Game Mechanics
My first question is about how often skills/influences refresh.
Is it at the end of the game? Are there chapters?
How much should we be worrying about budgeting points vs chasing potentially false leads?
Game Mechanics
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Summary:
How does stuff work.
In terms of a play, skills/influences refresh at the end of an act, but not the end of a scene.
You will always get something when you spend investigative skill points. It might not be useful, but it won't be false. Also, it's important to remember that your skill level remains the same whether or not you spend points, and so you will always find the appropriate clues for your character. Points get you optional extra information or the chance to dominate the scene or hog the spotlight. Because Trail of Cthulhu has a very narrativist structure, you will always get something that lets you move to the next scene, whether or not you spend points.
Eg Mattias used Intimidate to get some extra information about the crime scene. He would probably have got that info when visiting the scene anyway, but can now prepare in advance.
In order to encourage things to move along a bit, I have decided to change this ruling: You will get your skills or influcences refreshed according to how active you are :)
As the first award, Dr Lowell now has his Research skill refreshed due to some heavy book lifting he has been doing in emails with me :) Bravo Kim!
Gulp… I just remembered that I was supposed to write up "My Dinner With Dr. Lowell" over last weekend. And completely blew it off! Well, if you want to revoke that skill refreshment, I wouldn't blame you.
Wouldn't dream of revoking.
This does indirectly raise another point. In a tabletop game, even if your character is doing something on their own, other players can usually listen in (unless you obsessively pass notes, etc), which blurs player/character knowledge but gives a sense of action and overall plot. In this format, it's possible for player and gm to do a lot with messages, but it looks to the others like nothing is happening because it doesn't appear in the wiki. So the question is whether "private" information and actions should also appear on the wiki. My inclination is to make all things public unless the player explicitly wants them private (eg when they are backstabbing another character, not that any of you would do that of course). Thoughts?
/forum/t-211129/game-mechanics#post-
