C.O.R.E.

Conflicts

A roleplaying session without conflict of various kinds is just plain boring. If the characters can’t get into a good argument or fight, or pull a fast one of the local curmudgeon, something is lacking. Just like reading a story, part of the excitement in RPGs comes from living through dangers and triumphs that we will never see in real life. It might be racing through the streets, chasing the burglar on your Harley; finding our way through the maze of Roman politics; or even defeating the evil Overlord through cunning, guts, and luck.

Conflicts should be run fast and furious, so the flow of the game is not interrupted any more than it should be. To make this happen, the conflicts are divided into three different types so you only have to deal with the amount of detail needed for that conflict. Characters are encouraged by the rules to be both descriptive and daring, adding to everyone’s fun.

Put simply, conflicts happen whenever one person wants something and someone else opposes them. A conflict can be a fight, a verbal argument, trying to squeeze the proper amount of venom out of snake’s fang for a potion, or trying to wrest your opponent’s control of magic away from them. Conflicts can be associated with each of the four Attributes. They each form a different type of conflict, but all of them are resolved in the same way.

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Conflict Scope

Every group has different elements of the game they like to focus on. Some groups like to get deep in the specifics of every combat, while other groups might like to detail only the conflicts that are most crucial to the story-line, speeding through other, less important conflicts in a single roll. C.O.R.E. handles this with ease. Following, you’ll find our recommendations for how to handle conflicts, and how much detail to go into. Remember, though, that the reason we roleplay is to have fun, and each group should feel free to find the level of detail they prefer.

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Inconsequential Conflicts

Inconsequential conflicts are all of the smaller conflicts that do not have any direct impact on the overall story. These could be haggling over the price of a horse, or mowing through the vast battalion of orcs that stand between you and your true enemy. These conflicts are handled with a single roll for the overall conflict. They often do not present much in the way of danger to the characters.

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Important Conflicts

Important Conflicts are those that have a small impact on how the story progresses, but not so crucial that the story would end if this conflict was lost. These types of conflict should definitely hold the possibility of danger and death, but don’t necessarily need every little blow to be detailed. In the case of multiple opponents, you might separate each opponent into their own, individual conflict.

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Crucial Conflicts

These are conflicts that are vital to the story. The chance of death, if a physical conflict, is very real. The iconic example of this is when the heroes finally reach the primary villain. Every strategy the players and villain can use to put their opponent off-balance should be another conflict. Every blow might be detailed, depending on the group.

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Energy Points

Energy Points represent the character’s physical, mental, social, and spiritual (or magical, etc.) energy. Whether we are physically exhausted, hurt, or simply mentally drained from hours of magical research, our current ability to perform is hampered in nearly everything that we do. All of these forms of exhaustion and pain are abstracted into Energy Pools.

Each Attribute is a separate energy pool. So, each character has separate Physical, Mental, Social and Spiritual energy pools. By default, each conflict results in a temporary loss of 1 point of that Attribute.

There are rules, like Giving It All You’ve Got, that allow a character to perform additional damage.

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Recovering Energy Points

Attributes can be replenished in several ways. Special situations may arise where your Director would award you Attribute Points as a bonus for success.

Rest. Eight hours of sleep will fully refresh all Attributes.

Healing Scenes. In order to recover Attribute points between scenes, our character must make a Healing Scene. This is a simple narrative that the player makes showing how their character got their confidence or energy back. This will fully refresh one Attribute. Only one Attribute can be healed between a scene. To recover other Attributes, you must either rest for 8 hours or heal a different Attribute after each scene.

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Death And Dying

Dying does not happen randomly in C.O.R.E. Instead, it will be the result of a failed conflict where the players and the Director agreed upon the terms. This allows the players to choose to make their deaths matter. It might be a sacrifice to save their party, or it might be the result of a specific spiritual ritual or quest that ends in the character’s transcendence.

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Story Points

At the beginning of every game session, each character receives one Story Point (SP). Story Points allow the character to make 1 automatic success at the time of their choosing. They can not be saved from session to session. The most a character may ever have is one.

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Frames of Time

While the system is designed to be flexible, frequently a reference is needed to how long a conflict lasts, or a spell effect lasts. To handle this, we use the following terms for defining time.

Series. The overarching story for the game, synonymous with a campaign in other systems, made up of one or more Stories.

Story. A self contained adventure with a beginning, middle and end. It may take several Episodes to complete.

Episode. A single playing session.

Scene. A series of character Actions that all take place in the same location.

Action. A variable length of time that allows a character to perform some task.

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Who goes first?

Some groups may not need, or desire, a set method to determine who goes first. Many people, however, have been raised on Dungeons & Dragons™ or other systems that have taken the idea of Initiative from it. For those that are most comfortable with a turn order in place, we’ve got two options for your group to choose from.

Turn Order: Option #1

This method works best when the Turn Order is being determined between two people, or two groups. It is handled as any other Opposed Conflict. Depending upon the situation, it might use opposed.

Physical Finesse + Brawl (or one of the other combat options.)

Turn Order: Option #2

Option #2 is ideal for use during Important and Crucial Conflicts, where every action matters. The turn order is determined by the character with the highest sum of Physical Finesse + Mental Finesse. This accounts for how quickly someone can spot what is happening and physically react to it.

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Handling Conflict

Stating Your Intent

When a conflict has reared its ugly head, the first step is for the player to tell the Director what they’re trying to accomplish and how they are trying to do that. They should make sure to tell what motivations are behind it. It is two very different tasks to dance with the Princess with the intent of impressing her father with your etiquette, or dancing with the intent to seduce her. Both situations would require a different set of Skills and Attributes to be used.

Skills are not tied directly to a specific Attribute. A situation often will be able to be solved using several different approaches, and the Director, paying attention to the player’s description of how they want to accomplish the task, will have the flexibility to choose the best one, or to modify the player’s choice.

Success And Failure Terms

Once the player has stated their intent, the Director states the results for both success and failure. Directors are encouraged to make failure more than “No, you don’t succeed.” Instead, the failure result should set the player up for more difficulties.

Bartering the terms

Often, what the Director states for success or failure is not what the players had in mind. In this case, they have one chance to barter for different results. After hearing that they will do only 1 point of Physical damage to their opponent, the player might want to try going for a more difficult shot for more damage. Of course, with more damage comes a larger penalty for failure. The player is encouraged to be creative with their suggested terms for failure. A good penalty for failure is often one that will provide more roleplaying opportunities in the future, like a scar that marks him permanently. When trying for more damage, the player can not reduce the cost of failure, but might be able to change the way the failure affects them. As always, the Director has the final approval for the success and failure terms.

The Roll

Once the terms have been set, the player makes a Skill Check against the assigned Difficulty to determine their success.

Skill checks are resolved by rolling a number of d10s appropriate to their Skill’s Mastery Level (1d10, 2d10, etc) and adding the value of the Skill and the relevant Attribute, plus any other bonuses that may be appropriate, such as for higher-quality tools or materials being used.

Lt. Johnson needs to get his men across the small chasm that blocks their path to safety. He sees two options available to him. He can either use his Technology skill combined with Mental to design and build a bridge with cut branches and vines, or use Technology + Physical to find the right tree to topple, while understanding where he needs to break it to have it fall in the correct place and not fall into the chasm. Since the enemy is closing in hard on their position, he decides that toppling the tree is the only realistic option.

His Physical score is a 3, and his Technology Skill is a 4 (Apprentice.) So he rolls 2d10 + 3 + 4. (2d10 because of his Apprentice Mastery level, 3 for Physical and 4 for Technology.) He rolls the dice and gets a 5 and an 8. He keeps the single highest result (8), adds his skill and Attribute values and has a total of 15. If he had not had any Mastery Levels in Technology, he would have rolled 1d10, gotten the five, and had a result of 12 (5 + 3 + 4.)

This resulting number is compared to the Difficulty Number the Director has assigned the task. If it equals or is greater than the Difficulty Number, the skill check is a success. If it is lower than the assigned Difficulty, the roll is a failure.

If the highest value on the dice is a one (1), then the Director is encouraged to find something bad that might happen because of the roll. It might not happen until the next round, or it might not become apparent until farther in the future.

Lt. Johnson successfully makes the tree-bridge, but rolled a one (1) on both of his dice. While the result is successful, the Director might decide that he did not judge the sturdiness of the tree as well as he should have. The tree has a hairline crack in the center of it now, resulting from the impact of the landing, and will collapse if enough weight is put on it. The Director secretly rolls 1d10 and gets a 6. He decides that when the sixth man is crossing, the tree snaps.

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Determining Difficulty Numbers

There are two methods for determining the difficulty of an action, depending on if it is a direct conflict with another creature, or another type of conflict.

If the conflict is directly with another creature, the difficulty is determined by adding the opponent’s relevant Attribute + relevant Skill + 5.

An unarmed person attacks an unarmed Kobold. The Kobold has Physical 1 and Combat 2, so the Diff is 1 + 2 + 5 = 8. Most people should have about even odds.

On the other hand, an unarmed person attacking an unarmed Dragon. The Dragon has Physical 18 and Combat 12, so the Diff is 18 + 12 + 5 = 35. The person has a big problem.

When the conflict is not directly with another person, we must use a different method. These conflicts add an amount of difficulty based upon the amount of story change.

Minor: +1
Significant: +5
Major: +10
Critical: +15

This number is added to 10 to determine the final difficulty.

The players may choose to lower the difficulty by accepting a larger amount of damage. The difficulty is modified by -2 for each point of damage.

The Kestrals Crew are locked in the brig after an almost omnipotent alien called “P” takes over...

One of the crew decides to break out. This is a Significant Story change, which adds +5 to the difficulty. The Director offers a minor story change for failure (the Alien notices and trusts them less), which drops the Difficulty by 1 to 14. Wanting to drop it farther, the Player suggests that on a failure his character also loses one energy (an-other drop of 2 to a total of 12.)

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Taking Damage

When a character fails a conflict, his penalty often will be to take some damage.

By default, the amount of damage done is 1 point. This damage is taken from the Attribute that represents the type of conflict they lost. If they were in a fight, the damage would be taken from their Physical Attribute. If it was a great debate in the Roman Senate, it would be Social damage.

There are no direct penalties associated with reaching zero (0) in any of the Attributes. Instead, they no longer have any bonuses to their die rolls. However, should a character reach 0 points in an Attribute and take more damage, they are considered incapacitated.

A Physical incapacitation results in the character being unable to move. They may have fainted, or fallen unconscious—the results are up to the Director and the stakes of the conflict.

For a Mental incapacitation, the character is considered dazed and is unable to perform any actions until they can heal their Mental Attribute.

A Social incapacitation results in lots of stammering, the inability to say what you mean to say, or the complete loss of any social grace. Suddenly, everything you do seems to come out wrong.