After Sundown: Seeking

[Username17]

I very rarely check the threads in It's My Own Invention, since I regard that as the place for things that are pretty much done and not really the place for flame wars. Anyway, I noticed this:

Also it's kind of weird to divide the time by the number of hits rather than staging it down.

The question of why getting extra hits on a Seeking test divides the base time instead of reducing the timeframe is a good one. The answer is because when you do timeframe shifts, you get very large changes in time. It is desirable for the purposes of looming psychoes searching basements for the amount of time in question to be a relatively narrow band so as to increase tension. It's just base time times Hider's hits divided by Seeker's hits because that generates much less swinginess on the search time.

Even the multiply or divide by zero portions are intentional. If the hider outright fails their Stealth check, they are spotted immediately. If the seeker outright fails theirs, they take the allotted time and then give up (this is why the seeker is required to specify an amount of time they will search before the dice are rolled - so they never end up caught in an infinite loop of searching for hidden people).

-Username17

[Orion]

Okay, that makes sense as a mechanic. That's not at all what's in the writeup. The word "multiply" doesn't appear anywhere. Instead instructs you to use a stealth check to set the "base time" and then later gives a lookup chart which also spits out a "base time".

[...You Lost Me]

I very rarely check the threads in It's My Own Invention, since I regard that as the place for things that are pretty much done and not really the place for flame wars.

Heh.