Dresdenverse game at RPol

[R00kie]

Hi,

I'm planning to run a Dresdenverse game using the RPol Portal. Since the Dresden Roleplaying Game isn't available I'm using the next best thing - a hacked version of FATE 3. If anyone is interested the game page is here.

And the Game description is:

Brown Cloak Orphans (an adventure in the Dresden-verse)
System: FATE 3 (Note: This is NOT the Dresden Files RPG, just a hacked version of FATE 3).

Since the Vampire attack on Archangel four years ago, when Simon Pietrovitch was killed, council losses have been painfully high. The council tries to protect its young untested apprentices, keeping them out of danger. Losses amongst full wizards has resulted in something the council has never had to deal with before, a large number of apprentices who've lost their master. They call them 'Orphans' and they are viewed with pity.

Players ideally should have read at least one of the Dresden Files Books, but that's not an actually requirement. Familiarity with FATE is entirely optional too since its easy enough to pick up, and available for free to download (as the SRD). However I recommend buying Spirit of the Century, not because you'll need it but because its excellent

Note: The game is set some time between Proven Guilty and White Night. The White Council and the Red Court are at war (and have been for close to five years), and Harry Dresden has taken on Molly as an apprentice. Any events detailed in White Night, It's My Birthday Too, Heorot, Small Favor, Backup, Day Off, The Warrior, Last Call, and Turn Coat haven't happened yet (and may not happen in this world if you change things).

I view character generation as a group activity, so I wont be starting anything until I have a full quota of players, but I am accepting applications to join now. Feel free to drop by.

Cheers,

Declan (a.k.a. R00kie)

[TheMouse]

Out of curiosity, how hacked are you going? Care to share your skill list, the way you're working Stress, and what sort of Stunts you're using?

[R00kie]

Out of curiosity, how hacked are you going? Care to share your skill list, the way you're working Stress, and what sort of Stunts you're using?

Actually quite mildly hacked.

Since all the characters are (probably) going to be apprentices (and therefore human) I didn't have to worry too much about how to represent Werewolves, Vampires, Dragons, Wild Faey etc.  As for NPCs, I'll be happy to represent most of their abilities as either existing Stunts or Aspects. I did consider armour in case anyone wanted to go the Michael route or something similar. Also in a world where Wardens use swords I can see someone wanting armour.

• Health and Composure Stress tracks starting at 3
• A Skill Pyramid with an apex at Great
• A Refresh of 3 (with a note that I compel quite frequently so there will be lots of chance to gain Fate points)
• 8 Aspects (4 custom phases)
• The -2/-4/-6 Consequence rules from Faster Conflicts
  
• Deadly damage (checks a stress track box and the one below it) and extreme damage (checks a stress track box and the boxes either side). Both reserved for supernatural creature. Mundne weapons will always do one box damage.
• The Companions And Minions Reloaded rules
  
• The Magic rules from Spirit of the Season with a requirement that if you take Mystic Rites you also take Rite of Evocation (ie Magic to replace Guns) and an Aspect to represent your magical nature (which can then be compelled to make machines fail etc.)
  
• Slowed recovery - Detailed below

Recovery
In Spirit of the Century, stress tracks are cleared after every stressful situation. Not so in the Dresdenverse. Stress is not so easy to get rid of. Instead, each day spent avoiding the relevant form of stress clears a number of boxes equal to the Skill that augments it, though at least 1. Thus a character with Endurance-4 clears four Health stress boxes per day. In addition competent medical attention or counselling will result in cleared boxes. Characters cannot begin removing moderate or severe Consequences until the associated stress track has been cleared. Once clear, however, Consequences are removed exactly as per Spirit of the Century.



The following skill list (carefully chosen to assist migration to the actual DFRPG if its released whilst the game is still ongoing)(Well mostly borrowed from one of Fred's posts)

Skill List

• Alertness - This is 'passive' awareness, on-your-toes-ness, the ability to avoid surprise
• Armour - Wearing and moving in heavy physical armour
• Art - playing to an audience, artistic composition and appreciation, creative communication
• Athletics - Running, jumping, climbing, dodging
• Burglary - The ability to break into places you shouldn't be, and to plan to break into them
• Contacts - Knowing people, tapping into the rumor mill, keeping your ear to the ground, hitting the streets to get the word out
• Craftsmanship - Building, fixing, and breaking things with tools
• Deceit - Falsehood, deception, distraction, misdirection
• Discipline - Concentration and self-control
• Driving - driving, flying, boating, car chases, shortcuts, street navigation
• Empathy - "reading" people, maintaining the social graces, spotting lies
• Endurance - stamina and toughness
• Fists - brawling, martial arts
• Guns - gunplay, firefights, gun knowledge, etc)
• Intimidation - threats, scaring people, provoking anger, interrogation
• Investigation - examination, eavesdropping, pattern recognition, surveillance
• Lore - arcane research, rituals, vague i've-got-a-bad-feeling-about-this "sixth sense"
• Might - lifting things, brekaing things, exerting force, wrestling
• Presence - charisma, leadership, reputation, social "teflon factor")
• Rapport - small-talk, friendliness, putting your best foot forward impression-making, gift of gab
• Resolve - Your strength of belief (whether that's in God, magic, or other higher powers) and thus your psychological fortitude
• Resources - wealth, equipment, lifestyle, accommodations
• Scholarship - mundane research, languages, using computers
• Science - Scientific knowledge and modern medicine
• Sleight of Hand - fine, dexterous activities like stage magic, pickpocketing, and replacing an idol with a bag of sand
• Stealth - hiding, skulking, ambushing, "shadowing" or secretly following someone
• Survival - animal handling, outdoor camouflage, riding, wilderness scavenging, tracking beasts
• Weapons - weaponed combat, swordplay, thrown weaponry, weapon knowledge

One Entirely New Skill (as opposed to renamed skills)

ARMOUR
Armour represents training with and access to all kinds of heavy physical armour. It’s a universal defence, even protecting against ambush. By default players have 3 Consequences to use in combat. Armour gives you one more physical-only Consequence equal to the value of your Armour skill. Thus if you have a good armour skill, your armour could take a -3 Consequence. If your Armour exceeds your Athletics, Endurance, Lore or Stealth, use of that skill suffers a -2 penalty. If you try to swim or cast magic in Armour, the entire value of your Armour skill is applied as a penalty.
• Set Aside: The character can remove their armour at any time, eliminating the above penalties.


Some New Stunts

Armour Stunts

• Second Skin — You have trained long and hard in the use of armor; wearing it is second nature. Ignore the penalties for having an Armor skill higher than Athletics, Endurance or Stealth
  
• Take the Blow — Requires Second Skin. You have learned how to use your armor’s glancing surfaces and padding to minimize damage. A character with this stunt gains one additional Health stress box.
  
• Armour Mastery — Requires Second Skin. By default Armor gives you one more physical-only Consequence equal to the value of your Armor skill. A armour mastery allows a further consequence (a fifth physical consequence) at a value of half the armour skill (round up).
  
• Wall of Steel — Requires Take the Blow. When your armour is struck by a non-magical weapon, which has not been bought as the result of any stunt, you may make an opposed roll of your armour skill vs the opponents weapon skill. If you win by one points or more the opponent must either give you a fate point from his fate pool, or have his weapon break
  
• Shield Bash — You have trained to use your armor as a weapon in its own right. You may use your Armor skill instead of Fists to attack if disarmed.
  
• Shield Mastery – You may treat your armour skill as one higher, but may not use two handed weapons
  
• Deflect Missiles – Requires Shield Mastery. You may make an opposed armour skill roll to protect others against incoming missiles. If you succeed the arrows are deflected. If you fail then you have placed yourself in the way of the attack, and both you and the original target may be injured.
  

.

Lore Stunts

• Single Talent Magic —  As per mystic rites, but may only be used to duplicate one skill, and doesn't have the prerequisit.
  
• Counter Magic — Requires either Mystic Rites or Single Talent Magic. Whenever you choose to hold your action, you may spend a Fate Point before another spellcaster acts to have them truthfully declare what they are about to do. If their intent is to cast a spell, you may then use your held action to block it, using your Magic skill to create the block. If you opt to not block their effort, you must wait until your target completes their action to proceed. If you commit to performing a counterspell regardless of what your target declares, before they declare it, you do not need to spend the Fate Point. Be clear about this when you make your demand!
  

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[TheMouse]

I'm going to try to poke holes in your system. I'm not doing this because I'm a meany head. This is meant to be constructive criticism.

If you want fairly deadly combat, you can use Stress as HP. Your track starts out at 5, increasing as normal. If someone hits you with an attack for 3 stress, you lose three boxes. It tends to bring the Consequences a little more quickly.

Letting stress stick around might be a bad idea. It makes it really difficult to have multiple conflicts in one session. If you run it close to the way the books work, you'll never have a day of down time, so you'll never recover from stress. Taking Consequences should be enough to model the way Harry tends to end up.

I'm a fan of using a small set of systems and avoiding building sub-systems. Much of what follows represents that tendency.

I'm also not sure why you're putting so much system band width toward armour. You can easily model armour with Aspects and Stunts. This lets you use the same Stunts to model creatures that are supernaturally tough. You could, for example, have a stunt that reduced incoming physical stress by 1 points, but it has a flaw. "Needs to be wearing armour," is a pretty good flaw. You could then use the same Stunt to represent something that's supernaturally resilient except against fire. Doing this also mitigates any need to spend valuable skill points on a skill to use it; that's a really narrow skill.

Requiring a Stunt to have protection offers you the chance to avoid people getting mechanical benefits for free, if that's something you're worried about.

You can model the disadvantages of armour with a proper Aspect. "Uses a full suit of metal armour," works. Compels have him unable to go certain places, having difficulty being stealthy, etc. Invocations let  him defend himself or add to unarmed rolls to smash someone with his big gauntlets.

I'm not certain of the need for a Concentration skill. Almost every instance I can think of in the books where someone needed to concentrate, I'd model it as a skill roll.

What skill are you using for magic?

Finally, I suggest using what some of us have been calling generic Stunts. A purchase of a Stunt might allow you to:

* Add +1 to a given skill roll under a set of circumstances. For example, using Science for medical purposes.
* Add +2 to a given skill roll under a narrower set of circumstances. Using Science to treat a poison victim.
* Use one skill in the place of another under a set of circumstances. Using Magic in the place of Guns if you have a focus, in which case you can blast something with fire, wind, or force.
* Have a gadget.
* Have a minion. Build using the generic minion rules.

You could probably have some that generically increase or decrease stress, the defensive one having some hole as above. Adding a single Consequence also makes sense; you might allow this to add a higher level of Consequence if it has a defensive hole.

[R00kie]

I'm going to try to poke holes in your system. I'm not doing this because I'm a meany head. This is meant to be constructive criticism.

Constructive criticism is always appreciated.

If you want fairly deadly combat, you can use Stress as HP. Your track starts out at 5, increasing as normal. If someone hits you with an attack for 3 stress, you lose three boxes. It tends to bring the Consequences a little more quickly.

Possibly a little to quickly for what I want. I'm trying to get that balance where a single powerful attack can break things, but where generally a fight can last quite a while.

Letting stress stick around might be a bad idea. It makes it really difficult to have multiple conflicts in one session. If you run it close to the way the books work, you'll never have a day of down time, so you'll never recover from stress. Taking Consequences should be enough to model the way Harry tends to end up.

Agreed. Thinking about healing carefully my main issue is the speed with which Moderate Consequences heal at. Generally if Harry takes a significant injury its with him till the end of the book. Changing the Moderate Consequence heal time to a few hours of 'downtime', up to a few days, and the Severe to 'Weeks' would cover this nicely.

I'm also not sure why you're putting so much system band width toward armour. You can easily model armour with Aspects and Stunts. This lets you use the same Stunts to model creatures that are supernaturally tough. You could, for example, have a stunt that reduced incoming physical stress by 1 points, but it has a flaw. "Needs to be wearing armour," is a pretty good flaw. You could then use the same Stunt to represent something that's supernaturally resilient except against fire. Doing this also mitigates any need to spend valuable skill points on a skill to use it; that's a really narrow skill.

I tried to balance Armour against Athletics. Both can be used to defend. Athletics obviously offers greater utility in that it can be used to climb, jump, move etc. To balance this I ensured a) armour offers benefits even against attacks your not aware of (ambushes) and b) it allows you to take an extra physical consequence, in an attempt to balance it, however you are right - its probably unnecessary. I'll drop it in facvour of stunts and aspects (which make as much sense)

What skill are you using for magic?

I'm using Lore for magic. Lore = Mysteries, Scholarship = Academics

Finally, I suggest using what some of us have been calling generic Stunts. A purchase of a Stunt might allow you to:

* Add +1 to a given skill roll under a set of circumstances. For example, using Science for medical purposes.
* Add +2 to a given skill roll under a narrower set of circumstances. Using Science to treat a poison victim.
* Use one skill in the place of another under a set of circumstances. Using Magic in the place of Guns if you have a focus, in which case you can blast something with fire, wind, or force.
* Have a gadget.
* Have a minion. Build using the generic minion rules.

You could probably have some that generically increase or decrease stress, the defensive one having some hole as above. Adding a single Consequence also makes sense; you might allow this to add a higher level of Consequence if it has a defensive hole.

Generic stunts would work really well for modelling any ability not already covered by existing stunts (so its perfect for all those other creatures). In fact I suspect that most of the existing SotC stunts could be remade as Generic stunts. These look like the perfect rules for generating stunts on the fly.


Overall I like all of the suggestions except using Stress as HP - but that does have the huge advantage of being easier to explain to people (and if Starblazer is anything to go on will become the norm). I may well adopt every single suggestion here. Thanks.

[TheMouse]

Agreed. Thinking about healing carefully my main issue is the speed with which Moderate Consequences heal at. Generally if Harry takes a significant injury its with him till the end of the book. Changing the Moderate Consequence heal time to a few hours of 'downtime', up to a few days, and the Severe to 'Weeks' would cover this nicely.

If you want to introduce longer lasting Consequences, I suggest adding the Extreme level and reducing the mechanical impact of all Consequences by 1. So they're 1/3/5/7. This makes it slightly more likely that you'll get a longer lasting Consequence.

Moderate Consequences last until you get a chance to actually rest. That's get a full night of sleep, a shower, and some food. If you run things like the books, they should probably last a couple of days on average. Then have Severe Consequences last until the end of the story. Extreme Consequences then last a number of stories, and represent things like Harry's burns.

Overall I like all of the suggestions except using Stress as HP - but that does have the huge advantage of being easier to explain to people (and if Starblazer is anything to go on will become the norm).

The HP method is simpler. That's one of the reasons I like it.

I may well adopt every single suggestion here. Thanks.

Glad to be of help. If you need more of a hand, feel free to ask.