Group Resources in Fate Core Tribe 8

This was a small addition I made to the Resources rules for Fate of Vimary that I felt was general enough to go here. Note that it uses another slight tweak, namely that characters have fluctuating Resources scores as they use and gain Resources. This Extra allows for the group to have a Larder that they can use to draw resources from.

Typically the group will have a community pool of resources, known as the Larder. These Resources can be used in place of personally rolling against resources when the Larder can be accessed, at the expense of depleting the group’s reserves. Having a Larder is slightly more bookkeeping, so it may not be desirable for all groups, but fortunately most interactions with it would be done either between sessions or during session startup, etc.

The Larder has a Resource rating equal to the median of the group’s Resource rank - in other words, the middle between the minimum and maximum. If the lowest Resources within the group is 0 and the highest is 4, the Larder is Resources 2. The Larder has a stress track with two stress boxes with an additional box added at Resources Average(+1) or Fair (+2), or two more at Good (+3) or greater. In addition, the Larder has three Consequence slots. On the chance that the Larder has Resources of Superb (+5) or higher, it gains an additional mild Consequence slot. The Larder’s Resources do not fluctuate when the individual group member’s Resources fluctuate, although it might increase if members of the group permanently increase their own.

The stress and Consequences for the Larder work slightly differently than a character’s stress and Consequences. Whenever a character needs something that would call for a Resources roll, and they have access to the Larder, they can use the Larder’s Resources instead. This can be used to directly take a specific needed item from the Larder, as well as to create advantages prior to an expedition or journey. The roll is made using the standard difficulty for obtaining the item or creating the advantage. If the roll succeeds, then an amount of stress equal to the value of the item is marked off the Larder’s stress track. Once the stress track is filled, the Larder’s Resource rank drops by 1 and all stress is cleared. If in a single “transaction” the stress would overfill the track, the Larder takes a Consequence equal to or greater than the overflow. Once Resources reaches zero, the Larder is depleted and has to be restocked. Stress can be “soaked” by instead taking a Consequence of equal or greater value than the stress. Consequences represent a specific shortage within the Larder, based on what the characters were trying to do. For example, preparing for a Joanite attack might result in the mild Consequence Running Low on Ammunition or Limited Food and Water.

Restocking the Larder must be done from the Resources of the individuals contributing to it. Typically this is done using teamwork, with the character with the highest Resources rolling and every other character with Resources of Average(+1) or higher contributing +1 to the result. The difficulty of the roll is Fair(+2), and each success restores one rank of Resources. All Larder Consequences must be cleared before the restock attempt can take place. If the roll is successful, each character reduces their Resources by 1 for the remainder of the session.

Milestone Worksheet

First things first, I cooked up a milestone worksheet to go along with my milestone fractal post. You can grab it from Google Docs. Also, I had a couple of comments after finding a great discussion on fractal adventure design on ENWorld.

A Milestone Fractal Example

Someone mentioned that they do a lot better grokking these kind of things with examples, so I thought I'd try to cook one up.

First, I have some slight refinements of what I posted yesterday (I swear I'm not trying to copy how +Ryan M. Danks posted his adventure fractal, I'm really not).

Travel, Fate Core Style - Part 2

In Part I, I covered a few of the basic ways that travel can be handled. In this second installment I'll give some examples of slightly specific Extras that can be used to add more detail to or just spice it up a little bit. These can either be used by themselves or possibly combined together, depending on the game's exat needs.

Aspects

Aspects are the easiest and most obvious additions to any scene involving travel, from Impassible Mountains to Plentiful Game to Trade Winds. Since the scale is much larger than most scenes, it's also possible for specific locations to be their own aspects. These location aspects can be used much like situation aspects. For example, a player can invoke the Greenbriar Village aspect to get a Lore bonus on finding the ruined tower or for a hot meal to help make a recovery roll.

Zones

Zones are another relatively simple addition to travel. Geographic areas tend to have natural barriers or boundaries - rivers, mountains, forests, marshes, etc. These boundaries can provide passive resistance to moving between zones, prompting appropriate rolls if one or more zones need to be crossed within the same scene. Similarly, they can be used to keep track of the pace of travel. Zones will likely have their own aspects. Locations can also be smaller zones with aspects of their own.

Distance Stress Track

Speaking of pacing, using a distance stress track is one technique for keeping track of how far the characters get and how fast.The stress track has a number of boxes each representing some unit of distance. As the group travels, they make appropriate rolls (Drive, Physique, Athletics, whatever). Each roll takes place at a specific time increment - the more shifts the characters accumulate, the faster they travel. Most of the time the resistance to the roll will be passive, but it might be active under the right circumstances (which we'll get into more in a bit). This stress track would likely be one that is "attacked" with straight shifts - two shifts means mark off two boxes. When the track is filled, the characters reach their destination.

An enhancement to this idea is to have specific boxes on the stress track represent locations that can be reached. In order to reach the location, the characters need to mark off stress equal to or greater than the location's box. If a location is very difficult to find, unknown to the characters, or hidden, you can require that the characters have to land on that exact box.

Consequences

It's also possible to the distance stress track one or more Consequence slots. These Consequences should be predefined, and are there for the GM to "absorb" shifts and thus slow down or complicate the journey. Good examples are Bridge Out, Roadblock, or even Flight Delayed.

Skills

Once you get to this level, you're pretty much going full Fate Fractal. The most obvious choice for a skill would be any situation where the environment can actively take action against the characters. A Winter Storm might be a skill used to attack characters travelling through a mountainous region. A more abstract skill could be Treacherous Terrain that can interfere with how far the characters travel in a scene - effectively meaning that the terrain is offering active resistance to the characters trying to mark off distance stress, if it's being used. Aspects can still be used to for specific threats - like Wolf Packs or Bandits.

Combining multiple Extras together can result in what amounts to a write-up of a campaign region. Each Zone would have aspects, a distance stress track with defined Consequences, and a skill or two (for generic zones Terrain or Weather and Threat are good choices for skills). Over time, the aspects and skill ranks for the zone can even change as campaign milestones are reached.

Example

Here is an example "campaign scale" zone from Tribe 8. The options in use are:

• Zones
• High concept, trouble and several other aspects Distance stress track with Consequences.
• Two skills: Toxic Environment and Terrain. 

Each box on the distance stress track represents 1 mile travelled (Vimary is a pretty small place), and rolls are made every hour of game time. Characters roll Physique to mark off distance stress, opposed by the Terrain skill. Consequences are used to absorb shifts the characters generate, slowing them down and placing

The Rust Wastes

Aspects:

Disintegrating Industrial Area
Deadly Rust Storms
Artifacts of the World Before
Olympus
Access to Subterra
Skills:
Toxic Environment +4
Terrain +4
Distance:

OOOOOOOO
Consequences:
Keeper Pitfalls (-2)
Collapsing Ruins (-4)

Vimary Zones and Locations

Finally, I completed my write-up of various zones and locations from Vimary. More accurately, I decided to not include Distance stress tracks for the locations. My intention is still to use them, but they a) were a pain to write up and b) I'm actually thinking they shouldn't be set in stone. It's probably a lot better to set Distance stress tracks depending on the journey, time of year, and other circumstances so that they can be varied for each trip (or ignored completely if need be). Anyway, without further ado you can grab the document below. An updated Vimary zone map will soon follow.

Vimary Zones and Locations

New shiny random exploration tables!

I have completed completely revising and rethinking the random exploration tables, and this is the result. I like them so much better than the previous ones. They may actually be suitable for random generation of modern cities with some modifications. These are going to be really awesome to use once I start a game (which is hopefully going to be shortly).

I just can't leave well enough alone (Exploration, part 2)

So I've been chewing and chewing on my tables, trying to reduce the number of tables and make things flow the way I want them to. I crunched a whole bunch of data on land use from various cities to come up with something that looks and feels about right. It led me to scrap the tables I had previously and come up with a single table subtypes.

The new table uses 5DF instead of 4DF because it's more granular and breaks down easily into the blocks that I need. I wanted to stay with 4DF as a nod to staying "standardized" but the dice for the tables aren't read in the standard fashion so I figured it isn't that bad.

Here's what the first table looks like so far:

There will be sub tables for each to get the specific building type. The table structure sacrifices leanness of the types of areas for having to roll on fewer tables (2 instead of 3 or more) and gives more freedom from the setup I had before.

EDIT: Here's the first of the subtables. Took me 20 minutes to throw together. I've decided to color code the areas so that it's easier to tell which labels belongs to which