What does Fate look like when it's Veeky Forums playing rather than para-ludo shared narrative jammers?
I'm trying to get a handle on the game, but examples are full of, "Anything can be a hat, your dog can be a hat!" or, "I hit the sorcerer with my ax and now he has a condition, Regrets His Distant Relationship with His Father."
If I'm just too dumb to narrativist shared experience, then what's the dumb asshole hack for the game? I just want to play 80s vampires.
Everybody talks about what a bad system it is and how hard it is to play, but I didn't have much trouble making my character, and the single session that I played went fine. I got to use some of my special description thingeys and everything.
>Not liking clowns
I don't mean to sound trite but perhaps you just need more experience. Also your players need to learn to reel it in a bit.
You get what you put into FATE.
That's the game I'm looking to run, something that can be played by someone who says special description thingey. The podcasts and other play examples I've looked at are more on the professional elite gamer end though and it's really hard to read what's really, mechanically, going on.
Like, I know the game can do Suddenly Laserghosts! or Provocative Personal Drama and everyone wants to show off how it can do Suddenly Laserghosts or Provocative Personal Drama, but I want to see how it does something simple like Making Scrambled Eggs.
Where would you like to start? Pick anything but not everything.
OK, right, I'm focusing too much on feeling in over my head than the issues.
So, I'm reading a play example, Avengers Accelerated, here: docs.google.com
Towards the end of page 3 and on, Steve is creating a Containment Strategy situational Aspect, I think. And he succeeds with style, so, that gives him or allies two invocations that he wants NYC to make use of. But then NYC tries to create an advantage on page 6 instead and gets attacked as a result, somehow, and then Steve defends against that attack.
Who is doing exactly what and when is especially confusing there. But more my main issue is wondering at the boundaries of aspects. It would be innapropriate, but it feels like the aspect Steve made could have been Abiding Love of Dogs and the game would say, yeah, cool.
I'll actually read it tomorrow when I have the time but I'll at least help based on RAW.
1. Four types of actions: Attack, Defend, Create an Advantage, Overcome. Every Skill can be used to Create an Advantage or to Overcome. Only some can Attack or Defend.
2. Create an Advantage places new Situational Aspects into play. A Success nets 1 Free Invocation of that created Aspect, a Success with Style 2.
3. Free Invocations can be used by other characters by permission of the creator. Just because you have Free Invocations or Fate Points does not mean you can just spend them. An Aspect must be relevant to the action being attempted in order to be Invoked.
4. You can theoretically spam a Skill to Create Advantages everywhere but if none of them can be made relevant to any action then they are worthless and you wasted your time.
If Spider-Man shoots webs everywhere he's created a bunch of advantages, a bunch of Situational Aspects. If the actual fight is being fought up in the clouds though then who cares? However, if someone were to be thrown down from the clouds and into the webs, now we're talking.
Is this helping at all?
Yes, that's a big help. Somehow, I got the idea that Create an Advantage meant you could ass-pull a thing into existence for a bonus on whatever. In reality, it's more like making use of something a character can do or something in the scene already?
Like, you don't summon a fire out of nowhere, but if you can turn up the gas on the stove and flick your lighter, you can create a fire aspect and you only benefit if being in the middle of an inferno somehow helps your next actions.
Honestly, you're gonna need to houserule quite a few things and streamline some of Fate's "works better on paper than in practice" elements (Boosts come to mind, coming up with something every other roll rapidly becomes repetitive).
>Like, you don't summon a fire out of nowhere, but if you can turn up the gas on the stove and flick your lighter, you can create a fire aspect and you only benefit if being in the middle of an inferno somehow helps your next actions.
Yes, everything has to make sense with what is happening even if there aren't any rules governing this sense, only your, well, common sense.
This is something people used to more simulationist rules have a hard time wrapping their head around.
Honestly my first game both played and Dm'ed was fate and frankly we could have done it without the rules or character sheet when I DM it
It's "Fate"
It's the ultimate game of pretend, because you not only play pretend, you also pretend to play a system that's not crap and superfluous while doing it.
One very important house rule I would recommend to any GM running Fate is to introduce a fifth action: discover.
Ryan Macklin explains here:
ryanmacklin.com
>If I could go back in time, I would add this to the ruleset.
Without the discover action, it is trivial to break the game through low-risk create an advantage actions under Empathy, Investigate, Lore, and Notice which stockpile free invocations.
Additionally, for any seeking to run Fate Accelerated, I would strongly advise devising your own list of six approaches. The definitions of the default six approaches are a complete wreck, to the point wherein Clever can apply to nearly anything.
>Clever: A Clever action requires that you think fast, solve problems, or account for complex variables. Finding the weakness in an enemy swordsman’s style. Finding the weak point in a fortress wall. Fixing a computer.
The optimal Fate Accelerated character is an Ozymandias/Amadeus Cho expy who uses Clever for everything.
It gets particularly degenerate in the Dresden Files Accelerated, wherein Clever is renamed "Intellect," and somehow manages to cover even more than before.
>Intellect: Quick thinking, the solving of complex problems, or accounting for numerous variables at once. Examples: Code breaking, outwitting a fae courtier, counting cards in a poker game.
Fae illusions are Intellect-based, because apparently, being intelligent is more important for weaving illusions than being sneaky or guileful. Likewise, the Sight and Soulgaze are both powered by Intellect and defended against with Intellect, because surely such willpower-based activities are simply a matter of being smart and clever.
Bingo.
Yeah, I think my confusion comes from how explanations of the boundaries often come with a side note saying, "You CAN do anything you want," or, "don't forget to yes and...!"
But in reality, it's more a sense of the setting's genre, I guess. Like, in The Street Fighter, it makes sense that Sonny Chiba can tap a dead sidekick for a combat advantage, but that sort of thing may be more appropriate as a compel in a gritty military setting.
I'm not ready to start tinkering yet, but thanks, I can see the underlying sticky points. Our group does have experience reining in the scope of trick usage in Savage Worlds, so I don't think it'll be a big problem.
With that in mind though, I am wondering whether I should run Core or Accelerated. Core has more moving parts, but then, they are more specifically defined within the rules.
For what it's worth, I prefer Accelerated.
It's just smoother. If you want you can just add mechanics from Core.
Oh, also, if you can get your hands on it, Atomic Robo RPG is Fate based and has some very cool sub systems for poaching.
>"I hit the sorcerer with my ax and now he has a condition, Regrets His Distant Relationship with His Father."
That sounds pretty badass desu
I still think another good fix is to make Create an Advantage only grant a Boost on a Success with Style. I plan to use Discover in future games too though.
> Customized Approaches
Going to run a Doctor Who game and I'm considering doing this. I'm not sure what a good list would be though.
It doesn't make much sense, because a normal Action Like attacking Will automatically Grant you an advantage if you get a success with style already, this way you'll make the create an advantage thing worthless.
Accelerated is good if you just want a quick and lazy system.
Dr. Who actually has a pretty nice dedicated system from what I've heard.
Also, definitely grab the Atomic Robo RPG for that one.
KANE LIVES?
If a player Succeeds with an Attack action they deal shifts of damage which may incur a Consequence upon which they get one Free Invocation.
If a player Succeeds with Create an Advantage they get one Free Invocation with the created Aspect.
If a Player Succeeds with Style with an Attack action they get a Boost on top of any Stress or Consequences incurred.
If a player Succeeds with Style with a Create an Advantage action though they get a second Free Invocation on that Aspect.
Is that not the cause of Fate's infamous "Success Spiral?" I realize that Discover does its part to curb that but I just think that there's more than one solution that can be utilized at once.
Has anyone played this? Is it any good? How does it compare to Venture City Stories or Mutants & Masterminds?
It seems like Accelerated is the version of choice for supers and running their powers more as aspect suites.
An easier fix could just be raising the difficulty on create actions. It'd have the same end result of giving one invocation instead of two on a result of +X without houserules.
Not to assume this is you, but most of the time I see the number of boosts and invocations being a problem is when a GM always sets the opposition at passive +1. They may be judging the difficulty on the task itself without thinking of the contextual stress. Even if the action as described is a menial task, it can always be tougher to pull of in a tense situation.
>Not to assume this is you, but most of the time I see the number of boosts and invocations being a problem is when a GM always sets the opposition at passive +1.
I make it +3. That's enough to be reliable but not guaranteed for your +4 skills and worth trying for your +3 skills and really only worth doing if you really need one really specific skill for anything less.
There's not a lot of die variance, so expect needing to create advantages to achieve meaningful results in conflicts.
Where does setting a difficulty number end and Invoking against a player begin?
In the core book, we get two examples for creating an advantage, starting pg. 137. In the 1st example, the action is opposed by a golem actively defending for a roll of +2. 2nd example uses passive opposition, but it's still based on the merchant's +4 deceive. Regardless, AP podcasts I've heard tend to fix the opposition at +1 for every instance of create an advantage. I think that may be the source of the too many advantages complaints when creating advantages should just be tougher to pull off.
Now, all that said, that golem example would be the place where you could invoke against the player. It's active resistance after all. He's not just trying to give the player a fair challenge, he's trying to make her fail and either stop her or turn it around to his advantage. If a bad acts like a bad, the players can't really complain about it.
You probably don't want to burn a fate point to invoke against a player while defending against advantage creation though. Although you can gain an invoke on the advantage if they fail, that fate point can be better spent elsewhere.