NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9549745" data-attributes="member: 42582">From the Scholar's Guide, pp 218-9:In Torchbearer, we give you four tools you can use to make your expeditions more than just loot hunts and massacres. Beliefs, creeds, goals and instincts all contain the potential to hook in players and push play to another, more intense level. If, during an adventure, you find an opportunity to present a player with the choice of either playing a belief or acquiring loot, then you’ve offered what we call a meaningful decision. At this juncture, the player must decide what is most important: satisfying that belief or scoring some loot. Torchbearer thrives on choices like that. The game presents many opportunities for the players to earn benefits and improve their characters—through the rewards mechanism, advancements and acquiring loot. If you pit acquiring a reward against acquiring loot, your players will squirm and struggle with that decision. And the ultimate outcome will be more meaningful for the tension. The game becomes even more interesting once you present decisions that set a belief and a goal against one another. If a player has a belief to soak up loot and a goal to teach their young companion, what will they do if their young charge is captured - but they’ve also stumbled on a statue with glittering gems for eyes? Will the player waste time prying out those gems or will they hurry to the rescue? If a character has a belief about making it rich but a goal about serving the common good, the game master can create tension by offering conflicts that fork both priorities. . . . The key to playing Torchbearer is to insert those situations into your adventures and leave them there for the player to decide. Don’t force them. You can prompt a player to make a choice, but let them make the decision. Neither outcome is correct or better. It’s the decision that matters. . . . But if they do write those beliefs and goals about solving the riddle, saving their companions or scoring a big haul, be sure to give them a chance and include those moments in your game.And from pp 221-2:Players can convert their relationship characters into friends and enemies during play. To make a friend, the player must make a genuine and sincere gesture to the character that appeals to the character’s idiom. Sometimes a thoughtful gift is enough, but in some cases you might have to prove yourself across multiple adventures. Go with your gut. Do you feel a kinship between these two characters? If so, then add the friend to the player’s allies list. They’re considered a friend for all that implies in the rules. Making a friend might involve arguments and debates, but you can’t argue someone into agreeing to be your friend. Such agreements are merely alliances and friendship may or may not be the result. Conversely, it’s possible to make new enemies in play. If you deem that a player has treated a character cruelly or callously, you should add that character to the player’s enemies list. This character now counts as an enemy for all that implies in the rules. This new enemy will seek to bring about the character’s downfall directly or through careful plotting.Here was your example, upthread:Where does the necromancer come from? Are they an established enemy? If not, why is the GM framing a situation where they are trying to command the PC? How has this necromancer become salient?Likewise, the sick mother. Where has this state of affairs come from?And what about the red ruby of doom - why is that salient? Have the PCs been searching for it, and for clues about it? Or is the GM just pulling it into play like a rabbit from a hat?As I posted upthread, you seem to be assuming that the GM is under no constraints in framing scenes, establishing conflicts and stakes, establishing failure results, etc. None of that is true of the GM in Torchbearer 2e, in Burning Wheel, or in Marvel Heroic RP. Prince Valiant is more informal in the way it discusses these things, but I think there are some pretty clear "best practices" for that game also.</blockquote>

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