A Question about Threat

I see no problem with this. In my campaign, on the missions/sessions where I have the pool hidden, I plan on letting them know generally how much threat there is. For example: If they ask me how much I have, I will round the number off (either higher or lower to nearest 5) and tell them that number as a ‘roughly this much’. The pool will still be hidden, and they will still be informed of when it is generated and used, but they will not know the exact number available, but can get an estimate.

One mission that I plan to do this with is the first session when the group is learning the game, the ‘Rescue at Xerxes’ mission from the core book.

I think threat makes sense as a mechanic. You can let your players build up threat to roll more dice for tasks, and then of course you can spend the threat to change things. This way its not like “if i just wanted fog I would make it foggy in the first place.” its more like… your players wanted to get an advantage in doing X, so they added to the threat pool for an extra die on the task, and this extra threat is something you decide would add dramatic tension or whatever by doing Y, such as making it foggy, or an electrical storm kicks up in the atmospher, or whatever.

The couple sessions where I wound up with 30+ threat, it just depressed the players further than their failure alone… they bombed the mission with bad bad rolls (and a few bad ideas) and had tangible proof I hadn’t been putting the screws to them as hard as I could have been, and they STILL hadn’t succeeded. (One of those was 4p or 5p, the other was 2p.) In both cases, I’d spent at least half that much already, not counting momentum from the rolls.

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What about taking advantage of the Success with a Cost rule?

They had… Joe’s horribly unlucky. The planet was 50% casualties, the PC ship was at 70%, and the klingons were firing at each other… If it hadn’t been for success with cost, they wouldn’t have succeeded at all.

I once tracked Joe’s rolls for a full session in D&D… the average was 5 points below expected on d20s, and 2 below on d8’s (his weapon damage die) and d10s (spell damage die).

I’ve seen Joe roll well substandard repeatedly. With his dice, with my dice, with Ed’s dice…

What do you expect? Rolling with other people’s dice means bad luck. It is known! :smiley: :smiley: :smiley:

But this brings me to a question. While it’s easy to decide what to do with too much Threat (just don’t use it, if you don’t want to), during the session I GMed, I ran into the opposite problem. Over a complete scene, I had almost no threat. Okay, I kept spending it almost immediatly, but my players really had luck on their side. During combat, I had less than one point of threat per turn, so not every Romulan were able to fire deadly shots.

What do you do on such occasions?

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I do the best I can: use cover, help each other, and, in the end, let the players win.

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My players are scared to give me threat. I treat it as a precious resource because I know I ain’t getting more of it.
Garrett

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Honestly, go with it. Me personally, whether I have a pool of threat or not isn’t important. There are enough ways in game to makes things interesting without threat. aramis had some pretty good suggestions. Another suggestion, If there are NPCs, have an NPC commander present who performs the Rally action. No reason the enemy can’t inspire their allies.

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I am trying to figure out how I will do tis in ST:A but in Pathfinder, I really like taking the players to the very edge of their abilities, hit points etc - very exciting stuff. That way the “feel” like they won’t succeed, and it makes winning out over the BBEG even sweeter in the end!

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Paying Threat for NPCs to make lethal attacks? Is that an actual rule I missed?

If I recall correctly, any action that a player could use that would award threat, costs the use of threat from an NPC. (PCs making a lethal attack awards threat to you, using lethal attacks from NPCs costs you threat.)

This is listed on page 281 of the core book in the Threat section of the Gamemastering chapter.

It seems weird that a squad of Klingons would start dropping their Bat’leths and start punching the heroes in the middle of a combat just because the GM runs out of Threat…

Any actual rules reference other than vague memory recall?

Bat’leths can be used for non-lethal attacks as well…

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Cf. page 86 (right column, second paragraph) and also page 281 (right column, third paragraph): Player characters using deadly force generate threat.
Cf. page 181 (side-bar “threat spends”): Any action by an NPC that would generate threat if taken by a PC, instead costs the GM threat.

Thus, strictly speaking, the GM has to pay for a lethal attack by an NPC with threat.

Edit: I just thought again about those rules. The nexus to threat generation/cost is escalation. So, maybe just the first deadly hit on both sides costs threat, because if a brawl escalated to a firefight, shooting would maybe not escalate further. There’s precedence on Shield of Tomorrow; I am pretty sure they interpreted the rule like I did above. But I think the interpretation “only the first use of deadly force generates/costs threat, respectively” is, considering the wording of the rules, equally valid.

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Yes. Well, kind of.

Page 174, Making an Attack, step 3.

The character declares whether the attack is intended to be non-lethal or lethal. If the attack is Lethal, add a single point to the Threat pool.

Coupled with page 281:

Non-Player Character Threat Spends. For any action or choice where a Player Character would add one or more points to Threat, a Non-Player Character performing that same action or choice must spend the equivalent number of points of Threat.

174 is clearly stated in the PC’s mode.
281 is telling you that all threat adds by PC’s are threat spends when done by NPCs.

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I agree. It’s a bit funny. However, as GM you can add threat when a situation of event calls for it. If those 6 klingons show up intending to kill, you could say they add 2, 4 or 6 threat if you wanted. Maybe 1 per Klingon…up to you.

I don’t see it as a choice the Klingons make. It’s more like an unintentional consequence. They just happen to not kill their victim instantly. The Klingons don’t necessarily realize that they didn’t kill the PCs.

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Nor do I.

Batleth are not inherently lethal, either, so it doesn’t even up the difficulty.

Actually, that’s a good question. Romulans, Klingons, and a slew of other races use disruptors instead of phasers. Do those weapons even have a stun option? Otherwise, the GM would have to bleed Threat non stop any time there’s a battle.