Suggestion: Prepare Action (Previously "Investigate as Bonus")

Oh, and I think I missed a post of yours.

"If those Investigations had been pitched as Aid actions, they *may have* provided Marks for the Hunt. And therefore wouldn't have been mechanically "useless"."

It really does seem as though you're saying that Aid *can* do what I'm saying this new Prepare action should do. If you can Aid an action for a future month, why not streamline that by giving it a name and description in the book and making it clear, easy and obvious what resources are usable and how it works? If it's something that would be used often, it might as well be.

I think that what I want is available with the current rules, in several forms even (contingency, future aids, ongoing actions without tests) but this isn't obvious to all of us.

Corral wrote:OK, that sounds good to me so far. Can you also do this pre-hunt on your own one month, and then use your earned marks to contribute to a Group Hunt later? ie, I start scoping out the Shroud and get 6 Marks on the Hunt, but I specify that I don't want to approach it yet. If next month I participate in a Group Hunt against the Shroud and get 5 marks, can I declare it ongoing from my previous hunt and then contribute 11 Marks?

First, there is no "pre-hunt". If you want to do an ongoing hunt, your action would look like this:
Action: Hunt (ongoing) or Hunt (long-term) or Hunt (building progress) [the thing you're hunting]
Effort: 7
Secular Power: 3
Resources: Spies, Thugs x2
Professions: Bully
Writeup: Something awesome

If you're doing a group hunt, the deal is that everyone who participates in the group hunt has to declare the same action, and they have to declare that they're participating in a group hunt. So you could do:
Action: Group Hunt (ongoing), etc., etc., etc.
Effort: 7
Secular Power: 3
Resources: Spies, Thugs x2
Professions: Bully
Writeup: Something awesome

If you wanted to use whatever information you got on your previous month's Hunt, you might want to include that in your writeup. I might allow you to use it. I might not; it depends what it is. I don't think I'd have too much of a problem allowing people to use Marks from a previous, ongoing, long-term Hunt for a future Group Hunt, provided it's a) a Hunt for the same thing as you declared previously, and b) applicable (so if you got 3 Marks toward finding the Devil's lair, f'rinstance, you might not be able to use those three Marks toward a Group Hunt looking for the Demons *at* that lair)

You can NOT retroactively declare a previous action to be ongoing. Either it's ongoing/long-term when you first submit it, or it isn't.

It really does seem as though you're saying that Aid *can* do what I'm saying this new Prepare action should do. If you can Aid an action for a future month, why not streamline that by giving it a name and description in the book and making it clear, easy and obvious what resources are usable and how it works? If it's something that would be used often, it might as well be.

Aid is ALWAYS a short-term action. You cannot build progress on an Aid action. You cannot, therefore, do this:
Action: Aid next month's hunt for the Devil
(all the other stuff)

You CAN do:
Month 1 - Action: Hunt (long-term/build progress toward finding the Devil)
(all the other stuff)
Month 2 - Action: Aid Group Hunt for Devil (use progress from last month's long-term hunt action)

OK, so what did you mean by "If those Investigations had been pitched as Aid
actions, they *may have*
provided Marks for the Hunt. And therefore wouldn't have been
mechanically "useless"." ?? How might this have worked if Aid is always short-term as you're saying here?

And, I'm not fully understanding what you're saying.

1) Would I or would I not be allowed to do the action you first list ("Hunt (ongoing) or Hunt (long-term) or Hunt (building progress) [the
thing you're hunting]") and then specifically mention that I do not want to approach the creature, even if I get enough marks to try?

2) If the answer to 1 is YES, can I then also participate in the second action ("Group Hunt (ongoing), etc., etc., etc.") the next month, and get any mechanical benefit from the first action?

PS. I hope you're not getting too frustrated with me, apparently I suck at interpreting the written word. We could always try having this conversation at coffee or something.

Also, I'd just like to point out that if you *do* do an ongoing action, you really need to be specific.

I'm not keen on things like :
Action: Hunt (long-term) for anything that threatens the Civitas
getting 15 or 20 Marks that you then try to throw at whatever Group Hunt is currently being organised. That's not cool.

Corral wrote:OK, so what did you mean by "If those Investigations had been pitched as Aid
actions, they *may have*
provided Marks for the Hunt. And therefore wouldn't have been
mechanically "useless"." ?? How might this have worked if Aid is always short-term as you're saying here?

If those Investigations had been pitched as Aid actions *for the hunt in that month*, they may have provided Marks for the hunt *that was occurring in that month*. If they had been pitched as: Investigate the Demons (long-term action) and use this information for the upcoming Group Hunt next month, they may have provided Marks for a *future* Aid action that would have looked like this:
Action: Aid Group Hunt
Effort: Whatever
SP: Whatever
Resources: May I use the Marks from my long-term Investigate action that I began last month to provide Marks for this Hunt?

I may have considered that. I can't say it would have worked, and you wouldn't have been able to provide, say, 12 Marks from your Spies for the Group Hunt, but you may have been able to provide 3. Say. Something like that. I would consider the possibility.

Corral wrote:1) Would I or would I not be allowed to do the action you first list ("Hunt (ongoing) or Hunt (long-term) or Hunt (building progress) [the
thing you're hunting]") and then specifically mention that I do not want to approach the creature, even if I get enough marks to try?

If you say that you are doing a long-term action, it *necessarily means* that you don't get the Opposed Roll. IT's the same with Rehabilitation. You don't get to do the Opposed Roll (which is what the Healing Test is) until you reach a certain Difficulty, because Rehab is an ongoing action. If you took an ongoing Hunt action, there wouldn't be an Opposed Roll, and therefore there wouldn't be a confrontation.

Laura wrote:2) If the answer to 1 is YES, can I then also participate in the second action ("Group Hunt (ongoing), etc., etc., etc.") the next month, and get any mechanical benefit from the first action?

PS. I hope you're not getting too frustrated with me, apparently I suck at interpreting the written word. We could always try having this conversation at coffee or something.

I thought that was clear.
IF you have declared your first action as an ongoing action and IF you have been specific with it, THEN you may be able to use any Marks you achieved on the first Hunt action you submitted toward the future Group Hunt action.

BUT

You cannot retroactively change things, nor can you apply Marks from a previous hunt to a future hunt which is different from the first one in focus.

I am satisfied with the ability to do an ongoing/long-term hunt and then apply it to a group hunt of the same target. (I had said the same thing about Prepare, that it would have to have the same target/focus). It's basically what I was trying to propose, I think, but calling it something else because I didn't realize that long-term actions could work like that.

ie, if we were to bring back the dancing lessons example, I could put in an action like this:

Action: Teach Shamus dancing lessons (ongoing)
Effort: 4
Secular Power: 2
Resources: N/A
Professions: N/A
Writeup: I'm really only preparing for the eventuality that Shamus will want lessons from me. Booking studio, reading up, etc.

And then the next month do this:

Action: Teach Shamus dancing lessons (from ongoing action)
Effort: 8
Secular Power: 2
Resources: N/A
Professions: N/A
Writeup: Let's do this thing!

Right? If so, then it does exactly what I wanted.

Yes. That's why there's a
Marks Accumulated:
area for your downtime submissions.

Yes, but what I didn't know was that you could intentionally put off the action. I thought ongoing hunts, for example, were for in case you failed. I also didn't know that you could use an ongoing action to join a group action and still get a benefit from that.

Oh.
Well, you can. But it's not 'putting off a hunt'. It's hunting over a longer period of time. There's a big difference. If you came to me and said, "Can I put off this hunt for a month?" I'd look at you quizzically and say, "Sure." And then be confused when you submitted a hunt action.