View Single Post
Old 10-05-2018, 09:51 AM   #4
Skarg
 
Join Date: May 2015
Default Re: Jobs and critical success/failure

It seems to me the job table serves an important purpose but that it should not be too specific in ITL because what the specific special outcomes (both rewards AND risks) should really be quite variable and depend on the situation, and especially if this is a PC we're rolling for, it's vastly more satisfying for the GM to generate on his own some specific situation to describe and play out at some level with the player, rather than saying "something happened - roll to avoid taking a generic amount of damage that may kill you" as the only possibility.

I'd say it's not that a standard reward should be specified (though rough & variable guidelines might not hurt, IF an appropriate thing to suggest can be worded such that people won't mis-apply it...), but that the risk should also be more vague.

And again, above all, both the reward and the risk should usually be turned into an interesting situation unless the players really don't care and really just want to roll through it and get the results with as little effort as possible.

---

I think the original rule ran into trouble with the way many players related to it not just because it didn't scale (i.e. it should have said you get 100 experience or 3d x 10 experience or something rather than you get enough experience to go up an attribute). It was also a problem because players tended to relate to it as:
* written-in-stone absolute truth about the rate people can improve from those jobs
* something the designer had run long-term statistics on and approved the results of
* something that made sense to think every NPC was doing, so non-violent professionals are high-level characters after 10-20 years of job rolls
* a description of the only risks working at a job presents - it's always a saving roll or X dice damage

Those are all over-applications that lead to perverse results and conclusions.
Skarg is offline   Reply With Quote