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Old 09-07-2018, 03:27 AM   #1
Lentor
 
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Default Martial Artist: does cost of living cover his special diet in town?

Does cost of living (adventurer p. 96) cover the special food a Martial Artist has to eat because of Disciplines of faith during his stay in town? Does the MA has to pay 84$ per week in addition to the 150$ cost of living to keep his chi powers?

That aside the MA could always choose to not pay the 84$ loose access to his chi powers and then eat and meditate properly a day before he goes back into the dungeon to get them back.
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Old 09-07-2018, 05:59 AM   #2
malloyd
 
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Default Re: Martial Artist: does cost of living cover his special diet in town?

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Originally Posted by Lentor View Post
Does cost of living (adventurer p. 96) cover the special food a Martial Artist has to eat because of Disciplines of faith during his stay in town? Does the MA has to pay 84$ per week in addition to the 150$ cost of living to keep his chi powers?
My personal take would be no, the whole point of Town is that it's a simplification where nothing adventurous ever happens. If you find yourself caring about the bookkeeping details, or staging situations where it matters if some special power works there, you've already gone beyond the concept.

If you are going to track the extra cost of the Martial Artist's rations, do you also give him a discount because his bed of nails is cheaper to rent than the pillow room at the Smiling Slut the bard stays in? Once you break that wall for anything, you need to be prepared to break it for everything, because your players *will* try to shave off a few bucks. If that sounds like great fun, I suppose you can, but....
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Old 09-07-2018, 06:21 AM   #3
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Default Re: Martial Artist: does cost of living cover his special diet in town?

Cost of living is the same for everyone: $150/week. Even one-horse towns let Ninja Boy spend time keeping his chi in balance, because he doesn't have to spend much of the waking day exploring, fighting, standing watch, and so on. "You must also pay double for rations" is meant to be read literally: In situations where you have no choice but to rely on rations, you must pay twice the price for those rations. Town isn't normally such a situation.
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Old 09-08-2018, 10:08 AM   #4
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Default Re: Martial Artist: does cost of living cover his special diet in town?

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My personal take would be no, the whole point of Town is that it's a simplification where nothing adventurous ever happens. If you find yourself caring about the bookkeeping details, or staging situations where it matters if some special power works there, you've already gone beyond the concept.
I find this element of DFRPG amusing, but I don't entirely understand it. Depending who is talking about it, "town" seems to be far more abstract than it was in any of the old school games that I started playing in the late '70s and early '80s. Back then, lots of things were abstracted, but we always playout out some of the stuff in town. Inns usually had names and innkeepers were often recurring NPCs. Plenty of adventures happened in town, too. (Indeed, I Smell a Rat is a quasi town adventure, isn't it?)

But I'm 100% on-board with simplifying bookkeeping details. If players want to zoom in, I'm up for that, but I love having baseline numbers to go with for when we just want time to pass, healing to happen, and the next adventure seed to sprout.
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Old 09-08-2018, 01:00 PM   #5
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Default Re: Martial Artist: does cost of living cover his special diet in town?

My take:

If you are having the PCs pay to refurbish weapons and armor, then the Martial Artist pays an upgrade on his living expenses as well. If you aren't, then this is subsumed in the same hand-waving that is done for armed and armored PCs.
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Old 09-08-2018, 01:18 PM   #6
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Default Re: Martial Artist: does cost of living cover his special diet in town?

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I find this element of DFRPG amusing, but I don't entirely understand it. Depending who is talking about it, "town" seems to be far more abstract than it was in any of the old school games that I started playing in the late '70s and early '80s.
It's a feature more drawn from computer games, where Town basically only exists as a thin backstory for accessing the Buy/Sell screen or the Party Roster to swap characters in and out.
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Old 09-08-2018, 02:22 PM   #7
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Default Re: Martial Artist: does cost of living cover his special diet in town?

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Originally Posted by Dalin View Post
I find this element of DFRPG amusing, but I don't entirely understand it. Depending who is talking about it, "town" seems to be far more abstract than it was in any of the old school games that I started playing in the late '70s and early '80s. Back then, lots of things were abstracted, but we always playout out some of the stuff in town. Inns usually had names and innkeepers were often recurring NPCs. Plenty of adventures happened in town, too. (Indeed, I Smell a Rat is a quasi town adventure, isn't it?)

But I'm 100% on-board with simplifying bookkeeping details. If players want to zoom in, I'm up for that, but I love having baseline numbers to go with for when we just want time to pass, healing to happen, and the next adventure seed to sprout.
It really depends on the group though. Yeah in the game rules town is treated like a binary situation, either you are there or you are in the dungeon. This can be great when all you want to do is some hard core tactical hack and slash adventuring. But if the GM wants to have a fleshed out town with roleplaying and scenery they totally can. The rules for town work just fine for that too, they are just spaced out between scenes of roleplaying.

In fact, when Psuedonym ran I smell a rat for a group of us, we pretty much roleplayed the entire time. Albeit in a very comedic, non-serious way. It was still very fun. :) I'll always remember getting healed at the temple of Dudebros by the priest, Brother Brosef ;) we just basicly riffed the entire world as this big comedic slapstick kind of place. Is some of the best fun I've had with a group of people I've only just met :) Good group, Pseudo is a great GM.
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Old 09-09-2018, 06:18 AM   #8
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Default Re: Martial Artist: does cost of living cover his special diet in town?

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It's a feature more drawn from computer games, where Town basically only exists as a thin backstory for accessing the Buy/Sell screen or the Party Roster to swap characters in and out.
I always forget about the computer game connection. That makes more sense.
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Old 09-09-2018, 09:52 AM   #9
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Default Re: Martial Artist: does cost of living cover his special diet in town?

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. But if the GM wants to have a fleshed out town with roleplaying and scenery they totally can. The rules for town work just fine for that too, they are just spaced out between scenes of roleplaying.
The decision effects character design. In a game where “town” is an abstraction there’s less need for non-delving skills.

If town and the terrain in between become places where things happen, suddenly more skills become relevant.
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Old 09-10-2018, 07:31 AM   #10
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Default Re: Martial Artist: does cost of living cover his special diet in town?

It isn't that events are never gamed out in detail in town; it's just that many rules that use a lot of common skills won't matter there often or at all.

Ordinary people without adventuring skills – even little kids and the elderly – live in town, so it probably isn't full of deadly monsters and traps that demand constant vigilance. Shop doors are unlocked or even open because merchants want you to come in and spend money; you don't have to break in. If you want to find something, there are people to ask and signs to read. And you can sleep in the inn at night without worrying about posting watches. In general, you won't be using Cartography, Forced Entry, Lockpicking, Observation, Stealth, Traps, combat skills, etc. almost constantly. In fact, if you're always fighting, breaking things, sneaking around, and stealing in town, you're going to make life harder for yourself, not easier . . . the Guilds, the Town Watch, and the King's Men wield absolute power there in return for becoming useless the moment they step into a dungeon.

Which isn't to say you can't have adventures in town. You can! These are treated as dungeon crawls with zero travel time: Count Yvel's creepy mansion where 44 virgins have disappeared in 22 months, sewers boiling with giant rats and albino alligators, the Council Houses of Despair . . . you can't let your guard down there. But generally, there's still a part of town that isn't hostile, and you can rest there before you go to the dangerous end of town or enter the bad house.

For these reasons, martial artists in town are normally absolved from the kinds of routine maintenance tasks that are assumed to go on for everyone, like banging dents out of plate armor and saying extra prayers at the temple. But if the delvers go on a town adventure that prevents them from just returning to the inn to eat and sleep, and have to tote rations and blankets, then martial artists have to bring along their special granola, too.
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