Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Inanimate Handicaps

Question: When using Speak Hu, can I inflict dice penalties on an inanimate object to reduce its resistance, or is the resistance a cosmic constant?

Since Speak Hu only allows you to use your social knacks on inanimate objects, and there are almost no social knacks that inflict dice penalties on their targets, no, there is almost no way to lower the object's resistance. Objects are just objects and don't have most of the problems of living things; they don't care about environmental effects and are indifferent to your boons and non-social knacks, so if you don't have a social knack that can do it, it doesn't get done. (Unless you're Japanese, in which case you can break the rules with Tsukumo-gami, but Speak Hu is more limited.)

The only social knack I can think of that would actually inflict a dice penalty on an object would be Inescapable Vision, but you'd have to beat its resistance to use Speak Hu on it in the first place to succeed in affecting it. Anything you used afterward, however, would have the benefit of that -4 dice penalty to the object's resistance.

4 comments:

  1. As a crossover for when you have a Japanese Scion and an Egyptian Scion in the same party, does Speak Hu adversely effect the Kami of the Object being Hu'd at? Would the Kami of a Rock that had inescapable vision used on it see nothing but the Hu-ing Scion?

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    1. I'm afraid I can't help with that. I haven't rewritten tsuko-gami yet, and we don't use it as is ATM. I know when we do rewrite it it will address this question

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  2. I wonder if you can fight with your head against a rock? There is probably some merit to the idea of determining what a rock might be able to think or do and then countering it. Rocks probably even have some stamina to counter.

    But I don't think Speak Hu's resistance roll cares about stamina in the first place, so the issue is pretty academic.

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    1. And FWYH is a mental knack, not a social knack, so it's even more academic.

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