FATE (Dresden): Weaponized Blocks

During one game, the PCs had to work their way through a horde of zombies to get to their target (a necromancer).  I didn't want to run a battle with a hundred zombies, so I came up with another way of handling minions, the weaponized block.  This was a modification to the normal idea of a block, but it worked as intended: it brought the cinematic element of having to fight your way to the bad guy, without drowning the game in combat rolls.

You are not just moving through a blocked square, your having to fight your way through.  The PCs could perform two actions:  attack the block or fight their way through.

Attacking the block:  for this example, the zombie horde had a block strength of 5.  It was not as simple as breaking through a wall or pushing away crates.  These were zombies, and not easy to take down.  Each round, the attacking character would try to overcome the block by attacking it.  If they succeed, the block strength went down by 1.  If they succeed by 3 or more, the block strength went down by 2.  This way, the PCs could weaken the horde, but at the cost of time.

Fighting through:  The zombies are not passive; they are attacking anything that tries to make it though.  The PC trying to make it through rolled Athletics (or parry) to move through.  They had to take 1 physical strain to do this (just like a wizard has to take 1 mental strain to cast a spell).  This was to simulate the dangers of trying to plow through the zombies.  If they failed, they were prevented from making it to the next zone, and they took additional damage based on how badly they failed the roll.  If they succeed, they made it through that zone (they made it past the horde).

This was the set up:

The PCs had to make it through three zones of zombie hordes to get to the necromancer.  The first zone had a Zombie (block) Strength of 3.  The second zone had a zombie strength of 4, and the third zone had a strength of 5.

At first, all of the players tried to make it through, but some did not roll well, and backed up.  Those with armor (one supernatural and one wizard) started working their way through.  The others backed up and started opening fire.  They were able to weaken the first zone to help other make it through, while the armored people started moving through zone 2.  (due to the landscape being flat, they did not have a clear shot to shoot the necromancer; none of them thought about getting on top of their cars).  Eventually, the fastest, most athletic character made it to the center, but they were alone.  The wizard had gotten blocked at zone 3, and had to wait until the support fire weakened that zone.

Could they have driven into the zombie horde?  Yes.  I would have increased the damage that they could have done to each zombie block, but they would have needed to back up and get speed to try it again.  As an alternative, I would have let them try to just drive through the horde, with the car taking the damage, but it would have been much slower (have you tried moving a car through a horde of people?  Now try it with zombie bodies.).

The end result, it was an amazingly cinematic scene of them trying to get to the necromancer before he finished the ritual.  And, the scene did not get bogged down in rolls (it was fast paced).

Fate (Dresden RPG): Weaponized Sight

In the Dresden novels, Harry consistently describes using the sight as dangerous, but in the game, it is fairly easy to withstand these dangers.  In both running the game, and playing, I have rarely seen any PC take significant mental strain to cause even a minor consequence.  Yet we see Harry in the novel having consequences from using the site.  (Most of the time, the player accepts a few points of Mental Strain knowing that it will reset at the end of the scene).

The most common remedy I've seen GMs use is to just increase the default intensity of the discipline challenge until the player has to spend fate just to get out of the vision.  This can get absurd.  I've seen a GM declare that a vision was at +9 just to force the player to use fate points. I really hate artificially inflating the intensity, so I came up with a different way of dealing with the horrors and dangers of the sight.

Most of the time, using the sight shows relative benign scenes, so the intensity is fairly low.  Sometimes though, what is revealed is horrific, or just mind blowing (like seeing an Arch-Angels true form).  To handle these scenes, there are two system:  Weaponized Sight and Tags.

Weaponized Sight:  Choose an appropriate intensity for the vision, but then add a +1 or +2 weapon quality to the vision.  If the PC fails the discipline roll, they get hit with a harder than expected.  This serves two purposes, first it scares the player.  They realize that what they have just witnessed is truly horrifying.  In running the same scene with two different groups, one with weaponized sight and one without, the group that saw the weaponized vision reacted more strongly to the vision, even though it had the same description as the other group.  Just having the stakes raised was enough to convey the depth of what was in the vision.

The second effect of using weaponized sight is that there is a greater chance that the player will have to accept a consequence, usually a minor one, before they can finish the vision.  This may sound harsh, but the consequence system is a vital part of the role-playing experience in Dresden (and FATE in general).  Having to fight with consequences raises the stakes of the game, and makes conflicts far more interesting (and let's face it, when has Harry even entered the final battle fresh and well rested?).

Less than 20% of the sight challenges have been weaponized.  Remember, most of the time the vision is benign; this rule is saved for the horrific (but not mind blowing) scenes).

Tags:  Weaponized sight works well when I want to convey the horror of the vision, but to get to the truly mind blowing visions, I decided to switch the attack with tagging the PC.  Instead of defending against mental strain, the PC is defending against a tag.  This rarely comes up, and is saved for only the most intense visions.  In my current campaign (about a year and half now), this has only come up once (the PC opened the sight upon a horrifyingly grizzly scene that involved an outsider).  When they failed their discipline role, I placed a sticky tag on them.  After the event, we talked about what it would mean for the player, and how they could remove the stage.  It fit what was going on so much, that the player turned it into an aspect.  (like most good tags, it could be turned to the PCs advantage).  FYI, the tag was "Open Door", indicating that the PC had become more prone to possession.


The goal of these two house rules was not to punish players, but to make using the sight more dangerous; to make the players think twice before opening the sight.