Yep. Infil to get in position, and I'll allow HtH for the attack.

And with that, we wrap up the first session of the Amsterdam mission.

Everyone is getting a full refresh of their abilities this time. My use of "this time" should indicate that this session was done this way to let you experiment a bit with point spends and get used to how tests and ability spends in NBA work. Going forward, it's going to work like this: for the sake of the game, each major city you visit will count as a self-contained "operation", while each day spent there will count as a "session".

Investigative abilities only refresh when you finish an operation. Very occasionally, there may be opportunities to change that, but generally speaking, as long as you're in one city fighting one particular arm of the overall Bad Guy Conspiracy, you'll have to ration investigative ability spends. Remember that investigative abilities are still useful even if your pool is empty; spending points from these pools merely lets you sprinkle some extra awesome on top of what you need to succeed.

General abilities refresh easier. You've already used some rules that let you recover points in specific abilities, so if your character has those, use them. I'll be more liberal with offering 1-point refreshes here for good play or awesome ideas, too. Following your Drive into danger or complications is a good way to earn 1 or 2 points refresh on a general ability of your choice. Athletics, Driving, Hand-to-Hand, Piloting, Shooting, and Weapons fully refresh at the end of each session. Getting to a safe place to relax for an hour or more allows you to fully refresh up to three general abilities of your choice, but you can only do that once per session. If you need to refresh Health, resting for a session refreshes 2 points, and the use of Medic can accelerate this. Stability can be refreshed through use of Shrink and if you pull off something so awesome with a spend in another ability that we all agree it's a real confidence booster.

And just a reminder: Cover and Network never refresh. Those points are gone when you spend them. The only way to bolster those is at the end of an operation where you'll get some points to spend on improving your characters.

Phew! I hope that's clear enough for the moment. Any questions, feel free to lay them on me.

Tim's latest exchange brought this to mind, for me.

Guys, sorry about this, but I got lost somehow. The dutch doesn't help my reading comprehension either.

What is the plan now? Who are these people on the phone? What was Tim supposed to be doing?

Worse, it's Google Translate Dutch! Like Dutch Chocolate, it's not bad, but it doesn't taste like the real thing. ;P

Plan is the same: call girl sets the charge in the toilet, it gets water everywhere, you go in to 'clean up' and steal the briefcase. This going on right now? This is the setup for all that.

Three people on the phone, last I checked: said call girl (important), Laith the Company man with the cute dog (important), and the pothead Mason was just talking to (not very important).

As for what Tim's doing...well, securing some kind of quick exit for yourself would be good, in the (likely) event the op goes pear-shaped with you in harm's way. I'd say using Architecture and 1 point of Preparedness would do that, but I'd consult with Robert on that. There's also probably going to be Chinese agents afoot - you could try looking out for them, even (perhaps!) thwart them.

Hope that helps!

For summarizing the situation nicely before I had a chance to and creatively throwing shade at Google Translate, I'm granting Ross a 2-point Refresh on a general ability of his choice.

EDIT: Redeemed for Surveillance!

Alright, here's what I'm doing:

Going to spend 5 Athletics points.
If I fall short of the goal of 8, I'll eat the difference in Health using Roll through the Pain.
Lastly, I'll use my once-per-session Parkour ability to get back 3 of those points. I'll have to write up the approach, though. Just message me the results, Robert, and I'll post the write-up sometime today.

Here's the write-up! You can't say I don't work for my Athletics points.
Blake made it on a 10 vs. 8.

The dice giveth, and the dice taketh away!

So, I need to beat a 6 on the Drive roll to operate the drone. I have 4 points in Drive total, and I'm going to spend them all. While I could chance it as is, Robert and I thought it best to see if one of you would like to spend a point of trust to make this a success. To do that, just say you're going to spend a Trust point, and do a little write-up in the thread of what you do to help Blake. It could be advice on drone operation, it could be a pep talk, it could be a funny story about how you lost your medical license - whatever you think you would do.

And hey, if you don't want to do spend, that's fine too, and you can say so here in the OOC thread. I promise, I won't hold a grudge.

At this point, Tim specifically, as Mason does not have the Trust to spend to help Blake.

I would like to note that the roll was a Natural 6, that plus the Driving spend and Tim's trust makes a result of 11.

That's some mighty fine drone'ing.

I'm leaving the key card issue open because Tim went through the trouble to get a key card writer, but the prep for that kinda got lost in the shuffle. In any event, there's three options I would offer you guys:

a) Tim did spend the time to prepare a matching card that actually unlocks the door to the apartment above Varajev's. I'm calling that a Preparedness 6 roll; thanks to Tim's Forgery ability, it would even look legit. As in, good enough to make Ms. Akkermans believe it's a legit card you acquired somehow for her.
b) Tim put a "blank" card from his supplies into the package and is leaving the unlocking to Laith's security override. Preparedness 2, would have been dead simple to arrange during the package prep. Ms. Akkermans would know it's a fake, but probably not jump to the conclusion that it actually does nothing.
c) Don't provide a card at all, just unlock the door for her. No rolls required, though it might not be to your liking that Ms. Akkermans will thereby know you've hacked building security.

For clarity, Mason spent 2 points of Medic to heal 2 damage each for Tim and Blake.

I'm going to be AFK for most of the day, so I will ask these chase rules questions here instead of Gtalk -

1. When you succeed or fail on chase tests, your Lead shifts, okay. Does a greater margin of success or failure affect the Lead shift, or is it a more binary "Success gives you +1" ?

2. Swerve doubles all Lead changes - does that include an opponent's shifts as well?

1) away from PDF, too, but I recall it's more a pass/fail. Margin might come in when both you and the enemy succeed.

2) Yes. Be aware that there is only one overall lead showing the state of the chase, both sides are trying to shift it in their direction.

Okay, here's how it works:

Pursuer succeeds, pursued fails: Lead shortens by 2.

Pursuer fails, pursued succeeds: Lead lengthens by 2.

Both succeed/fail: Lead shifts by 1 toward whoever succeeded at their roll by a bigger margin/failed their roll by a smaller margin.

So in theory, if you swerve and make your roll and your opponent fails his (or vice versa), the Lead could shift by as much as 4 in a single round.

This might be a good idea to explain how Cover IDs work. So far, you've maneuvered around the problem by only using short-term deceptions or just plain refusing to identify yourselves, but if Mason is no-shit questioned by the police and has to provide them a name that will confirm his story, he's going to need a cover ID.

Much like Contacts acquired via Network, cover identities can be essentially summoned from thin air as needed by assigning points from your Cover ability. Within (minimal) reason, your cover ID can be anything you think might help you in the current situation, whether that's an undercover police officer, or a mafia enforcer, or just a regular kind of IT contractor for a country's military. Anyway, when your cover ID is checked, you make a roll against a set difficulty (depending on who's looking and how hard they're looking), spending points from that cover ID's pool to boost the roll if needed. If you fail the roll, that cover ID has failed to convince, otherwise the check shows that you are who you claim to be - of course, that doesn't protect you from being found out if you are then witnessed taking actions that your cover identity cannot explain. An active cover ID must have at least one point assigned to its pool, even if you don't intend to spend that point - a cover ID with an empty pool has been red-flagged and will automatically fail all checks against it.

Also note that cover IDs only cover the back-end paperwork; they don't provide badges or laminated FBI IDs (Forgery!), they don't change your looks or mannerisms to match (Disguise!) and they don't come with access codes or key rings your assumed identity would possess (Digital Intrusion! Infiltration!). Finally, like Network contacts, points spent from Cover do not refresh - they must be re-purchased with experience.

We're coming up on the end of the session.

A quick reminder of how the end-of-session refresh is going to work:

• Athletics, Driving, Hand-to-Hand, Piloting, Shooting, and Weapons fully refresh. (This is actually somewhat more generous than the RAW rule, which stipulates "24 hours after last use", but being that this is Wildcard, I don't think we're ever getting 24 hours without an action scene.)
• Health and Stability do not automatically refresh and need to be restored using Medic and Shrink, respectively. If you spend a session/day doing "restful activity" only, you do refresh 2 Health, but see above for how restful a Wildcard op is. The GM giveth and the GM taketh away.
• Each of you gets to nominate three General Abilities other than the ones above to fully refresh. Please tell me which abilities you want to refresh.
• Investigative Abilities do not refresh now, only when the mission is done.

Narratively, my plan is to play this as you guys using the evening/night to both rest a bit and prepare for tomorrow, since the vote seems to be towards meeting with Fractal at the Royal Palace. Please tell me what you're going to do with the downtime.

When we have all that, we'll be starting our third day in Amsterdam.

Does anyone has medic? Tim is teh hurts.

Also Conceal, Disguise, Surveillance.

Also also - Tim has some Forgery he can use to sneak people in. Press is free, but you don't go in with armor or weapons. If you want those, let's think about how we can get you in. Posing as guards seems an obvious choice, but it's probably not the only choice.