Clear as Mud

Question: How does your fatebond system work at the high levels? What if a Scion has two conflicting level 10 fatebonds? Does the +/- successes cancel the other fatebond out and if so, how hard is it as a player and as the ST to track this mechanic?

Our Fatebond system, which is in dire need of an overhaul to make it less similar to some kind of byzantine tax code, is a wild and untameable beast. I salute those of you who sally forth to understand it with us. John assures me that it all makes perfect mathematical sense, and I believe him, but occasionally I think too hard about it and my eyes cross.

Fatebonds do indeed cancel one another out. If you happen to be rolling an Attribute you have a bonus to along with an Ability you have a negative to, the two will fight it out in mortal combat and you will end up with the remainder as the victor. To use some real in-game examples:

Demigod-level Sangria has a maximum level Fatebond that grants her bonuses to Wits, Fortitude and Occult, and penalties to Perception, Empathy and Survival.

If she attempts to figure out the underpinnings of a spell on the fly, her Wits + Occult roll gets the full benefit of a level 10 Fatebond. If she's attempting to find her way through the endless maze of the deep dark forest, the bonus from her Wits is equivalent to the negative from her Survival, so she rolls as normal with no modification either way. If she's trying to understand what Geoff is so upset about today, she automatically botches; her Perception and Empathy are both negative and reduce the roll to a negative number of dice, so there's no hope of her succeeding. She actually can't even tell that he's upset at all; he looks like, you know, Geoff.

This also works for smaller-scale Fatebonds; if, for example, Vivian has a Fatebond granting her +4 successes to Control and one subtracting -6 successes from Wits, she ends up rolling with a -2 penalty, the power of mortal belief in her slow-wittedness a little bit stronger than their belief in her ability to drive things. Conversely, if she has a +10 bonus to Charisma and a -4 penalty to Command, she still ends up with a +6 bonus to her Charisma + Command roll; the power of her personality is too strong to be overcome just because a few people believe she isn't good at telling people what to do.

At the third layer, there are also bonuses and penalties to purviews; in Vivian's example, if she is rolling Charisma + Command to use the Corpse Oracle boon and also has a bonus of +4 to Death, she makes the roll with a full +10 bonus (+10 from Charisma, +4 from Death, and -4 from Command) because she's doing two things that her worshipers strongly believe she can do, and only one that they disagree with. Their combined belief in her incredibly magnetic personality and ability to command the dead is so strong that they expect her to succeed even though she's not always great at issuing instructions.

This all looks insanely complicated when written down. We totally recognize that. But in play, it's actually not bad at all! The lion's share of the work is just in figuring out what a PC's negative and positive traits are, which can vary from game to game if they happen to fountain a bunch of Legend in front of mortals, or stay basically the same if they're more careful about it. We just hand the player a card at the beginning of each game with any changes to their Fatebonds from the last time on it; most of them just write it down next to the affected trait on their character sheets (i.e., +6A next to Fortitude, or -5D next to Strength, whatever) and can see at a glance what they need to add or subtract from their roll. John takes care to also try to stay on top of what their bonuses and penalties are, so he can be ready to remind them about that bonus to Chaos or penalty to Perception in case it slips through the cracks. It doesn't happen much, though; once it gets rolling, it runs pretty smoothly.

Things actually get much simpler, for both ST and player, at God, but our Fatebond page hasn't yet been updated for the changes that occur once you have functioning cults as a deity. Mea culpa, and we'll try to get that on there as soon as possible.