Neo Mushroom Bowl is a fanfiction that takes after Roy's Sports Hall in Lemmy's Land and is the successor to the original Mushroom Bowl, featuring a series of wacky fights for a grand prize. In each of the matches in those works, the winner was determined by an audience poll—generally speaking, the character that got the most votes won the fight.
The winner of each match of Neo Mushroom Bowl is not determined so straightforwardly. Instead, the match is simulated with a tabletop RPG, one using a metacurrency that the winner of the poll gets more of.
In the interest of transparency, this is that tabletop RPG.
This page contains the full ruleset for a TTRPG also titled Neo Mushroom Bowl. It is based primarily on Evil Hat Productions' Fate Condensed, with some parts retained from Fate Core and further tweaks inspired by the Fate System Toolkit, all SRDs of which are under Creative Commons CC-BY (in case that matters for something that's not being sold).
Last updated: ??? ???, ????
If you're coming to Fate from Dungeons & Dragons, especially 5E, it may be a difficult transition. While both are TTRPGs, Fate operates in a different paradigm from D&D.
D&D is a heavy prescriptive system based in rules. Descending from wargames, what your character can do is strictly defined by specific actions that do specific things and roll specific dice. You look at the options on your character sheet, and describe what you do based on that.
Fate is a light descriptive system based in narrative. Descending from Fudge, a TTRPG made to break out of the hard math mold those earlier wargame-based systems established, what your character can do is limited primarily by what makes for a juicy dramatic story and common sense. You describe what you want to try to do, then find which rules best model that action.
To play D&D is to stage a few very complicated games of chess and construct a story around what happens to the pieces. To play Fate is to, very pointedly and explicitly, write a story together.
This does require a shift in thinking. If you're the kind of player who needs mechanical heft to carry your game, you might struggle with Fate. Many of its particular growing pains for players used to D&D should be mitigated by Neo Mushroom Bowl, due to the heavy combat-focus with prebuilt characters, but it can't mitigate all of it.
If you need a little more help adjusting, I recommend reading Shawn Merwin's article looking at Fate Core from a D&D perspective and this RPG StackExchange post.
Neo Mushroom Bowl is played assuming two to four other players, with me (supercomputer276) serving as Game Master (GM). It also requires some dice, some tokens, writing implements, paper, and something to write short notes on (e.g. small “sticky notes” or index cards); all of which should hopefully be available in Tabletop Simulator.
The game uses the following three types of dice in the course of play:
The Diamond Bluff Casino, located in the city of Onieplugmitt in the interdimensional nexus of The World Where the Worlds Cross, has announced the Neo Mushroom Bowl, a battle tournament to be hosted in their attached virtual reality stadium, the Solid Reality Arena. In this no-holds-barred combat tournament, the contenders will duke it out in "hard light" virtual arenas that are so real you'll forget they're fake. Anything can happen as Random Events can happen at any time. And, most enticing of all, in addition to a physical trophy, the winner will receive any (pre-negotiated) grand prize of their choosing!
The PCs are (at least for season 1) all villains from various video game franchises. They are not exactly like they are in the games, given more than a few of them, y'know, died. These alternate universe versions are alive, have traveled to Onieplugmitt, and also have the inclination to sign up for a battle tournament for a prize of their choosing (and, at least for this first season, they're all willing to play by the rules and not sabotage each other behind the scenes). Hey, in the infinite scope of the multiverse, anything's possible. One of the contestants is a freakin' computer virus.
All action effectively takes place in the Solid Reality Arena. The contestants are certainly going other places and doing other things between matches, but we'll only be roleplaying when they're fighting in the tournament.
See the About page for more of the "big picture" view of how the tournament works.
Neo Mushroom Bowl's implementation of Fate Core is very atypical. Each session consists of one scene, most of which is a single conflict. The exceptions are the two Grand Championship matches, in which there could potentially be more than one scene due to bracket resets, but each of them still focuses on one conflict.
Players do not make their own characters, but are assigned one of 24 different pre-built characters at the start of the session. The interviews serve to help players be familiar with their characters.
Each contestant in the tournament (or as I sometimes call them, each "fighter") has their character sheet built according to a modified version of the PC character creation rules.
All characters are built around a set of elements, with fighters possessing all of them:
Each fighter has:
An important note is that, while things like the skill list are constructed around the "tournament of video game villains" setting, all characters are built in the context of a campaign set in their home universe. Metal Sonic is built for a Sonic the Hedgehog-based campaign, Neifirst is built for a Phantasy Star-based campaign, and so on.
Aspects are short phrases that describe who a character is or what is important to them. They can relate to the character’s physical or mental qualities, history, beliefs, training, relationships, or even particularly important equipment.
The first thing to know about them is: Aspects are true. In other words, how you define your character is real and true in the story you’re telling. If you write down that your character is a Precog Sniper, then they are a precog sniper. You’ve told everyone that your character sees the future and is a crack shot with a rifle.
Aspects are used during play in combination with fate points to shift the story's direction. They can be used while spending points to improve the results of your actions, and also to introduce complications you suffer in exchange for points. The best aspects, therefore, are double-edged, able to be used both for and against the character.
We'll discuss all the different kinds of aspects later. Here's the ones used to build the contestants' initial six character aspects:
While aspects define who a character is, skills show what they can do. Each skill describes a broad activity a character might have learned through study and practice or simply have an innate talent for.
Each skill has a rating. The higher the rating, the better the character is at the skill. As a whole, your character’s skills will show you what actions they are built for, which ones they’ll get by on, and which aren’t their forte.
All characters start with a rating of Mediocre (+0) in every skill and 30 skill points. Each point put into a skill increases its rating by +1. However, there are two limits to this.
First, no skill can be better than Superb (+5). This cap remains for every character that doesn't become a Bracket Champ.
Second, skills must maintain a "column" structure. This means at no point can someone have more skills at a given rating higher than Average (+1) than they do at the rating below it. So if you want to have three different skills at Good (+3), then you need at least three others at Fair (+2) and at least another three at Average (+1). This naturally excludes Average (+1) skills, thanks to being on the "ground"; you can have more Average (+1) skills than Mediocre (+0) ones.
A good starting point is to spend the first 20 points building a "pyramid:" one Great (+4) skill, two Good (+3) skills, three Fair (+2) skills, and four Average (+1) skills. The remaining 10 can then build from there.
Character sheets only ever list skills of +1 rating and above, so assume any skill not listed for them is at +0.
In Fate, including Neo Mushroom Bowl, all ratings are organized into a ladder of adjectives:
| Rating | Adjective |
|---|---|
| +8 | Legendary |
| +7 | Epic |
| +6 | Fantastic |
| +5 | Superb |
| +4 | Great |
| +3 | Good |
| +2 | Fair |
| +1 | Average |
| +0 | Mediocre |
| -1 | Poor |
| -2 | Terrible |
| -3 | Catastrophic |
| -4 | Horrifying |
I'm inclined to use the left side personally, but either side can be used interchangeably so long as everyone knows what you're talking about.
This is a brief list of the 15 skills used in Neo Mushroom Bowl. Full details of skills and some things they can do is a little later.
A character's refresh is the minimum number of fate points they start each session with. If they ended the last session with less fate points than this, they go back up to this many; but if they ended with more, they stay at that amount. (This doesn't apply to fate points given through the audience poll. Those will be discussed when we get to talking about fate points in general.)
All contestants start with a refresh of 4. Refresh can be traded for stunts, to a minimum of 1 refresh.
While every character has access to all the skills—even if they are Mediocre (+0) at most of them—each character has some unique stunts. Stunts are the cool techniques, tricks, or bits of equipment that make a character unique and interesting. Where skills are about a character’s broad competencies, stunts are about specific areas of excellence; most of them give you a bonus in particular circumstances or let you do something that other characters simply can’t.
Each character begins with five free stunts. Additional stunt slots can be purchased for 1 refresh each, to a minimum of 1 refresh. If the character is taking an extra (see Extras), they can pay refresh costs with these free stunts 1:1.
Stunts are created fresh for each character. A stunt can do most anything within a specific scale of power. That scale includes, but is not limited to, the following:
Stunts thus might be written as:
Stress and consequences are how characters withstand the physical and mental tolls of the arena. We'll talk more about how they work when we get to conflicts, but here's what you need to know now.
Stress is tracked with... well, stress tracks, consisting of a series of boxes of escalating point value. Most characters have two, one for physical stress and one for mental stress, that are four boxes long each (so one 1-point box, one 2-point box, one 3-point box, and one 4-point box).
4
Each track is tied to a skill, and if that skill's rating is high enough, the track gets extra boxes; this is Tank for physical stress, and Will for mental stress. A track gains a 5-point box if its skill is at Average (+1) and higher, and a 6-point box at Good (+3) and higher.
Fighters also have three consequence slots, with space for one mild (2-point) consequence, one moderate (4-point) one, and one severe (6-point) one. A character with a +5 rating in a skill tied to a stress track gains an extra mild consequence slot that can only be used for damage to that track.
In a game of Neo Mushroom Bowl, you will control the actions of your assigned character, contributing to the story you are all telling together. In general, the GM will narrate the world and the actions of non-player characters (NPCs), and the other players will narrate their individual contestant’s actions.
To act, remember the first principle: fiction first. Say the action you want to take, and then figure out how to make the system do it. Most of the time, this consists of picking both the most relevant skill and one of the four actions ocad (which we'll talk about in a bit). Your character’s aspects inform what they can attempt and help set the context for interpreting the results. Most people couldn’t even try to perform emergency surgery on a disemboweled ally, but with an aspect establishing a medical background, you can try. Without that aspect you might at best buy a few moments for some last words.
In most cases (in a regular TTRPG), your action succeeds by itself, if it's not particularly hard and no one's trying to stop you. But if it is hard, or if someone is trying to stop you, or it could be really interesting actually if you didn't succeed, that's when the dice come out. Driving to the airport doesn’t require a roll of the dice. Racing down the highway to a waiting plane while being pursued by a chainsaw-wielding G.U.N. semi-truck, on the other hand, is a perfect time to roll the dice.
Taking an action works as follows:
Your goal is for your effort to be higher than your opposition. If what's stopping you is some environmental feature or situation, then that's passive opposition and you're rolling to beat a static effort value called its difficulty, set by the GM. If what's stopping you is another character, they provide active opposition by rolling a defense action (following the same steps) and whoever puts up the highest effort wins.
If you come up short of your target and don't feel like taking a failure right now, you have a couple options to modify your roll before locking in your result. Specifically, you can invoke aspects and use stunts.
If one of the aspects in play could be relevant to what's happening, you can invoke that aspect. Do so by describing how that aspect justifiably helps with your current action. Invoking an aspect costs either a fate point or a free invoke on that aspect if you have access to one.
Invokes are subject to the bogus rule: if the invoker's justification doesn’t sound right, make sense, or fit the tone, anyone at the table is free to call bogus on it. The invoker then has the chance, if they like, to have a quick discussion about how they think the aspect fits. If the challenger is convinced and changes their mind, the invoke goes through; but otherwise, drop it and try a different one. The bogus rule is in here to help everyone at the table have a good time. Someone invoking Great at First Impressions to throw a car is likely bogus. But maybe that character has a supernatural stunt that makes them incredibly strong, strong enough to plausibly throw a car, and this is their opening gambit in a fight with a horrible monster. In that case, maybe Great at First Impressions is plausible.
Each invoked aspect gives you one of the following:
You can invoke multiple aspects for the same roll, but each aspect can be invoked at most once per roll. The exception is if you have multiple free invokes on that aspect; you can use as many of those as you want.
(NOTE on worldline aspects: If a character and an arena share the same worldline aspect, those are effectively the same aspect, so you can't invoke both the character and arena copies of them for the same roll. Instead, the presence of the arena copy makes invoking the character copy a lot more justifiable.)
Some stunts can give a bonus to certain skill rolls, usually +2, if their specific criteria are met. Consider creating advantages and describing your actions carefully to help you meet those criteria.
Once the efforts of all characters involved are determined, find the difference between your effort and the target difficulty or opposition's effort (subtract that from your effort). The result is the number of shifts you scored—how many steps on the adjective ladder are between the two of you. The outcome of your action depends on the number of shifts.
| No. of Shifts: Outcome |
Possible ways it plays out |
|---|---|
| -1 or less shifts (effort < opposition): Failure |
|
| 0 shifts (effort = opposition): Tie |
|
| 1 or 2 shifts: Succeed |
You get what you want with no additional cost. The fiction defines what "success" looks like at any given time. |
| 3 or more shifts: Succeed with Style |
You get what you want, and you get a bit more on top of that. |
There are four actions you can roll, each with a specific purpose and effect on the story: overcome an obstacle with your skills, create an advantage to turn the situation to your benefit, attack and harm an enemy, and defend against your enemy trying to do those things against you.
Overcome to surmount obstacles with your skills.
Overcome is a very straightforward action. You have an immediate goal you want to achieve, but something's in your way—a wall to climb, a crowded street to race through, clues to a mystery to put together, a bar fight to avoid. Whatever it is, this is how you get past it to achieve your goal. That goal can include getting rid of an obstacle presented by a situation aspect, removing that apsect.
Outcomes:
Create a new situation aspect or gain a benefit from an existing aspect.
Use your skills to shift the direction of the story and stack the deck in your party's favor. Changing circumstances (like barring a door or forming a plan), learning new information (researching a monster's weakness), and making use of already known information (giving the CEO some scotch he likes) all fall under this action.
You can choose to either create a new aspect or take advantage of an already existing aspect by adding free invokes to it (which both you and your allies can use). The latter also lets you discover existing unknown aspects, ones you know are there but don't know the text for.
Regardless of which, you'll face active opposition if you're trying to add aspects or free invokes to an opponent, and passive opposition otherwise.
Create a new aspect: Specify the aspect you're creating and who or what you're attaching it to - the environment, an ally, an opponent?
Outcomes:
Take advantage of an existing aspect: Specify which aspect you're trying to add free invokes to. You can do this to either a known or unknown aspect.
Outcomes:
Attack to harm the enemy.
Oh yeah, you're gonna be using this one a lot. This is how you take out opponents - kill monsters, knock out innocent guards, or insult someone so hard it does emotional damage. Or, in the Neo Mushroom Bowl tournament, win the match. That said, there are only a handful of skills that can even be used with this action—some just aren't built for directly inflicting harm. Instead, they can help you and your allies set up, creating advantages you can invoke during your attack roll.
The skill used to attack determines its damage type - that is, which of your opponent's stress tracks will be the one mitigating the damage if your attack lands. Which skill you're using will naturally set what damage type you can do—Fight isn't made to do mental damage.
Outcomes:
Defend to survive an attack or interfere with a foe’s action.
Those other three things we just talked about? Other people are trying to do them to you too, trying to overcome obstacles you present, set up advantages on you, and attack you. A lot. Don't take that lying down! Provide active opposition! Defend yourself!
Defend is the only reflexive action; you do it automatically any time you're targeted by someone else's action, and it never counts as your action in a conflict exchange. What skill you defend with will generally be based on what skill your enemy is rolling.
Outcomes:
Now that you know about the different actions, let's go in detail about the skills you can use with them. Each description contains a list of game actions that you can use the skill for, as well as some sample stunts associated with each skill. These lists are not exhaustive—consider them inspiration.
If an action icon is faded out, that means that most of the time you won't be able to use that skill for that action unless a stunt or other effect specifies otherwise. But there are some edge cases where you could, if you can come up with a reasonable way that specific skill can be used that way that the GM accepts.
Command
Command is the skill of being the Boss and commanding the minions below you in the villain hierarchy. With your network of cronies, henchmen, and mooks as your sword, you enforce your will on the world.
NOTE: You cannot put skill points into Command without having an attached aspect indicating what sorts of minions you have at your disposal.
oOvercome: You use Command to overcome any obstacle you can throw subordinates at. This includes searching for people, researching hidden information, and directing an army to raze the hero's village, an action which could not ever possibly backfire.
cCreate an Advantage: Command lets you know the perfect minion to talk to for anything you might need, or to decide that perfect minion already works for you. It’s likely that you’ll create story details with this skill, represented by aspects. You can also create an advantage that represents what your spy network can tell you about a particular individual, object, or location.
aAttack: Command alone cannot be used to harm someone. If you send your goons to break someone's kneecaps, that's just the goons using Fight.
dDefend: Command serves as your primary social defense if someone tries to hurt your reputation with your troops. You might also use it to keep someone else's Trick or Command from poaching your minions for themselves, or keep your minions from deserting you.
Special: An Average (+1) or higher Command rating is needed to take the Summoning extra (in addition to points of refresh), letting you summon minions to join you in the arena. Details can be found in the Summoning extra's description in the Extras chapter.
Command Stunts
- Wall of Bodies: Whenever someone makes a melee physical attack against you, you can spend a fate point to pull one of your minions in the same zone as you in their way, directing the attack at them instead.
- Demagogue: +2 to Command when you’re delivering an inspiring speech to your minions. (The results are considered a zone effect.)
- The Weight of Reputation: You can use Command instead of Sway to create advantages based on the fear generated by the sinister reputation you’ve cultivated for yourself and your minion army. You should have an appropriate aspect to pair with this stunt.
Fight
Nothing is more important in a combat tournament than knowing how to combat. The Fight skill covers all forms of close-quarters melee combat, both unarmed and using weapons. For the ranged weapons equivalent, see Shoot.
oOvercome: Since you don't really use Fight outside of a conflict, it's not often used to overcome obstacles. You might use it to display your fighting prowess in a demonstration, or to participate in some kind of regulated bout or sport fighting- Wait, that's this entire game, nevermind, you're not using Fight to overcome.
cCreate an Advantage: You’ll probably use Fight for most of the advantages you create in a match. Any number of special moves can be covered with advantages: a targeted strike to stun, a “dirty move,” disarming, and so on. You could even use Fight to assess another fighter’s style, spotting weaknesses in his or her form that you can exploit.
aAttack: This is self-explanatory. You make physical attacks with Fight, targeting enemies in the same zone as you.
dDefend: You use Fight to defend against any other attack or create an advantage attempt made with Fight, as well as pretty much any action where violently interposing yourself could prevent it from happening. You can’t use this skill to defend against Shoot attacks, unless your worldline is fantastical enough that you can catch missiles or swat them from the air or use laser swords to deflect blasters.
Fight Stunts
- Heavy Hitter: When you succeed with style on a Fight attack and choose to reduce the result by one to gain a boost, you gain a full situation aspect with a free invocation instead.
- Backup Weapon: Whenever someone’s about to hit you with a Disarmed situation aspect or something similar, spend a fate point to declare you have a backup weapon. Instead of a situation aspect, your opponent gets a boost, representing the momentary distraction you suffer having to switch.
- Finishing Move: Once per scene, when you force an opponent to take a consequence, you can spend a fate point to increase the consequence’s severity (so mild becomes moderate, moderate becomes severe). If your opponent was already going to take a severe consequence, he must either take a severe consequence and a second consequence or be taken out.
Know
The Lore skill is about knowledge and education. This generally covers topics that would be considered mundane for your worldline, but if magic is mundane for you, well...
oOvercome: You can use Know to overcome any obstacle that requires applying your character’s knowledge to achieve a goal. For example, you might roll Know to decipher some ancient language on a tomb wall, under the presumption that your character might have researched it at some point. Frankly, you can use Know as a go-to skill any time you need to know if your character can answer a difficult question, where some tension exists in not knowing the answer.
cCreate an Advantage: Know provides a lot of very flexible opportunities to create advantages, provided you can research the subject in question. More often than not, you’ll be using Know to get a story detail, some obscure bit of information that you uncover or know already, but if that information gives you an edge in a future scene, it might take the form of an aspect. Likewise, you can use Know to create advantages based on any subject matter your character might have studied.
aAttack: You can't harm someone by knowing stuff, despite what most forum members on the Internet would have you believe.
dDefend: Know can't be used to defend.
Know Stunts
- Specialist: Choose a field of specialization, such as herbology, criminology, or zoology. You get a +2 to all Lore rolls relating to that field of specialization.
- No, That's Wrong!: When someone tries to use Trick to lie about something you could have learned about or looked up, you can defend against it with Know instead of Will.
- I’ve Read about That!: You’ve read hundreds—if not thousands—of books on a wide variety of topics. You can spend a fate point to use Lore in place of any other skill for one roll or exchange, provided you can justify having read about the action you’re attempting.
Move
The Move skill represents your character’s general level of physical fitness, whether through training, natural gifts, or series-specific means (like magic or genetic alteration). It’s how good you are at moving your body. Any particularly action-y character makes good use of it.
oOvercome: Move allows you to overcome any obstacle that requires physical movement—jumping, running, climbing, swimming, etc. If it resembles something you’d do in the decathlon, you roll Move. You use overcome actions with Move to move between zones in a conflict if there’s an barrier aspect or some other obstacle in your way.
cCreate an Advantage: When you’re creating an advantage with Move, you’re jumping to high ground, running faster than the opponent can keep up with, or performing dazzling acrobatic maneuvers in order to confound your foes.
aAttack: Move is not meant as an attack skill.
dDefend: Move is the catch-all skill for defending against physical damage by dodging. It's also good for defending against characters trying to move past you, if you're in a position to physically interfere with whoever's making the attempt.
Move Stunts
- Sprinter: During conflict, your regular movement covers two zones without rolling, assuming no barriers are in your way.
- Hardcore Parkour: +2 to overcome actions with Athletics if you are in a chase across rooftops or a similarly precarious environment.
- Dazing Counter: When you succeed with style on a defend action against an opponent’s Fight roll, you automatically counter with some sort of nerve punch or stunning blow. You get to attach the Dazed situation aspect to your opponent with a free invoke, instead of just a boost.
Notice
The Notice skill involves just that—noticing things. It specifically represents a character’s overall perception, ability to pick out details at a glance, and other powers of observation. Usually, the kinds of details you get from it are more superficial, but you also don’t have to expend as much effort to find them.
oOvercome: You don’t really use Notice to overcome obstacles too often but when you do it’s used in a reactive way: noticing something in a scene, hearing a faint sound, spotting the concealed gun in that guy’s waistband. Note that this isn’t license for GMs to call for Notice rolls left and right to see how generally observant the players’ characters are; that’s boring. Instead, call for Notice rolls when succeeding would result in something interesting happening and failing would result in something just as interesting.
cCreate an Advantage: You use Notice to create aspects based on direct observation—looking over a room for details that stand out, finding an escape route in a debris-filled building, noticing someone sticking out in a crowd, etc. When you’re watching people, Notice can tell you what’s going on with them externally; for internal changes, see Sway. You might also use Notice to declare that your character spots something you can use to your advantage in a situation, such as a convenient Escape Route when you’re trying to get out of a building, or a Subtle Weakness in the enemy’s line of defense. For example, if you’re in a barroom brawl you could make a Notice roll to say that you spot a puddle on the floor, right next to your opponent’s feet that could cause him to slip.
aAttack: Notice isn’t really used for attacks.
dDefend: You can use Notice to defend against any uses of Sneak to get the drop on you or ambush you, or to discover that you’re being observed.
Special: At the start of conflict, the character with the highest Notice rating is the one that goes first.
Notice Stunts
- Danger Sense: You have an almost preternatural capacity for detecting danger. Your Notice skill works unimpeded by conditions like total concealment, darkness, or other sensory impairments in situations where someone or something intends to harm you.
- Hyperfocus: Select a particular hobby or interest. +2 to Notice rolls that would let you find anything related to that hobby.
- Reactive Shot: You can use Notice instead of Shoot to make quick, reactive shots that don’t involve a lot of aiming. However, because you’re having a knee-jerk reaction, you’re not allowed to concretely identify your target before using this stunt. So, for example, you might be able to shoot at someone you see moving in the bushes with this stunt, but you won’t be able to tell if it’s friend or foe before you pull the trigger. Choose carefully!
Operate
The Operate skill covers the operation of vehicles of all kinds. Planes, trains, automobiles, boats, tanks, spaceships, humongous battle mechs... If you're sitting at any kind of directional control, Operate has you covered.
oOvercome: Operate is the equivalent of Move when you’re in a vehicle—you use it to successfully accomplish movement in the face of difficult circumstances, like rough terrain, small amounts of clearance, or stunt driving.
cCreate an Advantage: You can use Operate to determine the best way to get somewhere in a vehicle, and a good enough roll might allow you to learn features of the route that get expressed as aspects, or declare that you know a Convenient Shortcut or something similar.
You can also just read the Move description, and then make it about a vehicle. Advantages created using Drive often revolve around getting good positioning, doing a fancy maneuver (Did a Barrel Roll, anyone?), or putting your opponent in a bad spot.
Lastly, Operate should be your fallback skill for using any features of a battlecraft that isn't covered by another skill.
aAttack: Generally speaking, Operate doesn't work as an attack skill unless your plan is to ram your vehicle into something. Ramming into another vehicle will just deal the same amount of damage to you as you inflict on them. Even if you're piloting some kind of battlecraft, attacking with it would still be done with Fight or Shoot, depending on its weapon loadout.
dDefend: Avoiding damage to a vehicle in a physical conflict is one of the most common uses of Operate. You can also use it to defend against advantages being created against you or overcome actions of someone trying to move past you in a vehicle.
Operate Stunts
- Hard to Shake: +2 to Drive whenever you’re pursuing another vehicle in a chase scene.
- Who Needs Auto-Aim?: If you're driving a battlecraft equipped with a gun or other projectile weapon, you can attack a target in any other zone (line of sight willing) using Operate instead of Shoot.
- Ramming Speed!: When ramming another vehicle, you ignore two damage. So if you ram and deal four damage, you only take two yourself.
Shoot
The counterpart to Fight, Shoot is the skill of using ranged weaponry. Guns, missile launchers, slingshots, hand grenades—if you're hitting from a distance (and not using magic), you're Shooting.
oOvercome: Unless, for some reason, you need to demonstrate your Shoot ability in a non-conflict situation, you probably won’t be using this skill for normal obstacles much. And Neo Mushroom Bowl is nothing but conflict situations.
cCreate an Advantage: Shoot can be used to perform a wide variety of moves, like trick shots, keeping someone under heavy fire, and the like. If you wanna be cinematic, you might even be able to disarm people and pin their sleeves to walls—pretty much anything you’ve seen in an action movie. You could also make the argument for creating aspects based on your knowledge of guns (like placing a Prone to Jams aspect on an opponent’s gun).
aAttack: This skill does physical damage. As befits ranged weapons, you can hit opponents up to two zones away from you, though this is subject to having a clear line of sight.
dDefend: Shoot is unique in that it doesn’t really have a defense component to it—you’d use Athletics for that. You could use it to lay down some covering fire—which might act as a defense for your allies or provide opposition to someone else’s movement—though it could just as easily be represented by creating an advantage (Covering Fire or Hail of Bullets, for example).
Shoot Stunts
- Sniper: If you're in a high place and have the appropriate weapon for it, you can make a Shoot attack against anyone you can see from your perch, regardless of zone distance.
- Called Shot: During a Shoot attack, spend a fate point and declare a specific condition you want to inflict on a target, like Shot in the Hand. If you succeed, you place that as a situation aspect on them in addition to hitting them for stress.
- Uncanny Accuracy: Once per conflict, stack an additional free invoke on an advantage you’ve created to represent the time you take to aim or line up a shot (like In My Sights).
Sneak
The Sneak skill allows you to avoid detection, both when hiding in place and trying to move about unseen. It pairs well with the Steal skill.
oOvercome: You can Sneak to get past any situation that primarily depends on you not being seen. Sneaking past sentries and security, hiding from a pursuer, avoiding leaving evidence as you pass through a place, and any other such uses all fall under the purview of Sneak.
cCreate an Advantage: You’ll mainly use Sneak to create aspects on yourself, setting yourself in an ideal position for an attack or ambush in a conflict. That way, you can be Well-Hidden when the guards pass by and take advantage of that, or Hard to Pin Down if you’re fighting in the dark.
aAttack: Sneak isn't used to attack.
dDefend: You can use this to foil Notice attempts to pinpoint you or seek you out.
Sneak Stunts
- Face in the Crowd: +2 to any Stealth roll to blend into a crowd. What a “crowd” means will depend on the environment—a subway station requires more people to be crowded than a small bar.
- Ninja Vanish: Once per scene, you can vanish while in plain sight by spending a fate point, using a smoke pellet or other mysterious technique. This places the Vanished boost on you. While you’re vanished, no one can attack or create an advantage on you until after they’ve succeeded at an overcome roll with Notice to suss out where you went (basically meaning they have to give up an exchange to try). This aspect goes away as soon as you invoke it, or someone makes that overcome roll.
- Slippery Target: Provided you’re in darkness or shadow, you can use Stealth to defend against Shoot attacks from enemies that are at least one zone away.
Steal
Sure, you may be a villain, but that doesn't mean you're good at capital-C Crime. The Steal skill covers your character's aptitude for stealing things and getting into places that are off-limits. This skill also includes a proficiency in crime-committing technology, allowing the character to hack security systems, disable alarm systems, and overall pretend to be Carmen Sandiego.
oOvercome: As stated above, Steal allows you to overcome any obstacle related to theft or infiltration. Bypassing locks and traps, pickpocketing and filching, covering your tracks, and other such activities all fall under the purview of this skill.
cCreate an Advantage: You can case a location with Steal, to determine how hard it will be to break into and what kind of security you’re dealing with, as well as discover any vulnerabilities you might exploit. You can also examine the work of other burglars to determine how a particular heist was done, and create or discover aspects related to whatever evidence they may have left behind.
aAttack: Steal isn't used for attacks.
dDefend: Same here. It's not really a conflict skill, so there's not a lot of opportunities to use it to defend.
Steal Stunts
- Always a Way Out: +2 on Steal rolls made to create an advantage whenever you’re trying to escape from a location.
- Security Specialist: You don’t have to be present to provide active opposition to someone trying to overcome security measures you put in place or worked on. (Normally, a character would roll against passive opposition for that.)
- Talk the Talk: You can use Steal in place of Command whenever you’re dealing specifically with other thieves and burglars.
Sway
Sway is the skill of emotional manipulation. Most of the time, you'll use it to elicit negative reactions—fear, anger, shame, etc. But you can also use it to creative positive reactions—trust, loyalty, bravery, etc. But let's make no bones about it: this is manipulation, and you're only doing this because there's something in it for you.
Sway also makes you decent at reading the mark's current emotional state, so you know how easy it'll be to push them in a certain direction.
To use Sway to invoke an emotion, you need some kind of justification. That could come entirely from situation, or because you have an aspect that’s appropriate, or because you’ve created an advantage with another skill (like Trick), or because you’ve assessed your target’s aspects (by reading them with... also Sway).
This skill requires that your target can feel emotions—robots and zombies typically can’t be provoked.
oOvercome: You can Sway someone into doing what you want in a fit of emotional pique. You might intimidate them for information, piss them off so badly that they act out, or scare minions into running away. They oppose with Will.
cCreate an Advantage: You can create advantages representing momentary emotional states, like Enraged, Shocked, or Hesitant. Your target opposes with Will. On the positive side, you can boost up your allies with states like Encouraged or Rallied.
aAttack: You can make mental attacks with Sway, to do emotional harm to an opponent. Your relationship with the target and the circumstances you’re in figure a great deal into whether or not you can use this action.
If your opposing contestant uses the Summoning extra, Sway can also be used to make morale attacks. See the Summoning extra for more details.
dDefend: Being good at swaying others doesn’t make you better at avoiding it yourself. You need Will for that.
Sway Stunts
- Lie Whisperer: +2 to all Sway rolls made to discern or discover lies, whether they’re directed at you or someone else.
- Draw Aggro: When you create an advantage on an opponent using Sway, you can use your free invoke to become the target of that character’s next relevant action, drawing their attention away from another target.
- Pep Talk: Once per conflict, you can spend a fate point to clear two of an ally's mental stress boxes. You can't use this on yourself.
Tank
The counterpart to Move, Tank represents the character’s natural physical aptitudes, such as raw strength and endurance.
oOvercome: You can use Tank to overcome any obstacles that require the application of brute force—most often to overcome a barrier aspect—or any other physical impedance, like prison bars or locked gates.
cCreate an Advantage: Tank has a lot of potential for advantages in physical conflict, usually related to grappling and holding someone in place, making them Pinned or Locked Down. You might also use it as a way of discovering physical impairments possessed by the target—grappling the old mercenary tells you that he has a Bum Leg or somesuch.
aAttack: Tank is not used to harm people directly—see the Fight skill for that.
dDefend: Though you don’t generally use Tank to defend against attacks, you can use it to provide active opposition to someone else’s movement, provided you’re in a small enough space that you can effectively use your body to block access. You might also interpose something heavy and brace it to stop someone from getting through.
Special: Tank is tied to the physical stress track, and as such provides an extra physical stress box at Average (+1) and higher, and another at Good (+3) or higher. At Superb (+5) and higher, you also get an extra mild consequence slot used to mitigate physical damage only.
Tank Stunts
- Vice Grip: When another character tries to steal a handheld gear aspect from you, you can defend with Tank instead of Fight to make your grip on the item too tight to finagle it away.
- Take the Blow: You can use Physique to defend against Fight attacks made with fists or blunt instruments, though you always take 1 shift of stress on a tie.
- Tough as Nails: Once per session, at the cost of a fate point, you can reduce the severity of a moderate consequence that’s physical in nature to a mild consequence (if your mild consequence slot is free), or erase a mild consequence altogether.
Tap
The Tap skill represents your attunement with the forces of everything supernatural, metanormal, or just plain weird; and your ability to harness—that is to say, tap into—that attunement and shape it to your will. To be specific, it lets you use what counts as "magic" in terms of your worldline. Whether it's harnessing arcane knowledge, channeling the power of a deity, "magitek", or the spell list of your class in an RPG, if it's identified in that world's fiction as magic or supernatural and/or your home game lets you do it for an MP cost, the Tap skill lets you do it here.
NOTE: You cannot put skill points into Tap without having an attached aspect indicating you have access to "magic;" this aspect can be what you're tapping into or specific fields / schools.
oOvercome: Tap can be heavy-handed when it comes to overcoming obstacles, but it has its uses, such as by blasting boulders. A show of magic might also serve to intimidate some rubes into helping you.
cCreate an Advantage: Tap really shows its flexibility in the variety of possible advantages it can create. Help your allies by with blessings and buffs of speed and strength. Curse your opponents with debilitating debuffs to slow or weaken. Twist the environment to put up barriers of fire or ice, get to high ground, or cleanse the area of impurities. If your home game lets you do that (especially with an MP cost), you can do it here.
aAttack: Whether classic attack magic or telepathically transmitting hurt, there's plenty of ways to harm others with Tap. Attacks with Tap could be either physical or mental, following the nature of the attack. It can also target someone in your zone or someone up to two zones away for the same reasons. Make sure to settle on what range you have and damage type you're doing before you throw the dice.
dDefend: Use your own Tap to protect yourself from the Tap attacks and advantages of enemies.
Tap Stunts
- Dedicated Caster: Select one "type" of magic, such as an element or support ability (if there's a way your home game divides spells, use those). You get +2 to Tap rolls to use such magic.
- I Cast Fireball Centered on Myself: If you have an aspect that indicates you possess fire magic, you can spend a fate point to turn your Tap attack action into a zone attack on your current zone.
- Healing Magic: When you succeed at creating an advantage with Tap on an ally, you can use your free invoke to clear 1 of either their physical or mental stress boxes.
Tinker
Tinker is the skill of working with machines, for good or ill. Most of the time, this includes repairing, upgrading, and inventing any kind of primarily non-magical technology; simply using tech falls under other skills like Shoot, Tap, or Operate. That said, operating machines that aren't vehicles is this instead of Operate.
oOvercome: Tinker allows you to build, break, or fix machinery, presuming you have the time and tools you need. Often, actions with Tinker happen as one component of a more complex situation, making it a popular skill for challenges. For example, if you’re just fixing a broken door, neither success nor failure is interesting; you should just succeed and move on. Now, if you’re trying to get your car to start while a pack of werewolves is hunting you…
cCreate an Advantage: You can use Tinker to create aspects representing features of a piece of machinery, pointing out useful features or strengths you can use to your advantage (Armor-Plated, Rugged Construction) or a vulnerability for you to exploit (Flaw in the Cross-Beam, Hasty Work).
Creating Tinker advantages can also take the form of quick and dirty sabotage or jury-rigging on mechanical objects in the scene. For example, you might create a Makeshift Pulley to help you get to the platform above you, or throw something into the ballista that’s firing on you to give it a Jammed Pivoting Joint and make it harder to hit you.
aAttack: You're probably won't use Tinker to attack in a conflict, unless the conflict is specifically about using machinery, like with siege weaponry. Usually, any kind of weapon you end up crafting will likely use a different skill to attack with it—a guy who makes a sword still needs Fight to wield it well!
dDefend: As with attacking, Tinker doesn’t defend, unless you’re somehow using it as the skill to control a piece of machinery that you block with.
Tinker Stunts
- Always Making Useful Things: You don’t ever have to spend a fate point to declare that you have the proper tools for a particular job using Tinker, even in extreme situations (like being imprisoned and separated from all your stuff). This source of opposition is just off the table.
- Better than New!: Whenever you succeed with style on an overcome action to repair a piece of machinery, you can immediately give it a new situation aspect (with a free invoke) reflecting the improvements you’ve made, instead of just a boost.
- Surgical Strike: When using Tinker in a conflict involving machinery, you can filter out targets from any zone attacks you make.
Trick
Trick is the skill about lying to and misdirecting people.
oOvercome: Use Trick to bluff your way past someone, or to get someone to believe a lie, or to get something out of someone because they believe in one of your lies. Other contestants get a +2 to their defend rolls when you lie to them because the nature of the tournament means they know what your stake in the matter is.
Trick also allows you to do small tricks of slight-of-hand and misdirection.
cCreate an Advantage: Use Trick to create momentary distractions, cover stories, or false impressions. You could feint in a swordfight, putting an opponent Off-Balance and setting you up for an attack. You could do the whole, "What's that over there!" trick to give you a Head Start when you run away. You could establish a Wealthy Noble Cover Story for when you attend a royal ball. You could trick someone into revealing one of their aspects or other information.
aAttack: Trick is an indirect skill that creates a lot of opportunities you can capitalize on, but it doesn’t do direct harm to an individual.
dDefend: You can use Trick to throw off Investigation attempts with false information and to defend against efforts made to discern your true motives with the Empathy skill.
Trick Stunts
- Ventriloquist: You get +2 to Trick rolls that involve throwing your voice.
- Lies upon Lies: +2 to create a Trick advantage against someone who has believed one of your lies already during this session.
- Mind Games: You can use Trick in place of Sway to make mental (and morale) attacks, as long as you can make up a clever lie as part of the attack.
Will
The Will skill represents your character’s general level of mental fortitude, the same way that Physique represents your physical fortitude.
oOvercome: You can use Will to pit yourself against obstacles that require mental effort. Puzzles and riddles can fall under this category, as well as any mentally absorbing task, like deciphering a code. Use Will when it’s only a matter of time before you overcome the mental challenge, and Know if it takes something more than brute mental force to get past it.
cCreate an Advantage: You can use Will to place aspects on yourself, representing a state of deep concentration or focus.
aAttack: Will isn't really used for attacks. If you have psychic powers, that'd be done with Tap.
dDefend: Will is the main skill you use to defend against mental attacks from Sway or Tap, representing your control over your reactions.
Special: Will is tied to the mental stress track, and as such provides an extra mental stress box at Average (+1) and higher, and another at Good (+3) or higher. At Superb (+5) and higher, you also get an extra mild consequence slot used to mitigate mental damage only.
Will Stunts
- Strength From Determination: Use Will instead of Physique on any overcome rolls representing feats of strength.
- Hard Boiled: You can choose to ignore a mild or moderate consequence for the duration of the scene. It can’t be compelled against you or invoked by your enemies. At the end of the scene it comes back worse, though; if it was a mild consequence it becomes a moderate consequence, and if it was already moderate, it becomes severe.
- Indomitable: +2 to defend against Sway attacks specifically related to intimidation and fear.
By default, skills follows these guidelines:
Other skills may gain permission to attack or defend under special circumstances, as determined by the GM or table consensus. Some stunts may grant broader, guaranteed permission when circumstances might otherwise not do so. When a skill can’t be used to attack or defend but might help with it, prepare for it by using that skill with the create an advantage action, and use the free invokes generated on your next attack or defend roll.
An aspect is a word or phrase that describes something special about a person, place, thing, situation, or group. Almost anything you can think of can have aspects. A person might have a reputation as the Greatest Sharpshooter in the Wasteland (see below for more about these kinds of aspects). A room might be On Fire after you knock over an oil lamp. After an encounter with a monster, you might be Terrified. Aspects let you change the story in ways that go along with your character’s tendencies, skills, or problems.
Fate points are a metacurrency both players and the GM have to influence the game. Keep track of them using some kind of token.
Each contestant starts each session with at least their refresh score in fate points. If they have more than that going into the session, they stay at that number.
The GM has a set pool of fate points for participating NPCs, such as summoned minions, to use that refreshes every scene. This is equal to the number of PCs in the scene (so, the number of contestants in the match) plus any that any major NPCs present (read: named summons) got from conceding and/or receiving hostile invokes previously. This pool is separate from the fate tokens the GM gives out for accepting compels; that source is bottomless.
Fate points are spent to:
Fate points can be earned by:
Neo Mushroom Bowl introduces support points, a special type of fate point that is distributed based on a poll taken by the audience of the website. Since the poll is for who they want to win, these points represent, well, the support the fighter gets.
Each match has a pool of available support points based on the match's round number. Round 1 has a pool of 4 points, and every round past it adds 2. (So 6 for Round 2, 8 for round 3, and so on.) The exception is the Grand Championship bracket, which has a flat 12 support points per match. At the start of the match, the pool is split among the main fighters proportionally to the percentage of votes they received.
Mechanically, support points are just like fate points, and can be spent in all the ways fate points can be. When a fighter has both support and fate points, support points are spent first. Support points can't be earned mid-match, nor are they resupplied during the Grand Championship bracket resets.
Unlike fate points, support points don't carry over between sessions. Once the match the poll was for ends, all its unused support points go away.
You can invoke aspects for a bonus to a roll and compel them to create a complication. But even when those aren’t in play, aspects still affect the narrative. When you have that flesh-wrapped monstrosity Pinned in a Hydraulic Press, that is true. It can’t do much stuck in there, and it’s not getting out easy.
In essence, “aspects are always true” means that aspects can grant or withdraw permission for what can happen in the story (they can also affect the difficulty of passive opposition). If the aforementioned monstrosity is Pinned in a Hydraulic Press, the GM (and everyone else) has to respect that. The creature has lost permission to move until something happens which removes that aspect, either a successful overcome (which itself might require a justifying aspect like Superhuman Strength) or someone foolishly reversing the press. Similarly, if you have Cybernetically Enhanced Legs, you’ve arguably gained permission to leap over walls in a single bound without even having to roll for it.
That’s not to say you can create any aspect you want and use its truth like a club. Aspects grant a lot of power to shape the story, yes, but with that power comes the responsibility to play within the story’s constraints. Aspects have to line up with the table’s sense of what actually passes muster. If an aspect doesn’t pass the sniff test, it needs to be reworded.
Sure, you might like to use create an advantage to inflict the aspect Dismembered on that fungal super-soldier, but that clearly steps on the toes of the attack action, and besides, it takes a bit more work to lop her arm off than that (could work as a consequence, though—see the next section). You might say you’re the World’s Best Shot, but you’ll need to back that up with your skills. And as much as you’d like to make yourself Bulletproof, removing permission for someone to use small arms fire to harm you, that is unlikely to fly unless the game you’re playing involves using aspects-as-superpowers. (Which, generally speaking, we're not.)
There’s an endless variety of aspects, but no matter what they’re called, they all work pretty much the same way. The main difference is how long they stick around before going away.
These aspects, possessed by both characters and the arenas, indicate which universe (read: media property) they come from. They take the form of "Worldline: <X>" where X is the universe in question. They turn into a character aspect when on a character, and a situation aspect when on an arena.
All copies of a worldline aspect are in effect the same aspect. This means that if a character is on an arena with the same worldline aspect, they can't invoke both their character aspect version and the arena's situation aspect version in the same roll. However, the arena having the same worldline as the character does make invoking one of them a lot more justifiable.
These aspects are on your character sheet, such as your high concept and trouble. They describe personality traits, important details about your past, relationships you have with others, important items or titles you possess, problems you’re dealing with or goals you’re working toward, or reputations and obligations you carry. These aspects primarily change during milestones.
These aspects describe the surroundings or scenario where the action is taking place. A situation aspect usually vanishes at the end of the scene it was part of, or when someone takes some action that would change or get rid of it. Essentially, they last only as long as the situation they represent lasts.
In Neo Mushroom Bowl, each arena is defined by its own set of situation aspects, including its worldline designating its original universe. Random Events are also situation aspects that last for the duration of the Event.
Most of the time, you don't need to worry about your character's gear. If you have a skill that requires the use of a tool or weapon, it's assumed you have one on you to use it with. If it's a mundane tool, it doesn't have any mechanical interest outside the use of the skill. But sometimes, those tools are far from mundane.
Gear aspects are a type of situation aspect that represents a specific significant item, weapon, armor, or any non-character thing. If the aspect is attached to you, you have that item, and it can be invoked and compelled just like it was one of your character aspects. It might have effects of its own, such as weapon or armor ratings.
Up to one unattended gear aspect in your current zone can be picked up without it counting as your action; if you want more, make a Tank overcome action to pick up up to your effort.
Any gear aspects you have can be dropped on your turn for free. You can make an opponent drop a gear aspect with an overcome action (usually with Fight, but another skill may be able to do the trick).
Gear aspects can be stolen from another character unless it has an effect specifying it can't. Attempting to steal is an overcome action with Steal against the target's Fight.
These aspects represent injuries or other lasting trauma taken by absorbing a hit, often from attacks. Under normal circumstances, they'll last more than a few scenes, but Diamond Bluff's medical staff tries to fully heal contestants between matches, so you probably don't have to deal with them again after the match is over. Unless I think prolonging one would be narratively interesting and/or funny.
Boosts are super-transient aspects describing an extremely temporary or minor situation. You cannot compel a boost or spend a fate point to invoke it. You may invoke it once for free, after which it vanishes. An unused boost vanishes when the advantage it represents no longer exists, which may be a few seconds or the duration of a single action. They never persist beyond the end of a scene, and you can hold off naming one until you’re using it. If you’re in control of a boost, you may pass it to an ally if there’s rationale for it.
As previously explained, aspects can be invoked during dice rolls by spending fate points, or by using a free invoke from you or an ally creating an advantage.
You can also invoke one of your aspects to help an ally's roll, if you can manage to spin the story that way.
If you want an easy way to ensure you have room to incorporate aspects into a roll, try narrating your action with an ellipsis at the end (“...”), and then finish the action with the aspect you want to invoke. Like this:
Ryan says, “So I’m trying to decipher the runes and...” (rolls the dice, hates the result) “...and If I Haven’t Been There, I’ve Read About It...” (spends a fate point) “...so I easily start rambling about their origin.”
Most of the time when you invoke an aspect, it's a situation aspect or one of your character aspects. However, it's also possible to invoke one of your enemy's aspects against them. This is called a hostile invocation. It's like invoking any other aspect—pay a fate point to get a +2 to your roll, a reroll of your dice, or to add +2 to the passive opposition the enemy is facing—but with one key difference: if you spent a fate point to hostilely invoke that aspect (as opposed to using a free invoke on it), that enemy receives the fate point you spent at the end of the current scene.
By the same token, if someone invokes one of your aspects against you, you'll get the fate point from them at the end of the scene.
Granted, most sessions in Neo Mushroom Bowl aren't going to have more than one scene, but it still happens. Hope it doesn't come back to bite you later.
You may add an important or unlikely detail to the story based on an aspect in play. Don’t spend a fate point when “aspects are always true” applies. Pay when it’s a stretch—or, table willing, when there’s no relevant aspect.
Aspects can be compelled to complicate the situation and earn fate points. To compel an aspect, the GM or a player offers a fate point to the player whose character is being compelled, and tells them why an aspect is making things more difficult or complicated. If you refuse the compel, you must spend a fate point from your own supply and describe how your character avoids the complication. Yes, this means that if you don’t have any fate points, you can’t refuse a compel!
Any aspect can be compelled—whether it’s a character aspect, situation aspect, or consequence—but it must be something that affects the character being compelled.
Anyone can offer a compel. The player proposing the compel must spend one of their own fate points. The GM then takes over running the compel for the affected target. The GM does not lose a fate point by offering a compel—they have a limited pool of fate points for invoking aspects, but can compel as much as they’d like.
Compels can be retroactive. If a player finds they have roleplayed themself into a complication related to one of their aspects or a situation aspect that concerns them, they can ask the GM if that counts as a self-compel. If the group agrees, the GM slides the player a fate point.
It’s okay to recognize a compel as off-the-mark and withdraw it. Compels are just as subject to the bogus rule as invokes. If the group agrees that a proposed compel wasn’t appropriate, it should be withdrawn at no cost to the compelled character.
When offering a compel, make sure that the complication is a course of action or major change in circumstance, not a denial of options.
“Oh, you’ve got sand in your eyes, so you shoot at the creature and miss,” is not a compel. It denies action rather than complicating anything.
“You know, curse your luck, I think that the sand in your eyes means you can’t really see anything. Your shots at the shoggoth go wild, puncturing a few barrels that are now gushing gasoline toward the fire pit.” This is a much better compel. It changes the scene, ratchets up the tension, and gives the players something new to think about.
There are two general kinds of compels: events and decisions.
An event compel is something that happens to a character because of an external force. That external force connects with the aspect in some way, resulting in an unfortunate complication.
A decision compel is internal, where the character’s flaws or competing values get in the way of better judgment. The aspect guides the character to make a particular choice—and the fallout of that choice creates a complication for them.
In either case, a resulting complication is key! Without a complication, there is no compel.
Don’t confuse hostile invocations and compels! Though they are similar—they are ways to give a character an immediate problem in exchange for a fate point—they work differently.
A compel creates a narrative change. The decision to compel a character’s aspect isn’t something that happens in-universe; rather, it’s the GM or player proposing a change to the story. The effect can be broad, but the target gets the fate point immediately if they accept the compel, and may choose to refuse the compel.
A hostile invocation is a mechanical effect. The target doesn’t get a chance to refuse the invocation—but as with any invocation, you will need to explain how that aspect makes sense to invoke. And while they do get a fate point, they don’t get to use it in the current scene. However, the ultimate result is much more constrained: a +2 bonus or one reroll of the dice.
Compels let you, as a player or GM, change what a scene is about. They throw a wrench in the narrative. Using them against an opponent is a risky proposition—they might refuse, or accomplish their objective despite the complication thanks to the shiny new fate point you handed them.
Hostile invocations help you in the current moment. In addition to your own aspects, you have your opponent’s aspects available to invoke, giving you more options and making scenes more dynamic and connected.
You can create or discover a situation aspect using the create an advantage action. You may also create boosts that way, or as a result of a tie or success with style when you overcome an obstacle, attack, or defend.
You can remove an aspect provided you can think of a way your character could do so—blast the Raging Fire with a fire extinguisher, use evasive maneuvers to escape the pursuing guard that’s On Your Tail. Depending on the situation, that might require an overcome action; in this case, an opponent could use a defend action to try to preserve the aspect, if they can describe how they do so.
However, if there’s no narrative block to removing an aspect, you can simply do so. If you’re All Tied Up and then a friend unties you, the aspect goes away. If there’s nothing stopping you, there’s no need to roll.
Most things can be resolved through a single throw of the dice. But sometimes—some might say oftentimes—you'll face an extended engagement requiring many rolls to resolve.
Fate provides three different tools for resolving these engagements. Neo Mushroom Bowl is a game about a combat tournament, so it only cares about one of them: conflicts. Conflicts are for when characters are willing and able to harm each other, and boy howdy do these characters want to harm each other.
Before the battle can begin, we must set the stage.
Every match in the Neo Mushroom Bowl takes place in an arena: a simulated space created by the stadium's "hard light" Solid Reality Arena system. When the contestants signed up, they each selected an area of their universe to serve as the basis for their "home" arena. In addition, Ambition has contributed three generic arenas from the original Mushroom Bowl: the Battle Pit, the Battle Ring, and the Battle Pillar.
All 27 total arenas are set up before the season proper starts.
Before each match, the arena has to be selected. In-universe, this is done with a massive virtual wheel. Here in the real world, we have to settle for filling in the table below with arenas associated with the provided characters, then rolling on it with a d20.
"Randomly filled" draws from the arenas for contestants that are not participating in the current match; a given arena drawn from this pool cannot appear more than once. "Contestant #" indicate the fighter in that slot on the bracket; if that slot isn't used that match (e.g. contestants 3 and 4 in a two-man match), they are randomly filled from the pool instead.
Each arena is broken up into a few discrete sections called zones. Zones abstractly represent a particular part of the physical space of the arena. Most have two to four, but some can have more. Zones help guide the story by shaping what is possible. Who you can attack and where you can move depend on the zone you’re in.
Anyone in a zone can interact with everyone and everything in that zone. This means you can hit, stab, or otherwise physically engage with people and things in your zone. Need to open that wall safe in the bedroom? You’ll have to be in that zone. Anything outside your zone is usually beyond your reach—you’ll need to move to get there, or use something that can extend your reach there (telekinesis, a gun, etc).
Moving between zones is easy, so long as nothing is in your way. You can move to an adjacent zone in addition to your action during an exchange as long as nothing is in your way. If your movement is impeded, it takes your action to do so. Make an overcome roll to climb a wall, rush past a group of cultists, or leap across rooftops. If you fail, you stay in your zone or the movement costs you something. You can also use your action to move up to a number of zones equal to your Move, in addition to your one free movement.
If something isn’t risky or interesting enough to merit a roll, then it isn’t an impediment to movement. For instance, you don’t need to use up your action opening an unlocked door—that’s just a part of the movement. Anything that is interesting enough will take the form of a barrier aspect.
Shooting lets you attack from a distance. Ranged attacks can target enemies in adjacent zones or maybe further, if the zones are clear enough. If there’s a creature rooting around in the bedroom upstairs and around the corner, you can’t shoot it from the bottom of the stairs. Pay attention to the way the zones and situation aspects are set up when deciding what’s fair game or not.
Arenas come preloaded with all kinds of situation aspects that define its interesting and dynamic environmental features. These can apply to the entire arena, only to specific zones, or to the boundaries connecting zones. This includes things like:
Anyone can invoke and compel these aspects. To sweeten the deal, some of these aspects start the match having free invokes on them that are available to everyone. Seems Ambition thinks the contestants interacting with the environment a lot while fighting makes for a really good show.
Zone aspects are a type of situation aspect attached only to a single zone in the arena. Anyone sharing a zone with it can invoke or compel it.
An aspect placed on the border between two adjacent zones is a border aspect, indicating something preventing free movement. It's similar to a zone aspect, but in both zones in the same time. It comes in two flavors.
Connection aspects enable passage between two zones that wouldn't otherwise have it, such as ladders, rickety stairways, or old bridges over troubled waters. If the aspect is removed, the two zones are no longer considered adjacent for purposes of movement.
Barrier aspects obstruct movement and includes things like rocks, walls of fire, and locked doors. It has two passive resistance ratings, indicating the difficulty of moving through it (overcome with Move) and of clearing it out (usually overcome with Tank).
Often, you won’t need to know who is acting precisely when, but in contests and conflicts turn order can become important.
Conflict takes place over a series of exchanges. In an exchange, each involved character gets:
...that they can use in either order, but they do not have to use either if they don't want to.
Turn order is handled with elective action order, also commonly known as "popcorn" initiative. The first active character of the conflict (a.k.a. the one whose turn it is) is the one with the highest Notice rating; break ties with Move, than Tank, then just highest 4dF roll. Once the active character finishes their turn, their player (or the GM for NPCs) chooses the next active character from everyone that hasn't had their turn yet this exchange. After everyone has taken a turn, the last character picks who gets the first turn of the next exchange.
Neo Mushroom Bowl offers three methods for teamwork: combining the same skill from multiple characters on a single roll, stacking free invokes by creating advantages to set up a team member for success, and invoking aspects on an ally’s behalf.
When you combine skills, figure out who has the highest level in the skill among the participants. Each other participant who has at least Average (+1) in that skill adds a +1 to the highest person’s skill level. Providing support like this uses your action. Supporters face the same costs and consequences as the person making the roll. The maximum total bonus a team may provide this way is equal to the highest person’s skill level.
Otherwise, you can create an advantage on your turn and let an ally use the free invokes when it makes sense that they can. Outside of your turn, you may invoke an aspect to add a bonus to someone else’s roll.
Conflicts in Fate are flexible and can be physical or mental. Physical conflicts can be shoot-outs, sword-fights, or ramming extradimensional beings with trucks. Mental conflicts include arguments with loved ones, interrogations, and eldritch assaults upon the mind. Here in Neo Mushroom Bowl, they're pretty much all physical. That's what makes for the best show.
Timing matters when using some kinds of teamwork. You can invoke an aspect on your ally’s behalf to improve their roll at any time. You can help an ally before their turn comes around by creating an advantage or giving a +1 bonus as your action. If they take their turn ahead of you in the exchange, you can’t create an advantage to help them, but you can use up your turn (skipping it for that exchange) to give them a +1 teamwork bonus.
Along with your action, you can move to an adjacent zone for free, assuming there are no barrier aspects on the border between them. Crossing an barrier aspect requires a successful overcome Move action.
If you want to move further than one zone (and don't have any stunts saying otherwise) and can find a path free of barriers, you can use your action to move an additional number of zones equal to your Move rating.
Certain special extras, usually produced by Random Events, can have a Weapon rating or an Armor rating, represented by a number, such as "Weapon: 1" or "Armor: 2". These values augment the damage given or taken by attacks.
When you successfully land an attack while using something with a Weapon rating, that rating is added to the weapon's damage. Similarly, if you take damage while using something with an Armor rating, that rating is subtracted from the damage you take. If you hit but the target's Armor reduces the damage to 0 or less, you don't damage them but you get a boost to use against them.
Nothing makes for a cool show like a good explosion. As such, there are a few ways that will permit an attack or effect to affect multiple targets at once. Whenever you want to do something like that, use whichever of the following three methods is most appropriate.
If you're targeting a few specific targets and not others (e.g. you're recreating D&D's Magic Missile, or you're cutting down a bunch of mooks with a single sword swing), you may split your effort. Roll your attack effort, and if the resulting total is something positive, you can split that total up however you like among your targets; for each target, the amount of shifts you give them is the effort they roll their defend against. If you don't assign at least one point to a target, you didn't target them.
More indiscriminate splash damage like explosions use a zone attack, which targets everyone in a single zone, friend and foe alike. Here, you don’t split your effort; every target must defend against your total roll. The circumstances and method must be right for doing this; often the GM will require you to invoke an aspect or use a stunt to gain permission.
If you wish to create an advantage affecting a whole zone or group, target the scene instead: place a single aspect on the zone or the arena itself rather than placing separate aspects on each of the targets. This has the added advantage of reducing overall book-keeping. If someone insists on creating a separate aspect on each target, they should be constrained to the effort splitting method.
By default, all these methods require the targets all occupy the same zone. The GM may allow the occasional exception due to method and circumstance.
Only one action type should be used—such as attacking several targets in one blow, solving two problems at once with overcome, or swaying the minds of a few key NPCs with create an advantage. A GM might allow two different action types under special circumstances, but those actions should make sense for the skill used by both.
When an attack is successful, the defender takes damage equal to the shifts between the attacker and defender's efforts (plus any Weapon ratings on the attacker, minus any Armor ratings on the defender). They must absorb the damage by marking a single stress box on the track associated with the damage type and taking consequences. If this fails to absorb all the damage, they're taken out, removing them from the scene—and if they're one of the contestants, they've just lost the match.
Stress is a resource that absorbs damage a character takes so they can keep going. Think of how video game characters can take as much damage as they like and their ability to act never wavers as long as they have a single HP. There's only so much damage they can mitigate before the bill's due, though.
Each stress box on a stress track has a point value that's one more than the box before it, indicating the damage of the strongest hit it can absorb. For example, a three-block stress track...
3
...has a 1-point box, a 2-point box, and a 3-point box. Main fighters have four boxes for both physical and mental stress (allowing them to absorb 4-10 damage without consequences), possibly more if the tied-in skills have a high rating.
When you take damage, check off a single stress box with a value equal to that damage. If that box is already checked, you must check off another box with a higher value. If there's no higher available box and you can't take any consequences, you're taken out out the conflict.
All of this is with the stress track for the damage type. Physical damage must be absorbed by physical stress boxes, and mental damage by mental stress boxes.
After a conflict, when you get a minute to breathe, all stress boxes are cleared and become available for your use again.
Consequences are aspects that reflect wounds the character has taken. If damage is too much for the stress track alone to take, consequences must be taken to reduce the damage to a point stress can handle the rest.
A consequence must be taken into one of three types of consequence slot: a 2-point mild (Nasty Bite), a 4-point moderate (Bite That Won't Stop Bleeding), and a 6-point severe ( Crippled Leg). When you take a consequence, the damage is reduced by the point value of the slot it was put into. Most people have one of each, but another mild consequence slot may be available for certain damage types depending on your skills.
This allows you to check a lower stress box than you would be able to otherwise. If you take a 5 damage hit, you could absorb the entire thing with a 5-point stress box, a 3-point box and a mild consequence, or a 1-point box and a moderate consequence. Your choice.
The downside is that, again, consequences are aspects—and aspects are always true. If you've got Gut Shot, your gut is shot and you aren't doing anything someone with a shot gut can't do (like run fast). It can be the cause of a compel making your life more complicated, which since they're always negative is a lot more likely than an invoke. And to top it off, the attacker that gave you that consequence gets a free invoke on it since, like with the ccreate an advantage action, they created a new aspect! Fun!
If you can't absorb all the damage in a hit with stress and consequences, you're taken out.
Getting taken out is bad. Because if it's the main fighter, they just lost the match. Luckily, we're dealing with a regulation fighting tourney that has explicit rules for this case, so Fate's usual consequence of "whoever took you out decides what happens" is severely mitigated here. Especially since the regulations include "don't kill anyone," and breaking it results in them being the loser. In Neo Mushroom Bowl, getting taken out either means you were knocked unconscious or were thrown out of the bounds of the arena and are disqualified by ringout, whichever whoever took them out picks.
Alternatively, you have the option of conceding a conflict. You can interrupt any action in a conflict to concede as long as the dice haven't hit the table yet. Announce that you're conceding and your character can't keep going. Your character loses and exits the conflict.
If the main fighter concedes, they lose the match, so why would they throw in the towel over going out swinging? Mostly because they'll come back stronger; when you concede, you gain a fate point plus an extra one for each consequence you took in the current conflict.
Conceding is a powerful tool. At least, outside Neo Mushroom Bowl. I admit, it's a much less attractive option in this context, when the fallout of being taken out is so much less severe. The main benefit is the conceding character's player is the one who sets the terms of their loss instead of their opponent, which in this case mostly means that the player who lost the match gets to decide how their character loses; just because the player surrendered doesn't mean the character did. It also can occur before you take too many consequences so you'll be in better shape for later matches (see Recovering from a Conflict).
You must concede before your opponent rolls the dice. You can’t wait to see the outcome of the dice and concede when it’s obvious you can’t win—that’s poor form.
At the end of each exchange, the GM may decide that Ambition is getting bored with the current state of the match and is opting to spice things up by triggering a Random Event. Up to three Random Events can be called in any one match, and generally only one Random Event can be active at a time.
Random Events are rolled on a table that differs per season, with events numbed from 3 to 30. The GM rolls on this table with 3d6 + 2 * (the round number - 1) + (2 if the match is in B-Grade, 4 if in C-Grade, or 10 if in the Grand Championship).
Most Random Events take the form of a situation aspect being attached to the arena with a free invoke and nothing else. Others can be invoked for effect, spending a fate point to get a specific mechanical benefit. Others still could summon NPCs hostile to both sides. The possibilities are endless. Each arena also has a Random Event of its own that can come up. These aspects go away when the next Random Event is called for.
Some Random Events introduce some type of ticking bomb—and that can both literal and metaphorical. This is represented by the countdown mechanic, which is generally attached to the Random Event's aspect.
Countdowns have three components: the countdown track (the fuse), one or more triggers (how the fuse burns), and an outcome (the boom). When a Random Event uses a countdown, it specifies all these components.
The countdown track looks a lot like a stress track, consisting of a row of boxes. The boxes are ticked off, one by one, and when the last one is ticked, the outcome happens, whatever it is.
What marks a box on a countdown track? That'd be the countdown's triggers, an event whose occurrence marks a box. These can be as general as time passing or as specific as "the villain takes a consequence or gets taken out." There could be multiple triggers, each box could have its own unique triggers, basically anything to match the fiction the Event is meant to invoke.
The match, and thus the conflict, ends when the main fighter of a side concedes or is taken out. (All minions immediately concede when their boss is no longer part of the conflict.) At that point, everyone who conceded gets their fate points for the concession, and everyone who was subject to hostile invokes during the conflict gets their fate points for that.
At the end of the scene, all characters clear their stress boxes. Consequences take more time and effort to heal.
Since it's in the vested interest of the Diamond Bluff Casino for the contestants of its fighting tournament to be in the best form they can, their medical staff begins the recovery process immediately after the match is over. Nurse the Yoshi is very good at her job, and is assumed to automatically succeed at the overcome actions needed to treat all of the fighter's consequences, and that the fighters are given enough time to recover from at least most of their injuries before they're expected to fight again.
To sum up: after the scene of the conflict ends, all of the consequences on all the participating characters are renamed to indicate that they are healing (e.g. Broken Arm may be rewritten to Arm in a Cast). After that, clearing a consequence is a matter of time. This time is measured in the number of matches in the tournament that pass after the match that inflicted the consequence.
The exception are the finals of each Bracket (Round 4 for A-Grade, Round 5 for B- and C-Grade) and the Grand Championship matches, including all subsequent matches caused by bracket resets. For these, the medical staff pulls out all the stops (including Nurse using "medicine via explosion," her beloathed) to make sure all the competitors start these fights in peak consequence-free condition.
As the contestants muck about in the tournament, they grow and change. A little. As a very much nonstandard implementation of a tabletop RPG system, Neo Mushroom Bowl doesn't have advancement in the traditional sense. Sure, the characters will change a little over the course of a season, but in the event they return for future seasons, they'll likely reset back to their starting sheet to keep things fair.
That doesn't mean advancement doesn't exist, though. After a match, the players get the chance to tweak the character they were assigned with a milestone. After that character has seen a few matches, that tweak becomes a full-on breakthrough, which adds things to the sheet. Winners of each of the tournament's three main brackets get the mother of all breakthroughs: a crowning.
Milestones happen after every match a contestant participated in, even if they lost. These focus on adjusting the character laterally rather than advancing them. The player doesn't have to use the milestone if they think it wouldn't make sense.
During a milestone, you can do one of the following to your assigned character:
Breakthroughs occur after every five matches a contestant has participated in. These are more significant, allowing characters to actually grow in power.
Along with doing one thing from the milestone list, you also do all of the following:
When a contestant becomes a Bracket Champ by winning a bracket's finals, they achieve a crowning before advancing to the Grand Championship to make the finals even more exciting.
The champ breakthrough has all the effects of a breakthrough, as well as all of the following:
As part of its purpose, Neo Mushroom Bowl has to bridge the gap between TTRPG and video game. There are simply many conventions of video games that don't automatically translate into Fate with mere aspects, skills, and stunts on their own. That's where the extras come in.
Extras are game features made to model the fiction of certain aspects of video games that characters can possess if they meet the qualifications for them. They're a lot like stunts (and are recorded on the same place in the character sheet), but they're far more powerful.
Extras have both a permission and a cost. An extra's permissions is something the character must do or possess to be allowed to take the extra, like having a specific aspect—the signal it makes narrative sense for this extra's rules to apply to them. Its costs is something the character gives up from standard character creation while investing in the extra; this can include the aspect slot for the aspect in permissions, having to invest in certain skills, and/or spending points of refresh (including converting free stunt slots).
Turns out platforming enemies and bosses can spend a lot of time in the air. Who woulda thunk?
Extra: Flight
Permissions: One aspect indicating an ability to fly
Costs: Aspect slot (for the permission); 2-3 points of refreshYour movement is not limited to the ground. Except for absolute barriers like solid walls, you ignore all barrier aspects that would impede movement and can cross borders that are only separated by empty space. If you spent 3 points, you also fly freely enough to increase your movement; you can move up to three zones on your turn, but one movement is also taken for every barrier aspect you cross.
The main villains are the stars of the show in video games, but they're not the only enemies in the game (most of the time). There's also all the normal enemies; the ones that show up, go down in one or two hits, and drop health pickups. We call them minions. And it just wouldn't be a big bombastic tournament of video game villains by leaving out the little guys.
Minions possess a weight class, a measure of their overall power on the scale of the adjective ladder—like a skill, but it can't be rolled. They can range from Average (+1) Goombas to Superb (+5) minibosses. The higher a minion's weight class, the more powerful they are. Minions can be either one in a nameless mob of goons (Risky Boots' Tinkerbats) or a specific named individual (Misery's lackey Balrog). Naturally, only one of each named minion can exist at a time, and if a named minion leaves the conflict after entering, they can't come back.
To call on minions to join mid-match, a contestant must have the following extra:
Extra: Summoning
Permissions: One aspect referencing a group of minions you possess authoritative command of
Costs: Aspect slot (for the permission); skill ranks, specifically those invested in the Command skill; 1-5 points of refreshYour side of the match gains a collective morale stress track of 3 boxes, gaining a 4th with at least Average (+1) Command and a 5th with at least Good (+3) Command. Your side also has a mild consequence slot for mitigating morale damage. If you have at least Superb (+5) Command, it gets a moderate consequence slot.
Create a number of minions equal to the amount of refresh spent. Their weight class cannot be higher than your Command rating, and all your minions are subject to "columns" structure, meaning you cannot have more minions of a given weight class above Average (+1) than you do the weight class below it. You may change your minions around as your choice at milestones.
To summon a minion (or a mob), you may use your action to make an Command roll. If you roll something positive, then place up to 3 minions in your starting zone (or, if an aspect can justify it, your zone) whose total weight class is less than or equal to the total roll.
Once a minion joins the battle, they are treated like any other character. Being the active character in an exchange can be "popped" to them immediately. Minions are controlled by the GM, and use fate points allocated for NPC use, but are considered your allies and will do their best to follow the orders you give them.
When you have more than one nameless minion of Good (+3) weight class or less in the same zone, you can group them up into a mob, a single unit of multiple minions. They get one turn, but can use teamwork to combine the skills of their members. When a mob unit takes a hit, damage in excess of what's needed to take out one minion is applied to the other minions in the mob, one at a time. On your turn, you can freely regroup any mobs that haven't had their turn yet this exchange. Without direction otherwise, these weaker minions will naturally gravitate towards forming one mob per zone.
When one of your minions is taken out, your side suffers a morale attack with a difficulty equal to the minion's weight class; if more than one minion is taken out at once, their weight classes are added together. The attack also happens if your minion concedes, but the effort is halved (round up). You oppose this attack with a Command defense; each time you make this specific roll per scene, it gets a cumulative -1 penalty.
Opponents can also deal morale damage by targeting your minions with Sway attacks, sowing dissent among the ranks or intimidating the poor fools on the front line or whatever other method of convincing them this isn't worth it; these are opposed by the minions in the attacter's zone using a teamwork Will defense. You can opposite it instead with a Command defense if you can justifiably intervene, but it suffers a -1 penalty for every minion unit you have not in that zone due to split attention.
If you cannot mitigate morale damage with morale stress and consequences, your minions' morale breaks and any still in the arena immediately concede and flee. You yourself are still in the match, but you won't be able to summon minions again for the rest of the scene. Morale stress and consequences heal like physical and mental do.
Minions are built using different stat spreads based on their weight class. (The text like "early-game" and "late-game" are general guidelines and are not strict denominations based on where they appear in their source games.)
All aspect counts do not include their worldline. They do have it, though, sharing the same worldline aspect with their boss.
Average (+1)
Early-game regular enemies. Rank-and-file order takers, local conscripts, and the like.
Fair (+2)
Mid-game regular enemies. Trained professionals, like soldiers and elite guards, or others whose role in the scene speaks to their experience, such as a sharp-tongued courtier or talented thief.
Good (+3)
Late-game regular enemies. The really elite guards. Tough opposition, especially in numbers.
Great (+4)
Early-game minibosses. This is the point where these guys start having names.
Superb (+5)
Mid- to late-game minibosses. Could probably have entered the tournament on their own merits, if we're being honest.
You know how bosses, especially final bosses, often have different phases where they'll get more difficult the longer the fight goes on, or when you think they're beaten but they transform into a giant monster and fight you again? Wanna be able to do that yourself? You can with this extra:
Extra: Second Phase
Permissions: precedent of multiple phases in your source material
Costs: 2 points of refresh; two stress boxes per trackYou have a second "true" form you unleash when you're on the edge of defeat.
Create a second character to represent your alternate form; we'll call them "Form B" and the original character "Form A." Follow the same rules of PC character creation. Form B has the same worldline aspect as Form A, as well as purchasing this extra; otherwise, you can make Form B as different from Form A in terms of aspects, skills, and stunts as you please; one might even take extras that the other doesn't. The biggest difference is that both characters have two less physical and mental stress boxes than you otherwise would have.
At the start of each scene, select which form you'll start in. For that scene, that form is "Phase 1" and the other is "Phase 2." Which one you'll start as should be informed by your aspects and the current state of the story; some characters always start as a certain form and others will pick one based on factors like the opponent they're going up against.
When you are taken out in Phase 1, instead of losing, you transform into Phase 2. (In-fiction, this doesn't have to be a literal transformation; it could be something like bailing from a war machine.) All your stress boxes are cleared, you gain an extra physical and mental stress box until the end of the conflict, your mild consequence slot is cleared (both if you have more than one), and all their remaining consequences are downgraded a step. Once your second phase is taken out, that's it.
If you concede in Phase 1, you don't turn into Phase 2—you just lose.
Some bosses, like Dr. Eggman in Sonic the Hedgehog, don't personally fight the hero, but use different battle vehicles. The vehicle itself essentially becomes the character the hero fights. The destruction of said vehicle defeats them, even if they didn't take any personal injury. This extra simulates that:
Extra: I Am My Ride
Permissions: A gear aspect indicating possession of a vehicle, preferably a rideable war machine, taken at character creation
Costs: Aspect slot (for the permission); skill ranks, specifically those invested in Operate; stunt slots; 1 point of refreshYou fight primarily from the cockpit of a war machine (or whatever other vehicle your brought), so much so the machine effectively is you in combat.
Your character sheet is of you riding the machine indicated by your gear aspect, with your stunts reflecting the machine's different features. Since it's assumed any machine you'd ride in battle is properly armored for it, you have Armor: 2. You use Operate anywhere you'd use Move. Your machine can't be stolen.
Your physical stress and physical consequences indicate damage to the machine; as such, healing any physical damage requires the Tinker skill. (You're still taken out as normal if you can't mitigate all the physical damage from a hit.)
At milestones, you can only rewrite your machine's gear aspect to another gear aspect indicating a different vehicle you operate in the same capacity. If you do so, also rewrite your stunts.
These extras were designed for specific characters to better model their game counterpart behavior.
For Misery:
Extra: One Loyal Henchman
Permissions: Possess the Summoning extra while spending only 1 point of refresh on it
Costs: 1 additional point of refreshYour authority stretches only to a single minion, but that minion is singularly competent. Your Summoning can call on only 1 standalone minion (not even a mob), but that minion can be of any weight class, regardless of your Command and ignoring the "columns" structure. Summoning them can be done with any positive result on the Command roll to summon.
For The Virus:
Extra: Hive Mind
Permissions: Possess the Summoning extra
Cost: 3 additional points of refreshAll your minions are really just you, your mind operating their bodies remotely. Your Command defense rolls against morale damage do not suffer penalties from previously taken-out units or split attention.
This work is based on Fate Core System and Fate Accelerated Edition (found at http://www.faterpg.com/), products of Evil Hat Productions, LLC, developed, authored, and edited by Leonard Balsera, Brian Engard, Jeremy Keller, Ryan Macklin, Mike Olson, Clark Valentine, Amanda Valentine, Fred Hicks, and Rob Donoghue, and licensed for our use under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).
This work is based on Fate Condensed (found at http://www.faterpg.com/), a product of Evil Hat Productions, LLC, developed, authored, and edited by PK Sullivan, Lara Turner, Leonard Balsera, Fred Hicks, Richard Bellingham, Robert Hanz, Ryan Macklin, and Sophie Lagacé, and licensed for our use under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).
This work is based on the Fate System Toolkit (found at http://www.faterpg.com/), a product of Evil Hat Productions, LLC, developed, authored, and edited by Robert Donoghue, Brian Engard, Brennan Taylor, Mike Olson, Mark Diaz Truman, Fred Hicks, and Matthew Gandy, and licensed for our use under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).
Fate™ is a trademark of Evil Hat Productions, LLC. The Powered by Fate logo is © Evil Hat Productions, LLC and is used with permission.
The Fate Core font is © Evil Hat Productions, LLC and is used with permission. The Four Actions icons were designed by Jeremy Keller.
Evil Hat Productions, LLC was not involved whatsoever in the development of this game.