A few rule questions

Dune: The Roleplaying Game
1

I’m running 2 Dune campaigns: Masters and Fall of the Imperium. I have a few questions for which I failed to find answers in any of the books.

  1. Warfare assets: Do we assume that players’ House has a number of assets such as troops, ornithopters, artillery, etc? How does one judge how many they should have? If they are to create them with Momentum… That’s a lot of Momentum and players can argue that the House should have troops ready by default. Same with skirmishes, when players tell me they want to bring some House troops with them.
  2. If a player creates a Fremen character and, obviously, takes a crysknife as an asset, is that crysknife automatically of higher Quality from the beginning?
  3. Let return to conflict. If the players are engaged in Intrigue and want to use certain information they have as an asset, but it wasn’t defined as an asset previously, does it make sense to grant them that asset for free?
  4. Player wants to create a “pilot” asset to make handling ornithopters easier. Does it work as lower Difficulty, but the player still uses his own Move? Or as a minor NPC? But then they can’t use both in the same scene.
  5. How do you handle a skirmish with 4-5 players against 4-5 notable NPCs so it doesn’t take forever?
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Some of these don’t really have fixed answers but depend on the GMs preferred style. I’ve put down what I think the answers are.

  1. When I have run warfare conflicts I provided assets for the players to use. In the last one it was 2 House Guard, 5 Regiments and an Ornithopter force. They all had various traits and named officers (some of whom were related to the PCs) as well so it wasn’t just here are X assets. For Skirmishes the players needed to have personal assets if they want to bring some official muscle with them. Or create using momentum.
  2. Crysknifes are automatically Q1, but there isn’t anything in the Fremen archetype that says they start with one. Obviously a Fremen player is going to want the iconic weapon, so in this case I would allow other players to boost one of the starting assets to Q1 to keep things fair at the table.
  3. Depends on the circumstances. If they have done work to get that information then I would probably allow it. If it is just something that is part of the general knowledge (we saw Duke X meeting with count Y) then I would ask them to spend momentum or make the D2 roll to do so.
  4. I would go with however the player wanted to be honest. If they want to make the pilot a full fledged NPC and use their stats to do the move roll go for it, otherwise it works just like an asset and reduces difficulty by 1 (also allows remote piloting of an ornithopter). I’d agree that they have to choose, no switching back and forth to get the best bonus.
  5. Run light, run fast. How I always run skirmishes. For the notable NPCs I’d cut down on any talents they have. Give them things that give a set bonus where possible (Master at arms, etc) so you aren’t having to reference things for them. Also for the non-major notable NPCs consider consolidating their skills into a single ‘HP’ bar possibly just Battle, so no matter the ‘attack’ it all hits one place and you aren’t tracking multiple damage. Let the players be aware of this, it make for more amusing attack descriptions. It makes them somewhere between a full notable and a minor NPC for survivability.