yrgirlkv

"it's yr girl; you already know!"

—dj who is not yr girl and who you do not know at all

sister @cass | mom @pegasus-poetry | writer/designer @ songs for the dusk, sunblack | asexual @ large

icon by @hedgemice.


fallouts! they are a cool idea but one of the roughest things about SBR games is that they are largely pregenerated and difficult to generate on the fly. i have a two-part solution to this problem:

  1. fallouts, instead of being a shorthand for "any consequences, ever," are now entirely sticky debuffs. if you want to blow up someone's gear on a failed roll, just do it, but long-term injuries/wounds happen when a strain track blows.
  2. fallouts are now named on the fly, but composed of tags assembled from the fallout's level. some examples of tags:

MINOR FALLOUT TAGS

  • BLEED (STRAIN TRACK): Take d4 stress to STRAIN TRACK at the end of every situation in which you have this fallout.
  • SUNDERED (STRAIN TRACK ): Your STRAIN TRACK protection no longer applies.
  • INJURY (BODY PART): Take a disadvantage to any check that requires moderate use of the body part in question. Checks that require significant use automatically fail unless you have help; if you do, you still take the disadvantage.

MAJOR FALLOUT TAGS:

  • SEVERE BLEED (STRAIN TRACK): Take d6 stress to STRAIN TRACK at the end of every situation in which you have this fallout.
  • FESTER (STRAIN TRACK): Nothing's going to get fixed until this gets fixed. You can't clear stress from STRAIN TRACK until this fallout is removed.
  • COUNTDOWN: If your character has three fallouts with the COUNTDOWN tag at the end of the session, they will suffer a catastrophic consequence in the following session. It doesn't have to be lethal, but they must be retired as a player character afterwards.

given this, an example of the fallout section on a character sheet might look like:

MINOR FALLOUTS:

BROKEN LEG: bleed (shape), injury (leg)
CURSED: distracted, sundered (soul)

MAJOR FALLOUTS:

LUNG WOUND: countdown, heavy stagger (4 rolls remaining)

the neat thing is you can even making healing injuries more piecemeal by removing tags piecemeal, while others clear over time. maybe for lung wound you clear up countdown but getting the stagger fixed just isn't worth it, so you just let it heal naturally, which sort of captures the feeling of getting the wound treated but still needing to give it time to heal. the granularity also lets you give out healing abilities to characters without seriously fucking up the fallout economy, since you can just let them clear up one or two tags instead of a whole fallout

sunblack's still very much in pre-alpha (the number of tags per fallout, for example, is not at all final) but hoooopefully this'll help me breakthrough to the alpha build and actually playtest this stuff!


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in reply to @yrgirlkv's post:

I like this! One issue with equipment tags that's always coming up in my group is that we have to keep looking up what tags mean. I think you'd want to make sure the fallout tags are pretty straightforward and memorable to keep things moving.