I’m afraid I don’t fully understand the debt/faction systems.
So I owe a debt to Vlad the vampire of the Night faction. He wants me to help him with some dark deed and cashes in the debt to offer me an XP. I refuse. The debt is spent, I don’t mark XP. At the end of the session, because I interacted with the Night faction, my faction rating with Night goes up by one.
So by refusing to pay a debt to Vlad, I lose nothing but the opportunity to mark XP and my standing with the vampires is improved? Surely that cannot be correct! But that’s what the Kickstarter preview seems to say.
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“The MC can cash in a Debt an NPC has on a PC to make a hard move.” That’s the cost — although the list of Hard Moves in U.S. hasn’t been released, there’s something bad coming down on you.
How bad could it be?
Jadasc Schneiderman
Is there a seperate Hard Moves list? If so then why? There are enough hard moves in the GM Moves list.
I don’t understand.
Tim Franzke In Powered by Apocalypse games, the GM doesn’t get to make a Move unless the rules say that he or she can. By refusing the debt, you open up yourself to punishment by the GM — it’s giving him or her a free shot at you or your character. Does that make more sense?
No it doesn’t.
The GM makes moves all the time. That is the majority of what you do at the table.
However i understand that refusing an NPC debt is a hard move. However i am not sure if i like that because that makes the choice really one sided. Do i want 1 XP or a freaking hard move?
I don’t like that i must say.
Putting aside the cost of refusing a favour, which certainly could justify an MC Move, refusing a Debt cashed in to offer you XP has no immediate cost except you missing out on the XP.
The thing about Faction is that it’s not about how popular you are, but about how well-known you are in that Faction. Blade the half-vampire is not a popular fellow among his vampire cousins, but everyone knows who he is, that’s a Night +3 if I ever saw one. But Blade doesn’t spend any time with regular people making friends or allies (minus the handful in the movies) so he might only have a Mortality score of +0 or -1.
That’s why you can refuse people’s Debts but still go up in their Faction.
I see, thanks! Could you give some examples of MC hard moves following a refusal to fulfill a debt please? Would there be an opportunity for an MC move if Vlad the Vampire were a player character?
Whenever a player hands the MC a golden opportunity, they can make a move, right? So Vlad isn’t going to be keep quiet about your snubbing him. He’s going to tell people about the way you ignore debts and favours. Maybe one of your allies gets wind of this and calls you on it. It’s a small move, but it has a lot of implications. Are you the kinda person who honours their deals? Can you be trusted in the future?
It might be nice to hand some counter moves?
Just in case it’s some PC that’s effected, not some NPC.
All right, thanks again! The MC move makes sense to me. But I’m not sure I like the faction rules.
Okay, Blade is not well liked in the Night faction, but he is known as a badass with a zero tolerance for bullshit. It’s sorta hard to tell him to fuck off in person, because me might cut my head off. I believe he’s got some political leverage from this rep.
The way I know debts from urban fantasy settings (Dresden Files, Iron Druid an the World of Darkness come to mind), however, refusing to repay a debt results in the worst loss of face imaginable. It’s hard to see how anyone could gain any kind of political influence from that.
In the example of Vlad the vampire, if my ally Obereon the Fey calls me afterwards to yell at me and to tell me he never to call him again, I’ve interacted with two factions now and get to increase two faction ratings. Feels wrong to me.
Jennifer Fuss. could you elaborate on that?
Markus Schoenlau, the thing you need to realize is that Faction is not about fame, it’s about rep. No vampire in the world likes Blade, but when he goes around their low ranking members looking for the word on the street, they talk because they know his rep.
The Faction mechanic doesn’t reward you for playing nice, it rewards you for getting involved so that you have a reason to go out there and do stuff.
Debts are the reward for playing nice, they are the political economy. Even with a -2 Wild, if you have Debts on some of their members you can cash in those Debts to get 10+’s on your Faction moves risk free.
From what understand – am not so experienced in the AW system – in a situation with a NPC the player got the choice between 1 XP or no XP and a hard move from the MC.
Tough am not sure if he can do hard moves anyway, I think AW doesn’t restrict those?]
If the player faces another player and opts out of granting the favor, he won’t get the XP but won’t receive any hard moves either. Specially considering that the character who gets his debt rejected is in a situation where he obv. needs a favor?
Jennifer Fuss, that’s essentially right. If a PC cashes in a Debt to bribe another PC with experience and they refuse, there is no further mechanical effect. However, if I was playing the denied PC, I would have a few follow up things to do or say.
One example that I loved is when my Vamp was being assisted by the Hunter, Fae and Tainted find out who was trying to kill her, we got attacked by a crap load of zombies and rather than stay and fight I bolted. The Hunter cashed in a debt on me, telling me to stay with them and face what was essentially my problem and I ignored him and kept running. If you think there wasn’t fallout for me afterward, you’d be wrong. lol. Paging Marcus Morrisey, remember that?
I think it might be nice to have something mechanical? For cases where ones character doesn’t get the chance to do something.
If your character bolts out of a debt, the other ones got to stay, can’t bolt and die (to salt the wound thanks to your vamps mess ^^;), .. well there’s not so much of a fallout left? ^^;
It’s something that I don’t like with the cWoD. There is this nice idea of a favor system, but close to nothing to make it relevant to the actual mechanics. So something that’s supposed to be ‘Godfather like serious boons’ kinda ends up to be even less like a vague promise. Something that only will have an effect if the other party would have done so anyways.
Jennifer Fuss, ignoring your Debts is a great way to find yourself alone and without allies. I think that threat is pretty big and will push most people into acting on them, plus people love XP so they do what’s asked 99% of the time anyways.
If you have any suggestions for what we could add to the effect, I’d love to hear them though. I just want to avoid making this mechanic too heavy, I prefer it be simple and direct.
Jennifer Fuss Mechanics like Sanity and Hit Points are representations they are role-play queues. If your character has 1 Sanity point left what does that indicate? Some players play the heck out of that weak grasp of sanity, others are happy the character is still sane and play a normal character. Neither choice is really wrong mechanically speaking.
Going back to denial of a debt, if you were to ignore my offer of an XP to help me I will react to that in the game. I may razz your character when we are in a scene again, “I sure could have used that help, buddy”. Which then creates a bit of drama between your character and mine. The mechanics don’t really matter more than the reputation. Heck, I may go so far as to actively tell other characters and NPCs that your character is an oath breaker and to not deal with you. This could trigger a move on my part, or it could just be narrative where my character is mad at your character.
To move something like this into a mechanical representation you soon find that you as a player lose agency or the ability to fully play your character how you want. That’s why things like Vampire: the Masquerade’s Blood Bond and Conditioning are so hated in LARPs. My character may deserve that punishment according to in-game law but to just hang around on the whims of another player/character? I would rather just have a new character and be done with it. 🙂
I hope this helps explains the AW-moves stance on this sort of mechanic.
Andrew Medeiros: That is exactly the point I am trying to make. The way I imagine urban fantasy debt systems to work, refusing to repay a debt would be a killing blow to anyone’s reputation, regardless of power, fame or status. (Mab’s debt to Nicodemus in Skin Game is a good example for that.) I simply cannot think of any way how this kind of publicity could be helpful to anyone.
I think I understand what the faction rules are meant for. However, in an Apocalypse-powered system, I don’t expect highly abstract rules to give me an incentive to let my character act in a certain way, I want rules effects to flow naturally from the fiction and vice versa. Thats’s not what I feel the factions in the preview version do.
In the playtest document v. 1.1, changes to faction ratings were dependent on how a character had interacted with a certian faction during a session. This version looks good to me, but it seems it didn’t live up to your expectations in the playtests. Why did it need changing?
Mark and I have some cool ideas to innovate Factions, and maybe even Debts, so please be patient with us as we work through some new ideas. And also please provide some specific ideas yourselves if you think of any. If you don’t like a rule as written, suggest something in it’s place and we’ll totally consider it.
I am not really deep enough into the system to suggest a well thought mechanic. Though I wouldn’t resort something even close to hit points of any kind (physical, social, mental … whatever).
Something I could imagine to be something cool, would be the attempt to design it as a move? You can accept to act according to the debt / favor / boon and cash in on the XP. Or you decide that your character says “f* you” and you got to role on a consequence.
I don’t think it would take agency away from the player.
He is still in control whether to oblige or not and the consequences can be of various sort.
As said before, with out that I consider the favor-system basically none existing. Like Bonsera approaches Vito, gets revenge for his daughter, and later on, when Vito asks to cremate Sunny he’s like “Ah, no it’s an inconvience and I don’t need the meager 1 XP to upgrade my funeral home.”.
On the one hand it’s kinda lush, on the other hand the player of Vito might feel like his agency get’s basically removed as the favor, for which he bargained and worked, is actually worthless. Sure he could put in even more effort to punish Bonsera. But I think it’s hardly satisfying.
Specially as without any system the player may attempt to totally subdue the other characters. Like for cWoD LARPs, they could ask boons from people, instead of 3-step blood bond or conditioning.
But why don’t they? Why do they go to the extreme?
Because in like 95% of the cases a boon (or a lesser blood bond) will be just ignored and in like 50% cause more trouble then without asking for a boon.
Markus Schoenlau, I think you might be giving Debts too much credit. they’re not as big as Mab and Nicodemus’ deal, although that is a good example of Debts being intertwined into political backlash. But you’re not going to be playing Nicodemus or Mab, you’re going to be Harry and Karrin. When Dresden goes to Karrin and cashes in a Debt for her help, she can say no and no one is going to blow up her house. But she might lose a friend, and her other colleagues might question her loyalty in the future. The conseqeunces should fit the scenario and the favour being asked, adding in too many mechanics in just limits that scope.
Just a quick idea.
Another (additional) option could be to balance the XP distribution?
You do the favor, you’ll get the XP.
You don’t do the favor, the scammed party get’s the XP. ( Maybe twice? )
Specially in a PvP scenario it might be a nice incentive to cash in on favors?
I would always make an offer to someone they would never take and just collect the XP myself…
I am not sure if I got you correct.
Before the exchange start one has to owe another a favort.
One can’t just declare ‘You owe me one’, like out of thin air.
Like the hunter, given in the example, didn’t try to create a favor, but to cash in on a favor. He did something in the past that’s been good enough so the vamp said something like ‘Fine, I’ll owe you something’.
Great conversation so far.
Perhaps I’m missing something, but to my understanding of the current rules, Debts and Faction score stand out as very different types of economy, ones that are not as tightly linked as is implied in some of the discussion so far. Faction scores pertain to a continuum of relevance. Negative factions scores equate with being a nobody, an insignificant ‘other’. Higher faction scores mean you are famous (or perhaps infamous), a mover and a shaker, someone to be loved, feared, or reckoned with, but not ignored. I think the loss and gain of Faction points nicely reflects this now (great change from the previous iterations by the way). In the hidden world of shadows, if you ignore Vampires, they’ll likely ignore you – they have many other concerns, like Blade knocking on their door.
Debts on the other hand, are the interpersonal connections you have with PCs and NPCs. These are operationalized as a form of currency to represent the ebb and flow of favours. However, real favours are far from cut and dried. I think they should not be too tightly linked to direct tit-for-tat, they are an abstraction. When thought of in this way, I think this alleviates the concerns about losing face somewhat. Think of a scenario where you owe someone a large amount of money. Even if they are a close friend, they might leverage that scenario without calling in the debt, e.g., You: “Hey, do you want to throw me a couple bucks for the popcorn?”, Friend: “No way, you still owe me like a MILLION dollars!”. They are leveraging the debt without calling it in. You’re not subtracting the price of the popcorn form your debt. They did you a solid, these little favours are all part and parcel of that. Also remember that calling in a debt is not a one-sided affair. If Harry Dresden owes Queen Mab, she can’t just ask him to bring her Saturn or he’s an oathbreaker (well maybe SHE can but the reverse isn’t true certainly). There must be equivalence between the favours and there is room for negotiation. So, denying a Debt, is not the same as publically denouncing obligation. It could just as much be a ‘not this time’, or ‘I can’t help you with that.’
Let’s put this in the context of a high stakes, life-threatening situations we find in Urban Shadows. Nigel Drake (Hunter), agent of secret British organization that deals with supernatural threats, is a known factor with the cities vampires. He’s ended enough of them that they know they can’t ignore him. He has a Faction rating with the vampires. He’s also on personal terms with Veronica (Vampire that Andrew Medeiros referred to above). Not friends exactly, but he knows she has valuable information and contacts and she is not one of the worst. They’ve helped each other out in the past. They have Debts with one another. So, when Nigel agrees to help her out, his interaction will be noted by the vampire community – he stepped in to help her out. Faction goes up. But Veronica is a no good bloodsucker who can be trusted to follow her word, so he has to spend some of her debt with him to have her stay when the zombies hit the fan. Nope, she’s off like a…bat in the night. Mechanically, she refused an opportunity to gain XP. Fictionally, she blew me off. You’d better believe Nigel is going to react to that!
Okay, clearer now. Thanks everyone! ^^
Jennifer Fuss: A simple suggestion for PvP-debt-rule: “If a player character refuses to fulfill their debt to you, you take +1 forward for having a little revenge for their betrayal.”
I love corruption, but factions is the only mechanic I am not 100& sold on. I think this is because I play a lot of games where everyone is the same faction.