[Diaspora] Social Combat

[David Dunham]

I ran our first map-based social combat last night, and there were some rough edges.

The players had rescued a derelict spaceship, and wanted salvage rights. The owning clan wanted to collect from the insurance company. The insurance company wanted the accident declared an act of God (and thus non-payable). There was also a shadowy group of off-worlders, who had some reasons to prevent several of these outcomes.

So I put these four agents on the map, and also a token representing the ship. The idea was to move the ship into (say) the "Salvage Rights" zone, and be there yourself. Mostly based on the book's "Changing History" example of moving pawns.

The biggest problem we ran into was that the token itself had no obvious resistance -- and I'd set up the mini-game around "Move Another."

We finally came to a consensus that anyone could defend on behalf of the token, though at the same distance penalty as the attacker. But this wasn't at all apparent from the rules.

Any thoughts as to how we could have better handled this?

David Dunham   
Glorantha/HQ/RQ page: www.pensee.com/dunham/glorantha.html
Imagination is more important than knowledge. -- Albert Einstein