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Your character is not just one of those individuals who goes through life always playing it safe, doing the bare minimum to get by, and accepting what the world throws at him with or without complaint (although he may have been one of those people before the call for greatness was thrust upon him). Your character is a force to be reckoned with; an arbiter of his own fate; an adventurer; a hero. To reflect this, all player characters in the game, including yours, possess an unconscious ability to control their fate to a certain extent by way of a force referred to as Ité (pronounced ee TAY’).
What is Ité?
Philosophically, Ité represents a power that suffuses all planes of existence and binds the mind, body, and spirit of a true hero with reality, fate, and time. Mechanistically, Ité represents a pool of points that enables your character to cheat the cruel fate that the dice can sometimes dole out over the course of the game, even when you thought you did everything right and covered all the bases.
When you play the game, you will spend points of Ité any time you need to give your character a fighting chance at success when all luck fails or to create opportunities at times when no such opportunities present themselves.
Ité and Genre
Ité points are designed to make the improbable probable in a manner consistent with the genre of the game. Since Big Showdown in Little Canyonside takes place in a setting where neither magic nor psychic abilities are not possessed by characters, Ité points cannot be used to create these types of effects. Ité points can, however, can be used to have a gas can explode mysteriously if an open flame somehow appears within a few meters of it, for example.
Types of Ité
Ité is classified as one of three types, each of which is obtained and tracked in slightly different way.
Lifetime Ité
When you create your character, you will be given a specific number of points of Ité referred to as your character’s Lifetime Ité. Lifetime Ité represent the total amount of Ité your character is born with. As you spend these points of Ité, you will cross them off your character sheet. Lifetime Ité is never replenished; once a point has been used, it is gone. In effect, running out of Lifetime Ité represents when your character’s luck has finally “run out”.
Floating Ité
In addition to Lifetime Ité, you may be awarded additional points of Ité that you may use in specific circumstances over the course of a single game session. Such points of Ité are referred to as Floating Ité. If not used, these Ité points do not accumulate or remain with your character, but instead simply “float away” at the end of the game session.
If an aspect description provides a point of Floating Ité, when that point is used, a point of Floating Ité is crossed off your character sheet. At the start of the next game session, however, any points of Floating Ité that have been crossed off your character sheet are added back to your character sheet as they “float back” to your character for use again.
Negative Ité
While friendly to heroes, Ité is very fickle, and it resists being spent more than one point at a time by a single hero. If your character really needs a stroke of luck, you may tempt fate and spend two points of Ité simultaneously on one action or event. Doing this, however, alters fate so drastically that instability occurs in the fabric of reality, resulting in a condition referred to as being out of balance. Any time you force your character out of balance, he incurs a point of Negative Ité which you will need to indicate on your character sheet by writing a “-1” in the appropriate space on your character sheet.
Each point of Negative Ité your character accumulates grants your Director a point of Ité that she may use at any time to arbitrarily decide that some totally bizarre, detrimental, or even perilous phenomenon affects your character, which you as a player cannot control or influence with further points of Ité.
Negative Ité points do not go away at the end of a game session and can accumulate. Each time your Director declares she is using one your character’s points of Negative Ité, she will inform you that you may erase or cross off one point of Negative Ité off your character sheet. Once all your character’s Negative Ité is gone, he is considered to be “back in balance”.
The Uses of Ité
You may use Ité in one of three ways
The first way you may use Ité is referred to as Cut-Scene Healing. Any time your character would be reduced to 0 points of STUN or less, you may spend a point of Ité to bring his STUN up to its full value the next round, when your character is on-screen. Cut scene healing can also be used to prevent a condition from affecting your character or to remove a condition from your character. Note that if your character takes damage from an attack or insult that both reduces your character to 0 points and inflicts another condition on your character, a single point of Ité’ may only be used to heal one of these two conditions; two points of Ité would be required to heal them both.
The second way you may use Ité is referred to as Kicking It Up (or Down) A Notch. Any time you make a task roll, after you have determined its result, you may spend a point of Ité to increase the level of success of the task roll by one level on the Action Results scale, turning a critical failure into a failure, a failure into a success, or a success into a critical success. Conversely, you may spend a point of Ité to decrease the level of success of any task roll made against your character by one level, converting a critical success to a success and so forth.
The third way you may use Ité is to Make It Happen. Any time during the game, you may spend a point of Ité to create the occurrence of a specific unlikely event or bring forth a fortuitous event or coincidence that might aid your character in some way. You cannot use a point of Ité to directly prevent an event your Director describes; however, you can use a point to create an event that interferes with it. You can also use Make It Happen to pull an unforeseen object from seemingly nowhere, so long as it is plausible, fits the genre of the game, and you can explain it quickly and extemporaneously. Whenever you Make it Happen, just as when you gain a critical success on a task roll, you are temporarily entitled to take over your Director’s role in describing the result of the event. The Director will step in to assume control of the narrative again once she determines the level of effect of the result has been reached.
Example: Making It Happen
Sarah, the Director, is describing an action scene to Ogun, who is playing a character named Johnny. Sarah opens the scene by telling Ogun, “The crazed worker from Canyonside Cable stumbles into his van and slams his foot on the accelerator. He is barreling toward Johnny at 100 kilometers an hour down a dead-end alley. Johnny is boxed in with nowhere left to run and little time to react! What do you want him to do?”
Ogun smiles, throws one of the poker chips representing his character's Ité into the center of the table, and retorts back, "I realize that the crazed zombie cable guy is about to run Johnny down and pin him against the alley wall or worse, but this point Ité says that a garbage truck that somehow got missed in the shot by the cameraman just happens to pull out from an off-screen side alleyway, right between Johnny and the van. Johnny is going then vault over the hood of the crashed van and bail out of the alley!”
Sarah tells Ogun, “The cable van slams into the garbage truck, halting them both as bits of crumpled metal and glass fly everywhere. As Johnny parkours his way over the wreckage of the crashed vehicles and pauses after bolting out of the alleyway, he sees a dozen or so ninjas back-flipping toward him from across the street”.
With a strong note of confidence in his voice, Ogun once again smiles and flips another Ité chip across the table and explains, "Darn it, the bad guys just keep coming...oh, look, a point of Ité says that some guy left his car here on the street running while he went back into the Moondoe’s Exorbitantly-Priced Koffee Haus to get his wallet that he left on the espresso machine. I think Johnny will just borrow it for a while…”
Cooperative Ité
Ité is the force of heroes. It refuses to allow itself to be used to exert negative effects on other heroes, but readily yields to heroes who use it help one another. Due to this heroic nature, you may never use a point of Ité to harm another player character or decrease the effects of another player character's actions. You may, however, spend a point of Ité to help another player character. Any time you choose to use a point of Ité to help another character (player or non-player), it is referred to as using cooperative Ité.
Using cooperative Ité enables you and the other players to not only save one another when one of you runs out of Ité points, but also to spend multiple points on a single event without having to incur a point of Negative Ité. Additionally, multiple players may spend a point of Ité cooperatively on a single action or series of events, which will allow the effects to be escalated to heroic proportions beyond that normally possible by the Action Results Scale.
For example, spending multiple points on one instance of Making it Happen can increase the level of power and unlikeliness of an object or random event or extend the effects of an event to the immediate surroundings, while the effect of a task roll by Kicking It Up a Notch can be used to extend the effects of a critical success to multiple opponents simultaneously.
The limits of the effects of cooperatively using Ité are left up to your Director to decide to ensure they stay within the genre of the game. Also, keep in mind that although cooperatively using Ité can raise the level of heroism to world-shattering and epic scales, the number of players at the game table will always remain the ultimate limit of how many points may be spent on a single action or event, as even when using Ité cooperatively, players may only spend one point on any event without taking on a point of Negative Ité.
Hujraad’s Hacks: An Example of Play Using Cooperative Ité
In order to see how cooperative Ité works, take a minute and read the following example of how multiple players can use individual and cooperative Ité in various ways to get out of a sticky situation:
Director (Sarah): You are all in the middle of the desert. You see at least ten thousand platinum-cyber-limbed, hyper-reflexed zombies running at you over the dunes barely 2 kilometers away, as indicated through your laser-range-finding binoculars. They seem to be skimming over the dunes at a pretty good clip. What do you do?
Player 1 (Xiaohui): Guys! Those zombies are out of control and are gonna be on us in seconds! We don’t have enough bullets, even with our aspects! Aagh! What do we do?
Player 2 (Mark): I spend a point of Ité to create a Mother of All Bombs.
Director (Sarah): Yeeeeaaaahhhhhh…no, it is too early in the movie, so that’s out of genre. They are getting closer. Whatdya want to do?
Player 3 (Peter): (Flips an Ité chip onto the table) I seem to remember that in 1969, there was some sort of Black Ops mission that went awry in this desert. The extraction team was never found…not even their helicopter…
Director (Sarah): That was on the far western reaches of the desert, some 500 kilometers from here…
Player 4 (Ben): (Flips an Ité chip onto the table) I seem to remember a typhoon had blown that helicopter off course to about here, which was what they attributed to the failed recovery of the team…
Director (Sarah): Come to think of it, I seem to remember that as well…but it’s probably buried under a lot of sand, maybe even several metric tons of sand…
Player 5 (Dave): (Flips an Ité chip onto the table) Actually, global warming has led to a larger number of windstorms the past 40 years or so. I’ll bet if we dig, we have a good chance of finding that helicopter…
Director (Sarah): As you start to dig, you hear a metal “clang” and seem to have hit the roof of a large metal object.
Player 2 (Mark): Sweet! If only we had enough time to dig that thing out…
Director (Sarah): The cyberzombies are 500 meters away…and closing fast...
Player 6 (Ogun): (Flips an Ité chip onto the table) Wow! Time sure flies when you are getting hunted down by zombies! I wish my character was dancing at The Club!
Director (Sarah): Indeed, it does! It would seem that the sand you have displaced with your frantic and desperate digging has redistributed it such that it falls into a small cavity under what looks to be the burnt-out husk of a Bell UH-1H helicopter with rusted and burnt out equipment and weapons! Within it you can see the mummified and scalded remains of the two pilots and 8 special forces fighters, wearing the remnants of burnt and blood-stained uniform.
Player 2 (Mark): I throw the pilot’s corpse out of its seat. I have a piloting VTOL skill, so I can get this bird running with panache!
Director (Sarah): You sure could…if the battery wasn’t dead, the wires weren’t fused together, and the...
Player 1 (Xiaohui): (Flips an Ité chip onto the table). Actually, the battery isn’t dead.
Player 3 (Peter): (Flips an Ité chip onto the table) And, actually, the wires are in better shape than we thought.
Director (Sarah): Wow, you’re right. Too bad the fuel burnt…
Player 4 (Ben): ...excuse me… (Flips a Floating Ité chip onto the table) …actually, I’m a half-full kind of guy…and so is the fuel tank! Looks like it landed without exploding…That should still be enough to get us out of here!
Director (Sarah): The zombies are 200 meters away and will be on you in ten seconds…you only have enough time to leap in and they will be on you…
All the players: “We LEAP IN!!!!”
Player 6 (Ogun): Wow they’re fast! This is crazy!
Player 2 (Mark): I fire this bird up…
Director (Sarah): It is going to take you at least 2 minutes to get this thing warmed up enough for takeoff…
Player 5 (Dave): Quick, I look for something to hold off those zombies!
Player 2 (Mark): I wish we had that MOAB…
Player 6 (Ogun): If only we had a bit more time… (Flips a Ité chip onto the table) …now we do!
Director (Sarah): Wow! I must have underestimated how far away those zombies are...it would seem you each have time for one more action before the zombies reach you and the chopper is warmed up…
Player 3 (Peter): Great! I’ll bet the M60 on the side of the chopper is still functional (Flips an Ité chip onto the table) …
Player 4 (Ben): and, of course, it’s already loaded and ready to rock (Flips an Ité chip onto the table) ... I open a large swath of fire on the zombies, hopefully mowing them down long enough to for us to make our escape…
Director (Sarah): The line of zombies hits your suppressive fire, and though you easily mow through the first rank, the rest of them launch themselves over the bodies as the skids of the helicopter leave the sandy ground…
Player 3 (Peter): (Rolling a successful task roll) I parkour my butt into the copilot seat, yank on the stick and roll the chopper over so the blade is between us and the zombie horde (Rolling a Critical Failure) ...AAGGHHH!!!!
Director (Sarah): The helicopter blade is shredded on the ground as the side of the chopper rolls over…
Player 2 (Mark): No worries… (finally flips an Ité chip onto the table) …I take back control of the stick and prevent the destruction of the blade, but we still fail…
Player 3 (Peter): (Flips an Ité chip onto the table)..or do we? That must’ve made it a success…get us outta here Johnny!!!...
Director (Sarah): The rotor blades, now at full speed, shred the zombies as they hit, grinding them to bits…now what Johnny?
Player 2 (Mark): The chopper pushes sideways creating a 10-meter-wide path through the horde like a suburban lawn edger…then I pull the stick back, and it’s off and back home to Canyonside…
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