Bonds are a weird thing. You as a player choose how many bond points your character have with a person, ally, city, organization, etc. Then while playing you can lower those bonds by burning them for your character to get a boost, but in turn those persons, allies, citizens or organization lower their perception of you. So, Bonds are not about what your character feel about the bonded but the other way around – how they feel about your character.
Things get complicated when a character Serves and Protects another character. Then, you as a player can choose to create or advance a Bond with you character to that other character. That effectively means that the other character increases his/her perception about you (that sounds good!). But then, the other character can raise his/her bond with you as well, which means that other character can modify your character perception about him/her, effectively messing with your character point of view (which sounds weird): “Hey, thanks for helping me! I’m sure your are now more engaged with me, don’t you? (I raise a bond with you).
Does it sound right?
Bonds are definitely going to be subjective and different from different character’s points of view. In some cases Bonds are how they feel about you (The City, Law Enforcement). But most of the time the Bond is about how you feel about others (Other characters, NPCs, etc.)
So essentially when you Serve and Protect and increase a Bond, you’re showing that your character thinks that Bond is being strengthened. Whether the other person accepts that and increases the Bond as well is up to them. Sometimes a player will think their Bond is actually very strong when it isn’t. (Maybe when you protect someone, and you raise a Bond with them you think your Bond is strong, but they resent the fact you think they need to be protected, for example, and so choose not to raise the Bond.)
As with everything in the AW engine, mechanics should follow the fiction first. If there’s no reason for the option to be chosen to raise a Bond (if your character wouldn’t see the relationship growing stronger by protecting someone) then you probably don’t want to choose it. Sometimes it makes for some pretty cool moments though.
Rereading the bond section, what you said gets more sense. I’m sorry, I was wrong.
Just to clarify it further, under bond rules, you can burn a bond point and then do a scene were your character gets angry or pissed or somewhat threats your relationship (one-directionally (if such a word exists) by something the other character has said or done. Is that right?
Yes, definitely!
Yeah, but your bonds guide your actions in play, they show development. A good GM will know when you’re abusing bonds just to get a boost. I’m new to this system, coming from Dungeon Worlds, but if I know Bonds well enough, abusing them sounds like a munchkin sorta thing.
My GM thinks there’s a limit that you can have 5 Bonds max though, but I think that’s work best as a max on how many bonds you can have with a person XD
It’s always got to make sense in the fiction, definitely. It’s going to be hard abusing Burning Bonds in the game when the game requires you to set up a story and the fiction around what’s going on. If the player thinks they’re power gaming by Burning a bunch of Bonds, but I get a bunch of story around why they’re doing it and it develops their character and who they are (which I can’t see how it couldn’t), then I’m totally fine with that as the EIC. There are limits to Bonds, but it’s not 5 and depends on how well your character passes off as “normal”. You can find the table in the character creation section.
Regarding to the new way to get bonds. Could you explain why did you remove the “vulnerabilities” table in favor to the new “passes off as normal”? I understand it must have been some game design decision issue, I just wondered what it was? (Should you can tell us).
Definitely! Well the main point we were always trying to drive home is the concept you see in most comic books – the more powerful a character is, the harder it is for them to relate to others. Sometimes more than that though (in terms of power), a lot of comic books are about how a heroes’ powers affects their life. That was always the core of what we were driving for, and I think that shows in all the examples and the text beforehand as well. The problem with vulnerabilities is that there wasn’t much control over it – a player, if they wanted, could come up with a ton of stuff that wouldn’t ever affect them and there were no mechanics to reinforce the downside to powers or how it affects everyday life, fitting in, etc. This way we get both, without all the hand-waving that leaves it up to the table and the EIC, but leaves the specifics to the player when they say just how and why they can’t fit in.
That sounds very good to me. Congrats!