Limits of Destiny

Question: You may have answered this somewhere already and I just missed it, but how do you prevent Fatebonds from spiraling out of control? If a character saves a few hundred people by holding up a collapsing building so they can escape, and they all become Fatebound, would he get a bonus to his Strength dice for each one? That would get pretty ridiculous pretty quickly. I know Scions are supposed to be powerful, but a hundred extra dice would just be annoying and insane. Did I miss something?

You did, but it's totally not your fault. We've talked about this on and off in blog posts now and then, but it's not well-explained in the Fatebond rules on the site and we wouldn't expect you to spelunk through the comments for every Fatebond-related post to try to find the crumbs of our conversations.

Whether or not you can ever prevent Fatebonds from getting "out of control" is debatable (most of our players would probably say they're always out of control), but in terms of bonuses and penalties, there's a hard cap to prevent an overwhelming amount of dice and successes from being thrown around. A single stat - whether an Attribute, Ability or Purview - can have a maximum bonus or penalty to it up to ten dice and ten automatic successes. That means that if your hypothetical Scion's roll is insane and he gets Fatebound to a hundred people at once who all want to give him a bonus to Strength, he'll only get +10/+10 as his total benefit. Conversely, if he also gets a penalty to Intelligence from the same people, it won't go any lower than -10/-10, even if all hundred of them agree on it. This prevents Scions from having hundreds upon hundreds of dice to mess with on their good rolls, and saves them from getting so Fatebound that there is literally no chance for them to ever try to make rolls involving the stats they're Fatebound away from.

This doesn't mean that Fatebonds past 10 don't exist, simply that they can't affect a Scion any more strongly with their bonuses or penalties. All hundred Fatebonds are still there, and it's important to know they are because other Fatebonds can still counteract them and affect the end result on the Scion, but there's no need for the player herself to keep track of an ever-escalating insanity of bonuses.

It's also good to remember that it's very unlikely for a Scion to get a few hundred Fatebonds in a single scene - the math on that is astronomically improbable. The Storyteller is rolling dice to determine whether or not each mortal becomes Fatebound, and it's vastly, vastly unlikely that they're all going to come up as successes. And even if they did, it's even more unlikely that they'd be Fatebound to a high degree, meaning that many of them would be only Fatebound at level one or two and have negligible effects that expire quickly. A Scion who blows 50 Legend on saving five hundred people probably will get, say, ten really strong Fatebonds, but it'd be almost impossible for him to get all five hundred, or even one hundred, at any important level.

By the way, it's probably clear by now that while all this is pretty simple for the player - how many dice to I have +/-? Great, I apply that to my roll! - it is a great deal more work for the Storyteller, who is in charge of making all those rolls to see if Fatebonds occur and then of keeping track of the results and the individual expectations of each Fatebound person. The major weakness of our Fatebond system right now is that, once you get to Legend 7 or 8 where Fatebonds become common and powerful, it is a bitch of a workload for a Storyteller. We're working on streamlining that (darn, forgot to add Fatebonds to the voting poll... next time!), but in the meantime, our rule of thumb for working with it is to avoid bogging the game down and doing as much (or little, to your taste) of the work as possible outside the game itself. When a Scion blows a ton of Legend around a bunch of mortals, we usually write down a quick note - what the Scion was doing, how much Legend/Deeds she spent, and how many mortals were around - and do all the rolling and math for the Fatebonds after the game, giving the resulting changes in bonuses and penalties to the player at the beginning of the next session. If you find yourself looking at five hundred mortals, meaning you'd have to roll five hundred times to see if they got Fatebound, our recommendation is to always boil it down to save yourself some work - roll some percentile dice first to just pull a number of those people who did get Fatebound, and then only roll for them. Ain't nobody got time to roll and record five hundred times, even between games.

By the way, our god-level Fatebond rules aren't up yet, but the cap changes once Scions get to god-level. They're the same at Legend 9 and 10, but at Legend 11, their cap rises to +15/+15, and at Legend 12 to +20/+20, reflecting how much more strongly mortal Reverence affects gods than heroes.