> When you take a hit that would go off your stress track, you are Taken Out. Whoever scored that fatal hit gets to decide what happens to you.
> A character is out of play when he sustains a hit past the end of any stress track. [...] The attacker narrates taking out his opponent (subject to reasonableness, as determined by table authority).
Well, I might Concede on this (heh), but this just feels like letting the players be stupid. There is a perfectly functional ruleset to handle the situation that they for some reason ignore.
You can write an answer that says "here's what the rules say about being taken out, they don't say they don't work in this case, BUT I think there's another rule that would make more sense here..."
I'd say that the crux of their question is probably "That seems like a way to get out of more serious consequences, which might be unfair."
And the answer to that is that Fate expects the group to speak up and consult when something is narrated that doesn't seem to have the right amount of "teeth" for the situation.
And I gave my answer: "There is no table where that will happen". But it is hard to base an answer on rules that just leave everything up to everyone at the table
The rules don't "just" leave everything up to the table. The rules are quite clear: if you take someone out, you get to narrate the result. The table can choose to modify, change, or ignore those rules, or may decide that a different set of rules is more applicable in a particular case.
But that's not the same as not having rules.
Fate is not a free-form game. It has clear rules. What it is NOT is a game where there's only one possible rule for a given bit of narration, nor is it a game which tries to force groups to use rules when the table thinks the game would be more fun without them.
We can use our experience to talk about how that interplay works in practice.
In this case, they're asking about how Fate's narrative-mechanic-narrative-mechanic piston works in a particular edge case where one bit of narrative triggers a mechanic, and the outcome of the mechanic makes it look like another mechanic would've been better--but they couldn't have known that before it was resolved.
@BESW I am still searching through the SRD, but their 1st example (Burn for maneuvering) involves no dice, the hit is taken for sure. they know beforehand.
@BESW Its a bit of a tangent in response to "nor is it a game which tries to force groups to use rules when the table thinks the game would be more fun without them." The rules should be agreed upon beforehand and not bent during play so that everyone can rely on them. And if the GM has veto powers anyway, whats the difference?
First off, DFRPG is full of "the group should agree" (YS92), "keep in mind the intended play style" (YS31), "make sure your players are okay this" (YS338), "make sure you're on the same page as your players" (341), and "when in doubt, talk it through with your group" (YS99).
In many places th...
In Fate, players rely on each other more than on the rules to provide a sense of continuity and reliability to their play experience.
I suspect it's underlying the system, but it wasn't until Core that the rules really got expressed so explicitly.
But your answer is still not answering the question about the "Taken Out" rule; it's challenging the question's frame by saying that they shouldn't be using the "Taken Out" rule.
And the Stack Exchange's rule for challenging the frame of a question is that you first gotta show why answering the question as asked isn't sufficient.
@BESW "Taking an action or describing an event that results in you no longer participating in a Conflict is the definition of Conceding" then a quote, then further elaboration is not enough?
The whole point of the Golden Rule and table consultation is that there's often more than one rule that could be used for a situation and the table will have to choose.
[shrug] I don't see anything that clearly says you can't take yourself out, that anything which does so must be treated as a concession instead.
I agree that in most cases it'd probably be cooler that way, but I don't see anything which is prohibitive of using alternative rules that match the narrative.
Your answer says it's flat-out impossible, but doesn't connect the dots on why.
@BESW I am used to "this is reasonable" not being a sound support. Yes, the rules do let you refuse to take fate points for doing this. But doing so does not enrich the narrative in any way and no table should let it be resolved that way.
Why is it necessary that the ONLY rule for running your engines hot enough that your ship can't participate in the scene anymore, is a concession? Is using the taking-out rule a poor choice? Sure, often! Argue that.
'cause, yanno, I've got a table of players who'd think that sometimes it's a lot cooler to take a ridiculous amount of burn stress in order to blast someone straight out of the sky and then drift derelict and helpless for whoever comes along next while we desperately fix the engines. Sometimes we like hitting rock bottom because it's fun to claw our way back up.
So argue for your position. Don't present it as fiat.
Your current answer says that you can't take yourself out, rather than arguing that it's not a good idea.
It'd be a lot better if you persuade us why we shouldn't take ourselves out.
Fate tends to let us do things like interpose ourselves between an attacker and the defender, to defend on their behalf. At the very least if the system doesn't have rules for it, stunts can let us do it. The thing you're suggesting is “anything we do that leads to us getting taken out is instead concession”, which suggests that in doing that, I inherently concede instead of getting taken out if i would get taken out.
That doesn't scan to me at all as interpreting or applying the concession mechanic appropriately, and means many times I'd otherwise get taken out, I instead get to automatically concede.
Being taken out is serious! Putting myself in situations where I'd get taken out is serious! Conceding is a thing I specifically do before I reach that point, to avoid reaching that point.
I can't accept the reading you're putting forward that turns taken out into a concession.
That's my issue with it, and I agree with what BESW's describing. It's quite reasonable to suggest the player should instead just concede instead of doing this, but that leaves the original question up in the air of what happens if you do it anyway.
@BESW @doppelgreener I have taken your helpful suggestions into consideration and have edited my answer significantly. Please review it if you have the time.
Part of the problem is probably that Diaspora rules (like a LOT of pre-Core versions of Fate) imply a lot of philosophy without ever being really explicit about it.
And that philosophy is very much at odds with more "traditional" gaming styles, which we often take as so ubiquitous that any unstated assumptions must be traditional assumptions.
It's clear that not all Core philosophy assumptions are present in older versions of Fate, but there are many places where they offer clarity to otherwise incomplete or contradictory passages.
I look at it this way: if I'm playing a game with friends and putting the "with friends" part first, we can play a terrible game and it's still a fine old evening well-spent.
@Thanuir just fyi we generally don't remove comments that have more than a couple of upvotes, unless there's some significant problem category they fall into (including the author is requesting removal, because sometimes these comments are quite unhelpful)
Well there's the issue, I don't really get how I can run 7th Sea as a fun game. It feels like it's a terribly fun RPG from a parallel universe where things work just differently enough to be awkward in ours
@BESW This is "soursweet" (I think I'm translating an idiom, wich I shouldn't, but I hope I convey the meaning), I love my friends in most ways, but thye make my DMing very difficult and I think neither of us is really having fun because of D&D, but only because we're together... Everyone at the table plays D&D but everyone plays a different game
Our Atomic Robo-based game withered on the vine partly because of diverging game expectations.
And when I ran convention sessions of Lady Blackbird it was really interesting to see the different expectations clashing at the table, because we didn't really have time to do a proper synchronization.
I ran across a conversation about publishing recently, in which someone expressed the opinion that a sign of reaching real equity will be when there are so many boring, mediocre, cliche-ridden novels by currently-marginalized authors that they're as unremarkable and everyday as all the mediocre cliche-ridden books by the dominant author groups.
One of the possibilities on the Surge table is the following :
11-12 Roll a d10. Your height changes by a number of inches equal to the roll. If the roll is odd, you shrink. If the roll is even, you grow.
Considering that getting this effect 10 times results in a summed height change of +5...
My wild magic sorcerer just got dropped to 12 years old by a series of (un)lucky rolls. We found no rules about aging, so my DM had to get creative to address this. This is our first 5e run, and while I'm not usually a fan of this wild stuff, the rest of the group thought it'd be fun.
The height...
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Equity can eventually lead to equality, but as terms of art in modern justice jargon, equality is a red herring if presented as an alternative to equity rather than a goal of it.
@Helwar The argument made in that post confuses me - could that not apply to any fantasy evil creature? I think stories occasionally (and RPGs constantly) need a "guilt free" enemy - Nazis, Zombies, Nazi-Zombies, Orcs, Goblins etc.
Obviously you don't want to imply any connection between those groups and real world marginalized groups
@SirCinnamon It can. Most "evil races" are that, I think they just use Orcs as an example
If any of you follow Forgotten Realms lore in any regard, I loved where they were trying to get Orcs back in 4e. "We have been savage, we misunderstood our purpose, now we have this place to call ours, and we are gonna protect it". They were "people" at last
but I guess Salvatore didn't like that his goodie two shoes dark elf didn't have a race to mow down without remorse, so they reverted it back to: "we are fucking dumb, kill, pillage, kill each other"
Well, killing is bad. They don't want the hassle of moral dilemmas... I mean, Drizzt has to be pristine and impolute. And also has meltdowns about every little thing that happens, I guess he would get cathatonic if he had to consider all the orcs he's killed might not have been evil spawn
I just don't think it adds to a story to discuss the morality of every goon that had to be fought to reach the bad guy. Which leaved you with a cartoony "Everyone lived, they just had to go to the hospital" or before every fight a thorough investigation that yes these exact enemies are truly evil
I don't read the Drizzt books so I cant speak to those specifically
@SirCinnamon Not necessarily. You have adventure stories where there are only humans, or more modern ones where the hero mows down a whole lot of enemy soldiers and it works. The characters assume they are killing people
I love reading what authors write about cultures that are "not us", both because it's so different and new but also because by writing about things that are "not us", you inherently show what you believe is "us".
@SirCinnamon I didn't mean it like that. It's not killing dehumanized humans that I complained about. It's that why do we have dehumanized humans? It's just because we can battle the "other" people, the different. And they are super duper evil, so they have no salvation!
@Helwar Yes, and I don't really see the issue with that - I enjoy the violence and combat in the fantasy genre, and I think sometimes you want an indulgent hack-and-slash without moral complications
it's like... if they are so evil, how do they even exist? shouldn't they kill each other? How do they take care of children? How do they have any kind of society?
@SirCinnamon These tropes very specifically get invoked by Orcs. Orcs in and of themselves get singled out as guilty of these problems, which is telling. Zombies and usually goblins don't usually experience the same issues.
Which is fine! Being tired of it is personal preference. I just feel like that article was trying to draw a conclusion about evil fantasy races being some sort of racist concept when I think it's honestly much shallower and simpler than that
@SirCinnamon The difference is the portrayal in the story. Even if you're killing a human, you likely still acknowledge that "good" people still exist.
But the issue with "evil races" is that when you pigeonhole all orcs as super-evil monsters, there's not that sense of "well, not all orcs are bad guys".
The reason there's a problem with how Orcs, goblins, etc. are portrayed in Fantasy is that there's real-world historical baggage associated with how those archetypes entered the public cultural sphere.
The issue is that Orcs also embody lifestyles we see in native cultures and nomadic cultures. They embody prejudices that settlers in the USA had against the Native Americans. Think about if you've heard this combination of tropes before: wandering nomadic tribes of bloodthirsty savages who raid and kill everyone and worship evil gods, who don't understand our language and life, who are beyond all hope; the only thing we can do is slaughter them all & the land will be the better for it.
Hint: I just described both colonial prejudice against many native cultures and also orcs. But I did not describe goblins (except partially) or zombies.
@Xirema Right and I think all effort should be made to separate those colonialist, racist views from these clearly not real groups, but the line has to come somewhere in my opinion
@Xirema that doesn't mean that every villain is intended to be linked to a minority or oppressed group. There are coincidences and alternate interpretations and often villains are just villains. Just because the real world portrayed some groups as inherently villainous doesnt mean including villains of a unity are representative of that flawed stereotype
Do any of you remember GI Joe the cartoon? The enemy soldiers (cobra troopers) got replaced by robots eventually so they could just be straight up killed instead of being shown to jump out when their vehicle exploded.
@doppelgreener Yeah, and that SUCKS because native americans were/are nothing actually like that. But how do you resolve that without eliminating all evil from your story
Reason the first: all people are products of their time, which means occasionally negative subtext gets added to works of fiction without there being malice behind it.
Tolkien wasn't setting out to make a story where all the PoC are evil savages. But apply even the barest minimum of Race Theory to his work, and that's unfortunately what he created.
@SirCinnamon I guess my problem is with absolute, no-choice-in-the-matter, evil people. I can understand an irredeemable individual (god, or whatever), but a whole people? it doesn't gel well with me
Incidentally, for those interested in someone way smarter than me talking about this stuff, I recommend you go find Lindsay Ellis' video on Bright, where she spends quite a lot of time explaining how racial coding has affected our popular culture's portrayal of Orcs and other fantasy races.
Orcs got brought up because orcs have a specific unique problematic relationship with prejudice against native peoples, nomadic cultures, and people of color. POC involved in pop culture uniquely draw attention to the problems with orcs, which NK Jemisin describes in part. Orcs are a specific very concrete issue that are not merely "we found someone who has some slight issue with it".
@Xirema I've watched many of these videos. There can ne no proof that those metaphors exist. It's just interpretive. "Evil races" existed in stories before racial problems were widespread
@doppelgreener That's how it feels to me - I would never intentionally associate Orcs with a real world group - theyre a complete caricature of violence
Like, seriously. People of color involved in popular culture have a BROAD AND VOCAL objection to orcs. This is not a controvertial, nit-picking subject among them. This is a genuine acknowledged problem. This is not just one person on the internet who's upset, and a case of digging deep to find that one person who has that one objection to that one thing. It's a popular African American figure explaining the problem that POC in pop culture see, and explaining why they don't use orcs in their novels.
@SirCinnamon I mean, if you don't actively seek out alternate perspectives on this subject, it's easy to miss. I've only been exposed to the intersection of Critical Race Theory and the Fantasy Genre only a few years ago, and I've been immersed in the Fantasy Genre for decades.
You're welcome to show me that it's a broadly considered issue and show me where I can learn more about it and better understand the issue, but it sounded like you thought it was just one person on the internet who was upset that we could find if we dug hard enough.
Maybe I'm a weirdo, but I don't think that the fantasy orc problem means "don't use orcs as enemies, full stop". To me, it means that players need to be aware of the inherent cultural issues. My personal philosophy is that it's fine to have problematic fantasy tropes in your D&D campaign as long as everyone is aware of their inherent issues and everyone agrees with the use of said tropes.
@Yuuki I generally agree, though I adjust to argue that if you're going to use problematic tropes, you at least have a responsibility to call attention to them and at least acknowledge them.
@doppelgreener Yes, I'm not a fan of small birds to begin with, and I'm wondering what the heck is a tat and why not just use some regular currency to purchase a pet?!
@doppelgreener Yeah, and that SUCKS because native americans were/are nothing actually like that. But how do you resolve that without eliminating all evil from your story
... when someone asked me specifically how to play without orcs and similar issues? This isn't me saying don't use orcs ever, this is me answering the question I was asked.
I mean, if someone doesn't want to use orcs or similar, there's ways to do that. I was asked how to do that. But go ahead and use orcs if you don't mind, or are aware of the issues and want to use them regardless.
@Adam In other news, I nearly killed my party on Saturday night. Well, I killed one of them, but brought him back to life at the cost of a simple life debt and favors to someone they probably don't trust.
I didn't want to lose the character (I liked them, their backstory, and was working to integrate the backstory more into the world), so I decided to make their death(and resurrection) a plot hook.
@ColinGross Yup. THey negotiated it to 3 unspecified jobs that they will not get paid for and they can not turn down.
@doppelgreener POCs having a problem with something is fine but that doesn't make that thing bad on its own. That's an opinion. I'm looking for an well argued ethical objection to the precense of evil races as a whole
@ColinGross heh, that's how I was thinking about it, too. Paladin could have saved the bard, but chose to keep attacking. And that was a reasonable decision given these guys basically just met each other.
@doppelgreener Only one line about etymology, which I was actually really curious about. Still learned stuff. Fun learning new things about phrases I use frequently. Still, I'm dying to know where "tip for tap" came from and how it evolved into its modern form.
@DavidCoffron advantage on initiative, extra damage on first hit if they go before someone in first round, the extra damage to their chosen type. It adds up quickly so that I need to build stronger encounters than I normally would (and then their friends die)
So the ranger can punch way above their weight class against chosen enemies, which necessitates that the DM either not provide chosen enemies (which causes its own problems) or the chosen enemies have be of a higher CR (which adversely affects other classes that can't so effectively punch above their weight class in specific situations).
And also that you can choose Humanoids as a chosen enemy class.
@Yuuki The idea of chosen enemies is hard to design around for that reason - a fortress of goblins? Ranger blows the party out of the water. Throw some bandits? He's much weaker
@Yuuki I thought if you picked humanoid you only got to choose two races, or is that not the same in revised?
But yeah, I'm thinking about moving them back to the regular hunter. Or at least limiting some of the more powerful bits. THey've got a lot of big combat utility and out of combat utility.
@Yuuki they just really messed up in how favored enemy and natural explorer work. Instead of becoming better at your favored enemy or terrain as you level (which would be cool as you could make your ranger really good for certain campaigns), you just get more options
Instead of getting really good at hunting and killing giants, you just get a little better at hunting giants, and demons, and fey, and oozes
Were I to design Rangers, dunno... might be my 4e legacy speaking but I'd design Fighters for tying enemies down, Rogues for positional special attacks and Rangers for fluid momentum-based offense. Not sure exactly how I'd implement these
First off, DFRPG is full of "the group should agree" (YS92), "keep in mind the intended play style" (YS31), "make sure your players are okay this" (YS338), "make sure you're on the same page as your players" (341), and "when in doubt, talk it through with your group" (YS99).
In many places th...
One of the possibilities on the Surge table is the following :
11-12 Roll a d10. Your height changes by a number of inches equal to the roll. If the roll is odd, you shrink. If the roll is even, you grow.
Considering that getting this effect 10 times results in a summed height change of +5...
We have MathJax
In this meta we discussed, requested, and gathered evidence for the utility of MathJax in RPG.SE posts.
Now it's time to use MathJax
For those familiar with LaTeX it will likely suffice to say that \$ ... \$ are our delimiters ($$ ... $$ for equations centered on their own lin...
