Investigations and the Veteran: this came up in a session, and I’m sort of curious how you guys would handle it. It appears like US pushes you to handle investigation of a thing with Faction moves, which is cool. But upon discovering unknown yellow crystals scattered about the place of a demon fight, the veteran wanted to take it back to his workshop and figure out what they were all about.
I handled it with normal Q&A and he ended up Hitting the Streets at the end, but I sort of felt like there should be a move here. Something like “Investigate an Item of Power” rolling with Mind that basically mimics “Investigate a Place of Power”.
What would you have done?
Workshop move like anything else you do with a workshop.
if you wanna treat it like a “lull in the action” (in which the player looks at you waiting for an answer), your move could then be the actual explanation of the object properties; it could involve explainign the consec. and asking; giving an opportunity with a cost; surfacing a conflict.
What Paul said.
So it’s intended to be run as a “do these things and you get info” sort of deal, right?
I’m also currently running a longer Uncharted Worlds game, where the Assessment move looks a lot more like Put a Face to a Name in that a 10+ gives you useful information and mechanical benefit, 7-9 just gives you information, and a 6- gives you information you won’t like. I think that’s what I was angling towards/hoping for.
But after talking this out while writing this post, I realize that adding a move like that could cheapen the utility of the Workspace, and thus the Veteran. Having someone who can automatically succeed at these things without needing to Hit the Streets or whatever is pretty solid.
On closer reading of the Workspace move, I also see it specifies you can “offer two sets of costs”, which I could easily layer on the “you get good info/you get bad info” dichotomy I was actually interested in.
Totally. The Workspace rules are one of the coolest innovations to come out of PBTA games.