Clogged Drains

[gaelicwolf]

The other skills i have questions about are the skills that allow you to no longer take effect from certain carriers.

Example 1:
Say Rappaccinian Caitlin walks into the ooky-spooky lair of Necromancer Bob, and Necromancer Bob hits poor Rappaccinian Caitlin with "Drain by Magic". Now, Rappaccinian Caitlin has purchased [i]The Gift[/i] which allows her to call "No Effect" when hit by a poison. If Necromancer Bob's Minions hit Rappaccinian Caitlin for "2 Damage and Agony by Poison". How should Caitlin react? Is she suddenly susceptible to Poison?

Example 3:
Say Fetch Timothy walks into the creepy laboratory of Scientist Henry, and Scientist Henry hits Fetch Timothy with "Drain by Technology". But Fetch Timothy has purchased [i]Vicious Realization[/i] and is calls "No Effect" to Cold, Poison, and Disease traits. How should he react when a bottle is knocked over and there is an "By my Voice, 3 Damage by Disease"?


Example 3:
Say Suit Alex walks in the woods and is attacked by Assassin Kristoff, and Assassin Kristoff hits Suit Alex with "Drain by Poison". But Suit Alex has purchased [i]Ice Water in The Veins[/i] and is calls "No Effect" to the Fear trait. How should he react when a monster calls "By my Voice, Waste 1 Sanity by Fear"?

[Jacob]

[quote]For a simple Drain effect, you cannot run or use any game skill, including weapon and shield skills. If the verbal is followed by a skill or ability name then you cannot use that particular skill. Drain can also be used to prevent entire skill headers. If a header is drained, you cannot use any skill that falls under that header. Drain can be used in this manner to suppress racial abilities and empowered named items. If an item is named after a Drain effect then no abilities from that item can be used until the Drain ends. Only simple Drain effects prevent you from running. The Drain effect will last until you rest for five minutes.[/quote]

Hokay. So. Plunger in hand, snake at the ready, stompable mushrooms all around, here we go:

I am not going to address each of the questions asked. Not because they're not legitimate questions, but rather because I'm sure we can come up with any number of other convoluted iterations of this problem, so specific answers won't solve the underlying issue. Instead, I'm going to try to set down guidelines through which we should interpret the subject at hand.

1) Drain is bad. Like--bad bad bad. It's generally considered a "take down" effect. Like Death.
2) Given that Drain is bad, getting hit with it should never be a beneficial thing (barring extreme circumstances such as "you're hit by a Frenzy and your pal whaps you with a Drain so you don't kill everyone around you").
3) The definition of Drain cites "Racial Abilities." For the sake of simplicity, we made "Racial Abilities" 'Skills.' Either way, Drain can "suppress" them, so I would suggest treating the whole thing as "are affected by Drains."
4) Did I mention Drains are bad? Drains are bad.
5) Since Drains are bad, interpret the Drain as broadly as possible given the wording of the Drain. A general Drain should basically short circuit your ability to use beneficial Skills. As such, even beneficial Skills that are always on get switched off until you rest off the Drain.

[i]However[/i]

A) It doesn't say which "end" of something the Drain starts at. In one of the questions above, a Drain essentially robbed a player of Vitality. Which sort of works, but on the other hand, a Drain is neither a Damage call nor a Waste Vitality (Know the difference, peeps, it's important), and as such, the Vitality lost due to Damage (let's call it 'Empty Vitality') can be said to stem from the Vitality granting Skill, while the player's remaining Vitality ('Filled Vitality') stems from their Void and Earth, in much the same way that Damage is applied to Armor before Vitality. Which means the Drain can remove the player's Skill-sourced Empty Vitality and not touch the players Filled Vitality.

B) For context, I'll point us to Remove.

[quote]Remove is used to simulate dispels or forced removal of effects. Remove works just like Cure except it is not a beneficial effect. This has several side effects. Where Cure can be touch cast, Remove cannot be touch cast. Where Cure can be refused because it is beneficial, Remove cannot be refused. Where Cure will not interrupt activity time, Remove will interrupt activity time. Where Cure is not negated by and does not consume Shield, Elude and Guard defenses, Remove will be stopped by and consume Shield, Elude, and Guard. Otherwise Remove works like Cure.[/quote]

So Cure/Remove specifics aside, this indicates that there are two fundamental types of Effects--Beneficial and Non-Beneficial. As a general rule, I would say that Drain 'suppresses' Beneficial Effects (for example, a Skill that lets you call Avoid to something) but not Non-Beneficial Effects (A skill that's a mixed bag, at best, e.g., a skill that lets you fall stable but prevents the majority of healing in the game from being used on you, or a Skill which is clearly meant to be a down side to playing a whatever you are.).

To summarize: Drains are bad. Take them as the worst possible option when you have to figure out how it would apply, BUT Drains are not Damage per se, and therefore will probably not drop you. Mind you, I can think of cases where a Drain would [i]effectively[/i] drop you, but they all require external factors. Assuming you're just sitting in a random field and a bird drops a packet on your head while screeching "'Drain by Hitchcokian Deus Ex Machina," you might be very, very confused, but you wouldn't be knocked to zero Vitality or rendered Unstable under the Accelerant rules. Also, only Called Damage can render you Unstable (unless you have some quirky affliction or some such).

Are people satisfied with these guidelines?

[Quick]

The only reason this is even a question is because you guys have done some interesting, innovative things with your skills. Rules are, of course, the natural enemy of innovation. So we end up with situations like these. No good idea goes unpunished...
I don't quite understand the dustiction between Empty and Filled Vitality. Are we saying that losing a skill that adds to your Vitality lowers your maximum Vitality and not your current total?
Drain should be interpreted very broadly and there is no doubt it should ruin your day. But thematicly, there are certain thing we don't want it to effect. Specifically, the things that were already busy ruining your day. I feel like bringing Effects into the description is potentially confusing because they already have a definition. Effects are something you do to yourself (usually beneficial) or somebody does to you (could be beneficial or non-beneficial). Is it possible to frame it in a way that would apply across the board? Is it possible to put in place something like Conditions? A Rap with the skill 'The Gift' would gain the ability to absorb poison to heal and the Condition of No Effect to Poison. A simple Drain would remove the ability to use skills but not the Condition, but a targeted Drain could remove both. So the Rap that gets hit with 'Drain Rappaccinian by Antidote' would lose their abilities and also be able to be poisoned or could touchcast without hurting people. That would involve reclassifying a bunch of skills, so maybe that is no good. But it feels like that would serve the theme.
I am fine with guidelines. I am willing to try and work within whatever guidelines are offered. It's just that in the past I've made assumptions about guidelines, and felt like a complete idiot later when I found out I was wrong. I can work with guidelines, but I prefer rules to guidelines the same way I prefer GPS to directions hastily given out over the phone. I'm just more likely to end up in the right place.

[Jacob]

Empty and Filled Vitality could just as well be called Maximum and Current Vitality. I would say that since Damage is a thing, and Drain is a different thing, Drain should not be interpreted as causing Damage barring some extenuating circumstance.

"Conditions" would be dicey at best. Just to go through it so as to avoid confusion: We are an Accelerant game that uses the core rules. "Conditions" are not a thing in the core rules. We may be able to do an end run using an Infliction (Note: This is how Defense Mechanisms work--they all say 'Infliction' on them.), so the point may be valid, but the implementation would have to be different no matter what.

If we want to get down to the base (atomic? Quark? Wait, there are things smaller than quarks now, right? sorry, haven't kept up with my subatomic physics, so let's go with Schrodinger's Cats) of the situation, we have to look at some very fine points of the core rules which are, in and of themselves, not always as clear as we'd like.

1) Just about everything is an Attack. "Heal 1 by Medicine" is an "Attack" for purposes of game terminology.

2) "Beneficial" and "Non-Beneficial" are not specifically defined to the best of my knowledge. This means that personal judgment is going to factor into the game at all levels no matter what.

While we can all agree that generally being immune to, say, Fire is a good thing, there will be those times when a boon would be Granted by Fire and you'd have to miss out. I'd say that, on par, it's still a Beneficial situation as a whole, but there are hiccoughs. Sometimes there are clues as to whether something is [i]meant[/i] to be Beneficial or not (e.g., an Imbue vs. an Inflict), but that's hardly the general case--usually it boils down to common sense. Damage is bad, Healing is good, etc. How would this stack up on the critter I saw last year in another game that took Damage from Healing and Healing from Damage? Your guess is as good as mine.

I'm not sure about reworking the races and such to make some things Inflictions as opposed to Skills, but it's an interesting idea. And, technically, the rules out now are just the Beta release. I'm not sure we have the time to overhaul everything by Session 1, but it's definitely something for us to bear in mind.

In the mean time, Drain interpretation, as with "Take Your Hits," "Fight Clean," and "Don't Use Skills You Don't Have," is part of the whopping great honor system that larps are based on. Drains are bad. Take them as such.

[Quick]

Jacob,
Thanks for taking the time to sort through these questions. I understand the solution you are looking for is something that both makes sense and is not crazy complex. If the easiest, most sensible solution turns out to be 'know your stuff and try not to screw up', I am cool with that.
I have been thinking a lot lately about what you can do in Accelerant. If you are following the core rules, you can't say, 'In my game, when you get hit by a Drain, you spin around for 10 sec like you are going down the drain.' But you are allowed to do all kinds of things with skills, so long as it's all on the players to know how their skill works. I could make a skill called Cookie Monster that let's you spend E to eat an Oreo. But I can't leave out a bag of Oreos and expect only Cookie Monsters would eat them.
I can make a skill that lets you call no effect to slam or maim or drain. That's not going too far. I can make a skill that does two things, like no effect to poison and disease and cold and spend E to turn reduce bullets to 1 Damage. That's not going too far. I should be able to take that skill and say in the description, 'The first part of this skill is not removed by Drain.' We are not changing the definition of Drain, and the player is responsible for knowing how their skill works. Is that too far? What if I wanted to use a shorthand blanket statement that said, 'skills or parts of skills that give the character a Condition are not removed by Drain' and then state in the skill description that the first part of the skill is a Condition. Does that go too far? Why or why not?
I guess it would get tangled if you wanted to have a bunch of NPCs play a role where they might get drained and not be clear on what they lose, but there are ways around that.
Anyway, thanks for the answers!

[Jacob]

Again, the solutions you have proposed are interesting and potentially something we may integrate. However, in the time frame in which we are working, I do not think it is feasible to change the rulebook (Coco would probably spontaneously combust, she's working VERY hard on OR stuff these days). As such, at the present time, "Follow the intent of the game and use best judgment" is about as good as I can do. We instruct NPCs that if they're hit with something and they don't know what to do, just fall down. They can always get back up later.

Off the cuff, I think making things Inflictions is easier than rewriting every skill to say whether or not it's affected by Drain, but... what's the phrase...YMMV?

[KyleDarklighter]

As a general rule in the system I have found that drain does not effect any skill that "permanently" increases an attribute or stat. The permanent trumps a temp effect in 9 out of 10 cases. In order to "cure" or remove a permanent trait or attribute you need an equally permanent carrier in the attack. Duration of effect is a graduated scale that doesn't roll upward for effect. You can likely get by with an errata to specific racial skills that state how they interact with Drain effects. I've seen it in other games where it is specified if it is effected by Drain & how.

Garrett

[Clockwork]

Does drain effect items you carry that grant abilities , like parry? or disengage?

[Jacob]

My interpretation would be that you cannot use any skills while Drained, even those granted by items.

A) The Drain explanation seems to follow a pattern of "General, General forbidden, Specific, Specific Forbidden." One of the Specifics is skills granted by items--if the Drain affects an item, only the skills granted by that item are lost. The implication, as I see it, is that a general Drain would cover the item skills as well.

B) A blanket 'no' is a [i]heck[/i] of a lot simpler than anything else I can think of as a reasonable interpretation, and Accelerant is pretty big on simplicity.