Designing Dresden 5 – Stressing Out
Hi there. I’m Fred Hicks, one of the designers on the Dresden Files RPG, co-author of Spirit of the Century, and author of Don’t Rest Your Head. Rob’s been writing these Designing Dresden columns so far, but I thought it might be time to get involved myself and talk about some of the fiddly game system decisions we’ve been working through.
As you may know by now, the Dresden Files RPG will be using a system based on the core engine used in Evil Hat Productions’ other Fate project, Spirit of the Century — which is not to say it will be the same game as that.
Spirit of the Century was written with the goal of supporting cinematic, pulp-style action, where heroes can face down against a mob of ninjas without mussing their dinner jackets. Characters in Spirit can take a lot of punishment without injury — and that’s intentional. And weapons and armor are mere “color” trappings in Spirit. A gunshot poses no more risk than a fist; what matters more is who’s behind the attack.
But the Dresden Files operates on a different footing. Getting outnumbered in the Dresden-verse sucks (if you aren’t prepared for it). A gun is still something to be feared — Harry’s able to hold off an entire pack of Lycanthropes, at least for a time, with the threat of a single pistol. And there are plenty of things out there that, if they can lay their hands on you, can rip your face off in a hot second.
Given all this, it’s clear to us that we need to revisit our core ideas for how damage (called “stress” in Spirit of the Century) is handled in the Dresden Files RPG. In this article, I’ll talk about where we’re at with that, right now, and why we arrived there.
But is this the final form of it, that will see light in the published game? Possibly not — and you can be a part of that. Consider this an open “concept playtest” if you’re already familiar with Spirit of the Century, you’re on a good footing for giving the ideas we outline here a test in the laboratory of your own play (and in fact, owning a copy of Spirit will put you on a solid footing for any future ideas we decide to air on this blog, and playtesting in general).
So, enough for the setup. Let’s get on to the particulars!
The Basic Needs
Let’s look at the basics of what we need a damage system to support in order to give us the world of the Dresden Files as written by Jim:
- Fights, when they happen, hurt. It’s not that we want to avoid combat, but anyone who gets into a fight — whether it involves fists, knives, guns, or supernatural abilities — should expect to come out the other side bruised and bloody at minimum — and maybe even with a burned, crippled hand, psychological trauma, or something else equally nasty.
- It needs to allow for “amped up” lethality — if the Nasty Thing can get its hands on you. Harry would have been dead several times over if it wasn’t for some quick reflexes and an ensorcereled leather duster.
- Getting outnumbered stinks. A three on one fight sucks for the “one” in that equation. There’s no cinematic sensibility saying that you can fight off a dozen creatures all at once (unless you’re Michael Carpenter fighting a pack of Red Court vampires — but he’s an exception that we’ll back up with the supernatural powers stuff).
- Preparation can mitigate some of the nastiness here. If you have time to get up a shield, or come into a fight armored to the gills, you’ve got a better chance. Maybe not a greatly improved chance — but a better one all the same.
There’s more to it than that, sure, but that’s a pretty workable list at the outset. I’m not going to get into drawing the connecting lines between each of those bullet points and the implementation we currently have on deck, below — I leave that as an exercise for the reader — but I want you to look at this list and keep it in mind as you read about (and possibly use) the system I talk about below. In practice, it should hit all of those points, and more — but we’re going to keep kicking it around our lab (and maybe you will too, in yours) until we’re dead certain of it.
Back to the Challenge Track
In Spirit of the Century‘s free predecessor, Fate 2.0, we had something called the Challenge Track. But as we put together the pulp version of Fate 3.0 found in Spirit of the Century, we realized that it wasn’t a good fit for what we wanted to do. So the challenge track got set aside and, to some extent, forgotten.
Fast forward to today. While the effects of the Fate 2.0 challenge track don’t quite track as cleanly in the current implementation of Fate, the concepts (and physical layout) of the track definitely have some value for us. We can take the idea of the “stress track” (to use Spirit’s term) and divide it up into “tiers”, like the challenge track did in Fate 2.0. Then, we can combine all of that with the modern Fate 3.0 idea of consequences to produce something pretty exciting. Here’s what a standard stress track might look like smashed together with the Fate 2.0 concept of the challenge track:
Let’s break down the basics of how this would work in play:
- The numbers on the left hand side represent the range of shifts (stress) on an attack that should cause one (or more — see below) boxes to be checked off at that level (or “tier”).
- Each tier has a consequence level associated with it. When all the boxes on that tier fill upthe character takes a consequence of that level of severity.
- Later on, if stress hits a tier that is already full and has a consequence, then a single box on the next tier gets checked off instead, as “roll-over”.
At it’s core, that’s it. But the nice thing about this set-up is that there are a lot of ways to play around with its functions, to get a richly textured (but still pretty straightforward) system of toughness and lethality. So let’s get into that.
Getting Tough
Toughness in the Dresden Files really breaks down into three categories: mortal resilience, armor and basic protection, and supernatural invulnerability (or particularly impenetrable armor). Let’s briefly dig into each one of those.
Particularly tough mortals can take a lot of minor punishment — bruising, but if you shoot or stab them, they’ll still bleed pretty badly. Looking at the challenge track, this sounds like someone who gets several extra boxes at the “Mild” level — they can take a lot of minor punishment before it adds up to a setback (a consequence) — but leaves them just as vulnerable as the next guy when it comes to the nastier stuff in the Moderate and Severe tiers. Pretty simple. At supernatural extremes, this might even extend to the idea of the “Mild” level having unlimited boxes — never producing a Mild consequence, or at the least, never “rolling up” to something worse.
For basic protection — extra-thick hide, kevlar, and so on — there are two ways of looking at it. One is simple damage avoidance — invulnerability, in other words, so we’ll push the discussion of that off to the third category, below. The other form is damage mitigation. So let’s look at that: first off we have the basic idea of toughness as presented above — extra boxes. Certain types of protection might add boxes, then — though they might pad out things at a higher level, like Moderate and Severe, depending on their nature.
But let’s dig at this a bit, and look at, say, a kevlar vest. Conventional wisdom suggests that if you get shot in the chest while wearing kevlar, you’ll still feel it — and the next day, you’ll probably have some nasty bruises on your chest and an ache that won’t go away for a while. So we can conclude this: kevlar certainly doesn’t keep you from getting hurt — it just makes the hurt less nasty. So how would we produce that effect with our challenge track? Easy: change the range. Maybe a Kevlar vest changes the tiers from 1-2, 3-4, 5-6 to 1-3, 4-6, 7-8. While a 5-point hit might put a normal person into Severe consequence territory (“Bleeding From a Gunshot”), a kevlar-adjusted hit would take that down to Moderate (“Deep Bruises”). There we go.
We can combine the effects of these first two approaches to toughness and create, say, an Ogre-blooded changeling who can take a load of punishment that would drop a mortal in short order:
Finally, invulnerability. With invulnerability, we have the idea that the damage that lands could simply have no effect — not even progress towards a consequence. This sort of thing should be used pretty sparingly, but it definitely has its place in the world of the Dresden Files, so we need to support it.
Invulnerability would work pretty simply: after the “stress” value of a successful hit is determined, it would be reduced by a certain number (usually small). If this reduced the stress to zero or below, the hit would slide off of the target with no effect. Certain types of faerie folk, Denarians, Loup Garou and more have all shown signs of some extent of this over the course of the Dresden Files. (Nicodemus in particular has a crazy amount of invulnerability … unless you hit him in a specific weakness. Don’t know what I’m talking about? Read Death Masks — one of my absolute favorites!)
Taken together, these provide us a nice amount of texture for “toughening up” the opposition (and the player characters, to at least some extent). We have several ways to make low and middle tier bad-guys tough, but not unbeatable, while allowing for top-class opponents like Cowl and Nicodemus to get cars and masonry dropped on them with only mild inconvenience.
Getting Deadly
The flipside of toughness, lethality, can be just as much fun — though from a design perspective, it can be pretty tricky. In general, I have a strong preference to use a fairly light touch with lethality in my Fate implementations, in part because I don’t want to throw effects into the game that are ruinous to fun. While a very tough opponent can certainly be a challenge to keep interesting and non-frustrating, few things can be less fun to a player than having his character dropped in a single blow.
But with the Dresden Files RPG, we’re also looking for some verisimilitude with the novels and real risk to life and limb. We’ve got to find a good middle-ground, where the fear of getting your arm torn off by a super-strong werewolf is enough to make you run, and the risk of a gunshot wound is bad enough to make a gang of lycanthropes think twice about jumping on you.
Looking at the stress track examples above, we have two clear paths to making something nastier: increasing stress on a successful hit, and increasing the number of boxes marked off when you hit. Both options are pretty nice on their own, but in combination, you can get some real depth (without a lot of complexity). Let’s look at what each technique offers us.
Increasing stress on a successful hit will “pump up” the potential nastiness of any consequences that result. Something that offers a +2 to damage on a hit will jump to the next nastier tier; using the default mortal stress track, a +2 pretty much means you’ll be skipping right past mild consequences and go straight into moderate or worse — feels like a good fit for a knife fight or gun-play. We could call this kind of boost potency or force, if we were coining terminology (this one’s hardly set in stone).
But using the default stress track, this method also doesn’t guarantee a consequence on a “fresh” target. With two boxes per tier, and consequences only happening if all the boxes on a tier fill up, you can hit someone for 5 and not produce a consequence.
Which brings us to our second technique — increasing the number of boxes that get checked off on a hit. Without “potency” involved, this simply accelerates the rate at which a hit will produce a consequence at the level at which it lands. So this technique seems to indicate the amount of trauma or wounding the attack represents: automatic gunfire (and gunfire in general), baseball bats, and so forth may be good candidates for this.
In combination the ideas of potency and trauma (curses! I cannot escape terminology!) work pretty well. And the fact that we can increase one, the other, or both gives us the ability to create some entertaining configurations for deadly things in the Dresden Files, whether they’re mundane weapons (Knife: +1 stress; Crowbar: 2 boxes; Pistol: +2 stress, 2 boxes) or supernatural abilities (Hands of Flame: 2 boxes; Ogre-Blooded Strength: +1 stress).
By the Numbers
So, at the beginning, we said that getting outnumbered stinks. Do we have that already, or do we need to do something about it? At present, I think the answer is that we have it already. Using a standard combat setup from Spirit of the Century — though probably without the minion rules in effect — the simple fact that each opponent in a three-on-one fight is going to get a whack at you, and possibly land a hit, eating up a box, is bad enough (much like the “trauma” concept from above, it’s a fast-track to Consequenceville). So, while we may feel the need to put in some additional rules to address the effects of numbers, for the moment I’m going to table this portion of the discussion and see how it shakes out in the lab.
Conclusion
So there you have it — the “State of the Hat” on the subject of toughness and lethality in the Dresden Files RPG. Combine it with your copy of Spirit of the Century and you’ll have a fairly robust (if occasionally brutal) damage system to spice up your fights. If you do decide to do just that and give these techniques a whirl, drop us a line — either by using the feedback widget or by leaving a comment on this blog post.
Stay tuned in later months as we dig into other sides of “Designing Dresden!” — and possibly revisit this very topic!
From the Getting Tough Section:
“At supernatural extremes, this might even extend to the idea of the “Mild” level having unlimited boxes — never producing a Mild consequence, or at the least, never “rolling up” to something worse.”
I would be careful with taking this too far. I have only read up trough Summer Knights in the Dresden Files but already there are several examples where this wouldn’t hold true in Harry’s world.
Many times the novels describe Harry having received numerous “mild levels”. By the end of the day or chapter Harry is starting to “crash”.
I love what I have read of this Designing articles but wanted to give some feedback because you guys are great.
‘I would be careful with taking this too far. I have only read up trough Summer Knights in the Dresden Files but already there are several examples where this wouldn’t hold true in Harry’s world.
Many times the novels describe Harry having received numerous “mild levels”. By the end of the day or chapter Harry is starting to “crash”.’
I think the unlimited Mild boxes would not apply to any humans, but maybe to an ogre or a vampire.
Mike’s right. The unlimited Mild boxes thing would apply to egregiously tough opponents, like Nicodemus, dragons, Cowl, and maybe Mavra. It’ll be an “expensive” ability to take.
Having armor change the challenge track ranges could cause a lot of confusion. It would be easier to simply have it shift consequences down; The severe consequence of getting shot in the chest becomes a more moderate cracked ribs. The moderate consequence of getting shot in the shoulder becomes minor bruising.
Couple this with the potency and trauma effects of a gun, and you’ll end up with something simple and easy to use. Plus, this lets you easily say things like “that bulletproof vest is effective against bullets, but not knives or crowbars” by only shifting consequences from the appropriate attacks.
You’re absolutely right about that, Bill, and it’s something I’m wrestling with a bit. What I want with the “range shift” idea is the *effect* of something “subtractive” like invulnerability, but without the option to reduce things to zero. But we may be able to solve that notationally, and stick to simple ideas of subtraction. In other words, it’d be the difference between “Invulnerable: 2″ and “Mitigate: 2″. If it’s “Mitigate” (or whatever), you’d know the lowest you could ever reduce a hit was 1, whereas “Invulnerable” would mean it could be reduced to zero. Maybe we’d even compress this, by noting those as “Armor: -2 (0)” and “Armor: -2 (1)”.
Something to chew on. Thanks for the comment!
Sounds interesting. Sort of a hodge-podge of 2 combat systems I am familiar with: the damage monitors of Shadowrun, and the charts of World of Darkness. I have to say that I’m a little confused about some of it, though. In one example you said that the default stress track (2 pts per tier) would not show a consequence with a knife hit of 5. Huh? Sounds like that would fill up 2 full tiers, and go into Severe level. Am I not reading this right?
Jasen, you’re assuming that every box prior to the one that gets marked off is getting marked off as well, “hit point style”.
In the Fate/Spirit of the Century materials, that’s not so. Only one of the boxes on the 5-6 tier would get checked off in the knife example:
1-2 [ ] [ ] Mild
3-4 [ ] [ ] Moderate
5-6 [x] [ ] Severe
Since not all of the boxes on the Severe tier are checked off, no consequence. Similarly, none of the boxes below are checked off.
I dig the idea of increased lethality in Dresden, and combining the Damage tracks with the consequence aspects will work out most excellently. This should be a spectacular game
I do have a comment though.
“So we can conclude this: kevlar certainly doesn’t keep you from getting hurt — it just makes the hurt less nasty.”
While I agree that makes getting hurt less nasty, but I
Thanks for the comments, John. And you’re right; we may end up doing something with kevlar and its ilk where it actually eliminates some kinds of damage entirely. That’s not ruled out; it’s just the convenient example that we had at hand.
When trying to differentiate Between Mitigation & Invulnerability, couldn’t you simpliify it further by saying Armor won’t let you reduce damage less than 1 & Invulnerability wil let you reduce damage to 0 in the rules?
So:
Armor 2
vs
Invulnerabilty 2
And no parenthesis.
Just a thought.
Yep, we could do exactly that, Doc. And we may!
I see, so unless a tier was completely filled, the consequence is, well, inconsequencial.
As for the kevlar comment above, how about borrowing a term from WoD: damage soaking. Let’s say, a punch does 2 dmaage (nonlethal, or stress) and kevlar has an armor rating of 3. the punch is absorbed by the kevlar and does no damage to the wearer, since it did not exceed the armor rating. (Actually, armor works this way in Shadowrun as well, reducing the damage power of the attack or wiping it out altogether.)
Or, since I recall you saying you weren’t certain you wanted the damage to be completely removed (invulnerable vs. mitigation), you can rule it doesn’t get lowered below 1. and since the punch was not lethal to begin with, the stress damage gets translated to “knocking the wind out of someone, who recovers after a couple of seconds.”
I think you have the right of it with that second paragraph, Jasen. We may be arriving at a consensus here…
Something I haven’t seen mentioned: when you design the character sheet, having boxes to check or uncheck results in a lot of erasing and paper damage (or if everyone has a pen, stuff gets written on a different sheet and lost track of). Deadlands had a great solution: run the numbers down the side of the character sheet and have people move paperclips along them to track damage/shots used/whatever.
I think Buffy has good rules for ganging up on people, with an attacker getting a +1 bonus for every being who has attacked the target before he goes, and the target having a limited number of defense actions. Not sure how lethal this would be in Fate.
Right on. I’ve seen the paperclip solution in other systems as well, such as Ron Edwards’ Sorcerer. In our local play, we tend to use plastic sleeves that let us use vis-a-vis transparency dry-erase markers over the top of our character sheets, but we’ll definitely keep an eye towards “sheet fatigue”.
The “Buffy rules” you’re talking about would definitely get pretty lethal unless I miss my guess, but it’s something for us to put on the table when we go into the laboratory next week to examine the many-on-one fight scenario.
Thanks!
A couple thoughts:
I like some of the Armor ideas that have been tossed around in the comments. Something involving a shift down the stress track seems rather grand — maybe more fitting for something supernatural rather than simple kevlar.
Minimum stress ranks: Some weapons could be so damaging that as long as you success, you’ll have a minimum stress rank. Coming to mind are things like cold iron & the Faerie. Of course, that adds some more complexity to the rules, having to manage what minimums & maximums trump what effects — but I thought I’d mention the idea anyway.
Catching your breath: When I’m reading it, Dresden is a about chivilric self-sacrafice. One common way Butcher portrays that, if i’m recalling right, is where he’ll stand up and keep fighting when he should stay down and catch his breath. I’m not sure exactly how “mild” you want mild to be, but perhaps one combat option would be “pause, losing a turn but unchecking your lowest mild box.”
Good for those “do you keep chasing the Thing even though all your mild boxes are filled and you can’t afford another consequence, or do you take a moment to catch your breath and hope someone else will be able to stop it from taking the girl away?” moments.
Apologies if I’m covering stuff already said. I’m still really tired, but wanted to get you my thoughts before I lost them.
Do you really need a mechanic for invulnerability?
I can’t remember my Dresden examples well enough, but it seems like the loup garou was completely immune to ordinary bullets. I take that to mean that even if I had Guns as my Apex skill, and I rolled ++++, and I found a way to invoke each and every one of my Aspects (and had the Fate Points to back that up), the bullet still wouldn’t hurt it.
So why roll at all? Why not just say “Loup garou are immune to ordinary bullets, try something else”?
A game where those rare and (seemingly) invulnerable enemies have to be beaten by exploiting a specific weakness is different in feel from one where the seemingly invulnerable enemy can be beaten by exploiting a specific weakness OR a lucky shot.
Other than that, the general outline looks really good. I’m looking forward to seeing how it turns out.
If you are going to go with notatations like
Armor 2 and Invulnerabilty 2, you can avoind creating new terms like ‘trauma’ by using the same notation on stress.
Ogre (+2 Stress 2) or (+2 Stress/2)
I guess you could relate the armor and invulnerablilty modifier with the same slash.
Armor/2
Invulnerability/2
Stress/2
Mitch
I am not familiar with the Spirit system, so this all sounds very complicated to me. But some things remain the same in an rpg no matter the combat system – combat needs to be lethal or why bother with dice, just narrate through it. Even a simple knife fight or bare knuckle brawl behind a bar can turn deadly in the right situation. The only rpg I know of where there is no death at all (and this will date me) is Teenages From Outter Space, a comedy rpg. I know you’re explaination keeps PC kills to a minimum, but without risk and danger, there can be no true heroes.
In every book, in every fight Harry is involved in, he knows it could potentially be his last, even when he is well prepard for it. He is always concerned for his friends who fight the good fight with him him, even though he knows that they are warriors and each capiable of taking care of themselves.
Authors do not kill off characters often in a long running series because that would be widdling away the franchise. But in an RPG game characters die, and how much better they are remembered when it is doing a heroic thing, against the odds, knowing that death was a real possibility. Without leathality, the character is played wildly until it is retired, the game table can become quite disruptive when everyone is playing a virtual immortal, and the game itself as a whole is not a long lived enterprise.
qtr – Terry Bane
A couple of thoughts about the stress tracks: right now anything that doesn’t fill up a stress track and cause a consequence disappears after the fight, right? If you want people to not get into too many fights, you could have the stress track empty at the same rate that the consequence would take. The mild (1-2) track would clear out at the end of the scene, the moderate (3-4) after a night of rest, and so on. This way you can get battered enough in a fight that it doesn’t actively hamper you (i.e. doesn’t cause a consequence) but still be leery of getting into another fight, because you’re still going into it hurt.
Also, I would either change the difference needed to hit a particular stress track (the 1-2,3-4, etc) or add more stress boxes, but probably not both. If you’ve got a different set of numbers, stress boxes, armour (potentially of different types) and so on you’re getting away from Fate’s simplicity and it starts to look like early Vampire, with different number of successes needed and target numbers and so on: confusing to work out and likely to give you really strange results.
a)I’m somewhat worried that Taken Out! means something entirely different in Dresden. I’m not sure, but a 7+ hit seems quite manageable, Aspect invoking considered, with completely different consequences that one can expect from a Taken Out! result in SotC.
b) In the knife example some comments above, if you consider a knife would add +1 stress, it does create an instant consequence (which, by the way, I like.)
c) Also, I agree that changing tiers is not the best of solutions, mainly because of the granularity issue.
and last but not least d) This kind of stress track would make Endurance or its equivalent fairly important in a game, does it not?
So, are you guys going to be at Dreamation?
Yep. Dreamation’s going to be my birthday convention, though, so I’m not planning on *running* much. I come to play!
In SOTC (pg 213), artifact Armor prevents damage from rolling up. A variant that might match general use of armor is to have roll-up stop at some point for armor. Thus, armor 3 would stop damage below 3 from rolling up beyond it. This is similar in the near term to subtracting 3, but if the charater took the armor off (it was destroyed, etc.), then they would already have the stress below 3 that they had taken through the armor. Similarly for example, it would reflect that a precise shot to the head (e.g, a “6″) would be unaffected bu the armor on the body (e.g., the armor 3). I don’t think this is a sufficient mechanic, but it was an interesting enough idea to remind you of
I’ve played a lot of “crunchy wargames” – indeed, they’re what I make my living off of.
So, I’m gonna go all retro on you, Fred, and break it down into wargame mechanics.
You have hit points, arranged in a matrix. Depending on how nasty the hit was, you may start marking boxes off on a lower row of the matrix.
Some critters have more hit points on a given row of the matrix than others.
Some weapons may start you on a lower row of the matrix (nastier damage), while others do more hit points on a given whack.
Armor may give you temporary hit points, or may make certain effects shift up one row on the matrix.
Stripped of the Terms of Art, what you’ve got isn’t that different from how damage states are tracked in squad level tank combat or vehicle combat games.
And, to me, it’s too wargamey for what I’d want in a Dresden Files RPG. Heck, it’s almost as wargamy as GURPS, though it’s a bit more coherent in its effects.
Think about what play modes and styles you’re rewarding with this.
1) You’re rewarding accumulation of Cool Armor or Getting More Hit Points (or better yet, both), since the consequences of not having them means that life sucks.
2) You’re rewarding accumulation of Bigger Frickin’ Guns(tm), because the foes are going to be getting tougher.
What you aren’t rewarding is the play style in the books, where Harry will take that extra round in a combat that’s kicking his kidneys into his tonsils so that someone else can (hopefully) get far enough away to be safe.
RPGs are reward mechanisms, not sims.
Coming late after the battle, I would like to comment on Jasen’s and Fred’s points from December the 6th.
I’m somewhat bothered that the 5-stress hit from Jasen’s example would let a previously unharmed character go completely scot-free.
It would also mean that the only way one blow could get a consequence would be the 7-stress “Taken out”.
What about giving the victim a consequence of the next lowest level, if it has not yet been used?
That way, getting hit by a 3-stress would mean suffering a mild consequence.
The 5-stress hit from Jasen’s example would mean an immediate moderate consequence, nothing to shrug at.
***
Another thing related to Ken Burnside’s point this time, I’m quite fond of the idea that the character should be more important than the equipment (I really, really hate D&D-style games).
To go seasonal, James Bond uses a small caliber pistol (a Walther PPK, unless something changed in the past few years). Realistically speaking, it’s far less efficient than inspector Harry’s .44 for pure damage, but the idea is that when you shoot really well, dead is dead.
The PPK is better for stealth and the .44 for intimidation, but true lethality is in the character.
All that to say, I’d rather have the equipment’s benefits and associated number-crunching kept quite low, thank you.
Unless they come back as part of the character, of course. But that’s different, that’s Aspects (something like Harry Neither-Dresden-Nor-Potter’s “This is the most powerful handgun in the world…” speech and probable Aspect).
***
Whatever your choices, I’m waiting for the next iteration of FATE with barely controlled impatience (I can keep the shakes down, though with some concentration).
Cheers.
Yep. This idea’s gotten kicked around enough that I think it’s bound to see some amount of change on my next pass. The holidays have been unkind to my efforts to get things moving forward, but come January, expect some more thinkery on stress and magic to emerge.
I have the same problem with this that I have with stress in SotC: no flavor. In the example above when someone scores 5 shifts and doesn’t achieve any consequences, WHAT DOES THIS MEAN? What is this attack doing in the game-world? How is “stress” represented in the fiction? To me, it just seems like a bunch of attacks that kind of disappear into thin air. I seem to remember description in SotC of what stress represents being about as vague and unhelpful as the description of HP in D&D. And believe me, it pains me to compare any of your games to D&D.
I’d be happy having every hit produce a consequence. That may mean creating an even milder form of consequence. In any case, I offer this critique because I love Spirit’s system and would love to see my few personal beefs with it eliminated from Dresden Files.
Fred, I think you’re literally doing this backwards. But then, I think most RPGs have been doing this backwards for a while.
Ultimately, it comes back to what you and I were doing aeons ago on AmberMUSH:
The color comes from the person accepting the consequences.
I’m also doing licensed RPG adaptations of literary properties.
What we did for most kinds of conflict resolution is this:
1) GM describes the setting and circumstances.
2) Players are encouraged to ask clarifying questions (basically, every player gets to define one thing about the setting or circumstances, without some fiddly token transfer mechanic, subject to GM saying “yes” or “no”)
3) GM describes opponent’s objectives
4) Players describe their intentions
Now, all that’s scene framing, and you know it as well as I do.
For a direct correlation, we do this:
We track wound levels. Weapons have a damage scale, armor has a damage scale. Subtract armor from weapons, and that’s how many wound levels one success is (we use roll-and-count, you’ll have to do something different.)
==Mechanics blither starts here==
Attacker rolls weapon damage, defender rolls armor; defender successes cancel out attacker successes, if the attacker has more, multiply by the number found above and that’s the wound level.
Characters go from level 0 wounds (unhurt) to level 5 wounds (incapacitated). Level 6 wounds on an NPC are insta-death; level 6 wounds on a PC are treated as level 5 wounds, unless the player wants to do something nobly dramatic resulting in character death…and for point of reference, a .44 Magnum and a Walther PPK are both Level 2 attacks. Unarmored man is Level 0 defense, and uses his Body attribute as armor. So each success gives 2 Wound levels.
The .44 Mag is around 5D+2, the PPK is 4D+1. Typical PC has a Body of 2D+2 to 3D+1.
(Yes, we’re based off the old Star Wars engine.)
==Mechanics blither ends==
So, you tell the person who got the wound “You get hit for a level N wound. Describe the effect.”
What we’ve found is that with a minimum of guidance (wound level), players will provide nearly all the color and gorey details you could possibly want.
We expand this “In a contested roll, players describe how they fail, and the consequences therof” into a generalized principle throughout the rule.
I agree with Asa. I’m totally unfamiliar with the Fate system, but from what I’m understanding here, there’s a chance someone (esp a combat monkey character) could be pummeled, knifed, AND shot, and still be totally unimpaired.
In some genres (superhero gaming for instance) this is OK. In fact, it’s probably ideal. In the Dresdenverse though, and in the hardboiled and noir genres it borrows from, a rousing fist fight has a good chance of ending in a trip to the ER or worse.
I’m unsure of how I’d handle this difficulty. Perhaps inflict the consequence of that wound level on the character as soon as they have a wound of that level, and keep the rollover rules as-is?
Not really useful, but an observation, in books like the Dresden series it’s damnably easy to be bruised and battered, but from that point you can get beat around for quite some time without anything ‘extra’ happening until you’re disabled or a ‘special effect’ injury happens (lose weapon, hand melts, that sort of thing). It’s almost as if when you’ve received a certain amount of damage in a combat/ round/ something, everything extra is just narrative over the top until the dial resets.
I don’t have any answers to it, other than saying that the linear ‘tracks’ (and WoD health things) don’t really match the cinematic nature of novels in this sort of approach. Everyone slowly gets worn down until they go splot.
This all is sounding far too complicated for FATE in general, frankly. +1 here, -2 there, change from 1-2 to 1-3 next… that sounds more like D&D bonus stacking than FATE.
Someone mentioned gadget Armor from SotC. This is a great start. The effect is simple… if an “armored” box takes a hit, it doesn’t roll up. This, in effect, can represent your “unlimited Mild boxes”. If you have 2 points of that armor, then every hit you take in that track (1 or 2) won’t roll up into Moderate land. The downside is that this armor is useless against any stronger attacks, but that’s not a big deal.
Branching off from that, you can have armor that makes damage roll DOWN instead. Again, it won’t reduce the damage from a high hit, but it lets you take a hell of a lot more punishment from mild or moderate hits.
If you kept getting hit with 4 point attacks…
Normally, you check off 4, 5, 6 (Severe consequence) 7-Taken out. 4 hits and you’re gone.
With Roll Down 4, you check off 4, 3 (Moderate consequence), 2, 1 (Mild consequence). 4 hits, and you’re definately suffering, but you’re still in action.
(At this point you have two choices. Either damage keeps rolling down “off the bottom” and disappears, or if all your lower boxes are full like this, then damage resumes rolling upwards)
The simplest change I’d make is to turn consequences into stress boxes of their own. Thus the track goes “Box” “Box” “Consequence”. A 3 point hit is then a consequence, even though the boxes in that track are still empty. Hitting the 2nd box twice will roll up into a consequence, while the first box is empty.
Why would characters would want anything but the best armor (in rating) and the very best weapons?
Wouldn’t this bonus thing lead to all the characters’ armor and weapons being a carbon copy of another?
In D&D, this changes because of many factors: size, special abilities, reach, critical range and so forth. Since these do not become factor in Dresden/Fate what will make player go for variety?
I agree with Asa, back there. We need more flavor. Getting stabbed, kicked and shot, and still having no telling signs is not what FATE is about.
Just a thought regarding one of ken’s earlier post.
as you said, the style of the novel seems to be in the classic:
“ow! i took one in the lung, but i’ll carry on an extra round to let the damsel in distress flee!”
(NOTE: i have never read the novels or played SotC 3.0, but i do use fate II)
well, what if you could use fate points and/or aspects to cater for that, either by delaying consequences, or absorbing damage
eg: (insert your character here) is nearly uncouscious from a severe beating he has taken from a group of thug, and as the final blow lands he SHOULD fall into never-to-be-seen-again land, but instead he uses his “tough, mean S. of a B.” aspect to carry on, delaying the consequences by spending one fate point
now clearly you could keep doing this but it would be a very bad idea, as the consequences would stack like mad, but for the milder levels, it would avoid the inevitable spiral of death.
clearly this is not quite relevent to the most recent posts, sorry about that.
otherwise, it looks like you are making a simply brilliant game, and, like a lot of other people, i await the release of the dresden files with trepidation!
Having multiple boxes to check off before a Consequence is inflicted sounded really cool at first glance. However, it causes some problems when using a kind of attack that will allow you to check off only one single box per hit.
Let’s say, I hit the bad guy for a Moderate result last exchange. Yay! He had it coming!
This exchange, I do even better. Severe result! Die, villain, die! But, oh no! Had I scored merely Moderate, he would have gotten a Moderate Consequence this exchange. But because I did so well, he’s still acting as if totally unharmed! Curse my luck!
Mildly confused, I give my vote to the “One Consequence per successful hit” faction here.
Looks like they’re doing things a bit different now, anyway… once they settle on which alternate idea they like the most!
I am way late coming into this, but my opinion about the whole damage thing and going with the books, makes the Shadowrun style damage meter seem best. You have a total number of boxes in health, and at certain levels of damage taken there is a consequence. A light wound is like one box and moderate is 2 and so on. This would make all the little hits add up. As with Harry in Fool Moon, he could still function after being beat up and shot, but he couldn’t function well. Armor done with this damage meter would also be easier to work. The armor reduces the number of damage boxes that the attack inflicts. It would mean that the guy in kevlar could still take a hit, but it would be much less of a hit than if he didn’t have the kevlar on. In general it takes out alot of the math in it.
What about the leathality track having a pyramid set up, just like skills?
1-2 ()()()
3-4 ()()
5-6 ()
7+ Out
This could be increased with skillpoints or purchased as an ability. Or it could be based on how many phases the PC has been thru, gaining one every time he gains an attribute. A PC with five attributs could have a progression that looks like this.
1-2 ()()()()()
3-4 ()()()()
5-6 ()()
7+ Out
This would let more powerful PCs take more bumps and bruises, but one solid hit will be nearly as bad for them as a lower level PC.
And what about going for something that would keep the mechanics simpler?
Like:
1 () –> mild consequence: -1 next turn
2 ()
—-
3 () –> moderate consequence: -1 this scene
4 ()
—-
5 () –> severe consequence: -1 this session
6 ()
—-
7 -> taken out (dead or as agreed stakes)
That would translate for the default, human level as thresholds: 1(mild)/3(moderate)/5(severe)/7 (taken out). Or 1/3/5/7
When some tougher opponent has extra
First I want to admit that I’ve never liked the way damage is handled in SotC. I think you guys would be doing yourselves an amazing favor by drawing some inspiration from Starblazer Adventures.
Everyone has a stress track though it isn’t always the same length. Everyone can take up to 3 Consequences but never the same Type of Consequence more than once (Minor, Moderate, Severe, Extreme). Each Type of Consequence reduces a certain amount of stress **from the attack which caused it** (-2, -4, -6, -8). In my own humble opinion I think this sort of system would work perfectly for DFRPG.
Are you guys using the Fudge Dice for this game??? Please say you aren’t. That silliness is a fundamental flaw if I’ve ever seen one. Roll 2D6 and designate one as a positive and one as a negative, results from -5 to +5. Much simpler. Also plucked from Starblazer Adventures.
Outside of my suggestions I am still very excited for this game!
@Levi —
Actually, it’s Starblazer Adventures that drew inspiration from *us*.
I showed them an early draft of the Dresden Files RPG combat system, and they used over 90% of it.
Note, you ARE responding to a post from 2006.
I fail to see how Fudge Dice are “silliness”. They look cool, provide a nice bell curve and have always worked out in my games. That said, it is nice to provide the alternative for people who don’t have them, to lower barrier of entry into the game.
I dunno. I call that alternative “use a d6, counting 1-2 as -, 3-4 as 0, and 5-6 as +”.
It (basically) works for Arkham Horror, after all…
Maybe I’m just weird that way
Fred,
Is it possible for you to say what differences there are between the new Dresden combat system and the one in Starblazer Adventures? Is there a playtest out there on the web somewhere that talks about it? Can you reveal anything about the new combat system at all?
By the way, i am really looking forward to the Dresden Files RPG. I discovered the books through buying SOTC and then looking at your various websites, so I have you to thank for opening up the Dresden experience for me!! I have never been the same since:)
@Iorwerth — Only broadly. When Cubicle 7 was developing Starblazer Adventures, I shared some early concepts and design work for DFRPG combat. That was their starting point, but they then went off on their own tangent and developed some of their own stuff. So folks who’ve read SA will find themselves in familiar conceptual territory, but not necessarily somewhere where the same *dialect* is spoken.
Me too have Starblazer Adventures, yet only because I couldn’t wait for DFRPG and also because I don’t care for classic pulp stories as a genre like the ones found in SotC. I’m using it for a Star Wars hack campaign for the time being, but I haven’t been able to tone down the system for a more gritty Dresden world.
Is there any difference between Fudge dice rolls and Starblazer ones, probabilistically speaking?
The images seem to be broken on this entry. Any chance of restoring them?
@Tablesaw, ancient post, man. I mean, I don’t see signs of broken images (but I’m not looking too hard), but it’s also a few years out of date…
EDIT: Aha! Found and fixed. That said, bears very little resemblance to the system we’re going to be going to press with.