[Basic] Disadvantage of the Week: Duty

[Pursuivant]

Here are some of my fixes for Duty.

Extremely Hazardous, etc. Duties still give a flat increase in points. Everything else is treated as a special limitation.

Multiple Duties

If you have multiple duties to the same organization, you have only one Duty, but with a higher frequency of appearance and possibly higher risk.

Duties to different organizations give full value for the first Duty, half cost for the second, and a quarter of the value for each subsequent Duty, arranged in order of original point value, and from most hazardous to least hazardous, up to a maximum of -40 points. For this purpose, any number of Non-Hazardous Duties count as a single duty, using the point cost of the highest Non-Hazardous Duty (minimum -1 point).

For example, a soldier regularly goes on commando raids (Extremely Hazardous Duty, 15-, -20 points), he also has a Duty to a spy network (Hazardous, 12-, halved for -2 points), to an organized crime family (Hazardous, 9-, -5 points, quartered for -1 point), as an official in his church (Non-Hazardous, 9-) and at the local ruler’s court (Non-Hazardous, 6-). These non-hazardous duties are lumped together and then quartered. They would normally be worth 0 points, except that they collectively count as Minor Duties worth -1 point. The character gets a total of -24 points in Duties, and his appointment book is packed.

If the GM rules that multiple duties appear at once, he can either try to work them all into the same adventure, or he can give the player a choice as to which duty to the means by which he fulfils his duties, and the order in which he fulfils them.

It is strongly suggested that characters be limited to no more than one or two duties unless the players and the GM are willing to put up with the added complexity.

Special Enhancements

Extremely Hazardous (-5 points): As RAW.

Involuntary (-5 or -10 points):

Add:

The GM can also impose the Involuntary Limitation if you don't get a choice of assignments and the consequences for shirking your duty are severe and almost impossible to avoid. This might apply to conscript soldiers or to soldiers in armies where the consequences for desertion or dereliction of duty are a long prison sentence or a firing squad.

If you have some control over your actions and can attempt to break free of your Duty, or modify its nature, the cost is -5 points. An example might be a commando who can take an active role in planning the missions he must carry out. If you have no control over your duty, and are likely to quickly die or be removed from the campaign if you ever shirked your Duty, the cost is -10 points. An example would be a special agent with a self-destruct implant in his skull, who is ordered to carry out missions exactly as ordered or die. Since players might consider Involuntary duties to be coercive, and not fun to play, both the GM and the player must agree as to whether a particular character should have an Involuntary Duty, as well as its nature. The GM should also be careful to enforce the involuntary nature of the Duty, otherwise he is just giving the player character points for free.

The extra points from for an Involuntary duty is unrelated to how hazardous the Duty is when you carry it out – the danger here lies in what will happen if you don’t carry it out!

Unknown (-5 points):

You have a duty, but you don’t know its nature until you are called upon to perform it. The GM should be creative in inventing different duties – some of which you will be completely untrained to handle!

Special Limitations

Favor Owed (-80%):

You owe someone a single major favor which you must repay. At some point during the game the person to whom you owe the favor will “call it in.” The GM can either decide when this will be depending on dramatic necessity or he can roll dice, just as for an ordinary duty.

In any case, when the person (or organization) to whom you owe the favor redeems it, you must perform some task for them. The task will always be inconvenient or costly for you to complete, and might very well be hazardous, but it will not occupy too much of your time (no more than a week). At that point, you have performed your obligation and you must buy off the remaining Duty disadvantage.

You may reject requests for favors which you feel are unreasonable or which you cannot honor immediately. In that case, however, you owe your benefactor another favor identical to the one you already owe him!

If a favor is sufficiently small that it is worth less than -1 point, it is too trivial to count as a disadvantage. If the favor requires that you spend or hand over goods or money greater than 10% of your yearly income, however, it is always worth -1 point, or -2 points if it requires more than 25% of your yearly income.

Non-Hazardous (-50%):

Although your duty might be time-consuming and demanding, it entails no more risk of death, injury or capture than any other job. The consequences of failing in your duty might be high, but they usually involve social disgrace, exile, financial loss, or permanent exclusion from your profession, rather than outright death or injury.

Examples of characters with Non-Hazardous Duties include court nobles, essential employees in critical industries (e.g., 911 dispatchers, chemical plant managers, data center network administrators, water treatment engineers), certain healthcare workers (e.g., EMTs, physicians or surgeons who are almost always “on call,”), certain members of the legal professions (e.g., defense attorneys and judges), missionaries, Peace Corps volunteers, and non-combat soldiers during peacetime.

The GM can also apply this limitation to “jobs you can’t quit,” or jobs where if you do quit, “you never work in the industry again."

This limitation is mutually exclusive from the Extremely Hazardous Duty special enhancement.


Subject to Reactivation (-50%):

You are have retired or are on detached status, but are subject to being recalled to active duty under certain circumstances. The duty appears normally, but never occupies much of your time when it does appear. Typically, the character will be called upon to give a briefing or act as an instructor. Alternately, he might have unique skills that his former employers still occasionally need.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Pursuivant

Examples of characters with Non-Hazardous Duties include court nobles, ... chemical plant managers,

Both of those can be hazardous, if you get them sufficiently badly wrong.

[jason taylor]

Favor Owed can include Duty to a criminal organization.

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by johndallman

Both of those can be hazardous, if you get them sufficiently badly wrong.

Absolutely! But, they don't imply going into harm's way in the same way that, say, being a combat soldier or test pilot does.

I was thinking more about the inconvenience the Duke of Blichester might face when he has to cut his fox-hunting short to attend the Opening of Parliament, and all that bother of having to sleep through sessions in the House of Lords, rather than the more lethal inconvenience one of Ivan the Terrible's Boyars might suffer if he misses an important courtly event.

If your courtly duties carry the regular risk of poisoned wine or the executioner's axe, or your chemical plant management duties bear the very real chance that you and your place of employment will be Ground Zero for a zombie outbreak or an antimatter explosion, then your duty is distinctly something other than "non-hazardous."

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by jason taylor

Favor Owed can include Duty to a criminal organization.

Yep. Or a spy ring, or mercenary outfit, or the cop who looked the other way during your last heist but might just "rediscover" all that missing evidence unless you go to Albania to rescue his nephew from terrorists, or that Army buddy of yours who just happens to be running explosives to a Laotian opium smuggling operation, or the strange cabal of orange-robed lizardmen who raised you from the dead who now want you to go to the City of Brass to steal the Djinn Queen's mirror, or . . .

Basically, it's points for giving the GM a big, old juicy plot line to gnaw on.