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In Fate I’d like to come up with a more deterministic approach to deciding between stress boxes or consequence aspects so that the engine or GM could do it automatically, because it’s such an extradiegetic decision: “do I want to get stressed out or should I get slashed instead?” maybe happens sometimes but Fate makes you make that decision all the time and I’m not into it.
From the gamist perspective deciding between consequences (which has a coarser granularity, but take longer to heal) and stress (which is limited and fine grained, but clear up after the fight) is an interesting and meaningful decision, and that’s the problem, since it doesn’t tie into the diegesis.
I’m trying to cobble together a game with a more diegetical interface to an underlying detailed game engine. In other words instead of saying “I roll a 5 for defense” “OK you lose six hit points”, it’s “I defended terribly” “Oh, you get a big cut across your upper arm”. The “hmm, do I check stress boxes or do I take a consequence” is too interesting of a decision!
Fate players, have you found a heuristic like “if such-and-such is true, take a consequence, otherwise take stress”?
This is why I was interested in Silhouette; it assigns consequences deterministically along this line:
(stamina âś• consequence threshold factor + armor) / weapon DM = shifts needed
So for example if I’ve got Stamina 25 (I wish…) and you’re coming at me with a knife, I get a moderate consequence if you get two shifts, or a severe consequence if you get four shifts, or am taken out if you get seven. And if I put on a chainmail armor, those thresholds are instead four, five, and eight.
Silhouette doesn’t have stress boxes; attacks that hit are either nicks and scratches or they have consequences.
It uses the word “mos” for what we call shifts and I’m assuming a DM 8 knife here. With DM 9 (as that knife would have for a stronger character), the thresholds are three, five and eight against my chainmail—only the chances of a moderate consequence increased. Or without the chainmail it’s two, three and six. The chances for a moderate consequence stayed the same while the chances for something more serious happening increased.
This is great! There are plenty of underlying “knobs” in order to make a gamist equipment list and character build option since DM and stamina are based off character traits, but it boils down to one roll trying to make shifts, and the interface is diegetic.
Silhouette also has a “called shots” feature, described under “aiming”, but it’s a li’l broken. If you say you’re going for the head for example, even if my chainmail does have a hood, the new shift thresholds become three, four and five (since my "head stamina" is effectively halved) but your skill decreases by three. With Fate’s 4dF system where increasing difficulty exactly corresponds to decreasing skill, that’d effectively mean that the new shift thresholds would effectively be six, seven and eight, but Silhouette’s dice pool system doesn’t have that property; skill four vs eight is 1.5% whereas skill 1 vs 5 is 16.7%, making going for the head a really good idea in this particular matchup if you’re going for a “taken out” result.
So while the interface itself is clean and simple (make a roll, hope for many shifts) and diegetic “I made a great attack” “OK, my arm is broken” we end up with a problem similar to GURPS—in GURPS, due to it’s math issues, it’s sometimes right to go for a “telegraphic attack” and sometimes right to go for a “deceptive attack”, and some players use a chart in front of them to try to figure out which to use. I guess similarly in Silhouette you’d want to know when you must go for a called location and when not. Fate doesn’t have that problem since there’s only one dimension to its rolls.
I also think that the formula is not exactly simple.
I presented it as “(stamina ✕ consequence threshold factor + armor) / weapon DM” earlier because that’s the boiled-down way to go from the input I care about (how good your attack roll is) to the output I care about (what happens diegetically; wounds are both diegetical and mechanical consequences, in both Fate and Silhouette). But that’s not how the game presents it. Instead, you take the shifts generated, multiply it by the DM, and then compare that to a “wound threshold” derived from stamina and armor. This is good since it’s easier to understand but it sucks because you have to do a big multiplication for every hit and also because you have to spend time doing stuff in the symbolic realm of numbers and sheets when my goal here is to be in the diegesis, then do a roll, then go back to the diegesis, quickly and easily. I came up with the idea to have a place in my GM’s protocol where I could fill these thresholds in during play. So the first time you’re coming at my dumb li’l chainmailed head with a dagger I’m filling in those shift thresholds by dividing the dagger’s DM, and then I can keep referring to that for every dagger swing against a defender with similar stats, and then later if your friend pulls a gun I can figure-and-fill those numbers.
But Fate Condensed has an optional system that’s a lot more direct on page 58:
A weapon value adds to the shift value of a successful hit. If you have Weapon:2, it means that any hit inflicts 2 more shifts than normal.[...]
An armor value reduces the shifts of a successful hit. So, Armor:2 makes any hit worth 2 less than usual. If you hit but the target’s Armor reduces the attack’s shifts to 0 or below, you get a boost to use on your target but don’t do any harm.
No division or multiplication, just good clean fun.
Either way, the question of whether to delay some of the consequences with a “stress box” system is almost orthogonal. Both system use shifts, and the specific shift numbers are modified by weapons and armor. It’s only after that that there’s a choice where one system immediately gives a specific, deterministic outcome mappable to an amount of shifts, whereas the other system puts a “stress box” system in between.
Here’s where I’m at currently; I’m intrigued by Fate’s coarser math and hopeful that you can still make an interesting equipment list especially if weapons have other traits like speed, inflicting specific aspects, parry, weight, handedness, price etc, but I’m also attracted to the immediacy of not having the stress boxes.
Silhouette has more consequence slots (the default for an average person is five moderate consequences ["flesh wounds"] and then severe consequences ["deep wounds"] counts as two) which helps the pacing a bit there, but I do like the way stress boxes wear me out and gradually increase my risk of losing, without actually harming me permanently. Although that makes them difficult to communicate diegetically. I like the characters to know they’re closer to the edge.
Hence my original conundrum; if there could be a deterministic way to select between stress or consequences, that could be the best of both worlds. For an example, if you’re on Fate Condensed’s default of three stress boxes, one mild consequence (absorbs two shifts), one moderate (absorbs four), and one severe (absorbs six), and you’ve still got all that unchecked, and there’s five shifts incoming. Does that mean all stress boxes and a mild consequence, or does it mean a moderate consequence and one stress box, or just a severe consequence? That would depend on your estimation of how rare that result was, i.e. how likely you are to get hit again. Did they get that one-in-a-million thermal exhaust shot by stacking a ton of invokes? Or is this just a normal Friday night firefight for them? It’s a gamist choice that’s utterly disconnected from the diegesis, which is a huge turnoff for me; I love my gamist choices but I want them to be more evocative and immediately tied into the game world or “the fiction” as indie designers like to call it (or “the cloud” if they are hippies).
I like how the stress boxes are a buffer between you and a more serious result but I want them to be used up “automatically” with no thought.
I’ll try to mark exactly one stress box unless there are exactly two shifts and I have two stress boxes available to use. And, secondarily, I’ll try to use as few consequences as possible; that’s not exactly optimal since a mild consequence + a moderate consequence will heal way faster than one severe consequence will, but it makes sense with the flow of the game.
This means:
Of course, as consequence boxes and stress boxes are filled, the choices narrow and this “heuristic” won’t always be necessary, but that’s a good thing; when all the boxes are open is when the decision is the most difficult.
For example, let’s say I’ve only got one stress and one moderate consequence left and there are two shifts incoming. I don’t have a choice and I’ve got to take the moderate consequence (even though the “heuristic” would suggest taking two stress instead).
Also, the main advantage of Fate Condensed’s “three 1-boxes” as opposed to Core’s “one 1-box and one 2-box” is that it’s less confusing for players but if the engine or GM is handling this then I might as well use the Core system.
That also leads to a way easier and better heuristic: I’ll try to not underfill any boxes, and as long as I’m not doing that, taking stress is better than taking consequences, and I need to follow the “only one stress box per hit” rule, which means:
Again, not exactly optimal since, again, mild + moderate is often better than severe, especially if you’re gonna run away (or win) right after that.
From Fate’s default system, I like how the effective shift thresholds change during the game and how options quickly start to narrow. The optional weapons/armor system from Fate Condensed move the consequence thresholds together. Upgrading your knife to a sword moves all the boxes one step.
From Silhouette’s default system (which is way too deadly by default), I like how the three consequence thresholds move independently from each other as DM, armor, or stamina ratings change.
Fate is so much less deadly (which is good); eight shifts take someone out in Silhouette but in Fate it’s a severe consequence and stress. But once you’ve taken a severe consequence and all your stress, eight shifts become lethal. The thresholds are moving independently based on how much stress you’ve taken; fresh it’s six, eight and sixteen. Put a chainmail:2 on and it’s eight, ten and eighteen.