I’m starting a new campaing and we plan low & gritty game.
Thinking about the themes we plan to incorporate I happened to wonder if someone used something like temporary traits in BW? I imagine them working a bit like statuses from Mouse Guards. To reinforce our campaign’s aspect of survival PCs could for example be hungry, sick or tired.
I don’t plan to make the traits any more complicated than Ob+1 so it would work mostly as a reminder that we should take some additional factors into account and that PCs should do something about it. Maybe it would just be some sort of visual tokens to reminds me about negative factors (like when I forget about darkness rules…).
It’s just my fresh tought and it’s quite possible we will just play by the book, but playing BW and MG2e I wondered if anyone used traits or statuses like that in BW.
I believe PCs can earn new traits during play like when they are taking damage or like in “Trouble in Hochen”, when they can earn “Infected by the Black Oil” trait. I couldn’t find any note if they could earn traits that won’t by long term/permanent but I have this feeling it wouldn’t be outside BW spirit.
This is something more or less already in the game. The Practical Failure heading in the Codex – Page 120 – discusses conditional Ob penalties as a consequence of failure. Thor talks a bit more about this kind of thing in this post. These ideas are what become the more concretized Conditions in Torchbearer, I think.
I think you’re definitely on the write track thinking about conditional Ob penalties, but I think tying it to traits is a bit of a red herring. You’ll likely be better off playing it looser and not bogging down the trait system with ephemeral situations of play. Save traits for big, long-term stuff, and catastrophe.
I play mostly online and have some tokens after MG and Torchbearer which is why it came to my mind. If it was only situational then of course I wouldn’t bother. I’m just not sure I will remember about thase factors if heros will be exposed to them over a long time.
One way to mitigate that is to ask players to remember as well; in the game @Mark_Watson is GMing at the moment, we remind him of ongoing negatives he applied on a fairly regular basis.
If your table aren’t great at pointing out the GM has forgotten a negative, you could try offering Fate like triggering an Instinct to make a situation harder or using a Trait against oneself.
