Episode 1: Countdown To Disaster!

Leaving a little open space here... we can jump ahead, but if you all wanted some time to plan and banter, I want to give it to you. If it is okay with all of you, when we do move ahead, we're going to try something I've been tinkering with... a MONTAGE! I'll explain it when we're all ready.

Sorry for the delay. I wanted to leave time for witchdoctor to chime in. If we need to, we can pause for some additional posts.

As I mentioned earlier, we're going to try something a little different to kick the mission off. Sneaking into East Berlin and making your way to the tenement building holding the Numbers Station is going to be handled as a montage. The way this works is that I will provide you with a list of tests, along with a little background color, and a Task Difficulty rating. It will be up to all of you to determine which character will take each task and then that character's player will narrate the action to overcome the test. If you succeed, everything is terrific! You pass! A failure on any of the tasks will result in a new Temporary Detail. You might have something in mind for what a failure could mean, based on your narration. I could also come up with something to describe what your montage failure might mean.

Here are the montage items, in order:

d12 - Sneak into East Berlin! It is early January in Germany, so the air is frozen and bitter. The guards at the checkpoint are tired, bored, and disinterested in the answers for the questions they are required to ask before stamping papers and waving people through, but they have a new commanding officer who has been keeping a strict eye on things to impress his superior officer. Is he watching? Are the guards looking to impress him?

d20 - Navigate the streets of East Berlin without attracting any attention. Depending on the time, maybe the streets are empty, just the hiss of tires on asphalt wet from melted snow and ice. Or, maybe the streets are crowded with traffic, including a few service vans that are virtually indistinguishable to the one the PCs are driving, making it easy to get lost in the crowded streets. Are the Stasi tailing the van?

d12 - Bypass cameras and the undercover guards keeping tabs on the building. The trick to looking like just another tenement is that the building has to look like just another tenement. Elaborate banks of security cameras will stand out, so mostly there are dog walkers, people throwing stall bread to fat pigeons, and a couple of folks coming home with suspiciously light grocery bags. Maybe their schedules are predictable and easy to time. Maybe there are others on the street that might be Stasi, but it is hard to tell.

d12 - Break into the Tenement Building. There are numerous ways to get into the building, whether that means walking in the front door, following in a child coming home for dinner through the back, sneaking in via the roof, or finding an unlocked window.

An example of how this will work:

We'll say that Laura Taylor is driving the service van through the checkpoint into Berlin, trying to get into East Berlin. The Difficulty is a D12. A Success happens on a result of 8 or higher, so Laura will roll a D12 (the Task Difficulty and also her current Impact Die) with a +1 for every Detail she can use to boost her chances (whether specific to her character or any of the Temporary Details). Windy will describe how Laura gets through the checkpoint and any of the Details she uses, then provide a roll. If she succeeds, great! Everything goes exactly according to plan! If she fails, we'll add a follow-up post that shows that something didn't quite work the way she thought. This creates a new Temporary Detail that Windy can suggest based on the action she described or I can come up with something.

Next, Maxime decides he's going to direct the team to the apartment building. Just like Laura's attempt to bluff her way through the checkpoint, Qralloq writes up a brief description of how Maxime finds the way from the checkpoint into Berlin and to the building. He uses an Character or Temporary Details, as appropriate, and rolls a D20 Task Difficulty (he can do this because his current Impact Die is D20). Again, a success means everything worked perfectly... a failure means something went wrong. A failure is never a disaster... just something is a little "off."

Ideally, we'll post in the order of the montage items above, so let's make sure every character has a piece of the montage and knows their place in line.

Does that make sense?

Hey, everyone! Sorry about the delay… work was a little insane.

Let’s clear up some of the confusion on how tests work! Using the Montage items described above as our example, each task has a difficulty measured in polyhedral dice from d20 (Simple) to d4 (Impossible). When faced with any test you roll your Difficulty and add +1 for any details, whether they are character details, scene details, or temporary details, that fit your character’s actions. If you roll 8 or higher, on any die (adding your appropriate Details), you succeed. If you roll 14 or higher, you get a Great Success (more on this in a moment).

The Impact Die isn’t actually rolled. It measures your character’s current influence, or impact (hence the name), on the current scene, setting the highest/largest die you can roll. All of the characters start with a starting Impact Die of D12, meaning the largest die they can roll, regardless of the task, is D12. If they are given a Simple task (D20), but have an Impact Die of D12, they can only roll a D12. If the task if Routine (D12) they can roll a D12 for that task, but if they attempt a Tricky (D10) or Difficult (D8) task, they will roll that die, not their Impact Die.

When your character is injured, whether it is physically or socially or spiritually, their Impact Die will be affected, being lowered by one die for each setback (so, D12 would become D10, D10 would become D8, and so on).

In most cases, I’m going to trust each of you to tell me which Details are appropriate to your action and can be included. No need for me to make a call, but if you pull out something super weird ("My character is a Moon Sign, and since the moon is out…") I may call a veto. Remember your team were given a whole stack of Temporary Details during the briefing (as Harrigan pointed out in his post, the Service Van and Deutsche Marks) that you can use, but if you get permission from each other, you can also use the Details of other characters. This is how character’s cooperate. So, if Hank says he’ll pay people some of the team’s Deutsche Marks to create a distraction (+1), hides the team in the Service Van (+1), and relies on Maxine’s Streetwise to figure out how to effectively speak with the guards (+1, assuming Qralloq agrees), Harrigan will roll D12 + 3.

It is, admittedly, a little tricky to get a 8 or higher regardless of which die you are using (even if you are rolling a D20 or D12, but the assumption is that you’ll be relying on your character’s strengths and situational details to give yourselves an edge. Most rolls will likely have between +2 and +4 thanks to the Details you use. And, please don’t forget, if you are using one of your Core details (Details with a "+") you get to add +2 for using it in your roll.

Windy, your question about "What time of day is it?" is one of the strengths of the montage… I’m handing over some of the narrative duties to you and letting you decide! So, if you decide to tell me its snowing like crazy which is affecting visibility on the streets, making it harder to be tailed, you’ve just created your own Temporarily Detail and get to use that +1 on your roll. I’m asking all of you to do a little more as players, but you get to have fun with it (hopefully), and come up with whatever you think would be cool.

It sounds like the "turn" order you’ve decided on is:
1. Hank - Sneak into East Berlin (d12)
2. Laura - Navigate the streets of East Berlin (d20)
3. Friday - Bypass building security (d12)
4. Maxime - Sneak into the building (d12)

Is that right? Did I miss any questions?

EDIT: Maybe I should say this explicitly, rather than just hint at it, but my approach to this system is really to give all of you a great deal of freedom. RPGs are, after all, a collaborative storytelling exercise and I’m counting on all of you to bring your ideas and build on each other’s posts, so… do it! Don’t ask for permission. If you go too far, we can talk about it and bring it back ("I get a +1 because I call in an air strike on the gate!" "Umm… maybe let’s not do THAT."), but I trust you all.

I’d love it if you guys would narrate how cool your character succeeds at their roll! Or, conversely, how cool they look even in failure. Please don’t feel like you have to go crazy, but a few sentences or even a few paragraphs, would be awesome.

Windy… :D. We’re still getting the hang of this, so go ahead and try a new roll when you have a moment and we’ll use that one.