Setbacks

Courtesy of Bailywolf

Whenever a player's character does not roll enough Yin Successes to prevent damage, he can choose to either cash in a Chi point as per usual or to take a Setback. A Setback is any described circumstance that puts the "damaged" character at a continued disadvantage. The classic example is dropping your lightsaber. Each Setback reduces the disadvantaged character's dice limit by one. Setbacks can be removed by rolling three Yin Successes over those required to prevent damage in a given turn and describing how the character gets back in the game. I.E., in a mook battle, four yin successes lets you remove one setback and seven lets you remove two.

Note that this gives Players and Nemesis a new resource to lose in conflicts, which will probably make them last longer. On the other hand, the dice pool resource is what lets you protect the Chi pool resource, so it might be a vicious cycle. On the other other hand, you can regain your dice pool by fighting defensively, so...YMMV, basically.

Alternate Setback Rule

Courtesy of Dan Bayn and Rose ?

Instead of reducing the die cap, Setbacks take away 1 Yang success for 3 rounds. Another character can assist by spending 1 Yin success to reduce the number of rounds by 1. At any time, you can pay the 1 Chi you would normally have lost to automatically recover from the Setback.

Yet Another Alternate Rule - Fatigue Points

by BURP

I like to use an alternate damaging system in the game instead of the Chi system, which i call the "Fatigue System". Instead of having an amount of Chi points in the begining of the game that goes out as the game gos on, the players starts out with no Fatigue and gain the points during play. Whenever a Yang dice hits them, they can choose between leaving the fight (as when they have below zero Chi), or take a Fatigue point, meaning wounds and setbacks, and then keep fighting.

Fatigue points will make it harder for other actions from the player to be succesful, always taking one success out from any roll that he makes. Example: our hero Danny Boy is fighting a small group of Mooks, and have 2 Fatigue points. He have 5 Yang dice to roll against a Trait of 3, and get the results: 5, 4, 3, 3 and 1. Usually that would make 3 successes, but after taking out 2 of them because of the Fatigue, he have only 1 left to use in the fight.

In a fight, the player can choose if they want to take the Fatigue points out from their Yin or their Yang dice, maybe splitting the points between them. In other situations, the succeses are taken out from the normal roll, and if there's no succesful die left, the action fails. Example: now Danny Boy tries to acomplish a common roll with 3 dice against a Trait of 4, with the same 2 points of Fatigue. He rolls 5, 3 and 2 - but after taking the Fatigue points from the roll there's no success left, so the action fails.

As an optional rule, if the player have more Fatigue points than successes, the remaining points counts as Yang successes against him, even when not in a combat. This would stand for things like continous bleeding from scars, broken bones piercing your organs when you move carelessly, and stuff like that.

The players reduce their Fatigue points the same way that they would gain their Chi back in the official rules - in other words, as the GM sees fit, usually around 1-2 points between scenes.

I find that using these rules have some interesting effects on the game: 1) makes players stand longer in fights, since they can stay on foot for as long as their Fatigue points aren't so much that no roll succeeds; 2) makes the battle heaten up as it goes on, as the players have to make more and more Embellishments in their actions in order to get over their Fatigue points; and 3) gets the player some neat ideas to their Embellishments in battle, like pain faces for fighting with a broken leg or scars bleeding out with the overwhelming effort of the action.