What happens if you partially resist a consequence, but have no available slots for the reduced consequence?
Eg
Scoundrel Bob is both Drained and Exhausted, and trying to fight off a disagreeable brute over a misunderstanding involving some gambling winnings.
Said brute slams Bob with a chair. The GM calls that a moderate consequence ‘Broken Arm’, but Bob’s player wants to resist. A partial consequence would best fit the fiction and tone of the game thus far- but would mean the resistance is basically useless.
Should Bob just be able to avoid the consequence, or can he just not resist?
Tough luck, he should have left one of those slots open. Or use armor (for example the Cutter’s special armor) on top of resisting.
I would want to respect the player intent and, assuming it’s reasonably possible, ground out the consequences elsewhere (“You avoid injury but…[insert slightly unreasonable badness]”).
But I also would not get too twisted up over it. If a player is getting into a fight with a lot of consequences already in play, they knew what they signed up for.
For the most part everyone above is right, I’d also add in the gm always has the right to say you totally resist an effect. If Bob is about to get shot in the head and he resist with Prowess he dodges and gets shot in the shoulder, or he dodges and the bullet just misses. That’s totally okay to do as well. Sometimes things are reductions sometimes they’re all or nothings.
Fiction matters, and sometimes what’s important is that you don’t get your Arm Broken. I say let them Resist to mitigate the specific injury if that matters to them. Whether or not I let them complete avoid it depends on the specific situation in play.
It’s possible to take consequences that have nothing to do with the action at hand, as long as everyone is okay with it. “You resist the broken arm, but somewhere off-stage, the bad guys have found incriminating evidence against you. You’ll have to deal with that later.”
There’s also a big difference between a Level 2 Harm of “Broken Arm” and a Level 2 Harm of “Heavily Bruised Arm”. Yes, they take the same slot, but a dude with a broken arm is going to be in a lot more Desperate positions than a dude with a bruised arm. If they try to run away and climb a ladder, for instance, the Broken Arm definitely makes that a desperate roll, while being heavily bruised might still be in the Risky category.
.J. Hunter
I agree. I feel like drawing more heat is a great fallback because you can always justify why players are making too much noise or drawing to many onlookers with their antics.
As Jacob Kriegisch said, the specific nature of the Harm is at least (if not sometimes more) important than the level of the Harm (I say this as a gang chief who labored with a Level 3 Concussion for two jobs). If the player doesn’t have space for a reduced Harm- for example, if someone is looking at a Level 2 Horrifying Haircut but the GM allows her to resist it down to Level 1 Shitty Bangs, but she’s already got two Level 1 Harms, then they’ve got Level 2 Shitty Bangs (let’s assume for the sake of argument that this particular scoundrel does not have an especially hard life). Also, now I can’t stop hearing “Shitty Shitty Bang Bangs” in my head.
In fiction, this is pretty easily explained- the abundance of lower-level Harm blocking the new, reduced Harm is both mechanically and narratively preventing the Harm from being numerically reduced (“You avoid a 2- Broken Arm by twisting away from the steel truncheon in time, but your 1- Bad Hangover and 1- Front Row Tinnitus makes you overstep your dodge, and you fall against the toilet stall divider, getting a 2- Heavily Bruised Arm”). For some reason this example is a truncheon fight in a nightclub toilet.
The PC is still catching a break, though- even though they’re at -1D whether they’d “fully resisted” or not, the named consequence is lesser, and so the GM isn’t going to hit them with that -1D for, say, lifting something heavy (as they would with a broken arm), but they would hit them with penalties to, say, win 1st prize in a flexing contest or to use Sway to get a job as a shirtsleeve model (both of which would also certainly have affected them had they’d gotten the full Broken Arm).
This is my best interpretation of it after a lot of experience with various Harms in our local game. Does it make sense? I hope it’s helpful.