Covenant Update for December 18, 2023

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Welcome to this week’s free post for Covenant!

Not a whole lot happened at this week’s playtest, but one of the players did do something that pointed out an ongoing problem we’re having with the rules.

We introduced some new characters from the Nature of Predators (NOP) universe (Reddit here, Patreon here) last week, and they brought with them the recorded memories of about a hundred survivors of a war in the NOP universe. The player characters (PC) decided to replay these memories, and it took them about half the session to recover from the experience and talk about what it meant to them.

After that, the PCs started planning for the raid on the Rekana Industries scrapping site, where obsolete acoes were murdered and turned into pet food. The PCs ship the Infinity was orbiting over the Rekana planet of Sujimma, where one of the scrapping sites was located.

That’s when one of the PCs – Jorlim, a skalgan from the NOP universe – threw us that curveball we mentioned earlier. Jorlim had 600 discipline and, after his player asked us how characters regain spent discipline – spent 599 of it on a bid to analyze a set of the scrapping site’s plans. He also tapped his Tactics trait, and since this gave him more advantages than disadvantages on that bid, doubled his bid to 1198.

The problem with this is that it doesn’t matter how much your character beats a bid’s difficulty or an opposing character’s bid by. You get the same results whether your character beats it by one or 1,000. Despite this, we’ve had players spend hundreds of discipline on their bids, and Jorlim’s bid is just the latest in this trend. Sean and Sazzy have talked about this, and we’ve decided to add a paragraph or two to the rules to make sure players understand that they don’t get extra effects for massively exceeding a bid’s difficulty.

That’s about it, though. Our players may be seeing some action next time, but only time will tell. We’ll let you know how it goes in our next Monday post. Talk to you then!