - if you make an argument that is based on a Pitfall, you automatically fail that roll, and Interest and Patience automatically drop one each.So, if you are negotiating with a Hag, they may have Motivations of Greed, Power, and Freedom.  They may have Pitfalls of Benevolence and Higher Authority.  Knowing about the NPC (either by doing legwork and asking around, or observing them in person), you may learn the Motivations or Pitfalls.Edit to add:  This is actually very similar to the Social Conflict rules of Savage Worlds Adventurer's Edition.  In SWADE, you get three rounds of arguments, rather than "until you run out of Patience", and you gather "tokens" for successes rather than measure the target's Interest, but the similarities are there.</blockquote>

Verification