If you can’t absorb all the shifts of a hit with stress and consequences, you’re taken out.

Getting taken out is bad. Whoever took you out decides what happens. Given dangerous situations and powerful enemies, this could mean you’re dead, but that’s not the only possibility. The outcome must be in keeping with the scope and scale of the conflict at hand—you won’t die of shame if you lose an argument—but changes to your character sheet (and more) are possible. The outcome should also fit within the boundaries your group has established—if your group feels that characters should never get killed without the player’s consent, that’s perfectly valid.

But even when death is on the table (it’s best to be clear about that before a roll), GMs should remember that it’s usually a boring result. A PC that’s been taken out could be lost, kidnapped, imperiled, be forced to take consequences… the list goes on. A character’s death means someone has to make a new character and bring them into the story, but a fate worse than death is limited only by your imagination.

Follow the fiction when describing how someone—or something—is taken out. Was a cultist taken out by a barrage of machine gun fire? A spray of red fills the air as they slump with a wet thump to the ground. Were you hurled from the truck as it crossed the 26th Street overpass? You disappear over the edge and are left behind as the conflict rumbles on along the Dan Ryan. Keep death in mind when discussing the terms of being taken out, but often it’s just as interesting to cheat death.

The ghoul gets in a very lucky hit, dealing a Legendary (+8) attack against Charles’s Poor (-1) defense. By this point in the conflict, all of Charles’s stress boxes are full, as is his moderate consequence slot. Even if he were to take a mild and a severe consequence at once, absorbing eight shifts, it wouldn’t be enough. As a result, Charles is taken out. The ghoul gets to decide his fate. The GM would be within their rights to have the ghoul kill Charles then and there…but getting killed isn’t the most interesting result.

Instead, the GM declares that Charles survives, getting knocked out and dragged to the ghoul’s lair, consequences intact. Charles will wake up lost and very fragile in the pitch-dark catacombs beneath the city. Because he was taken out, Charles has no choice but to accept the terms laid before him.