Though I suspect feedback to be minimal at best (does anyone even read this? Hello? *echo*echo*echo*)...

Guy recently pointed me towards a review of ORX that contained the following criticism:

"The Orcs can borrow fate faster than the GM can run down their stats, so it encourages the Orc players to simply borrow essentially unlimited fate to keep their stats from ever zeroing, thus making the huge fate total irrelevant. I'm not sure what the answer is, but the Orcs need some disincentive to simply grab as much fate as they can to jack up their scores."

It seems pretty obvious to me that you have an opportunity for jacking up the inter-player play here, thematically speaking. Fate is a pervasive force that can be justified for everything, after all. Therefore you want to make this a mechanic that provides for strategy and optimization and interesting choices that depend on the whole-board dynamic.

Therefore, how about having the Orc with the highest Fate at some specific juncture suffer somehow? The simplest thing to do would be to have the orc with the highest Fate at the end of the session face a Fate roll, but you could make this be something different as well. It's been a while since I last read the game text, but maybe you could attach the "highest Fate is picked for a screw-job" thing to something in the fiction instead of just the end of the session... like, perhaps let the orc with the current highest Fate make a Fate roll to have the whole crew avoid drastic consequences when the characters inevitably screw up; probably this wouldn't be voluntary, I imagine that the others would throw the poor guy to the wolves to help themselves out. Vote to trigger a Fate check for the orc most "favoured" by Fate at the moment in exchange for avoiding a (mechanical or fluff only?) bad thing that is in danger of affecting everybody? Majority rules, no chance to resist, or could the scapegoat contest the matter via the mechanics? I could see lots of interesting and cynical play with this sort of rule, although I'd make sure that there is no benefit to causing these Fate checks -. they're useful in avoiding consequences, but not in gaining benefits, as otherwise the other players would spam the mechanic. Only make it useful occasionally, when the majority of the orcs would be affected by something.

That end-of-session Fate check can also be made fictionally appealing by calling it the "Wintering check" or something and stating that the oldest and grizzliest orc is in the danger of keeling over as time passes in between sessions. Orc's life is nasty, brutish and short, after all. Gives the group some basis for riffing an explanation for how this particular character met his demise in between adventures, under his own kitchen table. I'd say that this would be a pretty clear reason for a player to avoid spending Fate indiscriminately, as he'd then be sure to lose his character at the end of the session. Of course one player might decide to "go nova" and make the session the last for his character, but isn't it cool that he gets to kick ass and take names before he's doomed? Having a high-Fate character in the crew would also be temporarily useful for the rest in that everybody else would avoid the "Wintering check" at session end if one player had a particularly high Fate score, although this'd catch up to them in the next session. It could also be interesting if the "Wintering check" applied to all highest-Fate orcs, even if it was a tie between two at the end of the session.

I could see doing both of those, in fact. That would solidify the idea that the reason you don't want to have the highest Fate in the group is that Fate hates orcs, and there's even a dedicated mechanic for heaping extra sorrow on the one with the highest score. It stands to reason that the players would then try to avoid getting more Fate than the next guy, causing discretion without actually punishing more than just one orc at the table. This would be good in that it wouldn't affect the balance of the game for anybody except the highest-Fate orc.

Those are some fine ideas there, Eero.

The voting idea could work: I might be able to tie that to the "when orcs help one another" rules. I'll have to reread those, though to see the ways it might be worked.

Using Fate to determine who gets the stink-eye from the GM next is an interesting concept. There might be too much room for abuse, however, if it leaves one guy stuck with the highest Fate all the time and ALWAYS taking the beating in the game. I'd have to balance that out somehow. Perhaps if you have the highest Fate you can't be chosen for a Conflict during a Scene, though the other players can pass it off on you somehow. Hrm. That's abusable. Have to think about it.

I definitely like the "Wintering" concept. I'm going to give it some more thought. I'm still concerned about the effects an automatic Fate roll against any orc could have, though. (I know the game is random and defeatist, I just don't know if I like it being THAT random and defeatist.)

Going to mull those over. Thanks for the input!

It's true that having the highest Fate could suck if you were stuck with it.

I hesitate to suggest it, but you could theoretically rip open the basis of the game's economy and make available some very rare and exceptional way of getting rid of Fate. Perhaps something that only comes up when you have more Fate than anybody else and manage to maneuver the game into a very specific sort of situation. If you could then get rid of some of that Fate or even give it to some other orc, that'd offer a way out for the highest-Fate orc. This would have to be a one-in-a-hundred sort of chance and not something guaranteed, of course. Just the slightest glimmer of hope to make the hopelessness all the more bitter. Perhaps if you roll a critical success (1 on a d20, whatever) in the wintering roll your orc "recuperates" instead of getting pneumonia and dying, allowing him to shed half of his accumulated Fate score. This would allow the highest-Fate orc to sometimes, very rarely, dodge his Fate and reduce the score, probably low enough to make somebody else the highest-Fate one for now. It seems like this wouldn't be too abusable, as you can't force the unlikely roll result, and even getting to make that roll requires you to have the highest Fate in the group, presumably making it a very lethal roll to make at all. A nice flourish would be to rule that any orc actually succeeding in "dodging fate" would have to adopt a new name for himself to fool the Gods ;)

Perhaps it would be useful to balance the extra shit you get for being the highest-Fate orc (you should give this status some spiffy name, you know) not by giving some other unrelated advantage, but by making the extra shit itself have some silver lining. If reducing Fate is on the table as a possible mechanic, one possibility would be to have the GM "pay" for giving the group grief by reducing that highest Fate score by one point every time he does whatever it is he does here. This would have the effect of giving some hope to that highest-Fate orc; presumably it wouldn't stave his inevitable doom too much, though, as he could never get below the score of the second-highest orc. And of course you could make sure that the thing the GM throws down with that Fate reduction would be more shitty than one point of Fate, even if it would come down partially on the other characters as well.

Perhaps you could even make that recuperation rule universal: any time the highest-Fate orc (and only him) has to check Fate, if he rolls a '1' he gets to halve his Fate score. It doesn't seem to me like this would have any major effect on the game (doesn't break the overall rule that Fate is irreversible, really), but it would give an unique benefit for being deeper in the dink than the others. It's also very incidious that there is a theoretical way of reducing the only inescapable fact of your orc's life, but reaching it requires driving directly towards your doom and also rolling insanely well. Suitably desperate, that.

While interesting, that seems to me to be piling one fix on top of another. Right now I'm thinking something simple is the best way to handle it. Something that doesn't change things too drastically, that is: something that doesn't add too many new rules. Also, there is already a way to reduce one's Fate score: Loot. It isn't a permanent reduction, but your Fate is effectively reduced by the amount of Loot you have, as long as you don't spend or can hang onto it (since other players can steal it).

But perhaps something like this might work: if you survive the Wintering roll, your total Fate is reduced to one point below the orc with the next highest Fate.

My main opposition is this is still lots of mucking about with Fate and its influence on play. It's no longer a gamble, but a certainty (at least for one orc) which extends its influence from "MAYBE I can get away with this!" to "I CAN'T get away with this".