Recovering From Conflict

## **Recovering from Conflicts**

After the end of a **conflict**—whether physical, social, or mental—your character will have amassed stress and consequences, and you may have received some fate points for your trouble. But your troubles are largely just beginning— those consequences aren’t going to go away immediately; while they’re still attached to your character, they’re available for invocations and compels just like any other aspect.

 Any stress that your character takes during a conflict goes away immediately after the conflict—stress represents the close scrapes and glancing blows that your character can shrug off, so it doesn’t last after the end of that conflict scene. In rare instances, it might be appropriate for stress to remain if your character goes immediately from one conflict to another or to some other appropriate scene (like a fight that turns into a car chase), but for the most part, once the conflict is done, the stress is gone.

 Recovering from consequences is a bit more involved. It basically requires two things— some in-game circumstance that justifies that the character can start the recovery process and a certain amount of time in scenes or sessions before the consequence in question goes away. An appropriate in-game circumstance depends largely on the consequence that’s been taken— most physical consequences require medical attention or rest, while mental consequences might require therapy, counseling, or extended time spent in the healing presence of a loved one. Social consequences can vary widely and are situational; a consequence like **Frazzled** might only need a night at the bar and a chance to unwind, while a consequence like **Bad Reputation** might require your character to spend time doing very public acts of charity to rebuild the good faith he’s lost.

 Once this circumstance is established, the recovery time can begin. As stated before, mild consequences last until the end of the next scene after recovery begins, moderate consequences last until the end of the next session after recovery begins, and severe consequences last until the end of the next scenario (or few sessions, as you prefer) after recovery begins. Extreme consequences are, of course, their own special kind of beast. In certain cases, it’d be more appropriate to measure recovery with in-game time, like days or weeks – these will vary depending on story arcs and the GM’s discretion.

 Some powers affect either recovery time or the establishment of an appropriate circumstance (like Inhuman Recovery, Wizard’s Constitution, et al.). See those individual descriptions for details.

### **Recovery and Skills**

Some characters may have skills that lend themselves appropriately to initiating recovery; for instance, a character with Scholarship and the Doctor stunt could start a character on the road to recovery from a moderate physical consequence. This is handled via declaration, and most of the time no roll is required—but if there’s some kind of pressure on the healer character, a roll might be called for. In those cases, the difficulty is equal to the stress value of the consequence: Fair for mild, Great for moderate, Fantastic (!) for severe. Success means the recovery process can begin as normal; failure means the injured character has to wait.