Hi there! I’m going to highlight something that I think turned out pretty well with BURNOUT: the Fade check mechanic, which is the “primary” mechanical system of BURNOUT. It’s the thing that controls, well, the burning out of the Sunwell. I don’t think I’m anywhere close to the first person who’s done something like this, but I want to highlight something that worked because I think it’s a neat twist on the existing LUMEN dice mechanic as well as something that can produce a lot of interesting and diverse outcomes.

Framing Devices and Mechanics

BURNOUT, as a whole, is a campaign set up as a framing device. It only intersects a little with NOVA’s actual moment to moment gameplay. I wanted a few things going into it:

• Don’t Be a Buzzkill For the Actual Game: NOVA is what it is, power level-wise, and I don’t want to step on that - I just want to make it more tense around the edges. I like to think of introducing these aspects to a NOVA campaign like writing a high-power superhero story: introducing an explicit Kryptonite-esque deadly weakness or limiting their capabilities is a boring solution, but giving Sparks situations where they have to use their high power intelligently and to the fullest of their abilities to help people other than themselves is good. There are a few things that intersect with the actual gameplay (Dimming a Spark, +Draw if they go Dormant too much) but it’s mostly on the margins and can easily be removed if that’s your inclination. I’m not going to talk about this part as much, but it’s worth a mention because it was intentional.
• Long-Term: If you’re making something intended to frame the space around a mission-based game, it has to matter in the future and over time. There needs to be an ebb and flow.
• Short-Term: If things only matter in the long run, though, it’s going to seem distant and out of your hands or inevitable and not worth worrying about. That ebb and flow has to matter. There needs to be some stuff that happens immediately.
• Make decisions feel different: Whether or not they end at the same place, decisions made in the metagame phase need to feel like they matter and have different outcomes. If decisions are going to exist, they should feel like they need to.

Long-Term: Intensity, Draw, and Fading

The first of these is handled by the general Intensity and Draw mechanic. To summarize those:

• Intensity can be Bright, Healthy, Waning, Dim, or Exhausted. (Exhausted, as you might guess, is the failure state - not a terminal one for the campaign, but still.) In mechanical terms this mostly controls how high a roll can go (each step is correlated with a decreasing number of dice).
• Draw is how much power is taken up/taken up over time. This correlates with how far the Sparks go for missions, whether or not enemies who are attacking the city have been addressed, etc. (And one other factor: we’ll get to it later.) It’s usually somewhere between 2 and 4 during a mission at the start of the campaign depending on how many complicating factors are present but it can go as low as 1 or as high as 6+ depending on what happens.
• The Fade check incorporates both of those. You roll the number of dice indicated by Intensity, take the highest, and compare it to Draw. If it’s lower than Draw, the Sunwell is overextended and its Intensity fades by a step.

In the course of the campaign, you have access to sun shards, which can Kindle it back to Healthy from Waning/Dim, or Kindle to Bright from Healthy. So a lot of the meta-choice in the long-term concerns these.

Short-term: City consequences

But that’s all long-term stuff, and it’s pretty procedural without other mechanics: save sun shards, wait until it’s Dim, and then bring it back up to Healthy. Or bring it to Bright, because more dice is a higher result and that will often outpace Draw. I wanted a reason consider not doing the “optimal” thing for sun shard expenditure. That’s where city consequences come in.

In addition to comparing to Draw, when rolling a Fade check, you also look at the actual die result, split into three bands in NOVA/LUMEN fashion:

• 5-6 means no city consequences.
• 3-4 means a city consequence.
• 1-2 would normally mean a failure with consequence, but in this case since “failure” is handled by Draw, in this case it means more consequences or a critical consequence.

City consequences are basically bad things that happen to the people of the city or to its infrastructure. This can range from defenses being destroyed to lighting going dim to people going missing. These are things that, presumably, a Spark wouldn’t want to happen in-character. Critical consequences are worse versions of these: so in the case of lighting, a consequence might be that public lighting is unreliable while a critical consequence might be that public lighting doesn’t work anymore and central-function lighting is unreliable.

Now, this gives a non-mechanical incentive to be liberal with Kindling: less dice means more low rolls means more bad things to the people that the Sparks are fighting for. This is independent from Draw, so while you can stay afloat at low Intensity if you just keep Draw low, you’re still going to create city consequences.

Now, this would normally mean that the strategy would be to get to Bright as quickly as possible and stay there, because more dice solves both problems. But…

The Aforementioned Draw Caveat

At Bright, Draw is increased. The narrative reason for this is that The City enjoys their reprieve when they can: it’s kind of the opposite of negative consequences.

The mechanical reason is that this provides another kind of choice with regards to sun shard expenditure. You can choose to keep the city at Bright as much as possible to avoid consequences, but it will drop in Intensity much more frequently as a result, leading to “wasted” or “inefficient” sun shard uses. But what price is worth keeping everyone happy and safe, really? If you want to avoid city consequences as much as possible, this is the best option, but it’s the option most vulnerable to bad luck.

Summary

So to bring those factors together, this creates four outcomes from any given Fade check:

• Long-term and short-term success: The Sunwell doesn’t fade and there are no or few consequences.
• Long-term success and short-term failure: The Sunwell doesn’t fade because Draw was kept low, but consequences happen.
• Long-term failure and short-term success: No or few consequences happen, but because Draw was high, the Sunwell fades.
• Long-term and short-term failure: The Sunwell fades and consequences happen.

This also causes you to develop a strategy with regards to sun shard expenditure.

• Be judicious: Use them only when the Sunwell is Dim, or when they’d be wasted anyway, and take the consequences that come.
• Be a spendthrift: Keep the Sunwell Bright as much as possible to maximize die values/avoid consequences at the cost of spending far more sun shards.
• Something in between: Exactly what it says. Try to keep it Healthy and occasionally Bright but don’t go too out of your way.

These also interact with various other aspects that we didn’t go into here:

• Types of Missions: These Fade check mechanics have a big impact on what kind of mission you decide to take. Do you try to keep Draw low by taking closer missions and favoring defensive missions? Do you aim for something that’s more likely to have a sun shard but has higher draw? Do you ignore both of those in favor of meta-progression via Breakthroughs?
• Distance: The farther away from the City’s light, the more Draw is used between you leaving and returning. But farther missions also have a higher chance of having a sun shard available during that mission.
• Sun Shard Usage: You can gain the ability to use sun shards to further advance the Research clock early on, which then adds another wrinkle to the expenditure question. Is it worth it to speed up progression rather than save them for a series of terrible rolls?

Anyway, thanks for reading! If any of this sounds cool, pick up BURNOUT now! It’s on sale through the end of #NOVAjam.

Until next time!