There are two major categories for what a snag looks like in the game: Events and Decisions. These are tools to help you figure out what a snag should look like and help break any mental blocks:
Events
An event-based snag happens to the character in spite of herself, when the world around her responds to a certain descriptor in a certain way and creates a complicating circumstance.
As you’ll see with decision-based snags, the real mileage is in the complication itself. Without that, you don’t really have anything worth focusing on.
GMs, event-based snags are your opportunity to have fun. You’re expected to control the world around the PCs, so having that world react to them in an unexpected way is pretty much part and parcel of your job description.
Players, event-based snags are great for you. You get rewarded simply by being there—how much more Blacktastic can you get? You might have a difficult time justifying an event-based snag yourself, as it requires you to assert control over an element of the game that you typically aren’t in charge of. Feel free to propose an event-based snag, but remember that the GM has the final say on controlling the dice and the game world and may veto you if she’s got something else in mind.
Decisions
A decision is a kind of snag that is internal to the character. It happens because of a decision he makes, hence the name.
So the real dramatic impact from these kinds of snags is not what decision the character makes, most of the time—it’s how things go wrong. Before something goes wrong, the first sentence could be a prelude to making a skill check or simply a matter of roleplaying. The complication that the decision creates is really what makes it a snag.
The decision part should be very self-evident, and something a player might have been thinking about doing anyway. The same goes for players trying to snag NPCs or each other’s PCs—make sure you have a strong mutual understanding of what that NPC or other character might do before proposing the snag.
Players, if you need Vigor, this is a really good way of getting it. If you propose a decision-based snag for your character to the GM, then what you’re basically asking is for something you’re about to do to go wrong somehow. You don’t even have to have a complication in mind— simply signaling the GM should be enough to start a conversation. GMs, as long as the snag isn’t weak (as in, as long as there’s a good, juicy complication), you should go with this. If the snag is weak, poll the rest of the group for ideas until something more substantial sticks.
Retroactive Snags
Sometimes, you’ll notice during the game that you’ve fulfilled the criteria for a snag without a point of Vigor getting awarded. You’ve played your descriptors to the hilt and gotten yourself into all kinds of trouble, or you’ve narrated crazy and dramatic stuff happening to a character related to their descriptors just out of reflex.
Anyone who realizes this in play can mention it, and the point of Vigor can be awarded retroactively, treating it like a snag after the fact. GMs, you’re the final arbiter. It should be pretty obvious when something like this occurs, though—just look at the guidelines for event and decision snags above, and see if you can summarize what happened in the game according to those guidelines. If you can, award a point of Vigor.
Snagging with Situation Descriptors
Like every other kind of descriptor, you can use situation descriptors (and by extension, game descriptors) for snags. Because situation descriptors are usually external to characters, you’re almost always looking at event-based snags rather than decision-based ones. The character or characters affected get a point of Vigor for the snag.
Skills & Feats
Defining Skills
A skill is a word that describes a broad family of competency at something—such as Athletics, Melee, or Deceive—which your character might have gained through innate talent, training, or years of trial and error. Skills and Special Abilities are the basis for everything your character actually does in the game that involves challenge and chance (and dice).
Skills are ranked from 0 (Untrained) to 10+ (Supreme Grandmaster and above). The higher the ranking, the better your character is at the skill. Taken together, your list of skills gives you a picture of that character’s potential for action at a glance—what you’re best at, what you’re okay at, and what you’re not so good at.
Ranks are also described, but they aren’t descriptors. The rank descriptions are:
0: Untrained
1: Fundamental Awareness (basic knowledge)
2: Beginner (very limited experience)
3: Novice (limited experience)
4: Intermediate (practical application)
5: Advanced (applied theory)
6: Expert (recognized authority)
7: Master (a teacher of teachers)
8: Senior Master (superb skill and teaching ability)
9: Grandmaster (flawless skill and teaching ability)
10: Supreme Grandmaster (legendary skill and teaching ability)
We define skills in two ways in Steamfunkateers—in terms of the game actions that you can do with them, and the context in which you can use them. There are only a handful of basic game actions, but the number of potential contexts is infinite.
The Basic Game Actions
Surmount: True to its name, you tackle some kind of challenge, engaging task, or hindrance related to your skill.
Get the Upper Hand: Whether you’re discovering something that already exists about an opponent or creating a situation that helps you succeed, getting the upper hand allows you to discover and create descriptors, and lets you get free invocations of them.
Attack: You try to harm someone in a conflict. That harm may be physical, mental, emotional, or social in nature.
Defend: You try to keep someone from harming you, getting past you, or getting the upper hand to use against you.
There are also some special effects that some skills perform.
Even though there are only four actions that all skills adhere to, the skill in question lends context to the action. For example, both Burglary and Tinkering allow you to get the upper hand, but under very different contexts—Burglary allows you to do it when you’re casing a place you’re about to break into, and Tinkering allows you to do it when you’re examining a piece of machinery. The different skills let you differentiate the PCs’ abilities from one another a bit, allowing each person to have a unique contribution to the game.
Defining Feats
A feat is a special trait your character has that changes the way a skill works for you. Feats indicate some special, privileged way a character uses a skill that is unique to whoever has that feat, which is a pretty common trope in a lot of settings—special or elite training, exceptional talents, the mark of destiny, genetic alteration, innate coolness, and a myriad of other reasons all explain why some people get more out of their skills than others do.
Unlike skills, which are about the sort of things anyone can do in your campaign, feats are about individual characters. We encourage you to make your own feats, but we’ll also have example feats listed under each skill in the Default Skill List.
Having feats in your game allows you to differentiate characters that have the same skills as one another.
Feats and ReinVIGORate
Taking a new feat beyond the first three reduces your character’s reinVIGORate pace by one. ReinVIGORate can be no lower than 1, thus 5 feats is the maximum a PC can take.
Building Feats
In Steamfunkateers, we allow players to take feats during character creation, or leave open the option to take feats during play. There are a number of example feats listed under each skill entry below. These are not a hard and fast list; rather, they’re there to show you how to create your own (though you can certainly lift directly from the book if you’d like to).
We also have a list of all the things that feats can potentially do, to help you when you’re coming up with them for your game. When in dou
bt, look at the listed feats for guidance, as well as those the example characters have.
Adding a New Action to a Skill
The most basic option for a feat is to allow a skill to do something that it normally can’t do. It adds a new action onto the base skill in certain situations, for those with this feat. This new action can be one that’s available to another skill (allowing one skill to swap for another under certain circumstances), or one that’s not available to any skill.
Here are some new action feats:
Backstab. You can use Stealth to make physical attacks, provided your target isn’t already aware of your presence.
Scary Black Man (or Woman). You can use Provoke to enter the kinds of contests that you’d normally need Physique for, whenever your ability to psych your opponent out with the force of your presence alone would be a factor.
Heistmeister. You can use Burglary to make mental attacks and get the upper hand against a target, by staging a heist in such a way as to shatter their confidence in their security.
Adding a Bonus to an Action
Another use for a feat is to give a skill an automatic bonus under a particular, very narrow circumstance, effectively letting a character specialize in something. The circumstance should be narrower than what the normal action allows, and only apply to one particular action or pair of actions.
The usual bonus is +2d to the skill total.
You can also use this to establish any effect worth two shifts as an additional benefit of succeeding at the skill check. This might be a level-1 opposition, a mild Condition, or an advantage that takes level-1 opposition to remove.
Here are some examples of adding a bonus to an action:
Occult Expert. Gain a +2d bonus to get the upper hand using Scholarship, whenever the situation has specifically to do with the supernatural or occult.
Sniper. You are good at pinning down opponents with carefully placed, long-range shots. Any time you’re using a ranged weapon from 3 or more zones away from your targets and you succeed at a Marksman attack, you automatically create a level-1 opposition against movement in the zone you are shooting at until your next turn, because your opponent(s) fear getting hit by sniper fire. Normally, you’d need to take a separate action to set up this kind of interference, but with the feat, it’s free.
Bourgeoisie. Gain a +2d bonus to any attempt to surmount with Rapport when you’re at an aristocratic function, such as a royal ball.
Creating a Rules Exception
Finally, a feat can allow a skill to make a single exception, in a narrow circumstance, for any other game rule that doesn’t precisely fit into the category of an action.
The only limit to this is that a feat can’t change any of the basic rules for descriptors in terms of invoking, compelling, and Vigor economy. Those always remain the same.
Here are some feats that create rules exceptions:
Ritualist. Use Scholarship in place of another skill during a challenge, allowing you to use Scholarship twice in the same challenge.
Hogtie. When you use Tinkering to get the Hogtied (or similar) upper hand on someone, you can always actively oppose any surmount checks to escape the hogtie (also using Tinkering), even if you’re not there. Normally, if you weren’t there, the escaping character would roll against passive opposition, making it a lot easier to escape.
Riposte. If you roll Four Successes or Five Successes on a Melee defense, you immediately inflict a mild, fleeting condition on your opponent in addition to whatever descriptor the GM grants you.
Balancing Feat Utility
If you look at most of the example feats, you’ll notice that the circumstances under which you can use them are pretty narrow compared to the base skills they modify. That’s the sweet spot you want to shoot for with your own feats—you want them to be limited enough in scope that it feels special when you use them, but not so narrow that you never see them come up after you take them.
If the feat effectively takes over all of the skill’s base actions, it’s not limited enough. You don’t want a feat replacing the skill it modifies.
The two main ways to limit a feat are by keeping its effects to a specific action or pair of actions—only getting the upper hand or only attack and defend checks; or by limiting the situations in which you can use it—only when you’re among nobles, only when it deals with the supernatural, and so on.
For the best results, use both—have the feat restricted to a specific action, which can only be used in a very specific in-game situation. If you’re worried about the situation being too narrow, back up and think of the ways the skill might be used in play. If you can see the feat being relevant to one of those uses, you’re probably on the right track. If you can’t, you may need to adjust the feat a little to make sure it’ll come up.
You can also restrict a feat by only allowing it to be used once in a certain period of game time, such as once per conflict, once per scene, or once per session.
Feat Families
If you want to get detailed about a particular kind of training or talent, you can create a feat family for it. This is a group of feats that are related to and chain off of each other somehow.
This allows you to create things like fighting styles or elite schools in your setting and represents the benefits of belonging to them.
Creating a feat family is easy. You make one feat that serves as a prerequisite for all the others in the family, qualifying you to take further feats up the chain. Then, you need to create a handful of feats that are all related somehow to the prerequisite, either stacking the effects or branching out into another set of effects.
Stacking Effects
Perhaps the simplest way of handling a related feat is just making the original feat more effective in the same situation:
If the feat added an action, narrow it further and give the new action a bonus. Follow the same rules for adding a bonus—the circumstances in which it applies should be narrower than that of the base action.
If the feat gave a bonus to an action, give an additional +2d bonus to the same action.
If the feat made a rules exception, make it even more of an exception (This might be difficult depending on what the original exception is. Don’t worry, you have other options).
Keep in mind that the upgraded feat effectively replaces the original. You can look at it as a single super-feat that costs TWO reinVIGORate for the price of being more powerful than other feats.
Here are some feats that stack:
Bad and Boojie. Requires Bourgeoisie (see above). When you surmount an impediment with Bourgeoisie, you may additionally create a situation descriptor that describes how the general attitude turns in your favor. If anyone wants to try to get rid of this descriptor, they must surmount +2d opposition.
Advanced Ritualist. Requires Ritualist (see above). You gain a +2d bonus when you use Scholarship in place of another skill during a challenge. This allows you to use Scholarship twice in the same challenge.
Branching Effects
When you branch, you create a new feat that relates to the original in terms of theme or subject matter, but provides a wholly new effect. If you look at stacking effects as expanding a feat or skill vertically, you can look at branching effects as expanding them laterally.
If your original feat added an action to a skill, a branching feat might add a different action to that skill, or it might provide a bonus to a different action the skill already has, or create a rules exception, etc. The mechanical effect isn’t connected to the prerequisite feat at all, but provides a complementary bit of funkiness.
This allows you to provide a few different paths to being funky that follow from a single feat. You can use this to highlight different elements of a certain skill and help characters that are highly ranked in the same skill differentiate from each other by following different feat families.
As an example of how this works, let’s take a look at the Deceive skill. If you look at the skill description, there
are several avenues that we might enhance with feats: lying, sleight of hand and misdirection, disguise, creating cover stories, or social conflict.
So let’s make our first feat something like this:
Glib. You get a +2d to surmount with Deceive, provided you don’t have to talk to the person you’re trying to deceive for more than a few sentences before blowing past them.
Here are some potential options for branching off of that feat:
Quick Disguise. Requires Glib. You’re able to put together a convincing disguise in a heartbeat, using items from your surroundings. You can roll Deceive to create a disguise without any time to prepare, in nearly any situation.
Instant Cover. Requires Glib. You can whip up a cover story like no one’s business, even if you haven’t made an effort to establish it beforehand. Any time you surmount an obstacle in public using Deceive, automatically add a situation descriptor representing your cover story, and stick a free invocation on it.
Hey, What’s That? Requires Glib. Gain a +2d bonus whenever you’re using Deceive to momentarily distract someone, as long as part of the distraction involves saying something.
Every one of those feats thematically relates to very quick, spontaneous uses of Deceive, but they each have a different flavor of funkiness.
Purchasing Skills and Feats
You start with three skills intrinsic to your chosen archetype (see Archetypes). Your intrinsic skills start at 1 rank. To purchase more ranks in an intrinsic skill costs one point of Vigor for each rank, so if an Aviator wants to raise his Drive 1 skill to 4, it will cost him 3 points. To purchase a feat for an intrinsic skill also costs 1 point of Vigor, so purchasing three feats only costs 3 points of Vigor.
For non-intrinsic skills, it costs 1 point of Vigor per level of rank and this stacks, so if that same Aviator wanted to purchase the Deceive skill and raise it to 4 ranks, it would cost him TEN points of Vigor (1+2+3+4). To purchase a Feat for a non-intrinsic skill costs 2 points of Vigor; so three feats would cost 6 points of Vigor.
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