[DitV] Fun with Fallout

[cdr]

In yesterday's game we tried a mix of applying fallout dice to NPCs and rolling them over into a followup conflict.  By the rules you would do one or the other, but as an experiment we tried the following.  The Dogs were chasing Brother Daniel. Stakes were "Do the Dogs catch Brother Daniel before the lynch mob back in town get fed up with waiting and come after him?"  We considered and rejected "Do the Dogs find Brother Daniel?"  which would have led naturally to the followup "Now that we've found him, do we catch him?" if it succeeded, but would have been blocking had it failed.  We also considered just "Do the Dogs catch Brother Daniel" but again, if they fail to catch him, the story doesn't really move forward.  Either outcome to the stakes we settled on would be interesting, and provided opportunity for both escalation and giving.  The outcome of that was the Dogs capturing Brother Daniel in a timely fashion, with him taking 22d4 of fallout.

So our experiment was to roll the 22d4 in the center of the table and let the Dogs use dice from it in the followup conflict (with the stakes being "Does Brother Daniel tell us truthfully everything  he knows about Brother Simon's death?") .  Whatever dice they didn't use from that would be applied to him as fallout.

I wouldn't want to use that all the time, but in this instance I think it worked quite well.  The players helped themselves to a few 4's and 3's as they referenced various elements of the chase and his ambush, and at the end he gave and told them everything.  There were still several 4's and all the 1's left, so he bumped his "I won't be shamed 2d4" trait to 2d6 with experience and took long-term fallout of a 1d4 relationship with Sister Love, a Dog who had been injured in his  ambush.

In an unrelated note, I really like how Demonic Influence affects healing, as a source of tension.  In catching him Sister Love took 4d4+3d10 fallout when he shot at them and she took the blow by falling off her horse and hitting her head, but she only has Body 2d6 (she's  a teensy slip of a girl) so the odds of the top two dice of that being 13-19 were quite good, and in fact she rolled a 16 for fallout. The worst they'd seen was the Sin of Violence and Brother Jabez is well built for healing, so could handle the conflict vs. 4d4+3d10+1d10 demonic influence, no problem.  BUT if Brother Daniel had revealed that it wasn't just killing, but Hate and Murder, Demonic Influence jumps to 5d10 and Sister Love is in a lot more trouble.

Other nice effects of how healing works: If you take a ton of verbal fallout it's no big deal, but if you then take d8 or d10  on top of that and need healing, all those d4's are there to cause grief for the healer.  That nicely models something I don't quite have a handle on how to explain, but I like it a lot.   Also, Body 2d6 is pretty scary, because you only have a 1/36 chance of not needing healing to save you if you take 12 in fallout, and you can't make a 13-15 at all.  Brother Jabez also took Body 2d6, because he's consumptive and sickly, but Brother Thomas has enough Body for two folks.