4: Stunts
New Stunt Rubrics
Stunts as presented in Fate Core provide numerous ways to customize your character, adding fun mechanical tweaks to the game. You get a little more out of each skill when you pick up stunts, and this can be a lot of fun. If you want to tweak your stunts even more, this section’s for you!
Flexible Stunts
This is the easiest option to implement, as it’s merely a shift in how you think about stunts. In Fate Core, stunts are tied explicitly to skills. What if you want your stunts to be skill-agnostic, or tied to multiple skills, or tied to something else entirely different, like an aspect or piece of gear or a stress track? Some examples:
Ally’s Shield: You can invoke Dwarven Shield-Maiden when a nearby ally suffers an attack. When you do, redirect that attack to yourself. Your defense is Average (+1) against that attack.
Berserk Rage: When you suffer a physical consequence, you can invoke that consequence for free on your next attack. If you suffer multiple physical consequences, you get a free invocation for each.
Useful Little Things: Your pockets are full of useful little things. Whenever you need something, you have it, provided it’s not something too unusual (like a map to Jimmy Hoffa’s body) or too large to fit in a pocket, belt pouch, or backpack. When you say you have something, the GM should be likely to agree.
This isn’t really a mechanical change, just a shift in how you approach stunt design. Any of the above three examples could be tied to a skill—Provoke, Fighting, or Resources, for instance—but not thinking about which skill to tie your stunt to frees you up to be a bit more creative with your design, moving beyond +2s and skill swaps.
Aspected Stunts
For stunts which are tied to aspects, you might view some of their effects as narrowly defined free invocations. Other aspected stunts might require an invocation, as Ally’s Shield (above) does, but give something extra or particularly unusual when the aspect is invoked. Such effects should be more potent than a “vanilla” invocation. You could even design a stunt that triggers under particular kinds of compels—just be careful you don’t end up neutering the downside with the resulting benefit.
Charge Like Ox: Because you are Strong Like Ox, once per scene, as a single action, you may move two zones in a straight line then make a physical attack.
Teflon Troublemaker: When your Can’t Keep His Big Mouth Shut aspect is compelled to make you the target of an attack, you may immediately clear any mild consequences you currently have, instead of taking a fate point.
Triggered Effects
When you use this stunt mechanic, you create stunts that trigger under a specific narrative condition, require a skill roll, and have a specific effect as a result. Stunts like this are a great way to encourage players to do the kinds of things you want to see them do in the game, as those stunts directly reward doing those things.
A Friend in Every Port: Whenever you enter a settlement, you may declare you’ve visited it before and roll Contacts against Fair (+2) opposition. If you succeed, you have a friend there who owes you one favor—nothing costly or life threatening. If you succeed with style, your friend will do any one thing for you that is within his power.
Not to Be Trifled With: When you make it clear how dangerous you are, roll Provoke against your target’s Will. If you succeed, that target will not attack you or willingly come near you unless you take action against him first. If you succeed with style, neither will anyone with a lower Will than your target.
Whirlwind Step: When you assume the stance of the whirlwind, roll Athletics against Fair (+2) opposition. If you succeed, you may run on vertical surfaces and leap unlikely distances without making rolls to do so, until your next turn ends. If you succeed with style, you may instead gain these benefits for the rest of the scene.
You probably noticed that none of these stunts say what happens when you tie or fail; this is deliberate. These triggered effects tend to be powerful, so their drawbacks should be equally so. A tie should be similar to a success, but at some sort of minor cost. On a failure, feel free to apply appropriate repercussions.
Broad Stunts
If you’re looking for more variety in your stunts than a +2 or its equivalent, consider the idea of a broad stunt that offers a +1 to two or three things. These could be three different actions within the same skill, or could branch across multiple related skills. If you’re going to allow broad stunts like this, watch out for the overlaps in stunt combinations: you don’t want two broad stunts giving the net effect of three +2s for the price of only two stunts.
Combined Stunts
If you want to offer particularly potent stunts, consider bundling the benefit of multiple stunts together to produce a single big effect. For example, you could create a stunt that provides a monstrous 4-shift effect—that’s a combination of two stunts, and as such would cost two refresh. (You may recognize this as the method used for constructing the supernatural powers in The Dresden Files RPG.) This kind of focused benefit can throw a game out of whack quickly, though. Consider limiting access to such “super-stunts,” either in quantity—e.g., “everyone only gets one double-stunt”—or in selection and permission—“only these stunts are available to werewolves.”
Stunt Costs
In Fate Core, you get three free stunts, three refresh, and you can buy up to two additional stunts at the cost of one refresh each. This is the default way to handle stunts, but it is by no means the only way. Each of these components—number of starting stunts, starting refresh, and cost of each stunt—is a dial you can turn in either direction, making stunts more or less common as you do. How you turn those dials will determine, in part, what kind of game you’re playing, as well as having an impact on Milestones.
More stunts means more powerful PCs. A PC with more stunts can bring to bear larger bonuses on rolls, use her peak skills more often, and break the rules more frequently. It leads to a more pulpy, larger-than-life, even fantastical feel. If that’s what you want, great! Consider, though, that giving PCs more stunts also gives them more conditional benefits and exceptions to the rules, which makes for more complex characters. If the players aren’t used to this complexity, this can slow down play at the table and make things less exciting rather than more.
On the flip side of things, giving the PCs fewer stunts makes their characters simpler and easier to run at the table, but also makes them a little less competent. A PC with only one stunt, for example, has one “schtick” that he can call upon, one signature move. That can mean a grittier game or a game where the PCs have clearly defined roles and a lot of niche protection, but it can also bore players that like a lot of rules or disappoint players that want to be good at a lot of stuff. PCs will still be competent, but not as competent.
Adjusting Starting Stunts
This is the easiest way to give PCs more or fewer stunts. Reducing it to zero means that a PC starts with no stunts, and will have to pay a dear price for each stunt she wants to pick up. This can make stunts feel more expensive, but it can also make individual stunts more important to PCs. Adjusting it in the other direction—giving PCs more starting stunts—gives players a lot of fun choices to make about their characters right out of the gate at no cost. It also brings up the baseline power level for each PC, making it more likely that your PCs will be highly competent at a wider variety of tasks, or seriously good at one or two. In addition, it has the effect of making stunts seem less expensive, which can encourage players to take even more.
One thing to keep an eye on when you’re adjusting starting stunts is what your players want. Are all of your players okay with a less powerful baseline character, or a more complex one? Not everyone wants to struggle for every victory or make a dozen choices before play begins.
Adjusting Starting Refresh
Of these three options, adjusting refresh has probably the most profound impact on gameplay, because it directly affects the fate point economy that powers the game. Giving players more fate points each session means they’re likely to resist compels more often and invoke aspects more often. It gives players more control over the story, which can be a good thing, but also makes it a little harder to challenge them.
Reducing refresh has the opposite effect—players have less control over the story, because they have fewer fate points on hand. They have to accept more compels and they don’t get to invoke their aspects as often. It also means they’ll rely more on free invocations from creating advantages, which might lengthen big fight scenes.
Adjusting Stunt Cost
Making stunts cost one refresh is one way to do things, but not the only way. You can adjust this dial slightly by increasing or decreasing the amount of refresh a player must pay for a stunt. Maybe stunts cost two refresh, or maybe a single refresh buys the player two stunts.
There are other ways to fiddle with stunt costs, though. Maybe a player has to give up a skill point in order to buy a stunt, lowering a Good (+3) skill to Fair (+2) in order to pick up that stunt he wants. Maybe he has to give up an aspect or devote an aspect to that stunt in order to get it. Having to tie an aspect to a new stunt can make for stunts players are more attached to, and sets a nice upper limit on the number of stunts they can have.
Another way to do it is to make stunts free or very low-cost, but build the cost into each stunt. Maybe each stunt costs a fate point to activate, or requires you to take stress, or costs an action to activate, or gives an enemy a boost. You can build any number of costs into the use of a stunt.
Keep in mind, stunts are priced the way they are, giving the benefits they do, because they permanently cost the character a fate point by reducing refresh. That’s a fate point that can’t be spent flexibly to get a +2 or similar benefit during play. So if you’re planning to change what stunts cost, you should also think about tweaking the benefits gained to match what’s been “lost” to the cost.
Somewhere In Between
Most solutions will require adjusting multiple dials to find the sweet spot for a particular group. That’s totally fine. This is your game, and it’s up to you and your group to determine what works for you.