Director’s Notes

The Director has one of the hardest jobs of running a game. They must create the world, play all of the Extras, and keep the Actors interested and excited throughout. While C.O.R.E. has been designed to make these things as simple as possible. But a few items still need a little more explanation.

Character Growth

As the game stretches into multiple scenes and episodes, the characters can—and should—grow into different heroes with new skills, powers, and an ever-evolving sense of confidence. To do this, they need some way to measure and balance their growth within the framework of the game.

Directors are encouraged to award 1-5 CGP for excellent role-playing—especially when the roleplaying situation might hurt the character—or for fantastic ideas and solutions during the game. These bonuses are generally handed out as they occur, since this encourages more role-playing from everyone involved.

Story Growth

Each story typically has a big picture which is going to take great effort and heroism
on the part of the Actors. This is probably not the end of the Actors’ lives, however,
and is just the beginning of a new story. When the Actors have come to the completion of the story, they should be rewarded in a big way.

Character Growth Awards: While the number may vary from story to story, based upon the power-level of your game, and how fast you want characters to advance, a rough guideline would be 20 CGP for each Actor. (And if any villains survived, be sure to give them a similar award.)

Story Awards: Another type of reward that should be included at this point in the game is to reward the actors with non-CGP items. This might be the deed for a new starship or tract of land, or membership in a very secretive organization. Use your imagination; just be sure to pay attention to each Actor’s motivations, and the motivations
of the group as a whole.

Episode Growth

In order to allow characters to grow throughout the game, they need more than just Story rewards. At the end of each Episode, reward the characters. This award can vary depending on how fast you want your characters to grow in power and skill, and how long each Episode is. A base range of between 2-5 CGP is recommended.

Working With Encounter Blocks

Encounter Blocks are the recommended way to handle all Inconsequential conflicts within the Story. Important and Crucial conflicts are handled slightly differently, and will be explained after we discuss how Encounter Blocks work.
What is the Encounter Block?

The Encounter block is a shorthand way to describe the difficulty of the conflict. Here is an example, taken from the Quick Start Narrative at the beginning of the rules.

Chase! Duration 3, Severity 1, Difficulty 12 (Traffic Maneuvers 16)

Let’s break this down into the individual pieces and describe how each one is determined.
The Title. The title provides a very brief description of the scene. It makes it easy to remember what is going on, or to refer to the proper scene in your notes.

Duration

This shows how long the scene is intended to last. The number shown—in this case 3—is the expected number of conflicts within the scene. This is not a hard and fast rule, but a suggestion.

Severity

This is the amount of damage that an Actor would take for failing a roll during the conflict. If the conflict would logically result in some form damage— whether physical, mental, social, or spiritual—then the sever-ity should be listed here. The majority of conflicts should have a Severity of 1. There may be times when something would be especially devastating, though, such as a bomb going off in the Actor’s immediate area. At such times, it might warrant a Severity of 2 or 3. One rule of thumb to keep in mind, though, is the longer the Duration, the lower the Severity. Take the bomb example. If the Duration is only 1, we might justify a damage of 3. However, if the Duration is 3, we don’t necessarily want to create a Severity of 3. What would happen if they Actor’s failed at all 3 conflicts? That would be 9 points of damage and, if they are all affecting the same attribute, it would surely put our characters unconscious. For Inconsequential conflicts, this is not what we want.

When a conflict has a Severity of 0, it tells us that failure does not result in any attribute damage. Instead, it creates new story problems. Just because a Severity is non-zero, though, does not mean there won’t be story problems that crop up, but a Severity of 0 tells us this is all that can happen within that conflict.
Difficulty. The base difficulty for the conflict should be derived using the same methods described earlier in the rules. In conflicts where there will be multiple people--say having to pass a number of guards to get into the warehouse--you should use the average abilities when determining difficulty.

If there is one (or more) special situations that you anticipate cropping up within the conflict, you might give additional, more specific, difficulties. Using our example above, that would be Traffic Maneuvers difficulty listed. This tells us that, for the majority of conflicts within this scene the difficulty will be 9 (the first number listed) but any special maneuvers within traffic would be done at a difficulty of 12.

Often, when determining difficulties, you will have to use your judgment and modify the value up or down by a point or two. Do not go too far with this, though, or you run the risk of making encounters too easy or too difficult. Remember, the players have a number of options at their disposal for reducing the difficulty of the conflict.

Important Conflicts

Important conflicts differ from Inconsequential conflicts in that we want to force our characters to go through a number of different stages before the conflict can be called a success. This might be having to get past multiple guards or through multiple traps in a single tunnel.

The way we show these is to list each conflict below the title, in the order we expect them to be encountered. Like this:

Trapped Tunnel - Duration 3
Sliding Stone - Severity 1 Difficulty 15
Russian Soldier - Severity 1 Difficulty 17 (Bribe 13)
Spiked Pit - Severity 1 Difficulty 15

In this example, we expect the Actors to be forced to go through all 3 conflicts. If the players do not make it through this encounter, it would require a major amount of story change—perhaps they must take an alternate route that keeps them away from their goal, or presents new story goals. This would normally have a difficulty of 20. Since there are 3 encounters, though, we have lowered the difficulty, giving the characters a slightly better chance to get through. In the case of the soldier, note the bribe difficulty listed. If the players do not immediately try to shoot him down, they could talk with him and bribe him. On a success, they might be shown a safer, more direct route. On a failure, the soldier might radio in their location, unless shot down first. If he shows them a safer route, we would not need to do the last conflict.

Crucial Conflicts

Crucial conflicts are a completely different beast. During Crucial conflicts, we are telling the characters that this conflict—be it the final battle with the master villain, or a showdown of wits on a game show—will be done where every roll is a direct roll against the opponent. The conflict will not be resolved until the Director has decided that the opponent is well and truly defeated, meaning that their stats do not allow them any more options and the logical result of an Actor’s success is for defeat of the character.
The recommended way to show this is simply to list the title of the encounter, and then give a listing of the villain’s stats in the conflict’s description.

Challenge Ratings

Every character or creature in C.O.R.E. has a Challenge Rating (CR). The CR is a quick way to describe to the Director how much of a challenge the character is for your party. While this does not see any use in the basic rules, it provides a measure for Directors to use to gauge the difficulty of their encounters. In future supplements, this number will be used for each character and creature listed.

A CR is calculated by adding the total number of points it would take to build that character. For example, consider a character with the following stats:

Physical: 8
Mental: 6
Social: 5
Spiritual: 3
Total Attribute scores: 22
Everyman: 5
Combat: 5
Fitness: 4
Nature: Negotiation: 3
Skullduggery: 0
Supernatural: 2
Technology: 3
Total Skill points: 28
Total Secrets: 2

So, to find the CR of this character, we add the total number of Attributes, Skill points, and Secrets and find a CR of 52. To increase the usability of the CR, we also add a prefix that tells what type of conflict the character is most suited to. The possible prefixes are:

• P – Physical
• M – Mental
• So – Social
• Sp – Spiritual
This character is geared most heavily towards physical and combat, so its CR would be P52.