High Score! FAQ

This is an FAQ for High Score! Thanks to everyone who sends in any questions. I’ll work on clarifying everything here until the next revision. Now updated for Playtest 2.

Q: Are Difficulty and Setbacks the same thing? Do they build up over time or can you chip away at them each Phase?

A: They work the same, but the idea is that Difficulty is something the GM attaches to a character or objective based on the narrative circumstances or the challenges of the Event, while Setback is a disadvantage characters inflict (and which PCs can inflict too). However, all of them work the same. You do indeed chip away at them. If you have a Difficulty of 10 in your way, and you roll 8 for score, you reduce the Difficulty to 2. Next round, if you roll 8 again, you’ll score 6 points and clear the Difficulty. Difficulty does not normally build back up over Phases, but the GM might have it do so.

Q: Can multiple players work to clear the difficulty?

A: If the Difficulty is linked to an Objective, any character scoring off the objective reduces the difficulty.

Q: If both the Enemy Team and the Player Team can score off an objective, do both erode its difficulty?

A: This scenario is at the GM’s discretion. They may have separate Difficulty, or they may both chip away at the same Difficulty. Sometimes, the GM may have both teams “racing” to get an objective – for example, there may be a huge bejeweled artifact on a pedestal in some ruins and both teams racing up to get it first. They are “scoring off” the jewel, and whoever erodes its difficulty first will “get” the jewel and score its objective points. But sometimes, the enemy and player team have different interactions with an objective, and this won’t work. Heck, the jewel objective could work either way. It all depends on what you want to do.

Q: Liabilities and Spotlight Time are cool, but infrequent. Have you any alternate rules?

A: You can try it this way: each time you Link a character’s Liability, count the number of Phases the character spends disadvantaged by that Liability. Then, give the character half as many Karma Tokens as the amount of Phases spent burdened by the Liability. How long does Spotlight Time last then? A single Phase per Karma Token. So the character can choose exactly how long his or her Spotlight lasts by spending Karma Tokens this way. So you can tap into a character’s liabilities more often and give them more spotlight time on average than they’d usually get. However, this is more book-keeping intensive.

Q: How would you handle traps?

A: Minor traps, like the crossbows in the wall and or the pit traps in a dungeon floor, could be handled as a Difficulty or Efficiency challenge in the midst of a greater Event, like “explore the dungeon” or “escape from the cannibal lizardmen.” You could also treat them like enemies. Large, killer traps are probably their own miniature event. You can handle the “disable the trap” aspect of a dungeon gameplay with an Efficiency Threshold – roll high enough or you “fail” and lose the points and grant them to the enemy team (and maybe take a hit to your Persistence due to the trap setting off).

Q: How would you handle Vehicles in a game?

A: If vehicles are very important to your game (such as a game based on Anime mechas or modern vehicle warfare or something), you might want to write something like Vehicle Profiles. Treat the Vehicle like a Temporary Asset that has different dice for different situations. Players may or may not “own” these Assets, but they are Temporary because they can be lost, and it is desirable that players uses these temporary vehicle Assets over their own. Rate the Vehicles’ Speed, Weapons and other stuff in dice and assign each vehicle a Persistence and a Staggered Value (the amount of points the enemy earns when they Stagger the vehicle). So for example, we might write a Tank the following way:

•Persistence 75 (tanks are sturdy!)

•Speed: 1d4 (tanks aren’t all that quick! when you use the Tank asset and link it to a roll that depends on speed, the tank is not going to add much to your score).

•Weapons: 2d6 (whoa, see what I did there? assets don’t normally roll two die, they roll only one – so the tank must have amazing weaponry to be beyond normal assets).

•Stagger Value: 50 (regardless of your character value, the enemy will earn a big push to their score when they manage to mess up your tank).

Q: Are players basically invincible? What happens if the cops burst into their hotel room and I want them to escape out the window?

A: Basically, what normally happens in any game – your PCs might decide to stay and fight regardless of the danger presented, or they might run away like you want them to. What you can do to coax them, is assign the objectives different difficulties. For example, you might tell them “if you stay and fight the cops it’s a Very Hard group difficulty.” And going out the window will suddenly look like a much better prospect.

Players are not invincible. The GM can manipulate the score to make things downright horrendous for them if he or she wants, and the consequences of failure are always set by the GM, and include injury and death. But like in any game, if you don’t set the expectation beforehand that the game will be gritty and deadly, or realistic (if you will), then the players will feel cheated when their character is suddenly killed.

Q: I really would like you to try to do some of the math for this.

A: I’ll give it a go. This table here has every possible combination of skill and asset (based off the book) and the average points you’ll score if you have that combination. These are ROUNDED by the way – I don’t think .5s and .7s are very useful for this kind of game so I just round up to the nearest whole number.

Complicating this are Perks. With Perks, you can make a free maneuver (which may give you half as much again of these points) every once in a while for a little burst of points, or a +5 bonus every once in a while. Advantages also throw in a wrench – being able to reroll any bad roll will drastically affect your average scoring. So if you gain Spotlight Time, this math flies right out.

Q: What does this mean for High Scores and Events?

A: It depends. Your players will have different skills and values and averages. You can go completely insane trying to figure out just the correct amount of High Score to assign to any event. Or you could set a number like 500. If the players beat it too fast? Okay something happens narratively, now you have another event as a continuation of the last, and it’s also 500. If the players are taking too long to beat it? You know not to make 500 High Score events again, go with maybe 250 next time. Try it on for size. The game is really very flexible about this as long as you and your players are willing for the narrative to be flexible. So you shouldn’t go crazy with your graphing calculator trying to figure out the absolute most optimal high score for every event. Just keep this in mind: if the High Score is enormous, the event will take longer and need more dice rolling to be completed.