aka an Exercise in just plain Wrong

When I first read through Achievements and Consequences, my first thought was of the positive/negative scales that are used in Fudge (partially because of a gentleman's agreement I'd had with one of my friends to only play Fudge & variants for a year). So I created a scale based on the standard 7-Trait ladder used for Fudge with Consequences (1-3) to the negative, Achievements (4-6) to the positive, and 0 being that the minimum Achievement (4) and minimum Consequence (3) both occurred. If the A&C were orthogonal, it worked; if not, massive breakage - it definitely encouraged developing different story ideas. The bell curve made the extreme results far less common and the central results the norm.

In playing that way, we hit on a secondary function - using satellite traits to add or remove dice from the roll (the primary roll was 3dF). This made the roll an exercise in competitive resource management - not necessarily a bad thing, but definitely distracting from the main game systems. Various trait points could be spent for re-rolls as well, insofar as they could be reasonably be explained to the satisfaction of the table.

As there were multiple colors of Fudge dice at the table, we could set up "side bet" A&C pairings as well. The results could then be compared and were offered as choices of where the story could go to bring other characters in to the scene indirectly. If Blue dF were at +2 and White dF were at -1, then White Consequence and Blue Achievement happened, even if Blue were acausal to White. Kind of fun, in a synchronistic sort of way.

What went wrong: It was very common for the acausal events to become more of the focus of the fiction than the key conflict of the scene at hand. It became trivial to hijack the story and basically steal someone's turn. While it could be done later as a retaliation, the social aspects of the game would often kick in and the players who were "robbed" felt bullied and violated - definitely not cool. Having a consistent arbiter would prevent this, but that would destroy part of the appeal of the game.

An error in how it was run: there was minimal drive to allot coins to satellite traits or to even make claims on the scene. This was my error in explaining Claims and Traits. It has worked much better with the updated version of the moment chart and with the improved "encouragement" to make Claims and use Traits.