The Toolbox - Roleplaying Game Hacks and Nifty Stuff

System: Spirit of the Century / Fate v3 (www.evilhat.com/?spirit)
Hack Type: Genre (modern, noir)

So, I've been thinking about running some gritty, noir-ish investigative stuff using Fate, and I swear it has nothing to do with inspiration from The Dresden Files (about to move onto TV, yay), Robin Laws' new Esoterrorists game, or the upcoming Trail of Cthulhu by Kenneth Hite. Nothing at all. I swear. Really.

Part of what I need to help the transition into a modern setting is to systemically convey that modern folks aren't psychologically built to handle lethal violence as a common occurrence of daily life. Even people who are trained for such things, like soldiers and cops, often require both casual and professional support to cope with even one violent incident, let alone several. People report all kinds of weird stuff happening in real-life gun battles, like lapses in memory, altered perception of the flow of time, slight hallucinations, loss of motor skill and muscle control, and so on as adrenaline wreaks havoc on the nervous system.

I'm not really sure why it's a prevailing trend in role-playing games to overlook just how seriously fucked up it is to point a gun at a man and pull the trigger. I could guess, but as stated in my introduction, I'm not here to editorialize. Suffice it to say, I'm interested in something a little different, and so I propose something like the following:

***

In this system, any kind of violent conflict carries a chance of inflicting permanent mental damage to the participants. Groups can adjust this dial as specifically as they want - for some people, it won't be plausible to apply this system for fistfights or any other type of combat that more often results in subdual than permanent injury or death. By default, though, I'll say it applies to all forms of violence, because I'm lazy and that makes it easier on me.

Like any other damage in SotC/Fate, this damage is expressed as stress and consequences.

Whenever you're in a violent conflict and you inflict Health stress on an opponent, you take Composure stress in return. The amount of mental stress you take is equal to the stress you inflict on the target, minus your Resolve score. So, if your Resolve is Good (+3), and you hit your opponent for 5 stress, you take a 2-stress hit on your Composure track. 

If your opponent takes a consequence as a result of the attack, add +2 to the stress you take. So, if the example above had resulted in a consequence for the defender, you would take a 4-stress hit on your Composure track.

Your mental stress is adjudicated as normal, and can bleed up into consequences, which should represent the psychological damage caused by engaging in the fight. Note that this means you can concede and be taken out in a conflict purely from your own actions, simply losing the will to fight or just being so shocked that you freeze up and can't continue. It also means that you'll be less able to participate in other social/mental conflicts if you walk away with consequences, as your damaged psyche leaves you less able to deal with further mental pressures.

And that's it. The "nicer" variant of this has you rolling Resolve as a defense against a mental "attack" that you take whenever you inflict a consequence on someone - treat minor ones as Fair (+2), moderate ones as Great (+4), severe ones as Fantastic (+6). I'd recommend letting the mental stress hang around for a few scenes if you're going to do that, to give the chance for the stress to pile up in multiple fights.

Why I thought this up on Christmas Eve, I'll never know.