Crisis Guide

Player Apostate pages you: Basically I am going to use AP in crisis actions as tie breakers and to effect the magnitude of actions. It didn't make much difference for the silence action because comparing 85 actions with one another would have made the 30 hours it took to write responses more like a hundred, and it wasn't pvp in any way or form

COMING SOON.

Example

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Board: News, Post Number: 97 Poster: Pax Subject: @actions and You! Date: 01/14/18 23:41:18

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So, as we've been going through crisis actions, we've found that there's still a bit of confusion on how best to use @action.

We've often had people put in assists that are entirely different actions on a similar topic, or just trying to do other things as part of the same effort. We've had, more than once, secret actions that are entirely separate actions only tangentially related to the main action. This makes it very hard to GM, and it also makes it very hard to recordkeep (especially since we can't include replies to secret actions in the main story, obviously).

The key is that a single @action should always have a single focus. Assists should be how you are assisting that one particular effort, not a related but different effort. Secret actions should either be how you are helping or hindering that specific effort, if there are elements you want us to take into account that you don't want the other people on an action to see.

An example might be the following:

• Joe wants to find an aardvark to be his familiar, so puts in an 'I am searching for aardvarks' action. He details where he's looking for aardvarks.

• Jane puts in that she's using her expert survival and tracking skills to help Joe find likely aardvark habitats.

• Fred puts in that he's helping Joe by providing useful gear for the trip.
  • Secretly, Fred sets the 'traitor' switch because he wants Joe to fail.
  • Fred sets a secret action that he's coated all their gear in aardvark repellant.

• Petunia puts in that she's helping Joe, by using her knowledge of animals to find an aardvark.
  • Petunia puts a secret action that she's using a secret aardvark-detecting compass to help Joe.

All of the assists, and all of the secret actions, are related to Joe's search for aardvarks, and directly provide an impact on the success or failure metric of that specific action.

Now, we often see things like:

• Ronald wants to learn more about plants, so wants to use Joe's trip to collect as many specimens of herbs as possible.

• Wendy helps Joe find aardvarks!
  • Wendy actually is looking for buried pirate treasure she thinks might be near the aardvarks, but she doesn't want to share it with the others.

Ronald's assist, and Wendy's secret assist, are not directly related to Joe going out to find an aardvark. They should be entirely different @actions, rather than assists, because it's a completely different set of outcomes (a bunch of plant information, or secret pirate treasure) than Joe's (one or more aardvarks, hopefully).

If you want to take an unrelated action which is only made possible by being a part of the main action, you should submit your normal assist with the main action, and then put in a second, separate action of your own referencing it. You can then put in a secret assist on the main action which references the other action. For instance:

• Ronald is assisting with finding aardvarks!
  • While out there, Ronald is also separately looking for herbs. Please see @action 12345 for details.

This will let us handle responses in a concise manner and makes for better recordkeeping. Please help your GMs stay sane, and group your actions appropriately; our sanity is a limited resource!

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