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PGM Anshar's House Rules
Tavern Protocol:
I will not usually invoke wards within the tavern. Spells, poisons, attacks, and actions will be generally unhindered with obvious IC recourse when appropriate. The city guard is only a few shouts away, as indicated by the city map. I do not, and intent never to, have a NPC attributed to the name Anshar; there may be repeat NPCs in varying storylines that will have realistic stats, real motives, and very painful retribution if killed.
Identifying:
Alchemy, Appraisal, Herbalism, and Read Magic will yield automatic successes when used toward loot identifications. When used “on the fly” (pretty much whenever you’re IC), a roll against the skill stat is required for prompt identification. Poison Lore meets similar requirements but, when attempted to identify a poison of higher level than the user under any situation, a roll versus the stat is required – failed checks cannot be reattempted until the character or stat level is raised. In no event, of the skills listed, will a failed ID check inflict harm or destroy products.
Cannibalization:
Stamina is lost as soon as a roll is attempted. There is no benefit for a critical success, but a critical loss incurs double stamina loss with no power gain (with the potential of sending the caster into bleeding). Additionally, a failed MA roll grants the user no recovered power but still costs the specified stamina. Characters may not attempt to cannibalize if the loss would send the caster beneath 1 stamina.
Divinations:
Divinations will only be accepted during shifts. With some exception (i.e., the simple Omen), I will attempt to make extra effort for character’s divinations and this will often require a delayed response; if you want a simplified answer that is not dependent on my events, please contact another PGM. As always, divinations are generally restricted to the plane of casting.
Traps:
When using the skill Traps and Snares: the skill does not grant information covered by other skills (will not detect poisons), details unobservable from the character’s perspective (will not extend visual limitations), or specifics regarding devices or situations whose result may be undesired but not, technically, trapped (will not tell you to hurl a lit grenade).
Using the Traps and Snares skill to disarm a trap always puts the trapper within bounds of the trap effect. If there are exceptions to this rule, it will be explicitly stated when and if the trap is IDed. Creativity is encouraged but will not improve T/Sing skill attempts or saves against; obvious disregard for the presence or danger of traps, whether in disarming process or not, will be damaging to your health – in a similar but opposite gesture, creatively-unarming traps may be accomplished without necessarily using the T/S skill.
SW Fencing:
I will now be enforcing a roll versus the skill whenever fencing products via Streetwise. Failed checks, which will be rolled under proxy unless explicitly requested otherwise, will range failure to get payment to lawful apprehension. This applies to everyone, even the 100 SW’ers out there.
Sheet Updates:
In an effort to streamline hosting duties and minimize clutter, sheet updates will not include recently-acquired level-ups or correction alterations until the following week unless I receive the necessary paperwork prior to submitting the summary – I will do everything in my power to include it as soon as possible.
I will not provide sheets unless a request is made during my shift.
Character Notes:
When on my events, critical amounts of damage will occasionally result in scarring and physical deformities. Certain spells and situations may occasionally result in similar circumstances. Unless the damage is concentrated or severe injuries are incurred, this will result in a cosmetic affect only.
Poison Lore (As per PGM Velkaiva)
1. If you have the skill, Poison Lore results in a critical failure (and self-poisoning) only on a roll of 100. You cannot poison yourself on an identification check. You can poison yourself when extracting, refining, or applying poisons.
1a. If you do not have the Poison Lore skill, you will always poison yourself trying to do anything with a poison other than identifying it.
2. Poisons harvested from a creature (as opposed to a plant or mineral source) must be done within one hour of the creature's death, unless it is Embalmed (via the Necro Level 2 spell or some other method) in that time. If the creature is neither Embalmed nor harvested within one hour of death, the poison deteriorates and cannot be extracted. This rule generally does not apply to unliving sources (golems, corporeal undead, etc.), although that will vary depending on exact creature type. Also, if the source is noted as having exceptionally perishable poison, that note takes precedence over this default rule.
3. Poisons do not affect undead, extraplanar creatures, or constructs unless they are either magical or specifically noted as applying to particular creature type.
4. Nonmagical poison damage does not crit. Magical poison damage does.
5. Nonmagical antidotes and Slow Venom have no effect on a poison after its onset time has elapsed. Magical antidotes, Purify, and items which specifically state that they can be used retroactively will undo poison effects that have already kicked in.
6. Attempting to work with a poison higher than your character level imposes a -25 penalty to the Poison Lore skill for every level's difference (same as the overcasting penalty for MA on spells). A failure on an attempt to work with an above-level poison will cause self-poisoning. This rule only applies to refinement and application of venoms. You may attempt to harvest raw materials without taking the above-level penalty.
7. Characters who have the Poison Lore skill may attempt to procure non-Apothecary venoms by two methods: a) Streetwise searches; b) going out to look for natural sources.
Streetwise searches require at least 50 Streetwise (the higher the skill, the better your results) plus two weeks' advance notice. The primary advantages of Streetwise searches are that you can look for specific effects (for example, "poisons that will affect undead," or "poisons that have very subtle onsets"), and that you can work in cooperation with another PC who has higher SW to find things. The primary disadvantages are that I do require two weeks' advance notice (that is a hard rule; I will not accept searches with shorter notice) and that poisons acquired by this method are likely to be expensive. Also, if I receive repeated requests from a character who does not follow up on his or her results, I am eventually going to regard that as wasted effort and cease replying to further requests from that PC.
Going out to look for poison requires that the character spend at least one regular Parthos day OOP and be present in the room on that day to do his or her own rolls. I need at least three or four days' advance notice to set up scheduling and work on results. Characters may make one attempt per week. The finding roll is based on Poison Lore, IQ, Perception, and Luck. If you have Foraging, you may add Foraging/10 as a bonus to the check. Assuming that you succeed in finding something, you must then make a Poison Lore check to harvest it. Failure indicates a wasted attempt, as the materials will then be lost.
The primary advantage of going out to look for poisons is that it doesn't cost anything (besides being OOP a day). The primary disadvantage is that what you find, if anything, will be totally random.
SW/CG Contracts (As per PGM Velkaiva)
These are the rules for my SW/CG contracts:
1. Only one contract per player at a time. If you have a contract open, you cannot take another contract under any of your PCs until the first one is finished. If the contract requires an RP post, it does not count as being "finished" until the post is up, and I will not accept any emails from you trying to claim a contract until then (so if you're the first person to send me an email but don't have your post up, and somebody else emails me before the post goes up, then that person gets the contract, not you).
1a. If you owe me roleplay posts for something else (such as a tourney-related investigation), you can't take any SW contracts until those are done too. This is to ensure that I don't have too much of my time monopolized by any one player.
2. If your character does not have SW/CG at the appropriate level for a given contract, I will not let you take any action with regard to that contract until I hear from the PC who's relaying the information/job to you. I need to hear from the player providing the information first.
3. All emails for SW/CG contracts should go to PGMVelkaiva-at-gmail-dot-com. I'm still on AOL but I do not want to get any SW/CG emails on that account.
4. I reserve the right to terminate contracts on the grounds of inactivity if more than a week passes between a PC taking the contract and that PC taking some action in relation to the contract (email or post, whichever is appropriate to the situation).
I don't want to have a bunch of these suddenly becoming active a month from now, when I don't have time to spend on them anymore.
5. I'm borrowing a page from BGII and implementing a "reputation point" system for SW/CG contracts. The idea is that PCs will develop a reputation for competence or ineptness based on their track record with solo or small-group contracts, where the performance of an individual PC can be more readily separated from the performance of a tourney group as a whole. Over time, PCs who gain a reputation for competence may find that people are willing to entrust them with more difficult jobs and pay more to enlist them; PCs who are reputed to be inept may be turned down for jobs or have to discount their rates to find work.
A successfully completed contract will net the PC anywhere from 1 to 10 reputation points depending on the degree of success and the difficulty of the job. A failed contract (including one that gets terminated for inactivity) causes the PC to lose 1 to 10 reputation points.
In the future, I will be doing more contracts that have minimum reputation cutoffs and/or which have payment modifiers based on the PC's reputation points. I am not implementing this immediately because there hasn't been enough time for PCs to gain (or lose) enough points to make the system work, but I will be putting it into play as soon as I think the point distribution is reasonable.
In general, your tourney performances will not affect your reputation points, partly because most tourneys take place outside the city (and thus outside the awareness of many NPCs) and partly because, except in the most unusual circumstances, it's hard to attribute a tourney's success or failure to one individual member. However, when those unusual circumstances do arise and, for better or worse, one PC has a standout effect on the game, there may be some impact on that PC's reputation.
I haven't yet decided whether PCs will be aware of one another's reputation ratings (probably yes, at least if they're on the SW/CG board, but I'm still debating this) or whether high-level PCs will start off with some reputation rating independent of their SW/CG performances (probably no, under the "yeah, past record bla bla bla, but what have you done lately?" principle).
For reference, questions/comments on this system should go on the OOC board, since players can't post on this board and I don't want people cluttering my rankings thread in SW/CG. I will delete any posts made there.
Reputation rankings are not yet "active" (that is, NPCs don't yet know about them in IC-reality and won't be taking them into account) because, as noted previously, there hasn't been enough time for the rankings to be remotely accurate yet.
Once they are active, they will apply only to PCs, and only as a comparative measure. The numbers do not have any absolute values in and of themselves. There is no chart for what your number "means." Its value is determined by the job snapshots following your entry and the values of other PCs on the list.
An example to illustrate why this is:
Joe Q. PC has a reputation of 5. He is new to the scene and has undertaken only one job of relatively low difficulty, but has executed it competently. Other than this one job, he has no record.
John Doe PC has a reputation of 5. He's been working in the underworld a long time. He takes some easy jobs and some hard ones, does some competently and totally bombs others. His reputation zigzags all over the place depending on whether he's dug himself out of his latest hole yet or just come down in another crashing failure. Presently, he's about as high as he ever manages to get.
Both of these hypothetical PCs have the same numerical ranking, but their descriptive entries look totally different. NPCs are likely to view Joe as a potentially promising but untested rookie. They're likely to view John as a dubious bumbler who'd be worth hiring only if the job wasn't very important or if they need a sucker to take the fall. Both are iffy propositions for a tough or high-priced job, but for different reasons.
The number isn't the whole story; it also matters how you got there and where you stand relative to the other PCs on the list.
Also, why NPCs aren't covered:
1. Because it's already enough work keeping track of the PCs.
2. Because I have to put in job snapshots for all the entries and I'd rather use my job ideas for playable SW contracts than background color for NPCs.
3. Because the rankings are by comparison and therefore will evolve and shift to reflect PCs' successes and failures, so it's impossible to assign static numbers to NPCs. The meaning of their numbers would constantly change and need updating to keep a reasonable relationship to PC activity.
4. Because other GMs also have NPCs whose backgrounds should realistically be listed as well, but that further complicates the problems listed above. Additionally, as GMs come and go, their NPCs will come and go, and a new GM may want to establish an NPC who should have been active in the underworld for years but whose reputation rankings wouldn't reflect that since the GM hadn't been on staff/created that NPC earlier. Rather than retcon the list continuously to reflect GMs creating new NPCs and killing off or retiring old ones, I'm just going to limit my list to PCs.
Clarification, since the question's been asked:
PCs who do SW/CG contracts are not earning any XP apart from whatever they earn through the associated boardplay. As far as your XP take is concerned, it doesn't matter whether your contract requires in-room rolls or is handled entirely via email, or whether it takes 30 emails or 3 to complete. The only thing that affects your XP is how much and how well you write, and since I'm not handling boardplay (at present Cas is doing that job), I don't determine that.
Part of my goal in doing these contracts is to give PCs something purposeful to write about. Another part of the goal is to enable players who don't have big chunks of time for tourneys to advance their characters' reputations, wealth and levels via boardplay. To de-emphasize the importance of room rolls, and also to reward people who put in the effort to write more, I'm not awarding any XP for the contracts themselves. So, again, the only way that anybody is getting any XP from doing these things is through their boardplay posts.
As time goes by I might change this, but at present I have no plans to do so. If it turns out that people aren't earning enough XP to accurately reflect what they would have gotten for performing the same actions and taking the same risks in-room, it's more likely that this problem will be resolved by increasing the boardplay XP awards.
More clarifications:
-- PCs who refer contracts to other PCs are not thereby barred from accepting contracts of their own, unless they continue to take an active part in the referral.
In other words: if you refer a contract to Joe Bob PC, and you have nothing more to do with that contract and Joe Bob is thereafter left to sink or swim on his own, then you are free to take another contract if you want. However, if you're working in partnership with Joe Bob, then you cannot take a new contract until both of you are finished with that one.
-- If you're working in partnership with another PC, and that PC is supposed to do a post and doesn't so gets timed out, both of you fail the contract and take reputation hits plus whatever other effects may be appropriate in that situation.
-- Generally, there are no effects on reputation from referring another PC. If you refer Joe Bob as above, your reputation stays the same regardless of whether he does a superb job or completely botches his contract. The exceptions would be if you're working in partnership with the other PC or if you've made some guarantee to the NPC that "this guy's really good" or "you said you wanted someone who'd be terrible and fail, and boy! did I ever find a guy for you!", in which case you may get dinged if it turns out that you're wrong. Since in most situations there's no benefit to making such a guarantee and a potential downside if your referred PC doesn't perform as claimed, I assume most PCs making referrals don't offer any guarantees unless they've specifically stated otherwise.
Amendment/Tweak:
Boardplay posts that are related to SW contracts will be earning XP at a higher rate than other boardplay posts. This is a temporary system for now. If it works well, I'll keep it; if it doesn't, I'll find a different way of doing this.
Because SW contracts involve much more risk to the characters than standard boardplay (where nothing bad happens to the PC unless the writer wants it to), the XP should be higher than the usual. Because I want to keep the emphasis on the quality of the writing rather than room events or emails, the posts will remain the sole measure by which PCs are rewarded XP. As a compromise between these two goals, for the next few weeks I'll be sending Cas a series of modifiers based on my estimation of how much ingenuity the character had to show, or how much risk had to be run, in order for that contract to succeed. This will then increase the character's base XP by some multiplier (1.5x to 3x the base XP), but that base number will still be determined solely by the quality of the writing.
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