[Troubleshooters] Rules questions

[Runeblogger]

Hej, hur mår du?
I'm sorry I can't speak Swedish. I am running some Troubleshooters games, and I ran into some rules questions that you may have already talked about here. Can you help me, please?

1. So yesterday a player made a roll with a 15% skill with a -2 pips modifier. He got an 11. Is that a "good karma" roll or a failed roll due to the -2?
My copy of the rulebook (which is a Spanish translation and that might be the problem) says under the section about modifiers that if you get a result in which the units match the negative modifier, the roll turns into a failure, irrespective of what you rolled, so I guess that "11" turned into a regular fail.
What is your opinion? And did Krister Sundelin already cleared this up many years ago?

1.a. The same goes for the opposite case: if you have a modifier of +2 and you roll a 22 when you only have 15% skill, does that "bad karma" roll turn into a regular success?

2. I couldn't find this either on the rulebook: When you are rolling dice in a duel (the series of opposed tests), does a good/karma roll have any influence on the end result? I was thiking of making a "good karma" roll count as 2 regular successes, and the opposite for a bad karma roll.

3. Do you make your rolls for augmenting your skills through experience after a session (f.ex. a 2 hour game) or after the adventure is completed?
4. Can you use the free experience points to develop more than one talent after an adventure? F.ex. one of my players had 4 free experience points to spend, so he assigned 2 of them to one talent, and another 2 to another talent.

Thanks everyone!

 

[Bolongo]

Good questions!

I am not the designer, so I can't say for sure, but the way I have always run it is that the order of operations is to first decide whether there is a success or not (including applying pip modifiers), and then determine whether good or bad karma happens.
I base this mostly on the fact that the rules appear in this order in the book.

 

[Bolongo]

As for question 2, "something good happens" is open to a lot of interpretation. In the standard case, I would just give the +2 pip bonus to the next check in the duel (and the story point, of course). But it's up to the Director.

3: the rules say after each session. But 2 hrs seems awfully short. I would personally rule that it has to be at least 4 hrs of play, but again it's up to the Director - if you're running a short campaign, you might want improvement to be speedy.

4: if you have enough ticks, that's fine.