I played my first PbtA game last night, Monsterhearts 2. It was a lot of fun, but I had a few questions.
1. How do I determine the outcome of a contest between a PC and a NPC?
2. Can NPC strings on PCs be used to make rolls harder for the PCs?
3. Can NPCs use the PC’s conditions against them? How does that work?
Thanks!
Glad you had fun! I really like Monsterhearts 2, I’m not an expert, but here are my thoughts.
1) Totally depends on what the contest is. Say what you want to do and have a conversation with the MC. You might be able to just do it, might be keeping your cool, might be turning someone on. might be just spending a string on them.
2) Yup, but only indirectly. The string can be spent to give the PC a condition. The condition can make it harder to fictionally position your PC into doing something. It can’t be spent to just “give you -1 to a roll”, but it might make it so you have to do multiple rolls or do something else before you can do the thing you want.
3) Yup, conditions are “true” in the sense that they affect the fictional positioning. While a PC can invoke the condition to get a bonus to a roll against your character. An MC can leverage the condition to force you to “Keep Your Cool”, or put another fictional obstacle in your way first.
There is also a Monsterhearts specific G+ community if you want to check there too.
For the third question, about using PCs conditions against them, reread the section on “setting them up and knocking them down”. A Condition is a great excuse to “knock down”.
Yoshi Creelman Thomas Berton it seems like I don’t quite understand how conditions work. What would be an example of an NPC using a PC’s condition of *Idiot* against them?
For a condition like idiot, it might be less about how they actively use it against you, but more how the condition in general gets used against your character by the MC. You want to turn Maria on, “Sorry, at the moment you can’t do that, she can’t shake the image of you not even remembering your own name when the sub was taking roll”.