Realism Mechanic?

[David Berg]

Maybe you aren't guaranteed a benny for adding realism, instead maybe your chance of getting a benny increases depending on how intrusive or difficult the realism is.

Could be cool.  Just make sure that it isn't the GM arbitrating what actions activate what mechanics!  That would totally screw the competition.  But "choose to suffer 3 pts of Inconvenience in exchange for a benny on a die roll of 4+" could work...

For example: If you run out of ammo during a gunfight with the henchmen you roll a d6 and if you get a 5 or 6 you get a benny. If your gun jams before you take the final shot on a boss you roll a d6 and get a benny for the result of anything but 1.

That's obviously just a quick example (not well thought out yet), but the idea of gambling for future benefits seems interesting and potentially really fun. 

Neat!  I like where you're going with this.

A gunfight is fast and adrenaline filled, rolling 3 times, adding, comparing, checking stats and flipping through charts is not.

I agree completely.  Okay, so, it sounds like your goals are to make combat resolution both fast and colorful.  Is a given fight also a tactical exercise?  Or does the competitive nature of the game manifest in other ways, but not in a fight?

It's hard to give suggestions on "colorful" when I don't know how "fast & competitive" are being implemented.

Supposing that you could achieve "fast, tactical, and colorful".  Would you care whether the color reflected the sort of details that complex rulesets often track (like ammo depletion, jams, distractions, cover, interaction of bullet & armor types)?  Or would you be just as happy to have the color reflect more dramatic/cinematic concerns (like near-misses, slick moves, explosions, property damage, flying shrapnel, wowing bystanders)?

[JoyWriter]

Well one solution to overuse of bennies is to limit the amount you can "save up" at a time and then keep strong track of proximity. By that I mean that flubbing in events strongly connected to what you are saving up for is risky, and so people can't just get wrecked metaphorically just before the door to their main objective, and have none of their problem pass through. Now obviously doing that a little bit should be encouraged, it's part of why incentivising detail works, but how to stop absurdity?

To make such a system work failures cannot just be blank time, they must lead to something. Another idea is that repeated failures due to adding details make the failure penalty worse, or at least more persistent, as a kind of alternative death spiral, so people don't just kick their own asses for luck! But how to give that internal cause? Well firstly if you mix "appropriate" danger into the failures and require escalation in severity of the problem created for each extra fate point gained in a scene. I almost feel that this and a saving limit is too much restriction, because of how the diminishing returns would limit overuse, especially as everyone gets bored of loosing eventually. Also it could be so funny to bury an enemy in coincidence and circumstance, especially as they would have to get increasingly creative to use it! I suppose the enemy is spam and not creative ad-hoc tactics.

On the other hand, I'm not sure how realistic escalating dangers would feel; the requirement to fit it into the setting might make it fine, or it might get a bit daft. There's also the puzzle of deciding what constitutes an escalation in a consistent way.


David, that mechanism you mentioned reminds me of the power-ups like blue shells in mario kart, although the latest game shows what can happen if you push that mechanism too far; the "help you catch up" power is so good in close games you actually prefer being last because of how you can rocket to a win! In D&D 3.5, there is another example of that in the "xp catch-up" mechanism when you intentionally de-level via crafting, so as to grab xp more efficiently.