So, based upon the guidebook within the Villain section indicating that Villains are never required to roll all of their dice (page 193)...
Now my question is... Can we also allow our players to do this? Now I'm sure many people would baulk at this.
"Why would I ever choose to use only a portion of my dice and leave myself in a tight position?" and most certainly it is a fair consideration to give however just like Villains, narratively speaking, a character witholding their full skill/power/whatever until the opponent has already underestimated them, and then revealing that they have something else up their sleave can mean a hug boon in a narrative sense.
Now my question is, has anyone ever asked to do this at the table? And if so how did you handle it.
As follows here were some ideas I had for this. Note than NONE OF THIS HAS EVER BEEN PLAYTESTED, its just a bunch of ideas that I've been mulling over for a bit. The Withholding of Skill mechanic works in two different eays:
1. Witholding dice before a risk is rolled
2. Withholding raises during a risk.
When a player takes option one, the gamemaster grants that player a Hero Point, as the player is actively goading the villain/opponent into a false sense of security and giving them something to utilize later.
When using option two, the player actively sets one of their raises aside and chooses not to apply it for that action. Instead this single raise gets "banked". The banked raise can be "held" for a number of rounds in an exchange equal to the rating of the skill used to make that raise. (i.e if a player has three scholorship and is in an argument with a villain and trying to sway the court to his way of thinking by lulling his opponent into an argument trap, the player can actively bank one of their raises to use later in the exchange. In this example the player can hold onto it for up to three rounds before the banked raise is discarded.) When the player chooses to cash out that raise they can add it to the raises spent for that individual round or individual declaration. Basically giving the player two raises for that individual action.
Now, I think there should be a limit of how this can be done, probably in that you can only bank at the very first round in an exchange, and can never bank anything after that.
Thoughts?
In a way, this already exists with the players having the option to leave dice "unspent" when calculating Raises in the hopes that the GM will buy one or more of them, thus generating Hero Points.
After all, I don't think it's mandatory that if a player rolles nine dice for a Risk that they have to try and use all nine dice to form Raises; they could very well just use six of the dice, and even if those other three unspent dice would combine into another Raise, they can put them aside as unspent in the hopes the GM will buy them in the hopes of netting the player a few Hero Points that they can use in a later Risk or to fuel character abilities (such as Knack Advantages or Glamour Sorcery).
In the case of the trope namer, it could very well be that Inigo was trained in a dueling style that required a fencing weapon in the right hand, so by using his left hand, he knowingly limited his options by denying himself access to his style's bonus ability. Westley probably just had Student of Combat, but used a lower Trait instead of one of his better traits (which Inigo may have done as well), so both of them were likely not rolling their maximum amount of dice. The final exchange may well have also included Westley spending all the Hero Points he'd been racking up during the chase so that for that one round, he simply had far more Raises than Inigo could keep up with.
Dono's Gaming & Etc Blog
http://jedimorningfire.blogspot.com/
I think Donovan brought up good points on the Raises aspect. I have no fundamental problems with the concept of 'Banking Raises' but I feel that should be an Advantage that a character has to buy (e.g. Biding My Time) because I feel that it can take the 'ebb and flow' of the Action Sequence away if everyone can save a Raise on a Round when there isn't as much to do and save it for the next Round or so. I do like the mechanic of basing it on the Ranks you have in a skill (maybe +1 in order to be able to save a Raise for an unskilled check).
I absolutely don't feel Option 1 should be introduced. It's so easy for characters to get 6-10 Dice Pools that giving up a single Die for a Hero Point every seems way too much. That's essentially using 1/2 of a Raise to earn a Hero Point.
John