Friends at the Table: PARTIZAN 05: Profit and Loss and 06: A Palace During a Wake

February 1, 2020 4:44 PM

DOWNTIME SPECIAL! These last two episodes are all about bookkeeping, leveling up, and doing the most important part of any RPG: rolling to create additional problems!

PROFIT AND LOSS features a little bit of radio drama

A PALACE DURING A WAKE wherein our fearless heroes get turnt

Both teams complain that maybe three downtime actions is too many downtime actions.

Programming note which I posted on the previous thread, one of the players changed their name and pronouns after this recording:

"sylvi
@captaintrash
she/her▪️@friends_table cast member▪️podcast banshee for @emojidrome▪️🔞▪️mutuals can follow @mourningradio

names are also fake so i have a new one.
andi was good but it's run it's course. gosh, i just love announcing things about my identity, anyway hi im sylvia

RIGHT. fuck important 2 mention that the next friends at the table episode + emojidrome episodes u hear will not reflect this bc we already did those. (they're great stay tuned)"

posted by fomhar (3 comments total)

Three is DEFINITELY too many actions, but I understand the impulse to give players everything they ask for. You just want to make your friends happy and next thing you know they've got a flaming raging poisoning sword of doom and they're chopping down mountains with their third bonus attack per turn. I guess those extra resources are balanced out by the absolutely insane shenanigans with rivals.

Both episodes were good but I'm real invested in Clem's party right now.
posted by fomhar at 4:49 PM on February 1, 2020 [1 favorite]

Yeah three downtime actions is a lot of downtime actions, but again I'm impressed with how Forged in the Dark games add mechanics to stuff that normally has to be dealt with freeform in other systems like D&D. It feels like a way to get folks who are used to mechanics-heavy kill-and-loot dungeon crawling to ease into something with more roleplaying.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 6:34 PM on February 1, 2020

I think in the worst case from a mission, you have mech damage, pilot injury, and stress, all of which you need some opportunity to clear. And under default healing rules, level 2 harm would be impossible to clear in a single roll. So with two actions your stress and harm would spiral up very quickly even if you only did healing and cut loose.

Three at least gives you a chance to stay in good shape and maybe do a Train or Long Term Project. Also the Friends are much talkier than your average group and this was the first downtime, so I think it will move a bit quicker in the future.

I too am very invested in this group! We got great interaction between several pairs; I think it was a bummer that the other group didn’t do any Cut Loose.
posted by Maecenas at 6:50 PM on February 1, 2020