Thoughts on FATE/Dresden RPG: Part 4
ACTIONS DECOUPLED FROM CONSEQUENCES: This has really, really bugged me in Dresden game. As a mechanical artifact of FATE, you state your intended action, rolls for damage, and if you cause sufficient stress to take them out of the conflict, you get to determine the result.
This has however led to the unfortunate decoupling of causality in the system. A caster must merely state, "I am going to knock him unconscious", roll a power 8, weapon 8 offensive spell at the poor target, generate 16 shifts-defense roll, and take him out of the conflict. Using a spell that is theoretically twice as powerful at the weapon:4 military grade explosives.
Mechanically, there is never any reason to hold back from casting at a mortal for fear of accidentally hurting/killing them and violating the First law. Now I know there are tons of threads regarding this topic on the dresdenfiles RPG forum, but it really breaks the verisimilitude of the gaming experience for me. Especially because of how carefully Harry always is to "pull his punches" when flinging evocation around where any innocent bystanders could get hurt.
Proposed Solution:
If your intent is to subdue another character with an "attack", magical or otherwise, and in addition to taking enough stress to be taken out of the conflict, they receive enough overflow stress equal to their stress boxes, then something goes horribly wrong and they are killed.
So, if you fling a fireball and an innocent bystander gets caught in the blast, and that bystander has an endurance of 0, and takes 2 more than was needed to take them out, then they are killed*. In order for this to occur, a character must take the maximum amount of consequences possible, so you can't just hit a random person for 4 stress and kill them on "accident".
This presumes you are trying to subdue them. If your intent is to kill them, than they are not required to take additional consequences in order to be taken out of the conflict and killed.
The principle objective behind this change is to "give valid reasons" why a caster should cast a spell at a lower power than is possible. As it stands, since any and all spells with power equal to or lower than a character's Conviction score cause 1 mental stress to them, there is no mechanical difference between a power 1 spell and a power X spell, where X is their conviction score.
Since it's always more difficult to dodge a higher power level spell than it is to dodge a lower level spell, and a higher level spell will always cause more stress than a lower level spell and more quickly take an opponent out of a conflict, there is absolutely ZERO reason to ever cast a spell at a reduced power level.
I'd be open to suggestions on this topic, especially from my players.
This has however led to the unfortunate decoupling of causality in the system. A caster must merely state, "I am going to knock him unconscious", roll a power 8, weapon 8 offensive spell at the poor target, generate 16 shifts-defense roll, and take him out of the conflict. Using a spell that is theoretically twice as powerful at the weapon:4 military grade explosives.
Mechanically, there is never any reason to hold back from casting at a mortal for fear of accidentally hurting/killing them and violating the First law. Now I know there are tons of threads regarding this topic on the dresdenfiles RPG forum, but it really breaks the verisimilitude of the gaming experience for me. Especially because of how carefully Harry always is to "pull his punches" when flinging evocation around where any innocent bystanders could get hurt.
Proposed Solution:
If your intent is to subdue another character with an "attack", magical or otherwise, and in addition to taking enough stress to be taken out of the conflict, they receive enough overflow stress equal to their stress boxes, then something goes horribly wrong and they are killed.
So, if you fling a fireball and an innocent bystander gets caught in the blast, and that bystander has an endurance of 0, and takes 2 more than was needed to take them out, then they are killed*. In order for this to occur, a character must take the maximum amount of consequences possible, so you can't just hit a random person for 4 stress and kill them on "accident".
This presumes you are trying to subdue them. If your intent is to kill them, than they are not required to take additional consequences in order to be taken out of the conflict and killed.
The principle objective behind this change is to "give valid reasons" why a caster should cast a spell at a lower power than is possible. As it stands, since any and all spells with power equal to or lower than a character's Conviction score cause 1 mental stress to them, there is no mechanical difference between a power 1 spell and a power X spell, where X is their conviction score.
Since it's always more difficult to dodge a higher power level spell than it is to dodge a lower level spell, and a higher level spell will always cause more stress than a lower level spell and more quickly take an opponent out of a conflict, there is absolutely ZERO reason to ever cast a spell at a reduced power level.
I'd be open to suggestions on this topic, especially from my players.