Rules: conflict and healing

In standard FATE/SotC, there is a stress track that you gradually fill up as you take hits, and after that’s full, you start taking ‘consequences’, which are Aspects that are bad for you: after you take three, you’re out of the fight.

In this game, we’re going with a variant of that, dispensing with the stress track entirely, and instead adding a few consequences. All PCs have five consequence ‘slots’ that you fill as you lose individual conflicts (an attack vs. your defense) that act sort of like named hit points. If all of your slots are filled and you lose again, you are ‘taken out’, and whoever you were fighting decides how you lost. During the fight, you may also decide to concede, which means you get to decide how you lost instead.

As a PC, your consequence slots consist of:

• Two ‘minor consequences’, rated -2. Minor consequences are annoyances that last for the duration of the conflict, but disappear once you get a chance to catch your breath.
• One ‘moderate consequence’, rated -4. Moderate consequences are harder to recover from, but being able to rest overnight in a comfortable setting will usually let you remove them from your sheet.
• One ‘severe consequence’, rated -6. Severe consequences require substantial downtime to recover from, measured in weeks or months. Usually this means ‘for the duration of the current adventure’.
• One ‘extreme consequence’, rated -8. Taking an extreme consequence means a permanent change to your character, like Luke losing his hand to Darth Vader: whether it is healed later or not, you immediately take a new Aspect for your character. Apart from this new Aspect, recovery is the same as for a severe consequence.

When you lose a conflict, you check how badly you lost: if you still may take a consequence of that level or greater, you can take that consequence, and the conflict continues. If you don’t, and you have a lower-level consequence available, you may take that consequence and concede. Otherwise, you are Taken Out, and lose the conflict.

So, let’s say you have been in a conflict for a few rounds, and have taken a minor (-2) and a moderate (-4) consequence thus far. You still have the option to take one minor (-2), one severe (-6), or one extreme (-8) consequence. You then lose again, this time by 4. You have no 4’s left, so you have three options: you may take a severe consequence to continue the fight, take a minor consequence and concede the fight, or take no consequences and be Taken Out.

Conceding means you are taken out of the fight, but by terms you offer (like running away) instead of terms dictated by your oppressor (like being captured). If a reasonable offer is refused, the one who refused loses a fate point, the one who offered gains one, and the conflict continues. The one who offered takes no more consequences from the action: if they took a minor consequence after losing by 7, offered a concession and were refused, they still only take the single minor consequence. After taking a consequence, you always have the option of conceding immediately.

Healing

The ‘Healing’ skill lets you reduce the severity of a physical consequence by treating the injury in a relaxed environment outside of any immediate combat. A skill roll of Good (+3) lets you reduce a single consequence by one level. A skill roll of Fantastic (+6) lets you reduce a single consequence by two levels (severe to minor, say) or two consequences by one level each. Note that once you reduce any consequence to minor, it then disappears on its own once your patient is given a chance to catch their breath and rest. Any consequence can only be attempted to be healed a single time by this skill per healer; beyond that it must take its own time to completely disappear.

The ‘Magical Healing’ stunt lets you use your Healing skill at any time, even in the middle of a pitched battle. In addition, when treating a patient with multiple consequences, you can decide which consequence to treat after seeing the result of your skill roll (though a failure still means one consequence will remain untreatable by you). You must be able to physically touch your patient while attempting to heal them, but the effect is instantaneous.

When a consequence is reduced in severity but not removed entirely, it still takes up one of the available consequence slots you have for your character. In other words, if you have two minor consequences and a moderate consequence, and the moderate is then reduced by healing to ‘minor’, it still takes up the third slot on your sheet. If you take more damage right away, you will only have the severe and extreme consequences left.