Presence

Stickers on The Map (and maybe elsewhere) indicating one “unit” of a family’s influence or power in an area.

• Presence is geographical. When you want to invoke your family or your ally’s presence, it matters where it is.
• It’s roughly an estate-size? i.e. each estate you get is marked with one presence sticker.
• It’s not necessarily directly controlled by your family, if it’s some minor family you have allegiance with, etc.
  • But I also do want players to often be relying on support from other houses that they can noticeably calculate the cost of losing. e.g. “I have a lot blue dots (me), but here there’s a lot more green dots (my friends), and alienating them is going to change the situation a lot” I want it to feel almost parliamentary, with confidence and supply agreements.
• My thought is to take an entire sheet of sticker paper and use a hole punch, allowing us to pick very specific sections (it’s hard to get a printer to be accurate enough for pre-punched sheets, and even the largest default size stickers are bigger than we need). Just print a bunch of tiny circles, and hole punch them partially to get individual colored markers.
• Presence might be a second type of roll (and one that Improvements also use), that’s more unbounded, allowing it to just be one huge dice pool vs. dice pool kind of roll.
  • Or it’s always “difference between two values” and there’s a limit.
    • This could be the Advantage limit of 2 dice (so Presence just replaces Advantage in rolls where it matters).
    • Or it could be the inverse. Presence swing can be all 4 dice, and Advantage then applies on top of it. So you can have presence and then can also argue that you have or don’t have an advantage.
    • I could also see it being Presence + Reputation + Advantage, or Presence + Reputation.
      • Maybe families then have their own type of Reputation? For an actual subsystem here.