Editing Samsara:Contests (section)

==Simple Contests==
Despite all of the tension and drama that can result from running a full contest, it can also be a burden.  Sometimes, the needs of the story would be better served by quickly determining if an actor succeeds or fails.  Maybe you just want to know if your sneaky guy creeps past the guards or if he alerts them.  It’s not a given either way, but it would only slow things down to play out the full contest.  In that case, you run a simple contest.  These contests ignore checks and use the success descriptors from the last column of the Contest Roll chart.

Simple contests involve the same method for computing the contest roll: protagonist’s modifiers - antagonist’s modifiers + d12.  The result then is compared to the success descriptor column of the Contest Roll chart.  The GM and the player then must, as always, flesh out the meaning of the result, based on the actor’s goal and the narrative needs.  The descriptors are guidelines for how to flesh that out.

The most basic description is the success/fail description.  A roll of 7 or over is some kind of success and a roll of 6 or under is some kind of failure.  That might be all the description needed:

“I want to catch the bomb before it hits the ground.”  Success means that you do.  Failure means that you don’t.  Enough said.

But if the quality of the result matters, the distinction between spectacular, full, and simple, comes into play.  If the actor trying to catch the bomb, scores a simple success, he might fumble with it a bit, before fully catching it.  A full success means a solid catch.  And a spectacular success means that he runs to where it is going to fall, turns a flip in the air, and then catches it.  On his head.  You get the idea.

A simple failure might be very close to a success and leave the field open to trying again, perhaps.  While a spectacular failure means something just plain horrendous has happened.  If a character is trying to sneak past some guards and rolls a simple failure, he might have stepped on a twig and alerted the guard nearest him.  He’s still got options: he might knife the guard and continue, for example.  A spectacular failure, however, means that he snagged a trip-wire or the spot-light just fell full frontal on his sad face.  And 20 guys are training their weapons on him now.  He’s still got options, but not very good ones.

If your game involves [[Samsara:Ultramundane abilities|ultra-mundane abilities]] which a character cannot automatically use, such as magic or psychic powers, using the Simple Contest rules most of the time might be in order.   Thus the character might have to roll a Simple Contest against the power level of his spell: success means it works and failure means it doesn’t, with the possibility of extreme successes and failures keeping things interesting.  See the suggestions in [[Samsara:Ultramundane abilities|Appendix A - Ultramundane Abilities]].