Hi all,
I have a small question, so once I again I turn to planewalker.com.
I'm curious as to how brawls work in the Gehennian town Portent. It's described in the manual like this:
1)If a body can train himself to plan out an attack and assassinate another, then he's left unharmed
--- Only because this sort of violence occurs because of a specific reason (Example: stealing someone's trinkets).
2) A player has a round to cease his anger. At that point, he begins the attack as normal, rolling damage on his target. Any damage he does, though, he does to himself. Once he's gone through all his hit points he dies.
--- This happens because the reason isn't decent enough for one to resort to violence (Example: spilling your beer over someone's pants).
Now this is what I gathered from that; It means that any sort of violence (Without a valid reason) is out of the question in Portent. Seeing as the town interferes with your actions by stepping into your mind before you actually DO assault.
I can safely assume that my interpretation on the subject is correct, until here, yes?
Then for part two. Say you have a player that accidentally swings his blade around, just to show of. Now the said blade slips from her fingers and happens to hit someone in the back, thus killing the poor clueless cutter. How would this be handled?
And for part three. Your party travels with a very chaotic fiend (Powers know why) and he just decides to try and decapitate a clueless bugger, out of the blue.
Would the scene go like this?
- Chaotic fiend imagines that he swings his blade at the clueless cutter.
- In reality nothing happens.
- The fiend starts to hurt himself because of his mental images and before he actually swings the blade he falls dead to the ground.
The above would however indicate that the town is clairvoyant, in some way or the other.
And last, but not least. I can assume that the town's defensive nature surpasses any kind of mind protection spells/equipment?
Thanks in advance and Lady's Grace!
EDIT: I added something that slipped my mind .. ahem! But thanks for the early response, Clueless. 
Pretty close to it. I'd say it's less that the town forces you to never consider violence, so much as everyone there knows the *cost* of it and none want to risk it. When my DM ran us through Portent the reason he had assassins getting away with doing what they were doing was:
With the assassin's death strike attacks, the target was dead in under one round.
I can think of another one: Assassins aren't *angry* when they do what they do, so no emotions involved to trigger the effect.
I don't know which of the two reasons you prefer.
I just know that the robbers in Portent tried so hard to get away with our purse and make us attack ourselves, and I *still* almost killed one in one round... *still wish I rolled higher on that crit*