Huh.
I find myself pondering what would happen if you took a game like BitD, but made stress collective rather than individual. Or, to get more extreme, what if the whole D&D party pulled from the same pool of Hit Points?
(Handwave away the small problems, like tuning abilities)
I find myself pondering what would happen if you took a game like BitD, but made stress collective rather than individual. Or, to get more extreme, what if the whole D&D party pulled from the same pool of Hit Points?
(Handwave away the small problems, like tuning abilities)
Yes, in D&D, you'd need to address certain conceptual things like how to make some characters "tank" more effectively than others, but that's a genuinely trivially solvable problem.
That said, in D&D, I think it would be a gimmick. Similar issue with a "group" fate point pool in Fate. But I'm thinking about BitD specifically because stress is both *status* and *currency*.
In D&D, HP are status, so moving to a collective model is mostly bookkeeping.
In Fate, FP are currency, so moving to a collective model introduces all kinds of economic concerns like incentivizing free riders.
Both of these would work ok, but maybe not great.
In Fate, FP are currency, so moving to a collective model introduces all kinds of economic concerns like incentivizing free riders.
Both of these would work ok, but maybe not great.
But with Stress, the fact that you are trading off status for currency disincentives free riders, and rewards the people who replenish the supply. That is, if you add more Fate Points to a common pool, there's no guarantee that you benefit. If you add more stress, you benefit.
(If only because you don't, y'know, die)
There are some downsides. It drives the entire group towards the highest risk tolerance at the table, which could be a real problem if that's a big gap. It also undermines the player who *enjoys* taking hits or risks for the group.
Of course, it would be irresponsible to introduce such a mechanic without giving players a tool to allow stress losses to "ground out" through their character rather than on the group as a whole. And by "irresponsible" I mean "less fun for me".
One interesting solution might be a mix of personal and collective stress, though it raises a very interesting question of which pool you spend through first. Either one works, but each approach drives different behaviors.
(Sidebar: This all dovetails *super* well with the Superman model where consequences ground out on the environment)
(Additional Sidebar: This train of thought was inspired by thinking "man, it would remove so many edge cases of aspect handling if the players all pulled from the same pool")
I feel like there's a very natural dovetail here with Supers fiction. Teams tend to go down together, and of course, the ability to have the size of the total pool increase as the story goes on 100% maps to "defeated at the end fo issue 1, turned things around by the end of #3"
