Competition

Competition

Crushing your Enemies

When you find that someone has stepped on your toes, or is simply taking up precious resources that you require, you may ask yourself; how do I destroy them? The answer is not always easy to find, and there is no set mechanic for stealing or crushing your rivals influence. This is where the RP of this system comes to a head.

There are many methods for taking on a rival in Jyhad, you could perform investigate actions in order to determine who a rivals contacts are within an influence and then bribe, blackmail, or otherwise coerce those contacts away from his service into your own. Thus decreasing there influence while raising your own. Alternatively, you could kill those contacts. However, keep in mind that influence is a finite commodity. If you go around killing the mortals that make up that finite commodity you could find that the Influence Pool begins to shrink even tighter around you forcing even more competition and earning you even more enemies as everyone vying for that influence has to fight over increasingly small resources.

You can also work with others to Grow influences, or attack the influences of others. To do this you simply name those you are working with in your action, and explain how you are all working together. Keep in mind, others could learn who your contacts are if they help you thus opening yourself up for an attack later.

Attacking someone’s influence is the one action in Jyhad 4 that always requires a description, because the ST needs to know how you are doing it in order to determine how successful it is, and he needs to know how you are defending your own influence in order to determine how successful that is.

Attack Examples:(kept simple and generic, in game there would likely be more detail and names)

• Investigate Action: I look to find out who Billy Brujah deals with in street.
  • Success: You find that Billy has level 3 Street.
  • Game night: I meet with Billy Brujah’s street influence contacts and convince them to work for me.
• Alternative: Misc Action: I have Resources 5, I believe this to be more than Billy Brujah, so I offer to pay his contacts more than he does and take them for my own.
  • Result: You get a few of his contacts but you find out that his primary contact at this level is being black mailed by Billy. Billy has video footage of this guy giving head to a rival gang member. You will need to steal all of his contacts at this level to gain a level yourself. If you let this guy be Billy will be reduced in influence but you will not go up.
• I set about stealing that footage from Billy, and destroying it severing Billy’s hold over this mortal.
  • Alternative: I accept the loss so long as Billy goes down in Influence.
  • Alternative: I kill the hold out, so that Billy goes down and doesn’t have that contact to help him regrow.

Safeguarding your Influences

Keeping your Influence safe from attack is simple, obscure your actions and don’t let others know who your contacts are. You can perform Investigate Actions into your own influences to determine if anyone is talking to a rival, or if anyone is suspected of being disloyal. The more influence you acquire the more restricted the resources. Just because someone works for you, does not mean they are not working for someone else.

If you come under attack, the ST will alert you to the details you would know and how you respond is up to you. You could keep it in the Jyhad and respond via your own investigations and RP with the mortals you are vying for power over or if you had the status and position to do so you could escalate it to Camarilla politics to try and force your rival to back down.