Lost in the Fog: Emerging House Rules
Fatherfog 0e is approaching its second week out and the conversations about it have been rolling!
The Warden’s Operation Manual for Mothership has a whole section on house rules and a chart of house rules that I’m sure arose from play and feedback. Some of the rules from the chart I’d assume are pretty widely used, while others might rarely get touched at all, but giving explicit permission to house rule is a great resource for Wardens.
It might be jumping the gun a bit to talk about house rules for the 0 edition of Fatherfog, a game that has already received updates (pick up the 0.2 version of the game from your downloads on TKG if you haven’t already), but there are some common practices, rulings, and deviations from the rules that I’m seeing crop up in discussions that have some community interest but might not be everyone’s cup of tea or might not quite line up with Alan Gerding’s vision for the game. We’re going to consider all of these as “house rules" for this post.
Disclaimer: I’m taking these ideas from discussions on the Fatherfog subreddit and the Fatherfog channel in the Mothership Discord. Some of these aren’t my ideas at all, and even if I thought of them, so did probably at least one other person.
The best way to understand these things is to go download the free Fatherfog 0e PDF, but I’ll do my best to give you a baseline on a couple important concepts.
Hope is something of a parallel system to Health. You can think of it as similar to Sanity in Call of Cthulhu or Stress in Mothership. It’s a way of tracking a character’s deteriorating emotional state. It starts at 100 and ticks down. Sometimes players roll a d100 hoping to roll under their current Hope. If they don’t, they get a result on the Despair table which range from somewhat mild results to some really horrifying and debilitating consequences.
A Bit in Fatherfog is the ones place result when rolling a d100. All rolls are d100 rolls, so there are lots of opportunities to apply a Bit, often as a Bit of lost Health or Hope.
A pretty common feeling is that ticking down 100 Hope one at a time can feel tedious and make the Despair mechanics feel less impactful. Currently, one Hope is lost on a failed check, players can lose a Bit of Hope if they fail a Mind Save when seeing something horrible, and the Guide can have players automatically lose some Hope whenever they feel like. It can be argued that those are a lot of options for losing Hope, and even at only 20 Hope lost, there’s a solid chance of rolling a Despair. Still, especially with short campaigns and one shots, I could see Guides wanting to get that Hope down a lot faster, and when they do, they might reach for…
Always Losing A Bit: Players lose a Bit of Hope on every failure instead of just 1.
Cinematic Hope Loss: Big chunks of Hope are lost at key, horrifying moments.
Spendable Hope: Hope can be spent to subtract from your roll result, 1 Hope for every 1 subtracted. (Alternatively, Hope could be added to the number you’re rolling against, but with the way damage dealt by players is handled, this could be too powerful for a horror game).
Combat is punishing in Fatherfog, and when the rolls are not on their side, it goes really wrong for players really fast. Many enemies will take out a player after just two or three failed rolls on the player side (to be fair, a party of 4 rolling well could take out most enemies in a similar amount of time). Another feature of Fatherfog combat is that enemies never miss; even on a successful roll to avoid an enemy attack, players lose a Bit of Health. Now, the game explicitly says it’s a bad idea to get into combat, but when you hand all the players weapons and have whole sections on combat-specific mechanics, fights are going to be an expected part of the experience. It also sucks to feel totally useless in a fight. Spendable Hope is one way of addressing this, but so is…
Players Never Miss: On a failed combat check, player still deal a Bit of damage. (This one has enough traction that I wouldn’t be surprised if it made it into the official rules at some point)
Strength/Body vs Will/Spirit
This is less of a house rule kind of thing and more of a thing I imagine naturally occurring, especially for Guides running Fatherfog more casually.
Here’s a question: with no other information, if a character is swinging an ax at an enemy, what would you have them roll, Strength, Intellect, or Will? Which one of those should shape how much damage that ax does? If a character was leaping out of the way of a falling boulder, would you have them roll Body, Mind, or Spirit?
I think someone just reading the stats off of a character sheet would pick Strength and Body for the above scenarios, but Fatherfog has a quirk. Will and Spirit are dexterity stats. Rules as written, all attacks are made with Will and all dodges are made with Spirit. Now, I plan on doing some apologetics for the use of Will/Spirit as they are at some point, but I think it is likely for common practice to use Strength for melee attacks, Body for dodging and other speed-based things, and Will/Spirit like a wisdom or sometimes charisma stat. The practices that seem likely to emerge are:
Strength for Melee Attacks: Make melee attacks with Strength Checks, still using the result for damage.
Stats at Face Value: Select a stats and saves for rolls based on which one seems best based on its name.
Fatherfog has a really cool system for resting where different amounts of rest and levels of comfort impact the benefits of rest. An emerging feeling is that there isn’t enough distance between these different levels of rest and the consequences for a bad night’s sleep aren’t quite bad enough. I don’t have a succinct house rule for this one, but I could see a lot of tables fiddling with these rest mechanics, likely adding consequences and tempering benefits.
Those are just a few ideas I’m seeing crop up! Obviously, as more people actually play it, rather than simply read it, and as rules get further adjusted, things will change! Also, I might have missed some ideas that are already out there. I’m looking forward to how people continue to interact with Fatherfog!
If you've read this far, thank you! Here's a stat block you can use to populate your woods.
