OK, about shifts

[MacsNewBrew]

I just don't get it. I am a complete pen and paper n00b, so can someone explain it to me

[LCDarkwood]

Shifts are just a concise way of measuring how effective your particular attempt at something is, or a particular effect is.

On a dice roll, it's the difference between the difficulty and what you rolled. So if you need a Fair (+2) to succeed and you get a Great (+4) roll, you succeed and have two shifts.

For some actions, it's important to have shifts (like pretty much everything in a conflict), because they govern how much damage you do with an attack, or how far you can move, etc. It just depends contextually on the action. For some actions, it doesn't matter as much, or having shifts lets you do something quicker than usual, or some other special effect.

For stuff like magic, you just talk about shifts directly without making a roll, and they just have a certain effect depending on what kind of action you're performing. So, like, when you summon power for an evocation attack, you just state it as a number of shifts. Those shifts translate directly to damage.

So I want five shifts of power for my attack, right? That means my spell will do at least 5 stress damage no matter what I roll, provided I hit my target.

Does that make sense? Do you have a specific question I can answer that might help more?


-L

[MacsNewBrew]

So, if my PC does action A, I can move shifts into effect B?
Examples with 2 shifts here:
1. PC jumps off house roof to attack two thugs below. Thug 1 gets it in the back, down but conscious, thug 2 drops gun in surprise
2. PC unleashes force attack on thug 1. Thug 1 flies into bookcase, bookcase falls on thug.
3. PC goes all fuego on a just made RC vamp. Fire goes through rampire, injures the one behind him.

Is this right, or am I still not getting it a complete doofus?

Examples help 

[iago]

The stuff you're asking about is "Overflow". You should be able to find your way to references to that concept in the index, etc.

[MacsNewBrew]

Ok, thanks Fred, that helps with what they aren't, but I still don't get what shifts are.

and I *am* rather thick-skulled sometimes....

[iago]

Ok, thanks Fred, that helps with what they aren't, but I still don't get what shifts are.

and I *am* rather thick-skulled sometimes....

So, in another game, when you're rolling against, say, a 15 difficulty, and you roll a 21, and the GM says "Whoa, 6 over the difficulty? That means I'll bump you up to the next level of results!"

That margin of "6" is your shifts.  They're how you shift the results beyond the most basic thing.

With an attack, what you're shifting is the amount of stress you produce: if you hit the defense exactly, you just "connect" -- 0 shifts.  If you roll 3 above it, that's 3 shifts, which with an attack turns into a 3-stress hit.

But if it's not an attack -- if it's you, say, rolling your Investigation against a difficult thing to detect, and you beat that difficulty by 4, maybe that means you found it much faster than you would have if you'd just hit the result exactly. So the shifts there are shifting the result to happen faster.  Or maybe instead they're instead shifting the result so you get more information than you would have if you'd just hit the difficulty target exactly.

[MacsNewBrew]

AHHH! I get it now! THANK YOU!!! 

[LCDarkwood]

1. PC jumps off house roof to attack two thugs below. Thug 1 gets it in the back, down but conscious, thug 2 drops gun in surprise

Hey, not to risk more confusion, but the rules also have one other concept to cover what you're talking about here: supplemental actions. Basically, that means you can take a penalty to your main action in order to do more than one thing on your turn.

This would be a perfect example: jumping off the house is movement, so you'd take a -1 penalty to the attack. (Probably you wouldn't be able to attack them at the same time unless you had a stunt, but let's not worry about that right here.) This is sort of like paying a shift in advance - it's like saying, "Hey, that cool thing I could do if I rolled an extra shift? Let me just pay for it up front with a penalty." So then, when you succeed, you can just do both.


-L

[iago]

Yep. You can think of shifts like a short-term stack of chips. What are you going to spend them on? Closing with your opponent (1 shift) and THEN smacking him in the chops (the rest, as stress)? Awesome.

[MacsNewBrew]

Sooo if my fists are +2 and I say knock thug 1 down with a difficulty of +2 (taking the -1 penalty to declare that shift ahead of time) and I roll a +2, I can use that shift to "untouched thug 2 drops gun in surprise"  --(totally Batman) or is it limited to the same target?


TOTAL RPG n00b here...sorry

[luminos]

That would kind of be like combining two full actions (knocking a guy down, disarming a guy) in a single turn.  I don't think you can do that.

[LCDarkwood]

That would kind of be like combining two full actions (knocking a guy down, disarming a guy) in a single turn.  I don't think you can do that.

Yeah, this is correct. The rules are pretty clear about what kinds of things can be supplemental actions and which can't be. I hope they are, anyway.


-L

[MacsNewBrew]

I think I am getting it now. Thank you all.