Sometimes challenges represent a single action in a single moment of time: a jump, a throw, a sprint. Other challenges are more like a marathon or a multi-stage race like the Tour De France. In those cases, successes and failures measure progress and setbacks towards an objective. A failure in one stage may set a Character back but it does not doom their enterprise outright.
Is this a multi-stage challenge?
If you’re not sure if the challenge at hand should be multi-stage, consider:
- Does this challenge take place over an extended period of time?
- Is incremental progress towards success possible?
If the answer to either of these is affirmative then consider running the challenge in multiple stages.
Running a multi-stage challenge
There is no functional difference between a standard challenge and multi-stage challenge except for this: the Difficulty of the multi-stage challenge is spread over two or more stages. These stages might represent the same task repeated over time or different related tasks undertaken sequentially. Each stage represents a specific amount of time. How long that time is depends upon the context of the challenge. In a downtime challenge, each stage might last a week. In a dungeon challenge, each stage might last ten minutes.
In either case, treat each stage as a separate challenge and run them normally. At the end of the process, any excess boons (if any) can roll over and count towards the next stage of the challenge. Conversely, if there is a margin of failure, that margin, can either be converted into banes (see “Sell boons”) or will add additional Difficulty to the next stage. This process is repeated for each stage until the overall challenge is completed, one way or another. At that point, deal with the overall success or failure as usual.
Using multi-stage challenges for retries
Many challenges, time permitting, can be run as multi-stage challenges. In these cases, the Character is repeating the same action for additional time in order to win, banking incremental progress as they go. To take advantage of this, that additional time has to be available. The amount of that time would set the ceiling on the challenge’s number of stages.
An example of this type of multi-stage challenge is climbing a wall. Running this climb as a multi-stage challenge might look like this:
- Determine how many rounds of climbing it would take to climb the wall; each of those rounds becomes a stage.
- Each successful stage moves the Character up some distance on the wall.
- Each failure either adds a bane or increases the difficulty of the next stage or both!
- For kicks, use the Character’s Constitution or similar attribute to determine the maximum number of stages they can attempt before they tire and fall.
Running races, chases, and contested challenges
Contested challenges are a particular type of multi-stage challenges that can be roughly divided into either a race (complete the challenge first) or a chase (overtake a competitor before they complete a challenge). For these cases, we’re going to introduce two new concepts: the gap and the margin of victory.
- Mind the gap!
- The gap is the distance, measured in boons, between the Characters competing in the race or chase. The more boons that separate the Characters, the wider the gap, the more distance (in whichever measure makes sense) exists between the Characters.
- Life is just a game of inches.
- Or, in this case, boons. The margin of victory is the amount of boons one Character needs to achieve, above and beyond those gained by their competitors, to win the challenge.
- Go, Speed Racer!
- In a race, two or more Characters compete to finish a challenge. The race can have a fixed number of stages, in which case whoever has the most boons at the end of the last stage wins. Alternatively, the race can have a variable number of stages and a set margin of victory, in which case whoever reaches that margin first, wins.
- The heat is on!
- In a chase, the gap represents the relative distance between the pursuer and their quarry, in whatever units of measure make the most sense. Each boon won by the pursuer closes that gap while each boon earned by the quarry widens it. Banes add to the opposition, if not bought off.
If the pursuer reduces the gap to zero, they’ve caught their quarry. If the pursued widens the gap to at least the margin of victory then they escape.