I'm reading fate and it feels like it's going to be really hard to DM for. The aspects stuff in particular. I mean...

I'm reading fate and it feels like it's going to be really hard to DM for. The aspects stuff in particular. I mean, how the fuck am I supposed to know the aspects for every person in a scene before the scene starts? Or is it that this game just really doesn't lean itself towards improvisational GMing?

If the person matters you give them an aspect and if they don't you don't.

is good advice. on top of that, because a lot of the time a person's aspects aren't obvious at first glance, you don't have to create them yourself. If your players want to knw more about a character you don't already have aspects for, ask them what kinds of t hings they're looking when you have them roll Notice, and use their suggestions as a base for what decide the person's aspects will be. You can do the same thing for pretty much anything whose aspects wouldn't be immediately obvious, too-- places, objects, organizations, you name it.

The other thing to remember is that an aspect is just a fact that you've decided has story relevance. When you describe something, you're talking about stuff that can be turned into an aspect any time you decide it's a good idea.

This makes FATE seem way more group oriented than other RPG's. In other RPG's the GM is telling the story. In FATE, from what I can gather, everyone is kind of telling the story together collectively. I'm not sure if I like that aspect (lol) of the game too much.

The GM still has the final say on anything, but the storytelling is a bit more collaborative, yeah.

But we're talking about a technique here for getting player input when you explicitly didn't already have a better idea. If you don't want to canvass your players about that kind of thing, the answer is to come up with stuff yourself. You can't ask for total control in one breath and then opt out of the work involved in another.

Huh, this system seems like it's got a lot more things to keep in mind all at once for GMING. Though I do like it.

The best advice for somebody looking to run Fate for the first time is to listen to a podcast of somebody else playing it. It sounds weird until you encounter it in action, but it's a lot more simple than it seems.

Well I'm like 10 years + of GMING multiple systems under my belt. What are the main differences?

The game revolves around improvisational GMing.

If you're worried about remembering every PCs Aspects, they should be punchy enough that you remember them after your first few sessions, and your players should be regularly invoking them or asking you for compels on them. If it's NPC aspects you need, the answer is that only major characters really need them, or that you can get by with things like Killer Robot or Incompetent Henchman Thug are perfectly serviceable on your mooks. You can also come up with aspects on the fly, especially for things in the environment.

In a similar vein, bad guys don't need the same skill lists as the PCs; all a random gunman needs are Fight The Good Guys +2 and Run Away +1.

The invoke/compel engine on the Fate point economy can be tricky if you aren't used to. Players have to be okay with bad stuff happening to them fairly often, and GMS have to be on the ball enough to actually do the compelling regularly. You also have to be aware that a compel is never an opportunity to really shaft the players, it's an opportunity to put them in a tough spot you fully expect them to get out of.

The option to concede conflicts is also a tough one to grok right away; at any point before a given roll during a conflict, you can accept that you loose and the other side accomplishes their aims. You get a fate point for doing it, and you get to mitigate the consequences of your loss. So, for example, if conflict is a wrestling match, concedeing is the difference between losing to a ring out, and losing because the other guy broke your ribs and you just can't get up anymore. It's a powerful option to have on the table, but it's counter-intuitive for a lot of players to accept that kind of outcome, and for GMs to adjudicate it even if players take advantage of the rule.

The biggest difference is Fate's focus on a narrative experience, though. PCs are good at things because they're protagonists. Even if your character concept is classic hero's journey start-from-nothing-and-become-a-hero stuff, the "nothing" you start from is still going to be, mechanically, skills-and-stunts-wise, pretty competent, simply because the story is about you.

That's okay, though, because the things that happen in Fate happen because they make the story interesting. Your pre-hero nobody probably has an aspect like "Bumbling, Untempered Youth", which is all the mechanical justification you need to fail at things when it would be inconvenient, and to get rewarded for doing it. You don't play the zero part of zero-to-hero by having low numbers, but by simply failing when you agree it would be good for the story if you failed.

>In other RPG's the GM is telling the story.
No they are not, attempting to do so is the sign of a shit GM

Okay I'm only confused about two things. If someone concedes they automatically lose to a lesser degree?

Also, this makes this system sound like it would be pretty much a 1 to 1 match for doing one of those low budget cartoons you used to watch on Saturday mornings like Mortal Kombat. But the problem with that is that it seems link FATE might not handle more serious and realistic scenarios that well. Can this game handle something that is a little more adult oriented like, and I'm literally just saying this because I'm thinking off the top of my head at my desk at work and could probably come up with something better given a bit of time, Berserk or a Clockwork Orange?

Nigger you know what I meant fuck you

Semantics

I know what you said you unfortunately still living piece of garbage.

They don't necessarily have aspects until they'd *need* aspects, just like how you don't need a full stat block prepped for each individual NPC in any other sort of RPG.

Most imoprtantly, all aspects are just facts relevant to the narrative. What are they, narratively or descriptively in that moment? What defines them as part of the story? They don't need thorough aspects, stunts, or skills like the player characters because they're not the protagonists, so they don't matter to the story as much and don't have to persist in the same way.
If a gunfight breaks out in the street, you could consider a nameless NPC to have "Hapless Civilian" as an aspect--or there'd be a scene aspect, "Civilians in the Crossfire". Or maybe both.

WELL GOOD I'M GLAD WE UNDERSTAND EACH OTHER!

GO KILL YOURSELF YOU ODDLY ATTRACTIVE LIVING SACK DOGSHIT!

If you concede, you're automatically out of the fight, and the other team achieves the goal you were trying to prevent.

Because of the way Fate handles health, this can be an attractive option even compared to winning the fight, if winning would be costly enough.

Characters in Fate have Stress, and they have Consequences. Stress is measured in boxes that you fill up, and they refresh every scene. Consequences are negative aspects that get added to your sheet, and the worst of them can take in-game months to get rid of.

So if you think you can win a fight without taking too bad a consequence, then fine. But maybe wining a fight means having a Dislocated Arm for the rest of the story arc, and it's worth it to let the bad-guys win a little now so that you'll still be in fighting shape when it comes time to face them again later. To say nothing of fighting until you get taken out, and then having to suffer all of those Consequences AND whatever your enemies decide to do with you.

Cont.

>Civilians in the Crossfire
Okay, that's got meverything curious as to how I would use that. Is it just am added conflict to not shoot into the crowd and hit a person? Do I only have them shoot a civilian if they fail? Or do I give them a negative for shooting into the crowd? How does that affect the mechanics?

On top of whether or not you take consequences, there's also the question of who gets to narrate the aftermath of the fight. If you lose, the enemy does. If you concede, you do.

So for example, you're trying to steal something from a warehosse and you have to fight the guards. Their goal is to stop you from stealing the thing you want. If they win, they narrate that they stop you by beating you up and arresting you, and the next scene will probably be some kind of escape from the law.

If you concede, you narrate that they stop you by being too tough and on the ball, and you're forced to flee into the night to plan your next move-- maybe another attempt on the object while it's being moved from the warehouse to the place you don't want it to go.

The GM can also have the NPCs conceded, too. It's a great tool for having a recurring antagonist-- let them duke it out a little, and if the PCs are winning, concede. The PCs get their short-term goal, but you can bring your bad-guy back for another go later.

cont.

AS for your other point-- Fate is not and never will be concerned with what's realistic. It's concerned with what's dramatic.

That said, you can still be plenty serious about things-- make a bleak setting, give PCs a lower Refresh and fewer stunts, be dark. Depict a serious world all you want. Just don't try to make it serious by making the PCs bad at their jobs, because PCs in Fate are always going to be competent even when you tone the mechanics down.

You use it how you want to use it. If you have a PC who's all about not harming innocents, you can compel the aspect to force him not to shoot until he can get through the civilians in the way or find some other means of not endangering them. If you want the bad guy to sneak away, you can invoke the aspect for a +2 or a reroll on their sneaking roll by having them use civilians as cover, or invoke it on a roll to create an advantage by causing a distraction or taking someone hostage. Invoke it on a Provoke roll to attack a PCs mental stress instead of their physical stress by threatening the crowd if the PCs don't back down.

So it makes for a good system to run a soap opera in, but a bad system to run a warfront campaign in?

I mean, what do you want out of a warfront campaign? Fate is not a high-lethality game, so if you're looking for a situation where any of the PCs could die at any time and that's the source of your drama, then no, don't use Fate. But if you're trying to run, say, Kelly's Heroes, go for it.

A Fate wargame is the one where the every time a PC dies, it's in some big, dramatic last stand, or throwing themselves on the grenade, or some other significant moment or gesture. PCs don't die meaninglessly in Fate.

So it's more of a "big damn heroes" type system?

That doesn't sound like a normal lethality system either. That sounds more like it's ONLY low lethality. I'm not a huge fan of that. I would prefer it at least have some normal real life lethality or something.

The men who died in Kelly's Heroes didn't go down in some dramatic or significant or heroic way. They were gunned down like helpless dogs, fighting desperately yet futilely. (Except for the landmine casualty - he just blew up randomly.)
So, in Fate, these guys would have been 'npcs'? Just 'mooks'? Or can pcs also die like this?
(Not interested in killing pcs, of course - just a system lethality/character risk question)

Fate's concern is the story first and foremost, like I said. It's more interested in PCs living through shitty circumstances than croaking it. If you want realism look elsewhere, lethality level included.

Thanks! I think that sums Fate up helpfully.
Pcs can, basically, negotiate their way through their universe. It is a 'cooperative' or 'shared' universe. Unlike our harsh and unforgiving reality. It presumes a universe that 'wants' the pcs to in some way succeed.
Less a reality simulator, more a drama simulator.

How low is the lethality level? You make it sound extremely low.

In my eyes it's less a matter of being high/moderate/low lethality, but a matter of making lethality be satisfying.
Sometimes someone can die and have had no control over it, and in Fate that can be fine too--so long as it's compelling and keeps the players attached enough to the game.

In most stories the 'universe' 'wants' the players to succeed, even if at a cost, even if it's a spectacularly uphill battle, but one where protagonists die is just a different type of story with a different type of composition.
The trick in making that other type of story something that can translate to the game and not alienate the player whose character dies.
The right time, the right place, the right ingredients (and maybe some strong writing chops) and a death that is meaningless within the fiction can mean something when viewed from outside of the game world by shaping characters or the substance of the setting.

Why do you care about lethality so much, user?

Actually getting dropped in Fate can be surprisingly easy: your average Core character has three stress boxes to fill before they're dropped (which the GM could make a kill, they decide what happens to a Taken Out player). Consequences add more survivability, but anything over a Mild Consequence takes a long time to heal and can be used against them.

A good hit with weapon mods can throw down 4+ stress pretty easily, with no soak other than Consequences. Three of those will end somebody, given how the stress system works.

Because my players like people to die when they are stabbed, including themselves.

>The right time, the right place, the right ingredients (and maybe some strong writing chops) and a death that is meaningless within the fiction can mean something when viewed from outside of the game world by shaping characters or the substance of the setting.
This goes with any good rpg - does Fate explicitly have mechanics/guidelines covering these points? Or is this what must be brought to the table by the players?