The Gift: Ultimate Effort

Long ago, I was talking about superheroes and games with a friend. He mentioned how superhero comics tend to make their popular characters immortal. If only for commercial reasons. We wondered what it would be like if it worked the opposite way, with supers burning out and dying young. In an RPG, you could give the PCs an overcharge mode, a sort of instant win button, but with an increasing risk of death each time you use it.

I was struck by how that could give a game a strong theme of self-sacrifice. Then I forgot about it, until I got to a certain point working on my Fate supers game, the Gift. I call it Ultimate Effort.

The Benefit

The most common benefit of UE is just raw power. For one scene, your powers are boosted. Anything that was on Super scale is now Cosmic scale. Powers that worked on Normal scale are now Super scale. 

Alternately, the player can choose to funnel that raw power into a single epic deed. This can include stuff that's normally off limits, like time travel, raising the dead, creating a new life form, or giving a normal person true super powers. That's a cool character idea: you were created by someone's ultimate effort.

The Cost

There are two systems for this, a predictable way and a random way. The group can decide which one they prefer. Either way, once the rush of power fades, there are three possible outcomes. You are lucky, scarred, or burnt out.

Lucky: You are in pain, but you can recover. Mark the Doomed condition, and you take a temporary aspect representing the enormous strain.

Scarred: The experience has changed you forever. Like before, you mark Doomed and take an aspect, but before you can recover, you must change one of your permanent aspects to represent the damage that you endured.

Burnt Out: Your character is out of the game. You can decide exactly what this means for your character. You could be dead, or you might be permanently depowered. Possibly you succumb to your dark side and become a NPC villain.

The Predictable Way

This way is very straightforward. You have three UE boxes on your character sheet, check one off every time you use UE. The first time you are Lucky. The second time you are Scarred. And the third time you are Burnt Out.

The Randomized Way

You have six UE boxes on your character sheet, check one off every time you use UE.Afterwards, roll a d6 to determine the aftermath. If you roll higher than the number of checks, you are Lucky. If you roll exactly the number of checks, you are Scarred. If you roll lower, you are Burnt Out.