Overcoming Resistance

As I mentioned in the last post, a character’s resistance will be a number tied to a description. To overcome it, personae roll dice.

The easiest way to do this is to have the resistance be the difficulty for the die roll, and, as yet, I don’t see any reason to make things more complicated. That still leaves the question of what the persona’s player should roll, and what she should keep.

I think that the player will roll the persona’s social skill. This will be something like persuasion or etiquette; the skill list will be worked out a little bit later. This means that someone with a high social skill is more likely to get a good result, but that charm and persuasiveness can only get you so far. Other things, the dice kept, are more fundamental.

The dice kept will be set by the strength of the persona’s relationship to the character, as long as the relationship is backed up by appropriate attitudes. Trust and love will be the most common, depending on whether the persona is trying to convince the character that something is a good idea for the character, or to do it because the persona wants it done. If the persona makes promises or threats, however, hope or fear might be appropriate. It isn’t really possible to use hate or doubt to get someone to do what you want.

Sometimes, this will be obviously hopeless. If the character’s resistance is 13 and the personae only have a two die relationship with her, they have no chance of overcoming the resistance. First, they need to either strengthen their relationship with her, or reduce her resistance. This is a good thing, because it reinforces the themes of the game. The personae need to build a relationship to get what they want, not kill things.

In many cases, however, rolling the dice will make sense, because the personae might succeed. What will be the effect of this roll? Right at the beginning of this blog, I talked about the effects that success on a die roll could have, and the need to avoid simple failure. In this case, I think there are two main choices: success might create an option, or change the context.

Success creates an option when it gives the personae another route towards the main goal, one that involves the cooperation of this character. For this to be appealing, the new route needs to be easier than the ones available beforehand. For example, if the personae need a ceremonial mask for a matsuri, and the character has one but is reluctant to lend it, overcoming her resistance lets them use her mask. If they cannot overcome it, the personae will have to make a mask, which will take time and effort.

Changing the context, on the other hand, will normally mean bringing more people within the benefits of reaching the goal. If a matsuri grants bonus dice to everyone present, convincing a character to attend means that she also gets the bonus dice. Of course, since characters do not actually use bonus dice, this would, instead, contribute to strengthening her relationship to the jinja, which in turn contributes to building the jinja up.

The players need to describe what the personae say to the character, and how the character replies. These decisions will be based on the elements describing the character’s personality, and on what the players have decided to have the personae do. This part of the interaction with the character is brief and simple, so the rules do not need to provide much structure. On the other hand, building a relationship is much more complex, as we saw earlier, and there, the rules do provide more structure for developing the character’s personality. What about reducing the resistance? That should also tell us more about the character, and so I will discuss it in the next post.


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