How do you play Fate?

Despite having played a lot of RPGs, I don't really get Fate. I understand the mechanics and all, but I don't really *get* it. I've never played it and I haven't seen it being played, so I'm having a really hard time visualizing what it actually looks like.

On one hand, it seems like a looser narrative system, but on the other, there's a fuckton of rules and clauses and special exceptions for everything. It honestly feels like a confused system that doesn't really know what to do with its ideas. Yet a lot of people who've actually played it find it really good, so I figure I'm just not understanding the magic.

But seriously though, how do you play this game? What does it feel like in action? How complicated is it in practice? What do you *do* during the session?

I'd appreciate it if someone could give me some experiences about this thing. I'd really like to figure it out, but I'm not really even sure how I'd start a game with it.

Other urls found in this thread:

fate-srd.com/fate-accelerated/get-started
ryanmacklin.com/2014/10/fate-the-discover-action/
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

I mainly use Fate Accelerated when I want to run a random one-shot and don't feel like building a system from scratch and don't want the players to spend a lot of time just building characters. It's kind of a utility system for me, especially when I've got a group that isn't all familiar with any one system, because it's really easy to teach and learn.

It's got a lot of weaknesses as a system, and it ends up being a system that works best the less you actually use it. As in, relying on its mechanics only when its absolutely necessary to resolve something. Typically, the games I run with it end up being heavily focused on the story, with dialogue, exploration, and investigation being the key focuses, since I find the combat to be finicky at best and cumbersome at worst.

It's also EXTREMELY important to explain the philosophy behind the game to the players, and to make sure that they understand they're going to have to detach themselves at times from their characters in order to make the story and game more interesting. Players who treat the game as "find the objective, complete the objective" type of game where they strive to have their characters succeed at any cost are just not going to have as much fun as players who are actively thinking about how to make the story more interesting and dynamic, and to actually make their flaws pronounced and to have real consequences (all without simply sabotaging the groups fun. It can be quite a challenge to get the right balance of "flawed" without simply being "utterly unlikable").

There's definitely a learning curve to the game, where it's easy to learn the rules, but it takes some time to really get an understanding of what works best with the system.

That's just me though. Some people use the system to its full extent, but I've found a casual approach with the Accelerated rules works best for me.

I am also interested in figuring out more about this, as I am still kind of intimidated by some of the stuff in this system. And this is coming from someone who has almost mastered Mutants and Masterminds 3e's crazy customization.

Why the fuck do they always advertise this thing as a "rules light, fast, intuitive" rpg? It's like 300 pages or rules minutiae and a shitload of mechanics explained in a really unintuitive way.

If I was new to rpgs and someone slapped this in front of me and claimed it's a good, simple one to start with, I'd probably run and never take another look at the hobby.

Have you looked at Fate Accelerated?

fate-srd.com/fate-accelerated/get-started

I wish I could help as I wanted to play FATE for a long time but did not have an opportunity to do so.

It looks like good system for roleplay and more importantly shared story crafting.

In the meantime I try to figure how to convert warhammer fantasy roleplay to FATE, but have no luck so far in my research into that direction.
I remember finding seething but it did not suit my needs so I discard the solution I have found

>how do you play Fate
In traffic

Atomic Robo Fate is for the most part a better core book than the core book. It actually explains and gives examples for rules to make them more intuitive.

Wow. For a system that's supposedly so awesome and popular, there's very little response here. And basically all of it is either "I dunno" or "Not very well"

You'd think people would actually have positive experiences with it, given how much it gets thrown around and mentioned.

You must be new, then, because every time Fate gets mentioned, it's generally followed up by a bunch of people saying that it's outright shit.

And usually, once a month or so, one of these people makes a thread like this, pretending they want honest opinions about Fate, but really just want to remind people what they think about it.

>You'd think people would actually have positive experiences with it, given how much it gets thrown around and mentioned.
I am pretty sure you are thinking of Reddit, where games like FATE and Dungeon World are recommended because they pander to the "rule of cool" audience who want to make super randumb characters whose face is "totally omg this right now" while they show you a pic from some anime they were watching on their phone with one of those shitty overexaggerated Jap expressions that make me glad we dropped the bomb twice. FATE is basically the ultimate in SJW power wank bullshit roleplaying. You can't even die unless you "consent" to it, because that would be bad for the story. The difficulty/skill ladder is an arbitrary arrangement of adjectives, the combat system, while simple, is the most abstract crap imaginable. Which would be okay for a system meant to handle literally anything, except then the dumb fucks at Evil Hat add in fighting defensively and called shots and shit. The game could be explained in 30 pages, and was in the earlier versions, but now it is 300 pages because they want to sell it for real money. As usual with these little RPGs, the designers got lucky and made something good pretty much by accident. Then they tried to add to it, and in doing so made it blindingly clear how amateur they are. It's sad, really. FATE is garbage. The dice are overpriced trash. I don't want to hear the "lol just use d6s" excuse because I don't want to go through that shit every time I make a roll. If you want to design an RPG, use dice that already exist. End of story. You want to do shit like FFG Star Wars did and make special d8s for your oh-so-special game? Then I will not be buying and I will be telling dozens of customers who come into my store not to buy it. FFG is complete shit, FATE is shit, stop using special dice.

In short: fuck FATE. It had a couple good ideas, like skill pyramid, but that's one nugget of gold in a pile of shit.

Does it surprise you to learn no one likes talking about generic systems?

>It had a couple good ideas, like skill pyramid
That's from FUDGE, the not-narrative system that Fate was birthed from

U sound mad

...

FATE is one of those things that Veeky Forums hates for no particularly good reason, like steampunk.

I enjoyed it a lot in its Spirit of the Century form. I was with a group that would be considered odd by Veeky Forums standards; we did a lot of freeform, tried RIFTS, ran some stuff in 2nd edition BESM, played a small amount of 3.5 (which nobody really liked but everyone had the rules to), and did one disastrously bad session of 4th edition (nobody wanted complex combat rules, and we didn't care much for a map or miniatures either; most of our campaigns had focused heavily on investigation, spying, diplomacy, arguing, haggling, etc., so we mostly could have played 4th edition by setting some books on the table and running a freeform campaign) before settling on FATE. We all moved away and I haven't had a group in a long time, so I don't feel qualified to comment on the current version of FATE, although I do own the core book.

I came away from this background with 1) a bit of puzzlement over the degree to which people are obsessed with combat in RPGs and 2) a strong preference for universal systems over setting-specific ones. (RIFTS was the only premise setting we ever used, aside from a one-shot Halloween Tomb of Horrors session.) FATE was really good for running whatever setting you could think up without a lot of overhead a la GURPS (which I'm interested in, but haven't played). You can do this to some degree with BESM, but BESM is pretty unbalanced, and it's easy to accidentally create an overpowered character.

ahaha wow

Its a fucking game dude

Same goes for the dice.

That's because they're all shitposting in D&D and Pathfinder threads

"Premise setting"? That has to be autocorrect in action, but I have no idea which words I meant to use there.

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/2014/10/fate-the-discover-action/
>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.

You have to think like this: Traditional RPGs are approached from two ends of a spectrum
>I really like board games, wargames, and video games. But I want something with more story focus and freedom
>I really like forum freeforms, quest threads, and improv , there's a board game version?
Veeky Forums is mostly the first, FATE is the second (FAE is the second, baby's first edition). These two groups of people have completely different tastes and needs.

>These two groups of people have completely different tastes and needs.
Well, that's not ENTIRELY true. I'm solidly in the second camp, and I enjoy lurking Veeky Forums despite the prevalence of posters from the first camp. I admit, though, that I strongly prefer the "let's make a setting" threads to the "let's have an edition war" threads. And the "depends on the setting" answer drives me nuts. (Choose a less boring answer and make up your own fucking setting!)

Eh
Particularly in OSR I see a lot of people asking why "story games" are the way they are. The answer nobody likes to hear is "because they hate what you like, and only think of their games as RPGs because of economic incentive not to split the market."

I enjoyed Fate for awhile. It's core design philosophy of "players creating an interesting story together" is not entirely encouraged by the rules, but there's plenty there that does. I ended up homebrewing it a bunch whenever I ran a new game.

I feel like it's a great way to introduce players to a different way of roleplaying. But ultimately you'll end up leaving the rules behind, but keep the philosophy behind it. Fiction first stuff, players deliberately hindering their characters for the sake of good story, players contributing towards the game, blurring the GM-player distinction, collaborate world- and character- building in session 0. Of course PbtA games do this too, and perhaps more directly and clearly, but I think there's a lot to be said for attempting it in a general system.

> how do you play this game? What do you *do* during the session?
Same way you do any other. Players say stuff, roll dice. You end up writing a lot of stuff on the whiteboard or cuecards or whatever, and using them as the focus instead of maps.
> What does it feel like in action?
I found it very fast paced and dynamic. There's a lot of "anything goes if you can convince everyone it's possible" so people can get very creative. Details that didn't seem directly relevant to the current scene coming into play via the Aspect system.
It's really fun as a GM but you have to be good at improv.
> How complicated is it in practice?
Once everyone figures out how Aspects and Fate points work, it really fades into the background. You have to go slowly at first and sometimes people have big hangups on the "meta" nature of the rules, but once you get used to the back-and-forth you barely notice the rules.

I feel like the worst mistake they made is having structured combat. Turns suck, seperate combat systems suck, just run it like the rest of the game.

One thing my players said was that FATE was one of their most satisfying games, but also exhausting.
They felt like they'd made something cool to look back on later, but doing FATE felt like work, not play.

It's a generic RPG. If you haven't trouble pick up accelerated version. It's only about five bucks.

It's core resolution is fudge aka Fate dice, which are normal a d6 a equal number of plus minus and blank on them. It's equal to 4d3-8.

There is very little range or swing with the system. You'll be rolling in flat zero most of the time. So a plus one or minus one makes a colossal difference.

The main gimmick is it fate points. It's typical role-playing meta currency but is handled a little better the most.

The current the player can choose a any random trait for the character and if there is a situation where say characterisation trait would be a advance to the player they can spend their fate point to get a bonus. But they only get the points back when is situation comes up with that trait is a disadvantage.

So the characters the traint "rich" and then spends all his points to buy his way out of a sticky situation. He hasn't run out of money, he but he can't get any bonus from his money until he gets the fate points to spend. Like if the GM could say flashing his money around drew unwanted attention. If someone then tried to swindle or rob him it would paradoxically restore his fate points letting him to use his wealth again.

It doesn't make any logical sense but creates a nice sense of cooperative storytelling.

It's to narrative play what GURPS is to Simulatism, or savage world to combat focus play.

It's not something most of /the/ seems to care for, myself included. But if you want to the many people who just looking as RPG's as a way of to replicate your favourite TV show or genre tropes, and honestly care for don't realism or rule mastery you can't go wrong.

I got started with Fate via the Dresden Files RPG, picked up the New rulebook and its my system for rpgs, so I'll try to help here. I will say though, the Dresden Files RPG version is...probably superior to the new Core system in a lot of ways. Core streamlined a bunch of stuff and then somewhat had to go and make a more complicated solution to fix what they streamlined.

First off, how to play.
Aspects are everything. Characters have them, locations have them, objects have them. In your normal DnD game you'll describe a room that your players go into and that's about it. You'll have a few key points that maybe are interactive, but the rest is just there, like a classic video game. Fate's Aspects make the world closer to a "fully destructible environment." That "stone wall" you described? Congradulations, you can now invoke that in combat for extra effects. "Broken pillars" "Slick floors" "gloom" everything is an aspect you the GM or the Players can invoke in combat.

secondly, Fate points. Fate points are what you spend (or earn) by invoking aspects. Want to invoke an aspect in a roll, you spend a point. Gm wants to invoke one of your aspects (or in some cases how they invoke an aspect against you), earn a point. The key responsibility of the gm is to make the fate points flow. you make that shit rain, and they spend it like gold in a whore house.

Narrative and player actions are crucial, but especially in character actions. It's not just about getting from A to B, it's about how a person with those aspects would get from A to B and the challenges they face. When you right your story, know the aspects of your characters. What are they good at, what are they bad at, what compells them, can you use that so that a well placed FP can put them back on track if they go off road, or cause them to jump their own tracks and go out into the wilds where you want them. Every part of your story has aspects, all your npcs have aspects, every location has aspects

cont

Why do people say that Fate is full of special exceptions, when literally everything works under the same rules?

part 2

skills are important for defining the character more often than they are for actually succeeding in a roll. This is mostly because if you're throwing around FPs enough, there's enough invocations that can be used to buff/debuff rolls, if you picked your skills right. DFRPG has a more extensive and better skill list than Core, to be honest. That being said, do not be afraid to add in skills based on setting, or divide skills into more specifics if needed.

I've found most of the rules are fairly self-explanatory in the Dresden game. Core...went a bit rule crazy because they did flub the streamlining thing too far. It's very much a 3.5 vs 4th type of situation. The pro for core though is its a lot easier to just apply it to every setting you can come up with, where as the Dresden edition is very much built for that particular universe.

I think it's because Fate rules are "talk about what's going on and figure out which rules to use. Here are your options" whereas other systems just tell you what rules to use when.

It's one of the things that come up when reading but not when playing. In play it's pretty much always obvious what rule to apply, as you have a great deal of context.

I still don't see how Fate is full of special exceptions anyways. Like, yeah, you gotta figure what rules to use to determine how to solve conflict, but it's not like it's a big thing either as you put it. And this allows to put fiction first which is an excellent practice even in more structured rpgs.

Guys I'm trying to think about how to hack FAE for a sentai/power rangers-esque game. I know there's a squad action hack in FST, but what are ways I could customize that further? By changing the skills maybe?

Mostly: Discard the game-forward assumptions about interacting with RPGs that most are designed to work from.
Fate really embraces the shared storytelling stuff. Like PbtA systems, but less obviously different so Fate is more of a pain to learn. It's easy for new groups to slip back into 'normal' RPG play without meaning to, which hamstrings Fate in a big way.
I recommend you do Fate Accelerated first to get a feel for it--less moving parts, so there's less that can go wrong. Still might want to at least skim the Core rules, because Accelerated's explanations for some things are a little lacking.

There are things you can keep in mind to help make it come together:
Welcome more open collaboration on things than you're probably used to from an RPG.
Do the prescribed Session 0 stuff where you *all* decide on who the major players are and what's going wrong/right in the setting and how your characters relate to the setting/each other. You'll be establishing important contacts and subplots here in a way that's like writing the outline for an outline, or like a setting building thread you'd see on Veeky Forums.
For real, though, fill in those worksheets, it's building the narrative jungle gym you guys'll be playing in later and it's worth the time. We half-assed the first time I played and we always had too many questions for how anything fit and it slowed the game down big time.

Remember to establish a fair understanding of the limits of any big Aspect or Skill if you're doing anything super-normal. Pilfering systems from Fate sourcebooks makes this *much* easier (a lot are up on Fate-SRD.com), as does just treating everything like a character if you don't have a better/more immediately satisfying solution (the "Fate Fractal").

Altogether the system excels at playing games in settings everybody understands and is familiar with. For your first game, try something like that and you'll be surprised how it "just works" after everybody gets their sea legs.

I'd really like something like Fate, built to be modular and played with the intent of "story telling" but with more crunch and rulesets. GURPs has a lot of what I'd like but it's firmly a "simulationist" system, and the difficult to describe difference kills it for me.

Basically I want narrativist DnD where there're a lot of options meant to modify the narrative direction rather than improve your mechanical performance.

1. Instead of the Advantages/Disadvantages with specific rules, you have Aspects which give a flat bonus and are more vaguely defined. That's all
2. Fate Points don't play that different from other system's hero points. The GM can compel you to spend them though, which is terrific.
3. You have skills and attributes basically rolled into one.

Other than that it pretty much plays like a normal, crunchier game. Main thing is that the advantages/disadvantages are more loosely defined and there is more back and forth with the hero points. It's not THAT different.

Isn't it funny how when there's a Veeky Forums thread about narrative systems it's either flamewars or a bunch of wall-of-text replies to the OP with no discussion?

I don't really think that's possible without tying yourself to a genre. So many narrative devices are thematic. I guess theme is defined by what narrative devices you use.

You could make a giant catalogue of them and somehow try to gamify them I guess. But everything would end up being too samey and it'd just be Fate or things would get too intricate that some bizarre OP or nonsensical combination would emerge, like it tends to in any sufficiently complex system. Sounds difficult to impossible.

Just read lots of systems and steal the best bits for a homebrew. I tend to spend a week knocking one together every time I start a new game. It's fun.

Session 0 is definitely one of Fate's better ideas. I won't ever play an RPG without a session 0 again, if I have any say in the matter.

>The difficulty/skill ladder is an arbitrary arrangement of adjectives
nah, that's not true. it's attributes and skills rolled into one. during chargen, you basically have a pyrmid of values you can assign, defining the ares in which you're specialized, the areas in which you're still good, those in which you're still above average and the rest is then average.

>the combat system, while simple, is the most abstract crap imaginable.
it certainly is abstract, especially regarding movement and distances, where the GM basically eyeballs it

>If you want to design an RPG, use dice that already exist.
now i must object to that. while FFG's implementation is flawed, custom dice can offer features that normal dice don't have aka multi-dimensional results aka non-binary results. this is good.

also, multi-dimensional dice have been used in german wargames from which later US wargames and then D&D have been derived. they are part of the hobby and they are under-utilized. what we need however are some standardized custom dice that can be used across many different RPGs. that would mean progress for the hobby.

>Session 0 is definitely one of Fate's better ideas. I won't ever play an RPG without a session 0 again, if I have any say in the matter.
idk... i kinda prefer finding out about the other characters (and mine!) during play aka sessions 1+

Check out Edge of the Empire and the other flavors of Star Wars RPG. The light side/dark side destiny point stuff, Obligation/Duty/Morality, and how the 'narrative dice' work let the GM and players steer the storytelling in little ways.
They're coming out with a generic version of it at some point, probably next year. It might scratch your itch.

I guess you could also do the sort of thing you want in 5e: let Inspiration be a pool instead of a binary thing, and use their Flaws/Bonds to compel PCs into interesting actions.
Require players interact with scene/character/creature details to spend it, and you're like 1/3 of the way to replicating Fate's core mechanic.

I think plotting out some setting touchstones and NPCs is important, and how people might know each other or know of each other.

Speaking of Fate, anybody got a lead on Dresden Files Accelerated? The PDF Share archive's just got preview/beta stuff.

>Choose a less boring answer and make up your own fucking setting!
It used to be that when people did do that they were told that no one wanted to hear about their homebrew. That's why people simply started responding with 'depends on the setting'.

First off, I definetly see myself as belonging in the second category but I can't stand any of the other things you listed.

Second, you're forgetting about the simulationists who don't want to win a game or necessarily create an interesting narrative but rather just see what the system allows them to do and how realistically it handles situations.

Fuck this shitposting, I got a question about the system and I need answers.

From what I've read, aspects seem super limited. I can understand the mechanical reason, but all they do is modify or allow a reroll. What about advantages like "the room is full of flammable gas" and I just lit a fucking match?

I always imagined create an advantage to be the representation of those scenes where an NPC or an army promises to lend aid to the relevant character, but again invoking an aspect cant do shit like that either.

Am I fundamentally misunderstanding the system or what?

well, you obviously don't need to shoehorn
>"the room is full of flammable gas" and I just lit a fucking match
into an aspect. nothing prevents you from dishing out appropriate damage immediately. you use aspects to represent stuff that gives tangible advantages/disadvantages. and you're right that they are all samey in that regard but it makes for faster play, being less distracted by mechanics/rules discussions.

whether that's worth it is up to you. personally, I like it more crunchy.

It's a shitty formalization of thing you take for granted in other games. The room has an 'explosive barrels' aspect. You invoke the aspect by shooting a barrel instead of any of the five guys around it. In a sane system you'd make an attack, resolve it, and go on with your life. In this, it needs to be dramatic enough so shooting the barrel may have sixty different things riding on it before you're done, up to and including your demolitionist's Vietnam flashbacks and how your hacker is a dragonkin and this makes her moist.

In that case, the room being full of gas is an existing advantage - me lighting a match is then a following action (attack?).

That's ridiculous. I run FATE as our groups main system and shooting a barrel is just that, a ranged attack that is resolved as usual, giving everyone I consider to be close enough damage and the "on fire" aspect.

The advantage of FATE to me is that I don't have to think about that solution in advance. If I have the characters surrounded in a "Warehouse full of weaponry" that's it. The barrel is now something that the players can add to the scene with a "discover" action, the gas may have either been there as my idea or a player spending a FATE point to make it so.

>Warehouse full of Weaponry
>"Filled with Gas"
>Player uses "dsicover" action
>"Barrel of explosives"
>Rolls attack roll, succeeds
>Everyone close gets knocked out, further away gets damaged accordingly
>Room now has the aspect "EVERYTHING IS FIRE!"

Go from there.

You could also invoke it to give +2 to attack a guy. Everyone who has played video games ever has shot at an explosive barrel to blow up a nearby dude and the invoke will mean you are doing a good chunk more damage to him.

Yeah, that's even juicier.

Remember, an Aspect is just a fact about the narrative or scene. If something happens that invalidates, disqualifies, or overwrites an aspect, it changes.

If you lit a match in a room full of gas it wouldn't take a roll to do it at all unless something's stopping you.
And the aftermath of that match being lit would be the GM describing the explosion and telling people to either take however many shifts worth of damage or to make an Overcome roll against some static score to mitigate that damage.
The building's "Full of Gas" would probably be changed to "Blown to Smithereens" and "Collapsing Ruins".

Is that you Virt?

>Player uses "dsicover" action
Literally doesn't exist.

read the rest of the thread nigga, it's an action that should exist

See here, we like it in our group and started using it to some effect. Notice if you don't.

This better be copypasta my nigga.

Why not just use Create an Advantage?

It gives a free invoke, so you can just use that a few times in a row to discover aspects, then invoke them all at once to instawin a fight. Discover doesnt give free invokes, so you need to actually think about the advantages you create.

Isn't that working as intended for Create an Advantage?

You make advantages with actions, you invoke them.

to be honest, trying to codify all possible in-world actions taken into 4 or 5 broad game actions is terrible game design

IDK, both FATE and PbtA seem to be doing fine with it.

How would you create an advantage to place a barrel of explosives somewhere?

If I understand correctly, creating an advantage is your character doing something to change the situation and then using that to his advantage.

Adding a barrel full of explosives to a scene is either notice or discover if you use those rules.

It's abstraction, just like hit points are an abstraction of broken bones, blood loss, burns and more in classic Fantasy games. I like it, keeps the game flow crisp and juicy for the most part.

this is copypasta
it does have a couple legitimate points though
>You can't even die unless you "consent" to it
the rules for conceding and being defeated are really, really fucky, and in the FATE games i've played they've either caused massive conflicts and arguing or have been outright ignored for convenience

the way it supposedly works is that if you're defeated, the enemy gets everything they want, and if you concede then they get what they want but you also get to avoid certain things
it's very vague, but every time i've seen it used it's been to the benefit of the NPCs, and never the players, because apparently you can only capture a conceding enemy if they're a player.

>the combat system, while simple, is the most abstract crap imaginable
it's also really shit and turns into each side furiously jacking off to stack aspects so that they can one-shot the other side, often blowing all of their fate points in the process (because who cares about those, you get like 3 every session?)

basically, there is zero strategy to combat and it turned into the most boring shlock i've ever played.
my absolute best character was one i put a +4 in a combat skill and stacked two +2 stunts on to boost that even further to +8, my absolute worst character was one i dared to put combat at a +2 on.

it doesn't help that consequences are also really abstract and poorly explained, leading to the other players in my group putting weird shit into those boxes that doesn't make sense (mental stun kind of effects in moderate, for instance) and in addition, consequences don't seem to have any actual effect
seriously, if there's penalties for having consequences our DMs literally never touched on them, and so it ended up worse than 3.pf in the 'fight till 0 then you drop' respect

>The dice are overpriced trash. I don't want to hear the "lol just use d6s" excuse
you can mark d6s, but i feel bad for bothering to deface even the shitty cheapo d6s i used for FATE.

I think you're overcomplicating this, there's no reason to create a separate and weaker version of Create Advantage. Roll Notice to discover the barrel of explosives, next turn roll your attack while tagging it for +2 or to convert your attack into a zone attack or something.

You don't need to try and put limiters to prevent players from insta-winning fights with stacked aspects, because while the players are trying to stack up aspects the enemies are going to be attacking them. From an action economy perspective it's perfectly acceptable to give free invokes for creating advantage.

also, the system requires a lot of negotiating with the DM because it's so loose and so vaguely defined, meaning that a lot of our sessions were spent trying to figure out some fucking compromise just so we could get the effect we wanted with an ability we had

so a combat that was basically 'soldiers shoot at you from one end of a boat to the other, fight or run away' that would've been clean cut in any other system now takes forever because every turn we have to play 'mother may i' with the DM if we want to do anything other than spend our turn attacking

it got worse when somebody conceded under the conditions that they were defeated and injured, but escaped, and the DM said 'no the soldiers want to capture you'
because fuck player agency, right? in literally any other system that'd be resolved with 'alright we're gonna start running, we move x distance' but in FATE apparently nothing is concrete.

create an advantage with the notice skill, the skill for noticing things?
it's not fucking rocket surgery, the fucklords in our group managed to find it out.

I still think a Success with Style on a Create an Advantage roll should garner a Boost rather than a second whole Free Invocation.

>it's also really shit and turns into each side furiously jacking off to stack aspects so that they can one-shot the other side, often blowing all of their fate points in the process (because who cares about those, you get like 3 every session?)
You need an absolutely massive number of bonuses to actually one-shot someone, since you have Stress and Consequences to shave off damage from single hits relatively cheaply. If they take one Severe consequence is basically trading down three aspects you built up for that attack. The sweet spot is hitting them just hard enough that they have to take a Mild consequence, then keep hitting them just as hard so they take a Moderate then a Severe consequence for the same amount of damage since their Mild box is already filled (and you can tag their consequences on subsequent attacks).

Burning all your FATE points on your big attack is a good way to get forced into sticky situations later when you can't buy off a compel or you flub an important roll.

>my absolute best character was one i put a +4 in a combat skill and stacked two +2 stunts on to boost that even further to +8, my absolute worst character was one i dared to put combat at a +2 on.
When you're playing a back line character you should be setting up advantages for your front-line characters. Notice the chink in their armor, Provoke to cause a distraction, etc.

Is it wrong to use FATE for narrative/story purposes and then just pull the combat rules from Strike! out for fighting?

contd. from >it doesn't help that consequences are also really abstract and poorly explained, leading to the other players in my group putting weird shit into those boxes that doesn't make sense (mental stun kind of effects in moderate, for instance) and in addition, consequences don't seem to have any actual effect
Mechanically it doesn't really matter what you describe it as, beyond the general caveat that the exact phrasing of an aspect can affect how it's invoked. Consequences are negative aspects that will persist on you between scenes, so getting a Twisted Ankle as a Moderate Consequence could get invoked in the following chase scene to cause you to fail to catch a runner, while Bloody Cut doesn't hamper you in a chase but might cause problems in a social scene.

>also, the system requires a lot of negotiating with the DM because it's so loose and so vaguely defined, meaning that a lot of our sessions were spent trying to figure out some fucking compromise just so we could get the effect we wanted with an ability we had
>so a combat that was basically 'soldiers shoot at you from one end of a boat to the other, fight or run away' that would've been clean cut in any other system now takes forever because every turn we have to play 'mother may i' with the DM if we want to do anything other than spend our turn attacking
Your DM just wasn't suited to running FATE I think, it's a very different sort of style where you're collaboratively building the story and the players get just as much input as the DM. If you're in a warehouse you can roll to declare there's a forklift you take cover behind, if he's an ass about that sort of thing he shouldn't be running FATE.

Yeah after playing in multiple FATE games, it seems very volatile depending on the GM.
I'm bad at GMing it. I just can't get my mindset right on it. I'm too focused on crunch. Need to work on that.
A couple of my friends have run some 'meh' games in FATE. Things were at least functional.
And I've also been in a couple short, amazingly run FATE games with the same GM.
I really think the GM can make or break this system, moreso than other games.

even more contd.>it got worse when somebody conceded under the conditions that they were defeated and injured, but escaped, and the DM said 'no the soldiers want to capture you'
>because fuck player agency, right? in literally any other system that'd be resolved with 'alright we're gonna start running, we move x distance' but in FATE apparently nothing is concrete.
This should have been perfectly fine, assuming they didn't already have aspects that would make escaping too difficult (Broken Leg or something). They're removed from the scene, can rejoin the party in a later scene, and can maybe negotiate having enemies removed from the scene at the same time (they're chasing him). If the rest of the party is captured you handwave him being captured as well.

tl;dr your DM needs to loosen up if he wants to run FATE

Did it with FAE, works okay, especially if you use 2d6 variant for both. Just leave the action of using aspects open in combat.

Responses like this are why people hare these games.

Flammable Gas would be an aspect. All you'd have to do is spend the FP, strike your match and toss it using your shoot skill.

The way I'd handle that as a GM is then make a roll based off a set bonus for the explosion, and anyone caught in the blast would have to beat that number or take the remaining damage.

>Invoking an army...aspect can't do shit like that

Why not? I mean sure, as a GM I wouldn't make it quit that simple, how I'd make it work is you invoke the aspect to buff your Contacts roll, and that would determine if the army can come help you. But if your game is one where that flat out doesn't work, that sounds more like an issue with your GM.

Hello, I'm ther guy that tried to make a fate general this months and tried to help people understanding the game more, I'll answer these questions if you want.

>the rules for conceding and being defeated are really, really fucky, and in the FATE games i've played they've either caused massive conflicts and arguing or have been outright ignored for convenience
That rule can be ignored without any impact in the gameplay, and was put in there in those scenarios where we have a returning BBEG fightning with the PC, in a comic-style kind of way.
>Did Superman kill Luthor? No, because blablablabla
It's the same thing.
>it's also really shit and turns into each side furiously jacking off to stack aspects so that they can one-shot the other side, often blowing all of their fate points in the process (because who cares about those, you get like 3 every session?)
You get 3 every session, or less if you have more than 3 stunts. If you spend them all in a fight you will have these problems:
>You cannot use them in other situations, like roleplay, where you can invoke your aspects to change the scenario, or just for other combat situations where you would be left to dry. Also, no Fate points means that you are obligated to accept compels, and that would complicate your life!
>also, another point, not all aspects are made t combo into each other, so if you were able to combo your aspects it was probably because of the GM, and his desire to make a cool moment.
>There isn't any strategy
That's not true, you can basically do anything, and that everything will turn into advantages and free invokations, you can create ONLY by using strategies and intelligence.
I'll continue later, with also some nice complains about my players to show how dumb they are and how I want to punch them in the face sometimes.

Strike basically uses a wonked up version of FATE's narrative structure.

Wonked up, but there's a lot of similarities.

Well, you kinda fuged up then. Here's a suggestion

>only one invoke per action

Seriously, if you're turning combat into a jacking off where you're blowing all your fate points to throw half a dozen bonuses onto a single roll, its who who broke the game. I don't know if something changed between Dresden and Core, but it used to be only one invocation at a time. If you stick with that, sounds like you'd solve half your problems right there.

I've run combat with Fate and it was fast and exciting. So I'm not sure what you're doing.

As for consequences, the DM probably should be listing/negotiating what those are so players don't abuse. As for your DM never invoking them, well...teach your dm to be better.

My opinions as someone who actually ran a successful mini-campaign (About 8 sessions). This is about Fate Core, not accelerated. Accelerated works well for one shots and that's pretty much it.

The most important thing for Fate is a good GM. Fate places far more burden on the GM that it seems at first. For all its claims of being a "cooperative storytelling system" the GM needs to know his NPCs, know his story, know how each situation can be approached by the characters, know how to do effective compels and so on. Fate is quite difficult to properly improvise in, which sucks.
You need to change how you think about combat and encounters in general. Combat in Fate should be treated exactly as any other scene that involves multiple characters acting against each other. There's no difference between two groups shooting at each other, a chase, debate, interrogation or anything really. If you somehow fall into combat as "combat" you'll run into what a lot of people complain about, which is stacking aspect invocations to get a nice fat +infinity roll that burns all Fate points for the group.

A lot of things new GMs and players forget is that aspects are facts. If something is 'On Fire' you don't need to invoke it to have it burn. Also, players can easily 'create an advantage' to create facts about the scene. Or just burn a fate point to make stuff up as they go along. Fate points should be used for fun stuff, not just invoke things for a +2/reroll.

Fate has one big issue though, which is that it is far too generic. If you try to simulate anything with more well defined rules like a magic system, gear or anything really you're on your own with houserules.
I ran a good detective themed thing, Fate seemed to work there. I would never use it for something that includes heavy combat, or complex systems. Use it to tell a story with your players and it shines, use it as a framework for something sandboxy and it crumbles. Sorry for rambling.

Continue from here >it doesn't help that consequences are also really abstract and poorly explained, leading to the other players in my group putting weird shit into those boxes that doesn't make sense (mental stun kind of effects in moderate, for instance) and in addition, consequences don't seem to have any actual effect
seriously, if there's penalties for having consequences our DMs literally never touched on them, and so it ended up worse than 3.pf in the 'fight till 0 then you drop' respect
The GM can compel consequences like any other aspect in the game, it can be like:
>You have an injured arm but you need to take that shot to kill that enemy that is running, I, the GM, will compel you, if you accept you will miss because of your injury(that's extremely funny to do, because it teaches to don't waste all your points trying to be a powerplayer). Also, every single aspect can become a character, thanks to the bronze rule, so if you want to complicate your life there's your deal. For example, you are poisoned, the Poison will become a character with two skills, like "It burns" to hurt the character by rolling, and another one that's just "being persistant" that will be your defense skill when you'll try to resist the antidote, it will also have stress to indicate how much "antidote" or "medical attention" it will need before it dies.
Also, nobody tells you to make a test more difficult if someone has a consequence of a certain kind.
>Your right eye is injured because of a fight you had before, to normally succeed this test you would need a 2, but because of that Severe Consequence you'll need a 4.
I hope I made myself clear.
>you can mark d6s, but i feel bad for bothering to deface even the shitty cheapo d6s i used for FATE.
You don't need to mark the dice, because it's stupidly easy to remember the association.
6-5=High=+
4-3=Medium=0
2-1=Low=-

Care to expand on that?

You can just roll 2d 6 and add 7 to the difficulties. It's so close to the curve it basically doesn't matter, FATE dice are a meme.

This is fantastic advice. Atomic Robo does a lot right.

Thirding.

I don't remember if Atomic Robo uses it, but if not, add Discover to it and you are basically on point.

Someone has the pdf?

...

...

As useful as all this information is, this Tumblr-tier comic isn't doing you any favors.

As long the information is straightforward and correct it can also be shared through a morse code network.

I know, I know. I held my tongue but I agree that everything outside of the green boxes is concentrated cancer.

It's kind of amazing to think how much it would be improved by just shopping stick figures over the people

What the fuck is there to "GET"? Fate is a system like any other, you run a session and people have fun or hate you for wasting their time, just like with any other system. I don't wanna go full hyperbole since it's not helpful for moderately civilized conversations, but if you have trouble with it must have a learning disability.

Fuck you, dragon spies are the shit.

No that comic is cringeworthy. I'd rather have people draw informative system exposition and examples with overly dramatic manga reactions.

>All these faggots who think literally 4d3-8 is hard

No, idiot, I actually wrote the post. Stop thinking every post longer than 2 lines is copypasta.

It's not hard, it's just pointless.

>I actually wrote the post
>and he's calling the other guy "idiot"
no self awareness at all huh

>writing a long post makes you an idiot
Not seeing the logic here. People wrote long rants against 3.x too, were they idiots?

As I promised here, I'll show you where the idiocy of people can arrive.
I will not explain my setting, but let's say it's very freeform and makes you able to play the character you would like to play the most, in fact I started with this idea because I wanted to try the idea of a versatile system with a huge world around it, flexing its muscles.
The players are:
>A being enterely composed of Nanomachines.
>An Deus Ex kind of Augmented guy with the knowledge of using fire magic to enchant its bullets with it.
>A mutant with poison blood, acid vomit, wings and camouflage.
>A mage able to use nightmare magic, armed with a magical rifle able to cast random effects
>An assassin guy with regeneration

>the game goes on and after 2 sessions they are able to unify into a party
>combat ensues and these idiots complain about
>"why my high caliber rifle doesn't make an arm explode with every hit"?
>Man you need to do a good success to actually chop of an arm of a person, or you can use create an advantage to wound his knee
>why he's still able to dodge after we hit him in the knee?!
>He has a malus doing it but he can still do it.
>Man this is taking up forever
>Only 3 turns have passed but a lot of actual time have passed because I had to stop the game explaining every single second, multiple times
>because of this the game gets this inside joke that it got slow combat
>that makes me rage a little bit, because we are all accustomed to games like Vampire, CoC, and so on, old games with slow as fuck and mechanical heavy combat, while also being unbalanced as fuck.
>they also find the concept of consequences "weird" because you don't really know your state
>I told them before how they worked of course, Stress and Consequences absorb hits, if you cannot absorb them, then you lose and the enemy decide what to do with you
>WHAAAT then if you don't use them with free invokation/fate points then it's like they are not there.
CONTINUES