7: Customized Tools

Stress

Stress boxes have a pretty specific purpose and use in Fate Core, but that’s hardly the only way to go. Here are some other options.

One-Shift Boxes: Every stress box absorbs only one shift of harm, but check as many as you want at a time. This option makes characters significantly more fragile.

Check Two: Check up to two boxes at once, add their values together, and reduce the hit by that many shifts. This option makes characters significantly tougher—a character with five stress boxes can take up to 9 shifts of harm in a scene without resorting to a consequence.

Step Down: Stress goes away gradually rather than all at once. Instead of clearing a stress box automatically at the end of a scene, erase it and check the box to its left (assuming there is one).

Bonus Only: Characters have zero stress boxes to start, but still get bonus boxes from skills like Physique and Will. This makes characters more fragile and emphasizes consequences.

Extra Effort: Voluntarily check a box anytime for a bonus on a roll. The bonus equals the value of the checked box. This can have unpredictable effects on your game. Not only can it result in some swingy rolls, it can also partially supplant the usual fate point economy. When combined with any of the above options, though, it becomes a little more viable.

Stress-Free: Characters have no stress boxes and don’t receive bonus boxes from skills. Instead, those skills grant one bonus mild consequence (physical or mental) at Good (+3) or two at Great (+4). This is the most dangerous and dynamic option—every hit results in a consequence and has narrative impact—but can potentially mean an unmanageable number of aspects in play.

Consequences

Just like stress, consequences can serve a variety of roles in your game, apart from the default presented in Fate Core.

Extreme Effort: Voluntarily take a consequence anytime for a bonus on a roll equal to the consequence’s value—mild grants +2, moderate +4, or severe +6. This can be dangerous, both to the PC and to the fate point economy, as with Extra Effort, above.

Group Consequences: Instead of tracking them individually, supporting and main NPCs share a pool of group consequences. This gives you the option to “sacrifice” a supporting NPC now to make a main NPC more challenging later. For every two supporting NPCs you expect to include in the scenario, add two mild and one moderate group consequences, to a maximum of three moderate group consequences. For each main NPC, add another mild, moderate, and severe group consequence. If a supporting or main NPC concedes, base the concession reward on the total number of consequences that NPC used during that scene.

The antagonists in Will’s superhero game all belong to a terrorist organization called CHIMERA. Minotaur and Scylla are the main NPCs, while Cerberus, Talos, and Cerastes are all supporting NPCs. That gives Will a pool of four mild, three moderate, and two severe group consequences for the lot of them.

In an early scene, the PCs face off against Cerberus, Talos, and Minotaur. During the course of the conflict, Cerberus and Minotaur each use a mild consequence—then Cerberus is taken out, Talos concedes, and Minotaur manages to escape. Will could have chosen to use some more consequences to keep Cerberus and Minotaur in the fight, but he chose to save those for a later scene. Plus, he gets a fate point for the concession—and only one, as Talos didn’t use a consequence.

By the time they hit the climactic battle, Will has one mild, one moderate, and two severe group consequences remaining to use for Scylla, Minotaur, and Cerastes, the three major NPCs in the scene, as they attempt to bring their nefarious machinations to fruition.

Collateral Consequences: In addition to their usual complement of consequences, the players can also make use of three communal consequences, one of each degree of severity. These represent damage to the environment or new complications in the story, such as Injured Bystanders or Anti-Mutant Hysteria. Players can effectively use them to offload harm from themselves onto the world around them. A collateral consequence can be cleared just like a regular one, using an overcome action with whatever skill seems most appropriate, with two exceptions. One, it must be done during the scene in which the consequence is incurred. Two, there’s no delay—with a good enough skill roll it clears immediately. This option is best suited for genres, such as supers, in which the PCs are likely to care a great deal about the world around them.

Zones

Using zone maps during conflicts breaks up the physical space of a fight, giving characters with high Athletics and Physique scores the opportunity to dominate the battlefield. Here are a few ideas to make zones an exciting part of your game:

Moving Through Zones

In games with quite a few zones, you may want to allow characters to sacrifice their turn in order to move a number of zones equal to their Athletics or to remove a number of physical obstacles equal to their Physique. Fast and strong characters want to be fast and strong, but rolling dice isn’t always the best way to represent that in Fate.

Tight Zones Can Create Drama

While zones divide up big areas like parking lots and stadiums—showing how difficult it is to run across a football field quickly—they can also be used to divide up small areas in interesting ways. For example, a fight on a ship might take place in tight quarters that require allies to cross several zones in order to offer support to a friend in trouble. By forcing players to choose between spending actions on moving or offering help from afar, zones can make ordinary conflicts dramatic.

Dangerous Zone Aspects

Zones can also create drama by restricting movement and providing threats the characters have to overcome. For example, a zone on a battlefield might have the aspect Taking Heavy Fire, requiring characters to make an Athletics roll to avoid taking damage as they run through the firefight. Some zones might also disappear after a specified number of turns. Collapsing bridges, sinking ships, and closing doors all push characters to move quickly as the battlefield shifts around them and give the players a chance to force NPCs into those zones to contend with the threats as well.

Mental or Social Zones

Not all conflicts happen in the physical world; Fate characters are often drawn into social or mental conflicts that can be mapped out in interesting ways. For example, a psychic surgeon may find her way through a patient’s dreamscape blocked by situation aspects that must be overcome though a series of Investigation and Empathy rolls. The zones could detail the obstacles that are keeping the patient from accessing old memories, traces of trauma and abuse that the PCs must punch through before they help the patient overcome his or her past. Similarly, a GM might detail several different social groups in a high school, indicating which groups the PCs have to impress before they can gain access to the more popular students. In essence, these mental and social zones serve to constrain the players, directing them toward conflicts by limiting their movement.

Refresh

If you want to build more character development into your game, you can let characters devote a scene to activating their refresh, adding some drama in between the scenes of exciting action. Refresh scenes might be:

Flashback scenes: Whenever appropriate, a player can declare that an event triggers a flashback scene. With help from the group, the player narrates a flashback to their character’s past, revealing a surprising or interesting detail that connects to the present, renewing the character’s focus or giving them the strength to keep going.

Recovery scenes: At the GM’s discretion, the group’s characters step out of their normal active lives to rest and recuperate, splitting up to pursue their own interests and refocus their energies. These are fantastic scenes for the GM to add new NPCs to the story.

Reflection scenes: One player declares a reflection scene and the other characters ask questions that reveal important and interesting information about the reflecting character’s backstory. These are perfect for action-filled stories where actual time away from the adventure is unrealistic.

These scenes can get PCs additional fate points in the middle of a session to keep things exciting or to replace the start-of-session refresh completely. Feel free to use one type exclusively, or open up all of them to your players to use.

Modifying the Setting: Making Big Changes

While Fate characters are always protagonists, sometimes the players decide they want to modify the setting itself, cleaning up the mean streets of a crime-ridden town or securing a military fortification against future attacks.

Discover the Problems Before You Solve Them

First, the players must gather the information they need to do the job. Perhaps the characters need to collect their existing experience—“Isn’t Bastion the main drug runner in town?”—or maybe they need to make new Contacts, Investigate, or Lore rolls to uncover old alliances and lost knowledge. Either way, the group should construct a series of setting aspects that represent the existing problem.

To clean up the streets, a group might list:

• Local Drug Pushers
• Midlevel Drug Mules
• Drug Financiers
• Corrupt Cops
• Crime Kingpin, Marty O’Banner

Episode by Episode

For each setting aspect the group wants to reform, the group must roll against an appropriate difficulty for resolving that problem. For example, arresting all the Local Drug Pushers might require the characters to make a Resources roll to mobilize the existing police officers, or a Physique roll to actually capture the bad guys themselves. While the characters can invoke their own aspects, the GM can pay fate points to invoke the existing setting aspects—such as Corrupt Cops—complicating the players’ progress.

For each roll, use the outcome to drop the characters into the middle of a situation—like a TV episode—that reflects the results of the roll. On a losing roll, the Local Drug Pushers have gone to ground, and it’s going to take some digging to get them out. On a successful roll, the group has rounded up the bad guys, but needs to get them to start talking. Either way, if the characters manage to resolve the situation, flip the setting aspect to a positive, turning Local Drug Pushers into A Few Clean Streets.

Once they start to make progress, let the group freely invoke previously resolved setting aspects that apply, as the job might get easier when they work their way up the chain.

We Need a Montage!

If you’re less interested in playing out the day-to-day changes needed to reform a criminal justice system or fortify a castle, you can instead construct montages for your characters’ progress. Set a time limit—including a limited number of actions—that represent that time and resources the characters have available to resolve the situation before the story picks up in full.

For each roll, the characters attempt to resolve one of the discovered aspects using appropriate skills. Characters can work together, or they can split up to try to solve multiple problems. In this style of making big changes, narrate the group’s success like a movie montage, pausing only long enough at each roll to see the group succeed or fail to improve the situation.

Other Dice

Don’t have your Fate dice or Deck of Fate handy? Here are some alternatives to get your game going.

D6-D6

Take two six-sided dice of different colors. Designate one as the positive die and the other as the negative, and roll. Subtract the negative from the positive to get a result of -5 to +5. Doubles are always a zero. It’s “swingier” than four Fate dice, and the range is broader, but it’s close enough for jazz.

Connect the Dots

This technique was first seen in “Baby’s First Fudge Dice” by Jonathan Walton. You can Google up a more extensive explanation of the idea—look for the link that leads to sinisterforces.com.

With a permanent marker and some pipped six-sided dice, you can make your own Fate dice by connecting the dots. The 2 and 3 sides become your [-] sides, the 4 and 6 sides become your [ ] sides, and the 5 and 1 sides become your [+] sides—you’ll have to freehand the 1. Ta-da—artisanal Fate dice!

3d6

If you go in for tables, or if you just have a good memory, you can roll three six-sided dice.

3	4	5-6	7-8	9-12	13-14	15-16	17	18
-4	-3	-2	-1	+0	+1	+2	+3	+4

4d6

This one’s the least work, but maybe not the most intuitive: roll four six-sided dice and treat 1s and 2s as [-], 3s and 4s as [ ], and 5s and 6s as [+].

Scale

If you expect your game’s themes and issues to give rise to conflicts between entities of different size or scale—dragon vs. knight, snub fighter vs. space station, or start-up vs. multinational corporation, for example—consider making use of these rules. If not, you’re probably better off giving this section a pass.

First, establish how many scale steps you’ll need. Three or four should do it. What those steps represent is going to depend on the nature of the setting and the stories you expect to tell, but they’ll always reflect incrementally larger or more potent things in the setting and will commonly be involved in conflicts.

Mike’s game about warring secret societies of varying size and influence has scale steps called Local (confined to a single city), Regional (multiple cities), and Widespread (all cities).

When two entities enter into a conflict with one another, the differences in their scale come into play. For every step that separates them, apply one or both of the following effects to the larger of the two:

• +1 to the attack roll or +1 to the defense roll
• Deal +2 shifts of harm on a successful attack or reduce incoming harm by 2

How to apply these effects depends on what makes sense in context.

If the Hatchet Gang (scale: Local) stages a daring raid against the Benevolent Association of Celestial Wanderers (scale: Regional), the Hatchet Gang will have a harder time of it, in terms of resources and personnel, against the better funded Association. It’s reasonable to give the Association a +1 bonus to its defensive Fighting roll.

Of course, if the conflict is between two entities of roughly equivalent size or scale, then none of these effects applies. They only come into play when the scale is unequal.

Scale as an Extra: Most things in your setting will have a scale rating just based on what they are as a matter of common sense—all small gangs are Local, for example—but you can give players the chance to alter the scale of their characters, possessions, or holdings as an extra they can take, if it fits with their high concept.

Sidekicks vs. Allies

Players can select both sidekicks and allies as extras, but differentiating a boy wonder from a squad of professional agents can be tough. Here are a few ways to distinguish sidekicks, who work closely with the PCs, from trained allies that they may call upon in specific situations.

Permissions and Costs

While both sidekicks and allies are extras (see Extras, page 269 in Fate Core), sidekicks tend to be unlocked through personal relationships and allies tend to arise from organizational or resource-driven permissions. For example, Sherlock Holmes might select the aspect Good Friend of Dr. Watson to add Watson to his sheet as a sidekick, while selecting the aspect Patron of the Baker Street Irregulars would add the mostly nameless children he uses as spies and couriers. As for costs, sidekicks tend to impose social and relational costs on the characters—asking them to contribute to important causes or aid them in times of need—while allies usually require more direct payment, favors, or other resources.

Stress Tracks and Consequences

One great place to differentiate sidekicks and allies is with stress tracks and consequences in conflicts. Sidekicks are like supporting characters—give them a limited stress track with one mild (or perhaps moderate) consequence slot and one extreme consequence that might change the character’s sheet in a dramatic moment.

Allies, on the other hand, are usually faceless mobs that have a stress box for each member of the gang. Stress inflicted on allies typically knocks them out of the fight completely instead of leaving them with consequences that carry from scene to scene. This distinction makes it harder to take out a gang of allies in a single attack, but makes sidekicks more flexible and resilient across a variety of social and physical situations in which they can utilize their consequence slots to protect or defend the PCs.

Permanent vs. Temporary Allies

Sidekicks are almost always permanent parts of a character’s sheet, but allies might be temporary, depending on the needs of the PC. For example, an intelligence officer might take the aspect Sent by the Feds to have a set of Federal Agents on call, at the cost of a point of refresh. It’s equally feasible that such a character could forgo such permanent allies in favor of creating an advantage for an upcoming scene, using Contacts or Resources. Of course, permanent allies should be much more powerful, with more stress boxes, additional aspects, and additional stunts, than temporary allies who are little better than a weak nameless mob.

Wealth

The importance of money in a game depends greatly on its genre. Fate Core suggests a Resources skill, but for genres in which the acquisition of wealth is often a prime motivator, such as cyberpunk or classic dungeon-crawling fantasy, you might want something a little more flexible.

Wealth Stress

One alternative is introducing a new stress track—Wealth. When you attempt something that would be made easier by the liberal application of cash, you can check a Wealth stress box for a bonus to your roll (see the ).

For example, if you’re haggling over the price of a hover-speeder using Rapport—or Provoke, if you’re being a real jerk about it—and you fail your roll, you could check a Wealth stress box to pay too much for it. Or perhaps you’re planning a heist and fail your Burglary roll? Check a Wealth stress box to get—or have gotten—the expensive gear you need to pull it off. Can’t find the assassin you’re looking for with Contacts? Maybe checking a Wealth stress box will improve your informants’ memories. And so on.

In other words, it’s succeeding at a serious cost, where that cost is literally a cost.

Starting Wealth

This will vary depending on your game—are the PCs professionals with steady work, or are they living sword-hand-to-mouth?—but starting off with a base of two Wealth stress boxes is a happy medium. PCs get +1 stress box for each aspect they have that relates to how well off they are, to a maximum of +3 stress boxes.

Gaining Wealth

Wealth stress doesn’t go away on its own. Instead, you can only clear a checked box when you gain more loot—gold, credits, barter, or whatever else works for your game. Acquiring a parcel of Wealth lets you clear any number of stress boxes whose total values don’t exceed the parcel’s value. If you have one or more checked boxes of a value greater than that of the Wealth parcel you’ve received, do nothing to the boxes that exceed the parcel’s value—it’s not enough Wealth to make a difference to you. For example, if you acquire 3 Wealth, you can clear your first, second, or third stress box, if any one of them is checked, or both your first and second stress boxes—but not your fourth, if you’re lucky enough to have one.

The only way to add stress boxes is at a milestone, by swapping out an existing aspect for a wealth-oriented one.

Weapons and Armor Alternatives

By default, Fate abstracts weapons and armor—along with all gear—into flavor. Having a gun allows you to attack someone with Shoot, but doesn’t do anything more. If you want weapons and armor to matter more, the Extras chapter in Fate Core (page 277) presents rules for Weapon and Armor ratings. If those aren’t to your liking either, here are a few more alternatives.

Damage Floors and Ceilings

In Fate Core, weapons are dangerous if you use the rules in the Extras chapter. A relatively unskilled swordswoman who gets a lucky hit with a two-hander can cleave a man in twain without trying too hard, and that can be scary. It lends itself to a gritty, lethal game, and if that’s not your cup of tea, you might want weapon and armor ratings that provide less lethality but still matter.

When you use these rules, Weapon ratings still start at 1 and go up, but they can go up a bit further (say to 5 or 6, for the most lethal of weapons). Instead of simply adding a weapon’s rating to the shifts you generate on a hit, though, a Weapon rating provides a minimum number of shifts of stress you can score with that weapon. For example, a longsword with Weapon: 3 does 3 shifts of stress if you tie, or if you roll 1, 2, or 3 shifts on your attack. Even for a grazing hit, you’ll still always deal at least 3 shifts of stress. If you roll shifts beyond that, you simply deal that much stress and ignore the Weapon rating.

Armor ratings do the opposite; they tell you what the maximum number of shifts of stress you’ll take from an attack is. Armor ratings start at 4 (for light armor) and go down to 1 (for the heaviest plate or most advanced powered tactical armor). The exception to this is when the attacker succeeds with style—if this happens, ignore the Armor rating. The attacker does full damage when she succeeds with style.

Armor ratings trump Weapon ratings. This means that someone with Weapon 5 attacking someone with Armor 3 will still only deal 3 stress at most, unless they succeed with style.

Armor and Weapon Aspects

Earlier in this book we told you that you could model important gear as aspects. This works for most gear, but some people may still want a little more when it comes to weapons and armor. This rules mod is meant to be layered on top of that system, though there’s no reason you couldn’t use it on its own—it would just mean that only weapons and armor are aspects, and other gear isn’t.

Weapons are divided into light, standard, and heavy. A light weapon could be a small knife or truncheon, a standard weapon is something like a sword or pistol, and a heavy weapon might be a shotgun, sniper rifle, or massive two-handed sword.

When you successfully attack with a weapon, you may make a special invocation with it. It costs a fate point as usual, but provides neither a +2 nor a reroll. Instead, you can force your opponent to take a consequence instead of stress. With a light weapon, you may force someone to take a mild consequence. A standard weapon forces a moderate consequence, and a heavy weapon forces a severe consequence. If you succeed with style, move the consequence up by one level of severity—minor to moderate, moderate to severe, severe to either taken out or an extreme consequence (victim’s defender’s choice). If the appropriate consequence slot is already in use, move the new consequence up by one level of severity.

This special invocation also acts a little bit like a compel. When you invoke a weapon aspect in this way, you offer the fate point to your target. If he takes the fate point, you deal the consequence. He can refuse the fate point and pay you one of his own to not take the consequence, but then he takes the stress he would have taken normally anyway.

Armor aspects are similarly divided into light, medium, and heavy, and also allow for special invocations. You can invoke light armor to absorb a single mild consequence; you don’t take the stress it would have absorbed, and you don’t fill the consequence slot. Medium armor can absorb a moderate consequence. Heavy armor can absorb a severe consequence, or two mild or moderate consequences in any combination. You can use your armor to absorb consequences beyond these limits, but if you do so, the armor aspect immediately changes to represent the fact that it’s broken and no longer able to absorb attacks. You’ll have to get it repaired, which might cost you and might take anywhere from a few hours to a few days depending on the armor and the place you take it.

Red and Blue Dice

If you have at least three colors of Fate dice and want something that isn’t quite so predictable for your weapons and armor, you can use Red and Blue dice in place of Weapon and Armor ratings. We’re using “Red” and “Blue” here for convenience—you can use any two colors of dice you want, as long as they don’t get used for anything else.

Red is for weapons: The more Red your weapon has, the bigger and/or deadlier it is. A Red:1 weapon could be a dagger, a goblin’s claws, or a very low-caliber pistol, while a Red:4 weapon could be a greatsword, a dragon’s bite, or a close-range blast from a combat shotgun.

When you attack, for every point of Red your weapon has, replace one of your usual Fate dice with a Red Fate die. If your attack outcome is a tie or better, each of your Red dice that comes up [+] increases the hit by +1 shift of harm.

Blue is for armor: The more Blue armor your armor has, the more protective it is. Light armor, like cured leather or tough hide, is Blue:1. Heavy armor, like a mail hauberk or plate armor, is Blue:2 or 3.

When you defend, for every point of Blue your armor has, replace one of your usual Fate dice with a Blue Fate die. If your defend outcome is a failure or a tie, each of your Blue dice that comes up a [+] absorbs 1 shift of harm.

Because you’re always rolling four Fate dice, the maximum number of Red or Blue dice you can have on a roll is four.

To mix things up even more, you can give defensive weapons Blue, like a quarterstaff or main gauche, and “offensive” armor Red, like plate armor with big nasty spikes or an electrostatic force field. You could also have stunts that let you swap Blue dice for Red when you defend—for example, a fencing master with a killer riposte, or a magical flaming shield.

Supplemental Actions

Supplemental actions don’t appear anywhere in Fate Core, despite having appeared in previous versions of Fate. We did this for two reasons. First, we feel it’s better to use bonuses than penalties, and supplemental actions imposed a penalty. Second, supplemental actions are there to make things more “realistic,” but they don’t necessarily make things more fun or more like an exciting story. They make it harder to do cool things, not easier.

That doesn’t mean that the concept doesn’t have value, though. If you want to use supplemental actions, you can simply use them as they appear in previous versions of Fate—performing an action that would distract from your primary action imposes a -1 penalty on your primary action. Most of these actions are free actions in Fate Core. We leave it to you to determine which free actions should be supplemental actions.

If you want something that’s a little more in keeping with the ethos of Fate Core, and that doesn’t impose a penalty, try this out.

SUPPLEMENTAL ACTION

When you perform some minor action in addition to your primary action—moving a zone, drawing a weapon, ducking behind cover, or anything else that the GM deems is a supplemental action—you create a boost such as Distracted, Obscured View, or Shaky Aim, which lasts until your next turn starts. You can perform only one such action, so you’ll create only one such boost. Anyone acting against you or defending against your action can use this boost—at which point it goes away, like a normal boost. Also, the GM may compel you with it once for free—meaning that she doesn’t have to offer you a fate point, but you may still pay one to resist the compel—at which point it disappears.