House Rules & Clarifications

FATE and Venture City House rules and clarifications

The Phase Trio (Pg 38, Fate Core): The phase trio is a tabletop gaming construct intended to help form a more cohesive PC party. We are not using it for Inheritance Gambit C-Gen so feel free to ignore it.

Consequence Recovery Time (Pg 165, Fate Core): For the purposes of consequence recovery times in Inheritance Gambit, a scene is a single role play scene, a session is one week and a scenario is four sessions (four weeks). This means that mild consequences heal at the end of the next scene after they were put into recovery, moderate consequences heal 7 days from when they were put into recovery and severe consequences heal 28 days after they were put into recovery.

Character Death (Pg 168, Fate Core): Player Characters may not be killed or made unplayable as a result of being taken out in combat without player consent. Most other things are on the table though, in the event that players have decided to use the system to adjudicate combat. Remember that being taken out gives the victor a great deal of narrative power, so if you’d prefer to avoid that in a system-adjudicated conflict it’s a good idea to use the concession mechanic before things get to that point.

Making Your Character and Powers (Pg 7, Venture City): In the event a player wants to play a completely unpowered character he may forego the three stunts for powers only in exchange for 2 extra refresh. Simply note this in the notes section at the end of C-Gen. The character may trade in those 2 refresh for 3 stunts of powers if they wish to become empowered during play.

Enhancements (Pg 8, Venture City): Power mastery enhancements – and any other enhancement that may be purchased multiple times – may be purchased a maximum of 5 times.

Power Themes (Pg 9, Venture City): To clarify, since the original wording is ambiguous, you may have 1 free power theme per power suite (set of related powers). Any themes on a given suite past the first one cost refresh/cg stunt.

Stat System

It’s not having a stat system that makes Inheritance Gambit different. It’s that aside from requiring you to use it to create a character, Staff really isn’t concerned if you use it or not. Really. Yes, there are rules in place for taking damage and powering your special abilities through Fate Points but if Players decide to just free-form RP and skip the mechanics, that’s fine with staff as long as the RP is still within our theme and no one in the scene has objections. And our theme covers a lot. Staff isn’t going to call you out for not having a certain Special Effect or Enhancement.

The main reason Inheritance Gambit has a stat system is to prevent Player conflict. That’s it. We do that by not only giving Players a resolution system, but by building a sort of ‘shared headcannon’ of what things should be possible and how.

What should temper or ‘limit’ your RP shouldn’t be the system, but the people you’re RPing with. As long as everyone is having fun, you’re unlikely to catch any kind of flack from Staff.

MUSH ‘news’

With the widespread use of websites in conjunction with the game server, Inheritance Gambit has opted not to duplicate all of the information put up on our website onto the game.

+bboards

While the bboard system is an amazing piece of MUSH code, it can be clunky and temperamental, especially as a game ages and there starts to be a lot of posts. In order to keep it in working order, you need to delete old posts and then that information is just lost. On top of that, you can’t utilize any of the modern-day searching features that you can leverage in a website.

Bulletin boards are really just an in-game version of newgroups or blogs, and so we’re using blog posts on the website instead of the standard +bboard system.

In addition, keeping all of our ‘bulletin boards’ on the website means that you don’t have to log into the game to stay abreast of things that have been posted.

+jobs

+jobs is another amazing piece of code that revolutionized how staff was able to work with players, but like the bulletin board system it can get clunky. Unless you used it constantly, you always have to look up commands for anything beyond basic replies.

There is something that’s designed to do the same thing as +jobs, that has had the resources of the internet community behind it. Support Ticket systems. So that’s what we’re using, based out of the website instead of the game server.

Character Generation

Character Generation, or ‘chargen’ on most games involves moving through a series of rooms typing the commands that tells you what the game-specific commands to set your character information up over and over as it scrolls off your screen. Again. Trying to figure out where you might have typoed that command because it’s throwing you an error. Part of that is an inherit constraint of the system. A screen only has so much real estate, even if you can scroll back. Another is that accounting for every option and error takes a lot of coding and accommodating that can end up with some convoluted commands.

So Inheritance Gambit has tried to make that easy on our Players, and moved it all to the website. Fill-in-the-blanks, tick boxes, etc. Making character decisions is hard enough, we don’t want to add the confusion of how to give us your information.

Approval of your character will import all of your information into the game as well as create your character page. No muss, no fuss.