Collateral damage happens when you fight the Hulk. There's a concept from Kerberos Club: Collateral Consequences.

Players get to shunt damage they receive into their environment rather than take it on their characters. Some you can fix, and some stay forever. This represents getting knocked through buildings, having sections of the city burn down, and the death of innocent civilians. Since they're Consequences, they're also aspects, so you can compel them to do stuff like have someone in a position of power mess with you because their relative was in the bit of the city that burned, AND IT'S ALL YOUR FAULT. I find these mechanics very satisfying for the most part. They've got mechanical rules that you can interact with and modify to change up the genre slightly. For instance, for more comic book stasis type settings, you can make healing the things a bit easier. Introduce a PR department element to the game, someone to try to play down the downside of collateral damage and make the public love you again. The problem is -- and I very rarely say thing -- the system is entirely player facing. It's a resource for the players. The reason that fighting someone like the Hulk does more collateral damage is because he's got a big damage modifier, not because he's a walking natural disaster. Having him directly do collateral Consequences to the scene is problematic because, 1. it takes a player resources away, possibly without them getting to try to resist, 2. there isn't any system in place for it to happen, so I'd be making anything up, and why not see if I can just make something up that solves the first problem as well? I considered compels and successes with a cost and rejected both for my purposes. Compels only matter if they hurt you. Hulk doesn't care. When he's raging, he smashes because Hulk smashes. Environmental destruction is his thing, and he doesn't regret it. "You did that, but you wrecked the city!" "Uh, sounds good to me. Free fate points! Weeeee!" That's a problem. Likewise success with a cost. A cost is only a cost if, well, it costs you something. If you don't care, it's not a cost. It's just a thing that also happened. So neither of those work the way I want. Collateral Consequences don't work the way I want. I need some additional system that can be used both by players and the GM to wreck the environment. Preferably something that isn't complicated and adds zero additional rolls during fight scenes. My initial thought is to run something sort of like Kerberos Club's system. The PCs can soak extra damage by letting themselves get tossed through things and wreck the world. But! Certain NPCs inflict stress on the world just by acting. I just need to figure out how to do this exactly to make it simple, fun, and not over too quickly.

11 comments

Fred Hicks
Apr 30, 2013
+ 1 2 1

I think +Mike Olson may have put something like this in Atomic Robo.

Christopher Ruthenbeck
Apr 30, 2013
+ 2 3 2

Could you not just have Hulk create advantage to place a nasty aspect? Since they last as long as narratively appropriate, they could last quite a while. I'd let any one character who could stop him roll defense. Heck, you could even give the scene itself a stress track and consequences. If the scene gets taken out, the heroes loose.

kenji ikiry

Apr 30, 2013

The way to make players care is to make them what they are... Collateral Consequences. They're aspects... so use them when they least expect it. First, it would have to be something where there's a healing time for the consequence, just like personally inflicted consequencesthen affect them in social situations with the results of them. To take your Hulk example, if he smashes the city. Then you use the consequence to bring the authorities on the scene, but they aren't just after his opponent. At the point when they break out the Hulkbuster, he's in a lot more trouble.

Carrie Schutrick
Apr 30, 2013
+ 1 2 1

It occurs to me that the Hulk doesn't care...but Bruce does. The Hulk can rampage around gleefully smashing things, and then he turns back into Bruce, who immediately gains What Have I Done?, General Ross Wants Me Dead, and I'm Always Angry as Consequences.

Michael Moceri
Apr 30, 2013

Fred -- Great. Another reason why I need to wait for Atomic Robo. It seriously sounds better and better every time someone mentions something about it. Christopher -- Smashing the terrain doesn't look like creating an advantage to me. It's mostly a thing that happens. And even if it were done that way, there's no system attached to it for how it lingers and affects the world. It has no gradation of effect. This is one of those times when, "It's an aspect," isn't sufficient for me. Kenji -- I covered why that answer is insufficient for my needs. Carrie -- In this instance, in my example, Hulk is an NPC who wanders through and Cloverfields a place. Then he's gone. Sure, Bruce cares. But Bruce has no screen time. Hulk wrecked some shit and then went away, and the PCs are left holding the bag.

Carrie Schutrick
Apr 30, 2013

Ah, OK, I misunderstood.

kenji ikiry
Apr 30, 2013

Ah... I misunderstood as well that this is the NPC. But it still works- it gives players a resource, i.e. they can freely tag it as a consequence in the same manner to get backup. So, they do damage to the Hulk, he inflicts damage to the scene in order not to get taken out too quickly, and the PCs get resources (the consequences) that they can tag in order to bring the conflict to a swift resolution. Couldn't that same player facing mechanic be used for the NPCs? Or am I still missing something?

Hypnos
Apr 30, 2013

Another incredible post, +Michael Moceri Another candidate for my blog to translate, I like a lot your ideas. But I was thinking about Naruto when I read, Madara VS The First Hokage.

Josh Culbertson
Apr 30, 2013

Michael, I don't know Kerberos Club, and while I tried to figure out how Collateral Consequences worked from the above posts, I'm still in the dark about their finer points, so forgive me if this just re-solves the problem in the same way that game did. But here's two options, both of which are compatible with each other. 1.) Incidental Damage to the Environment This could easily be represented by a Stunt, or anything else you want, but certain characters are so straight-up powerful that their physical attacks do incidental damage to the environment around them. These are the thrown cars which fling debris or knock over other things, or blows which shatter glass nearby raining it on bystanders. You can easily treat it as a scaled function of the size of the hit, say, half the total shifts done. So, when the Hulk lashes out with a Fighting check and gets 7 shifts, he's dealing 3 shifts out as an incidental background effect. This incidental damage can be applied as an Attack (if you've got pedestrian NPC's or structures you want to damage), but it's probably more fun to treat it as a Create an Advantage action, which will place aspects which serve as hazards for the PC's and threats they have to eradicate. One of the PC's has to jump in and shield those pedestrians from the Falling Glass, making an appropriate Defend or Overcome check. Or they've got to put out the Incidental Fires or deal with the Crumbling Buildings or whatever. 2.) Shifting Stress to the Environment Odds are this is what Kerberos does, but I'm not sure. Perhaps players can spend a Fate Point to shift monstrous amounts of damage to the environment, but it inflicts a Consequence on the environment. These Consequences then become aspects like any other, and which have to be resolved by the PC's as those same sort of threats. When you shift stress to the environment and a Serious Consequence is dealt, it's going to need to be handled by some PC stopping that building from toppling, or making sure the bridge doesn't collapse. To me, you'd want to apply some sort of scalar bonus: I imagine the environment can eat more damage than a player cana, even a superheroic player, so perhaps the Consequences can actually serve as -4/-6/-8, to incentivize this. Mild Consequences will, of course, be easily enough dealt with, as the PC's help to clean up, but the Moderate and Serious ones are hanging around. This is why some people regard the heroes as menaces--those Consequences sit there for a while for social compels against the heroes, obligating them to help out with damage control, or else getting them labeled as public dangers, or even being the source of future threats. After all, that Serious Consequence is probably still sitting Downtown, waiting to be sprung upon the players the next time they have a huge fight there. Unless, of course, they've been good citizens and helped to resolve it, which just promotes more story. Is that helpful, or just redoing what others have done before?

Mike Olson
Apr 30, 2013

Yeah, collateral consequences are in ARRPG -- a bit changed from Fate Kerberos, but mostly the same.

Brian Rock
Apr 30, 2013

+Josh Culbertson the idea of giving the Hulk a "collateral damages" stunt seems reasonable. I'm just riffing here, but the idea of the Hulk having the choice between having the consequence affect the environment instead of the player adds another level of complication to the players' lives, and also provides a mechanism for keeping lower level supers in the fight after they're hit with an eight-shift attack.