Samsara:Checks
Contents
CHECKS[edit]
Checks are always negative modifiers. They represent events and occurrences which hinder an actor’s efforts to achieve his goals in a contest. What exactly they translate to must be, as always, narrated by the GM. Remember that receiving a check is not the same as having been hit if you are in a fight.
This should be born in mind especially when a character rolls low and delivers checks to himself. No one should assume that the World’s Greatest Swordsman just tragically, horribly, stabbed himself in the foot. Rather, something has happened which hinders his actions in the contest. Maybe the ground suddenly gave out beneath him. Or he perfectly stabbed his opponent in the heart only to find that the villain’s Bible blocked the sword.
But don’t restrict yourself to wild coincidences (although they are the easiest to come up with). The Goon concept can be very useful here: while fighting his arch-nemesis and his underlings, the Great Swordsman is attempting to kill the Big Bad. When he rolls low and delivers checks to himself, maybe the villain’s goons swarmed in on him and it takes his several seconds to kill them, thus hindering his goal. Yes, he kills a bunch of guys on a bad roll. He is a bad-ass; let the game represent him as a bad-ass. Nothing makes a weaker story than having a character who is supposed to be cool roll badly and trip over himself as he walks across the floor. What contests and checks mean has to be kept firmly in mind and ideas about “to hit rolls” and “damage” tossed out the window while you are playing with SAMSARA.
Variation: Who Interprets the Roll?[edit]
Rather than always having the GM interpret every roll, this function might be opened up to the players. One way to do this is to let the player narrate the results of a successful roll and the GM interpret the receiving of checks. The player then gets to describe how cool he is when he comes out on top.
Alternately, and more interestingly, the GM could narrate the results of a successful player roll and let the player narrate the results of receiving checks. What? Yes, right. The idea is that the player might come up with interesting ways in which his own character is getting shafted. He has to accept the mechanical results of the checks, but might have some fun describing how they occur. This helps alleviate the sense of having “lost” on a bad roll and keeps the player connected to the story.
Variation: Dueling[edit]
Because the average person can only take 6 checks before he is out of the contest and because every roll always results in checks being delivered, few struggles will last long. If you would like to have a contest go for a more extended period, perhaps see-sawing back and forth, the Dueling variation comes in handy. The image for this are those great, sword-fights that last for ten or fifteen minutes, where one fighter is up, only to lose his footing and be pressed back, only to throw sand in his enemy’s face and press forward, only to…well, you get the picture.
In this variation, allow the player a choice when he fails a roll. Either he can deliver checks to himself as usual, or he can let his opponent remove an equal amount of checks from himself. Thus, if Baron Vile (you remember him), rolls poorly and delivers 3 checks to himself, he could let Capt. Smashing remove 3 checks instead. This stretches out the contest and can be narrated as sudden shifts in position or just plain recovery.
Obviously, the opponent must have had a certain number of checks delivered to him first for this option to be used. It could not be used on the first roll of the contest.
This variation should probably not be used for every contest. It adds time and complexity and should be reserved for dramatically appropriate actions. Trying to sneak past a guard is probably not an appropriate duel; attempting to one-up Gollum with the best riddle might be.
Variation: Checks as Hit Points or Wound Levels[edit]
To mitigate the “Death Spiral”[1] effect of receiving checks, the game could played with the checks functioning more as counters (like the archetypal “hit points”), than as active, negative modifiers. In the basic form of this variation, characters receiving checks mark them as usual, but the checks do not apply as modifiers to their subsequent actions in the contest. The checked actor continues to function at full effectiveness throughout the contest. The contest still ends when the total checks received provide a net -6 to his contest rolls. So an actor functions at full effectiveness in the contest until he loses. This can be a bit more over-the-top than the default rule.
Another way to implement this would be to regard the checks as counters along a wound level chart, which can be as simple or complex as preferred. As above, checks do not act as active, negative modifiers, but as counters. For example, one could make the rule that for every 3 checks received in the contest, the character does make subsequent rolls in the contest at a cumulative -1. This means that actors will function slightly less well as they begin losing the contest, though not nearly so badly as in the default rules. Characters with a higher initial modifier will have farther to fall than those with low beginning modifiers; an average actor will take 3 checks and perform at -1, and then be out of the contest at -6.
Varieties of Checks[edit]
There are two kinds of checks: temporary and severe. The distinction is made only to provide some kind of rules-differentiation between results that only apply to a particular contest and those that will be carried around for a while. If you don’t want to bother with the distinction, or only want to use it sometimes, that’s fine.
When a check is received in a contest, it is always a temporary check. Temporary checks only apply to that contest. When the contest ends, the checks disappear. The fact that that guy’s Bible blocked your sword-thrust ten minutes ago has no bearing on whether or not you compose a great song to your lady-fair.
But for every 3 temporary checks received in a contest, you also received 1 severe check. This is worked out at the end of the contest. Round down, so that if an actor received 2 temp checks, for example, then he has no severe checks. At this point, the GM and the player must decide to which sphere of action the severe check will apply. This should be from whatever sphere the contest occurred in, but sometimes there will be options. A severe check, unlike a temp check, only applies to further efforts in that sphere.
The idea here is that anything can help or hinder an actor in the midst of a contest. A fighter can be distracted by a rude comment and troubadour thrown off by a punch. These are temporary checks. But if the fighter takes the insult to heart, he now has a severe check in the Social sphere, but that won’t apply to his brawl. Similarly, if the troubadour gets whiplash, that might hurt him in the Physical sphere, but won’t affect him the next time he tries to sing.
As always, there’s a fuzzy area here, which will call for arbitration. But that’s a good thing as it allows freedom of interpretation. Maybe you decide that the insult was about the fighter’s battle skills and, in taking it to heart, he’s lost confidence in his martial prowess. Then say the severe check is Physical and not Social. Maybe the troubadour took the punch in the mouth and it really does hurt his social skills, but doesn’t stop him running and jumping.
How do you recover? Severe checks will naturally heal at a rate of 1 per game day. If you want. Or 2 if your characters are more heroic. Or every other day if you playing are playing up the struggle to survive. But you could have guessed that sort of answer by now.
Contents
2.Contests
6.Motives
7.Checks
