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Message: <blockquote data-quote="dbm" data-source="post: 8942686" data-attributes="member: 8014">Dramatic Tasks have some qualities which are really cool in my opinion.They are inherently fail-forward. The group needs to collect a number of successes by the end of the task (with each success or Raise counting) and so if the early rounds go poorly that doesn’t mean the party have failed at whatever they were trying in those early stages, it just means they need to pick up the slack later on.They encourage all the party to be involved, so for example in the infiltration scene when the PCs were trying to cross the base one party member used stealth to find the best route, but another used persuasion to talk their way past a guard they bumped into and the third (who was an engineer) used his knowledge of how docks are usually set up to help find their target location.There is, of course, a desire to use your best skills all the time as a player. The rules discourage this - the GM can veto or penalise repetition. More mechanically, though, the target is quite high - typically two successes per character per round for a tough but achievable dramatic task. This is because you can assume that the PCs will achieve a Raise on average (i.e. two successes per roll) each round. The balance works well in my experience.The system meshes well with the other parts. It uses the same initiative mechanism (with a twist I will come to) and that means edges which influence initiative or trigger off Jokers all work as expected. Your character’s abilities have the beneficial impact you would expect.The twist is complications - if you draw a club card for initiative then your action that turn is at -2 and if you fail, the whole task fails. This creates risk and drama in any task as nothing is ever assured. It also adds a degree of tactical choice - the player could avoid working on the task that round and so avoid the issue indirectly but put the rest of the team under pressure.Put this all together and you have a situation where the GM sets the starting parameters but the players’ choices drive how things move forwards narratively, based on the approaches that they take. Add in the mechanical aspects and overall it is a great way of putting a mechanical skeleton into any non-combat scene you want (unless there is one of the other non-combat tools you would rather use).</blockquote>

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