Conditions represent the emotional or psychological impacts on your character and offer different role-playing aspects for players to engage with.
Selecting Your Conditions
Every character interacts with the world in different ways, and as such are affected by the world in unique ways. When creating a character, select five conditions and list them on your character sheet. Ideally these conditions should reflect aspects that your character contends with as part of what makes them who they are.
For example, it wouldn't make a lot of narrative sense for the Fearless Dragon Slayer to have the Afraid condition. However, it's entirely pauseable for them to be Over-Confident.
See the list below for possible conditions to list on your character sheet, or work with your Game Moderate to come up with your own. Importantly, although we've listed these conditions on your character sheet, your character is not under the influence of those conditions when starting out.
Conditions Description Afraid Angry Disappointed Disoriented Foolish Frustrated Guilty Horrified Insecure Panicked Paranoid Remorseful Troubled Obsessed Obstinate Over-Confident Overwhelmed Vengeful
Condition Marks
Each of the five conditions you selected start with one available slot each. You may then add a number of additional slots, split across these five conditions, up to a number equal to half of your Willpower and Wisdom attributes combined. But remember the more slots you assign to a condition, the harder it is for you to be afflicted by it, but will also be harder to recover from it. If you are new to Contingency RPG, then we would recommend distributing your slots as evenly as possible.
The following table is an easy way to help you determine the number of additional slots you may select.
Willpower Attribute
vs
Wisdom AttributeD12 D10 D8 D6 D4 D12 - 11 10 9 8 D10 11 10 9 8 7 D8 10 9 8 7 6 D6 9 8 7 6 5 D4 8 7 6 5 -
Marking Conditions
As you are playing, you may come across some actions, situations or narrative outcomes that will require you to Mark A Condition. When this occurs place a mark inside one of the available slots next to the condition (if you have temporary slots, mark them off first, once marked the temporary slot is lost). Depending on the wording, there are three ways to know which condition needs to be marked.
- Marking any condition, let's you add a mark against any of your five conditions as long as you have slots available to mark.
- Marking an appropriate condition, let's you add a mark against a condition that best fits the current narrative, even if that condition has no marks remaining (see below around taking additional marks).
- Marking a specific condition, your Game Moderator will let you know which of the five conditions to mark.
When you have marked all the available slots for any given condition, your character becomes afflicted with that condition and its associated effects. You can record which conditions are currently afflicting your character, by placing a mark in the box to the left of the condition. Make sure you take these conditions into account when you are role-playing or acting as your character. Removing or recovering all the slots for that condition will resolve your character of that condition.
When there are no slots available
In the situation that you have no available condition slots to mark off, then your character's wellness begins to suffer. Instead of marking a condition slot, lower your character's wellness tracker by one level.
Clearing A Condition
Your character is able to clear a condition, by recovering all the marked slots against that condition. During a scene, if your character acts out on one of their conditions, the Game Moderator may reward the player for doing so, by allowing them to clear a number of marks against that condition.
A Good Night Sleep
Outside of scenes and role-playing, you may also be able to use Omens from the Rest activity to recover some marked slots.