Quickie question for first time MC – do personal directives work once per mission or are they stackable. An example is the Masochists Directive where the player took injury three times. Is that +3 xp?
Quickie question for first time MC – do personal directives work once per mission or are they stackable.
Quickie question for first time MC – do personal directives work once per mission or are they stackable.
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I can’t give you a specific page number right now, but there’s a bit in the book somewhere that says (paraphrasing here): “If you’ve got a player who’s spamming directives, feel free to raise the threshold at which it triggers; you can only screw someone over for 1-cred so many times and still get XP for it.”
For the first few times, I’d say go for it, but if the player keeps taking small-time harm, healing up and doing it again you can totally make a custom masochist directive. Just remember, directives are flags for the kind of game your players want!
Directives make things more interesting by introducing complications. I say just let them go for it.
Is that PC violent? Give them the chance to bust that friendly informant in the nose. Are they a Masochist? Give them the chance to lean into the plate and take one for the team. Compassionate? A group of orphans are caught in middle of their firefight. Do it early and often. Drive it like a stolen car.
I would go with 1 xp total if a directive is triggered at all. There are plenty of directives that aren’t easily spam-able multiple times per game; I don’t see a reason to make any directives more mechanically viable than another.
If the player is doing missions they aren’t starved of XP anyway.
+Omari Brooks I think that’s a totally viable hack! In our campaign, we found advancement really slow in the first place. To name a few reasons, our missions usually spanned at least two sessions, and we had a lot of +1 bonuses that really changed the miss rate, thereby giving us less XP.
So in our postmortem we actually decided on the opposite solution if we’re ever to play The Sprawl again: Make sure that 1) players take directives that are more easily spammable and 2) make sure the MC spams the hell out of the “unspammable” directives. Like Charles Moore suggests, throwing a bunch of orphans into every firefight or making every other NPC in hit the streets a member of that faction you’ve got in your vengeful directive is the way to go!
Nikolaj Munk
Seems like multiple exceptions are happening in your game; like mission taking more than one session.
You could just multiply the amounts of XP given out by mission objectives by the amount of sessions it takes to resolve a mission (it’s already established in the book that a single mission objective can be more than 1 XP). Or you can just give flat XP for failed/successful missions if you have an odd session-to-mission structure.
Omari Brooks Oh yeah, we’re fully aware that our issues are partly of our own making 😁
I think I missed the part about more XP for a mission objective, I guess our MC did too. That would for sure have mitigated the problem. Thanks for bringing it to my attention!
Nikolaj Munk “really changed the miss rate, thereby giving us less XP.” You give XP for a miss?
Thank you all for the help! I am leaning to use a ‘max 2 ticks per mission’ approach which stems from Blades in the Dark. It’s a safe balance of all worlds.
King in yellow Sorry, I’m misremembering! We didn’t. We absolutely still had those bonuses, but I guess they weren’t salient to our problem.