Eric Zawadzki
patreon
Nuts and Bolts and Jagged Edges
🕑 Added 2025-10-23 11:00:11 +0000 UTCI'm finished with the various introductions and am now working on the mechanics clarifications and optional rules chapter. I certainly have a fair number of items on my to-do list for this, but I also want to make sure I'm addressing things that make running conspiracies hard or confusing. I posted the following on the Deviant fancord, and if you replied there you don't need to do so here (I've already scraped those suggestions), and I'd love your thoughts on it, as well:
I'm working on a section of Deep Dive that includes errata related to conspiracy mechanics, especially with regards to corner cases and odd interactions that we didn't anticipate when writing them.
For example, conspiracy Attributes at Standing 1-2 aren't allowed to exceed 5, but a conspiracy also adds 2 points of Attributes for each additional player's character connected to it, which will cause it to exceed 15 total Attribute points unless the cohort is very small or connected to multiple conspiracies. So, does a low Standing conspiracy "lose" the extra Attributes or is it allowed to exceed the Attribute limit if it's due to a large cohort?
As another example, the core makes reference to Nodes at the top of a conspiracy being harder to research than those at the bottom, but after mapping 40 conspiracies it has become clear to me that most conspiracies don't have a "top" or "bottom". How does that even work?
As a final example, how do surveillance rolls work when the cohort is pretending to be Devoted to infiltrate the conspiracy? It's not like the conspiracy doesn't know exactly where the Renegades are, and they could mess with them at will (but why would they want to if they're cooperating?). I've come up with answers to the above, but are there other quirks of the conspiracy systems in the core, The Devoted Companion, or elsewhere that you'd like to see explained or clarified? Are there situations that have come up in your chronicles that the rules clearly didn't cover and for which it would have been nice to have some mechanical support?
I'll eventually gather suggestions for other mechanical bits (simplified conspiracy systems!), but what I'm looking for now is stuff along the lines of "this thing isn't very well explained", "these two things contradict one another", or "this breaks down if you have more than three players at the gaming table". What do you got?
