I am curious not so much about what the "official" way to do it is, but what other people think of it practically and aesthetically.
When there's a - in Safety during a mission, I interpret "the anchor loses control of the dream entirely" to mean
- The anchor may not communicate with the pilot
- The panic button/emergency eject doesn't work
In practice, of course, I like to have the Anchor continue to do the whole speaking-in-voice thing... but with their audience now being the other characters present in Control as he/she tries desperately to reestablish contact with the Pilot. What the Anchor can't do is describe the environment or give the Pilot instructions.
Anchor abilities work normally, though. Although depending on the fiction for how the ANIMa works, I could see them not working.
Thoughts?
2 comments:
This happens in Actual Play a lot.
I particularly liked Julian Wainscott from REM punching his console after a string of - results in safety and asking "Does this BLOODY THING ever actually WORK!?"
I usualy let the anchor comunicate with the pilot even during lost control moments. Connection just gets garbled, weakened, only sometimes completely cut off. What I do instead is that I start to contradict anchor describing environment, gradually taking over the control of surroundings. So they can still talk, but are not much of a help.
The eject button also still have some effect - pilot feels a shock, or a slight jolt, it just doesn't wake him up. And when he gets really deep into the nightmare, all the comms stop, and in the control room they see his body, sleeping calmly in the creche, not disturbed by the shocks at all ... blissed creepiness FTW :)
The nonfunction of the panic button was also legendary in that game. In the end, they improvised a rescue device to pull out pilots from the nightmare (based on the first ANIMA prototype ... you know, the one with 100% fatality rate?).
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