6: Special Circumstances

Chases

In any adventure story, you’re going to have a big chase scene eventually. This is an adventure trope and Fate Core is aimed at the adventure genre. What you want is to make a chase exciting. It’s no fun—and it drains out a lot of the drama—to have a single roll determine who escapes. There are a couple of different ways to approach this type of action.

Using just the standard rules, you can simulate a chase as a challenge (Fate Core, page 147). For a basic chase that you don’t want to spend a lot of time resolving, this is perfectly adequate. Set some obstacles for the rolls the players need to make and let them resolve those obstacles. If they succeed in enough rolls, they either escape or, if they are pursuing, catch their quarry. Simple, but not too interesting.

If there is more active opposition, the contest rules (Fate Core, page 150) are the next option and can work quite well. There is a bit of tension here, and the way to set this up so that every player character doesn’t need to make rolls individually is to frame the contest as occurring between two teams. The first team to achieve their three victories wins. If it’s the fleeing group, they get away, and if it’s the chasing group, they catch up, bringing whatever consequences that implies. Getting caught often triggers a conflict.

The contest rules work fine, but three victories is often pretty easy to achieve if you’ve got a reasonably sized group of characters, and sometimes you want some more drama in your chase scene. Here’s an alternative method, called the chase track. It’s a hybrid of the contest and conflict rules.

To start, set up a stress track for the chase. This is your timer for the scene. The fleeing party is trying to empty the stress track, while the pursuers are trying to fill it. The length of the stress track determines how long the scene lasts, and where you start on the track sets the difficulty of the escape.

You first need to decide how long you want your chase scene to go on. If you are looking for an average-length scene, a stress track of 10 should be the baseline. If you want to go less than 10, you should probably make the chase a regular contest. If you want the chase to be longer or more involved, add more stress. A 14-stress chase scene is a major event in the session, and an 18 or 20 stress scene could be the main focus of a whole session of play. You probably don’t want to go longer than that, or you risk your chase scene stretching out so far that your players get bored.

Setting how many stress boxes are already checked off determines how close the pursuers are to catching the fleeing group. Usually you are going to want the stress to start right in the middle (5 on a 10-stress track). You can make it harder for the fleeing party to escape by setting the stress closer to the top of the range, like 7 stress on a 10-stress track. By the same token, you can make the escape easier by setting the starting stress at a lower level. It’s probably best to avoid this, unless the player characters are the pursuing party. If the chase is less complicated, just use a challenge or contest instead of the chase stress track.

Once you’ve got your stress track set, determine who gets to go first. This can be a judgment call, or it can be based on which individual character on each side has the highest relevant skill. Each side will take turns, so who starts has a slight advantage, but that’s about it.

In turn, each side makes skill rolls to attempt to increase or diminish the stress track. This is an overcome action, and it can be opposed by either a passive defense or, more likely, by an active opposition from the other side in the chase. These actions can be all sorts of things, and it’s most exciting if they are varied and inventive. Drive rolls for vehicular chases should describe how the character is dodging through barriers or oncoming traffic, for example, and Athletics for foot chases would be about how the characters climb up on to the rooftops and parkour across dangerous hazards. A variety of other skills can come into play for different sorts of actions. You can use Deceive to fake out your opponent, Fight to knock someone down, Notice to spot hazards and avoid them while allowing your opponent to get entangled, Physique to knock obstacles into your opponent’s way. If a player comes up with a good action for just about any skill, you should allow it.

When making your roll, the outcome determines what happens to the chase stress track.

• If you fail, your opponent has the choice to either create a boost that works against you, or to move the stress track one check in their direction.
• If you tie, you may choose to move the stress track one check in your direction, but if you do so, your opponent gains a +1 on their next roll.
• If you succeed, you move the stress track one check in your direction.
• If you succeed with style, you get to move the stress track two checks in your direction, or one check and you gain a boost that you can use against your opponent on your next roll.

Each side takes turns making moves and rolling against their skills. Make sure each of the player characters gets a chance to contribute to the escape attempt. Sometimes the rolls will go really well or really poorly and you won’t get to everyone, but that’s okay. Keep the tension up with good descriptions, going into detail about each move and its results. When one side or the other has either eliminated or filled the stress track, the chase is over. Someone has either been caught or escaped.

Social Conflict

The social skills in Fate Core (Deceive, Empathy, Provoke, Rapport) already give groups a variety of ways to approach social conflicts, but your group can also implement a system of motivations and instincts to provide PCs more opportunities to engage NPCs in social interactions.

Motivations and Instincts

Any NPC—even a nameless guard—has two components to their social logic: a motivation and an instinct that follows from that motivation. For example, a teacher may want to safeguard his students (Motivation: Protect His Students from Harm) by keeping the players’ characters from interrogating a particular student (Instinct: Deny the PCs Access). Any attempts to produce a change will require the PCs to either alter the NPC’s motivation or convince them that a different instinct better serves the motivation itself.

You might notice that most motivations double as situation aspects that can be invoked and compelled using fate points.

Remember the Bronze Rule!

Discovering and Modifying Motivations

Of course, motivations are sometimes difficult to detect. While some NPCs will clearly announce why they are opposing the PCs—“I’ve come to avenge my father!”—most people don’t run around shouting out their internal monologues to the world. In order to discover an NPC’s motivations, the PCs need to create advantages using an appropriate social skill. Characters can pick up on small clues (Empathy), challenge the NPC through taunts or provocative statements (Provoke), or even pretend to be someone the NPC can trust (Deceive), in order to discover NPC motivations.

Once the PCs know an NPC’s motivation, they can try to alter that motivation using a variety of social skills, replacing the motivation with a urgent concern based on new information (Rapport) or attempting to falsely convince the target that their motivation is based on bad assumptions (Deceive). For example, a loyal guard (Motivation: Follow My Boss’ Orders, Instinct: Kill the PCs) might be scared off by a sufficiently impressive threat (Provoke) designed to change his motivation to Save My Own Skin.

Modifying Instincts

Rather than attempt to sway an NPC’s motivations, PCs may also create situations that demand more immediate attention or suggest that a different instinct would better serve the original motivation. For example, the PCs might start a fire (Provoke) in the lobby of the hotel to distract a hotel concierge (Motivation: Keep the Hotel Running Smoothly) or try to convince a drug lord to part with the drugs for less (Rapport) on the promise that future shipments will make up the loss on volume (Motivation: Make Lots of Money). These attempts to change the NPC’s instincts might move an NPC from Instinct: Keep the PCs Out to Instinct: Put Out the Fire! or from Instinct: Sell the Drugs at Market Prices to Instinct: Sell the Drugs Cheap. Ultimately these social interactions rely on the PCs’ ability to sell the new instinct as better serving the original motivation instead of changing the original motivation completely.

Challenges, Contests, and Conflicts

For most attempts to modify NPC motivations or instincts, the PCs will need to make overcome rolls against an active opposition; the NPC rolls an appropriate social skill to see through the deception or resist the fast talk. In some cases it may make sense to use the contest mechanics—trying to convince a judge to let someone out of jail before the judge moves on to the next case—or conflict mechanics—union and management representatives conducting a hard-nosed negotiation that leaves both sides exhausted. Players should also keep in mind that their opponents have social strengths and weaknesses: it’s easier to convince a dim-witted, loyal guard with Average (+1) Empathy and Great (+4) Will that his boss wants him to let you in to the secret meeting (Deceive to modify instinct) than it is to convince him that he should abandon his boss altogether (Rapport to modify motivation).

Michael Romero and Amarika Davis are Los Angeles homicide detectives investigating the murder of a wealthy socialite, Richard Bentley. After digging through the case, they discover that Bentley’s wife, Sandra Orastin, is the killer. Yet when they show up to arrest her, one of her security guards keeps them from getting close enough to close the case (Instinct: Stop the Cops from Arresting My Boss).

Knowing that a physical conflict would give Orastin a chance to escape, Amarika tries to talk her way past the guard, beginning with a Provoke roll to learn the guard’s motivation (create an advantage with Provoke). She has a Good (+3) Provoke and rolls well (+3), bringing her total up to Fantastic (+6). The guard, a nameless NPC with an Average (+1) Deceive, rolls decently (+2), but can’t help but reveal his motivation: he doesn’t want to get fired by letting his boss get arrested. The GM adds the aspect Motivation: Keep My Job with two free invocations, since Amarika succeeded with style. Amarika asks him why he wants to protect a killer and the guard sputters something about doing his job even though he doesn’t like it.

Michael, seizing on the aspect Amarika discovered, decides that he’s going to try to alter the guard’s instinct. He suggests that if the guard wants to keep his job, he should help the police arrest Orastin. After all, the guard will definitely lose his job if Michael and Amarika have to arrest him, too.

Michael has a stronger Rapport (+3) than Provoke (+1) skill, so he focuses on convincing the guard instead of scaring him (overcome with Rapport). Michael’s roll is average (+0), but he uses the free invocation on Motivation: Keep My Job to bring his roll up to a Superb (+5) result. The guard, with Fair (+2) Will rolls poorly (-2), and Michael convinces him that working with the police is the best way to fulfill his Motivation. Michael gains an additional boost Led by the Guards for succeeding with style.