What is the relationship between the severity of a Condition and the Condition Threshold for a villain? Do more severe Conditions take up more spaces? Is there a mechanical result for hitting a villain with a Critical Condition that makes it somehow different from a Minor condition? I’m sure I’ve missed something.
What is the relationship between the severity of a Condition and the Condition Threshold for a villain?
What is the relationship between the severity of a Condition and the Condition Threshold for a villain?
Any kind of Condition counts towards taking a villain down (by adding up to their Condition Threshold), doesn’t matter if it’s a Minor or Critical. Only difference is that a villain can shrug off a Minor Condition pretty easily (just like heroes), whereas a Moderate one is a lot harder to deal with, and a Critical is pretty much guaranteed to stick. If everyone ganged up on a villain and inflicted a ton of Minor Conditions to take him out, that would work just as readily as taking their time to inflict Moderate or Critical Conditions so it’s up to the players how they want to go about it as they don’t know what moves villains will have and what they’ll be able to shrug off or how many Conditions it’ll take to put them down.
TL;DR – All Conditions are the same for villains, severity denotes staying power.
And narrative positioning… Which can make a big difference. I was just wondering if I had not seen some other distinction.
This means a villain needs to be “taken down” at least as many times as their threshold, right?
Yeah, well like you say – it’s all about the fiction, so if their motivations mean that the players end up needing to take their threshold down to zero, that’s what they have to do to take away all of their opponent’s agency – What that looks like is up to you as the EIC. Once the number of Conditions dealt adds up to their Condition Threshold they’re knocked unconscious, die, surrender, transform into their harmless plasma form, are never heard from again, etc.