(I apologize if this has been asked before, I am unable to find it in the archive)
What exactly is supposed to happen when a character runs out of conditions to mark?
They get knocked out for a while, with all their attitude problems magically solved when they wake up? I hope not.
From the PDF, under Conditions:
“If you need to mark a condition and have no more conditions to mark, you are taken out. You lose consciousness or flee.”
It doesn’t say anything about removing conditions, it just dictates your response if you have to mark another and can’t. So I’d say if you black out, wake up and then something causes you to mark another condition again, you’d still have all your conditions marked, still be unable to mark another one and either black out again or need to run the hell away. You’re having a really bad day at that point.
That said, “run from something difficult” is the removal method for getting rid of Afraid, so after you run the hell away you might just be Angry, Insecure, Guilty and Hopeless, totally ready to get back in the fray. 😉
🙂
Interesting, I’d taken it for granted it would work as a sort of exhaust valve + refresh: you pass out, and clear all conditions.
If you think about it, it’s quite a time-honored trope of the genre (think the Chosen’s Darkest Self in Monsterhearts, as well). Also, multiple conditions are quite a big penalty and can easily throw you in a loop of getting more, while it takes time to remove them, so I think that a “clear all” option is quite needed…
As a one-off in-the-moment narrative thing, or as an actual Moment of Truth, bouncing back from the brink with a full tank of justice is awesome, but as the default ruling I feel like it’d take the teeth out of racking up conditions and put you in a weird place if you’ve got a lot of them marked. Like, if you’ve got all 5 conditions marked, you’d want to mark another condition quickly to stop getting -2 to all your rolls and stop your character being an emotional mess. And if you’re at 4, is it quicker to go up or down? Plus I’m struggling to think of a scenario where suddenly fleeing a fight and bailing on your team would stop a hero feeling guilty. 😛
For my table, I’d leave the full refresh to that mysterious, vaguely-determined realm of “when time passes”. The methods of resolving conditions aren’t very difficult to achieve, they just take a bit of fictional positioning to knock out, so if the heroes have had a couple of days (or whatever) of off-screen time I’d be perfectly happy just having their conditions cleared when next we join our heroes. That said, in doing so, I’d absolutely look down the list of things they got rid of and pick at least one to ask about, ’cause those clearing conditions criteria are great for generating a story.
“So, ASAP, in this past week you’ve hurt someone or broken something important, flung yourself into easy relief and taken foolhardy action without talking to your team. What stupid thing did you do? And team, which one of you is the maddest about it?”
I can see both approaches (keep them vs. refresh) being fine. I think it would depend on the character and the drama. Ask some probing questions.
Maybe passing out has led to some new perspective, and they’re no longer feeling Insecure and Angry. But they still feel Guilty for letting down the team, and Afraid of their own weakness. Or maybe they’re completely refreshed because everything that stressed them out is fixed. But instead maybe they’re as stressed out as they were before they passed out.
PbtA games are best when the players realize they don’t need to always roll a 10+ to have a good time. In fact, these games are not very fun if you never miss. So, I think once they’re used to it, that leads to players being less concerned with “yay I get all my conditions removed” and more concerned with “well, this is the state my character is honestly in.”
Moral of the story: I’d suggest asking some questions and eliminating some, all, or none of their conditions based on an honest assessment of their character. Screw formulaic set rules. That’s what leads to boring gaming.