Cold City and Hot War
Posted: Wed Jul 25, 2012 11:54 am
Thought I'd set the ball rolling on discussing the other games. Has anybody else played either of these?
Had a brief exchange with another poster on YSDC about the CC/HW system. I appreciate that it's more of a storytelling game than a traditional rpg and the mechanics reflect that. However, I felt that the conflict resolution mechanism as presented made far too easy for PCs to gang up and get a huge dice pool sufficient to win all but the most insanely difficult conflicts. As the potential consequences of a successful conflict include the upgrade of PC attributes and traits the characters become ever more powerful making it easier for them to win subsequent conflicts which enables them to become powerful and so on and so on. The other poster said he'd found that the opposite occurred with the PCs entering into a "death spiral", of declining abilities. I know Hot War introduced some tweaks but they don't strike me as having any major effect on the basic conflict resolution mechanic.
I was wondering what other people's experience of the game system was. Have I perhaps been running it incorrectly? The only thing I can think of is that I've been a bit too liberal with allowing PCs to use their trust ratings in conflicts. Be interested to hear your thoughts.
Had a brief exchange with another poster on YSDC about the CC/HW system. I appreciate that it's more of a storytelling game than a traditional rpg and the mechanics reflect that. However, I felt that the conflict resolution mechanism as presented made far too easy for PCs to gang up and get a huge dice pool sufficient to win all but the most insanely difficult conflicts. As the potential consequences of a successful conflict include the upgrade of PC attributes and traits the characters become ever more powerful making it easier for them to win subsequent conflicts which enables them to become powerful and so on and so on. The other poster said he'd found that the opposite occurred with the PCs entering into a "death spiral", of declining abilities. I know Hot War introduced some tweaks but they don't strike me as having any major effect on the basic conflict resolution mechanic.
I was wondering what other people's experience of the game system was. Have I perhaps been running it incorrectly? The only thing I can think of is that I've been a bit too liberal with allowing PCs to use their trust ratings in conflicts. Be interested to hear your thoughts.