Fate

Fate Core: is it worth it putting in the effort to "click" with the system?

Is it any good for longer campaigns?

Descriptions of general experiences with it are appreciated.

I've been playing the Dresden Files RPG, which uses the mechanics of Fate, for about 3 months now. It's been a good time. I'd say that Fate's mechanics are pretty solid, fun to play, and worth the effort.

It's alright.

As long as you've got imaginative players who actively gives each other compels you'll have the time of your life. If your players are all rollplayers you'll hate it.

No. If you're going to go rules ephemeral just play without a system. It's faster and you'll all enjoy it more.

woulda been faster to just say "rules light" instead of something that doesn't actually mean "rules light" eh?

I want to hear more about this Campaign. I have being dying to do one since I read the series. I opted instead to use World of Darkness instead.

Did I fuck up?

As someone who's played it a whole bunch, I can definitely say that it's good if you run a lot of games with a "setting over function" mentality.

At the risk of sounding like a complete and utter faggot, it's good for telling a story, rather than playing a game.

Fate Core is probably the most solid iteration of Fate, and Fate has always been a pretty solid narrative driven system for groups who enjoy that playstyle.

I'm not super fond of it, mostly because the combat is almost always really weak, but I'd still run it with the right premise in mind.

If you're prepared to get more specific though, I tend to find specific narrative systems more satisfying, bonus points for the ones which actually include a satisfying combat system alongside that.

Fate feels like a bounded system that one can weld onto another system with a few tweaks. You pick a game that provides a substantial mechanical framework and then you add Fate for the storytelling.

Fate's not rules light at all.

Sup LotW guy, how you doin'?

Still kinda sad that my favourite system is both dead and busted as fuck, yet only progressing slowly on an attempt to rewrite the ideas into something more palatable. So, about usual.

I like Fate, but there's two big issues I've seen crop up in the campaigns I've been in. Both were with newer GMs or GMs with only D&D experience, so it's possible that might have something to do with these issues.

First is that both tried to homebrew magic systems using magic as a skill and both times things got screwy was since magic was inherently more flexible than other skills, especially if you have a creative player. You either need to move magic over to stunts or really regulate what magic can and cannot do, or at least make sure magic has a cost to it.

The second was that there usually was a problem of the whole party generating free aspects and then one player burning them to get a huge roll and fucking destroy any person or obstacle in their path.

RPG's can be a labor of love, sometimes. Good luck.

I use it as my rules light system. But GURPS is my main system so it's fairly irrelevant how I label it.

If I'm already familiar enough with GURPS to be able to twist it around my finger for a given campaign and set of players, what do I gain (if anything) by learning Fate "properly"?

I've done several cold readings, run a few sessions, watched a few actual plays, but it never quite stuck and came off as a bit wonky. Not even because of the narrative elements (I love HeroQuest 2, so...). I liked a few of the mechanics, but a good chunk of those have already been aped or borrowed by GURPS over the years for various rules plugins.

Reading and playing a bit of Fate did show me a few interesting philosophies that exist in its narrative design, which I found interesting and a useful takeaway for my existing games. But I'm wondering if, having digested the "Fate philosophy" some and read a lot about it (and with GURPS already having good approximations for things like Fate Points if you want them), is there anything left for me to gain by playing the system itself?

Hey, you showed up right on time. Since you run both, would you happen to have any commentary on this? I'd appreciate it.

If you have a mature group, who can roll with shit can be collaborative, it can be good times.

If you have even one player who's the kind to need a GM constantly guiding their play, it'll suck. The murderhobo or the drama queen will both wreck their groups with their self-centered horseshit.

I gave it a good go. I really wanted to like it. But I didn't. I hated the lack of mechanical depth. I thought what it had would be enough, since I'm not a realism autist, but it's to the point that everything feels clunky, forced, and samey, like someone tried to tried to houserule a system into something it was never meant to do. Spaceship dogfights feel the same as a bar brawl. I have trouble believing people who say things like "You just need to be creative" have actually played the system much, because even with good narration you can feel the difference. If you are going to use a one size fits all mechanic like that, something as aggressively bell curvy as 4d3 is just wrong, because each +1/-1 amounts to a really large difference. The lack of any sort of magic system means it has to either be extremely limited (you get energy bolts and... energy bolts) or extremely open ended. There's also no real way to mechanically differentiate weapons or armor. I know the system toolkit has rules for that, but they're really wonky and add another level of complexity onto what's already really complicated for a supposedly simple and streamlined system. That's actually my problem with Fate in a nutshell: It asks you to make loads of sacrifices for the sake of simplicity, without actually being simple.

Also, the big thing no one told me is how hard Fate is to houserule for. In most other generic systems, it's easy to "piggyback" on existing mechanics, repurposing or modifying them to suit your needs to make the system do what you need it to. In Fate, stunts, aspects, and skills are all you really have to work with, and you can't really stretch them as far as you should be able to on paper.

System is a 5/10 for me, but very useful for the group of freeform players I run with. Since they're all coming from an emphasis on storytelling instead of mechanics they pick up things pretty quickly.

Hard part has been issues with characters that want to have specialized knowledge for the Lore skill. Since these are mostly people adapting freeform characters to Fate instead of making characters out of whole cloth, they all have too many ideas about what Lore could cover, but don't want to have their characters have a low stat in anything. Conversation always goes like "user, how do I have my character only really know anything about particle physics in Lore?" "Give them a low Lore and then a Stunt or an Aspect that gives them bonuses when that field comes up." And then they max out Lore anyway and never use it unless their character's exact field of knowledge comes up - which is rare.

Should be okay with longer campaigns, although character advancement as written is kind of a grind. Players will mostly shuffle their numbers around until they resolve major plots.

FATE is good because it woke up some designers to some new concepts, but it's not worth bothering with and is pretty much a waste of time to actually play. I was in some playtests for different versions, played some Dresden Files and my group asked for it never to be brought to the table again and I agreed. For story driven games, Fiasco and Hillfolk (or even stuff like Carolina Death Crawl, Shinobigami Ninja Battle Game that is very genre specific) do that better, and for the crunchy stuff-- everything does it better than FATE, from Runequest to Lamentations of the Flame Princess to 13th Age to Numenera-- they are all more fun and more sustainable as a campaign.

I wouldn't say you fucked up, I like WoD too. I will say that the Fate Dresden game is really solid, though.

I'll write up a storytime, but it'll take a bit. Stay tuned.

It's not that hard to 'get' Fate so long as you make sure that your first experience with the system isn't the generic Core version. There's a lot of under-the-hood tweaking it wants you to do to suit the campaign you have in mind. Preconfigured versions of the game (Dresden Files, Atomic Robo, etc.) will give you a clearer picture of how things come together in play and help you understand how you might want to customize the Skill system or ways you can use Stunts and the "Fate Fractal".
There's also Fate Accelerated, which is basically a much more compact version of Fate Core. There's less that can go wrong due to inexperience because it relies less on the group customizing the system as part of session 0.

Alrighty, here we go.

So to start things off, here's some background. Pretty much everyone in my regular RPG group fucking loves the Dresden Files. Of them, I was one of the only two people who hadn't read the books at all yet. I started reading after the first session, and lemme tell you I fucking loved it.

Anyway, enough blogposting. The game is set in San Francisco, just after Summer Knight takes place.

Here's our cast of characters:

Eric, a practitioner who's a junior member of the Department of Seismic Affairs, a branch of the White Council devoted to dealing with the tangled mess of lay lines that run through the city, draining power from them carefully so that they can't cause a horrible explosion or anything like that.

John, a kitchen witch who's only really good at one thing: enchanting. Thing is, he's autistically good at it. Self-styled cowboy (because that's all the player who made him every really plays), runs around with a six-shooter full of enchanted bullets, and a few other doohickeys.

Cross (actual character name was Erica, but that's too similar for this shit), a True Believer and Catholic reverend, who's made a career out of beating the shit out of supernatural nasties with her bare hands. We mostly call her Ghost-Puncher.

Cerberus, a temple pup. Yeah, not shitting you, this dude wanted to (and even after getting total warning about how annoying no thumbs or ability to speak would be) play as a temple pup. Worked out better than expected. He was bonded to John.

Lastly, me. I was playing an aging lycanthrope, who'd started to get sick of the whole “rage spirit living in your dome” bullshit, and was trying to find more constructive uses of overwhelming brute force.

Actual story will be in next post, it's loooooong.

And so it begins:

Things start off quiet, John had just gotten a shady-ass contract from the White Court (as if there were any other kind), to translate a magical tome they had come across. Issue was, it had a glamour of some sort over it to make it illegible, and they needed someone to crack it. Issue is, John doesn't know the first goddamn thing about actual spells, and has no hope of being able to crack it. The Court didn't know that, and John chose not to mention that. Reward was too big to not risk it.

So John goes and phones Eric, trying to get him in on this for a cut of the cash. Between then and when Eric would arrive, a couple shady fuckers, Triad by the look of them, come by the door. They want the book, and how the fuck the Triad is clued in nobody's quite sure of. Point is, they're here, want the book, and are both willing and able to burn down John's house to get it. So John hands it over to them for a smaller reward, figuring he can try and bullshit his way out of the White Court's ire.

Things get a bit interrupted when Cross gets a call from a desperate woman who's claiming that a horrible beast-thing went through and carved up a couple security guards at a local museum. A couple pieces are also missing, but that's not our main worry. So she goes and calls up the whole gang, because God knows we aren't going to that kinda scene without backup.

We arrive, look over the place, and it seems that only a few bits and bobs went missing. Oh, and the security guard is a floor-to-ceiling smear of paste on one of the back walls, too. Looking over the security footage, the great big bursts of static tell us that it's definitely something supernatural that went and did this, and powerful if it managed to hex out the camera 40 feet away. We take a bit of the security slurry and Eric preps himself a tracking spell, since we figured whatever pasted this guy has bits of him stuck to him. We get a lock, and follow.

We're led to a man who is pretty much the epitome of the warlock stereotype. Big black cloak, deep hood, long beard, the works. Guy's desperately washing himself off in a drinking fountain, having probably realized the same thing we did. Not being one to let the evil wizard get a word and/or spell in, I ran up to give him a good face-smashing. Missed completely, but hey. It was an effort. He turns about and blasts some fire at us, then runs away like a coward after Eric zaps him with a bit of lightning. Drops his focus, too, which means we can follow him later with more tracking.

To summarize a bunch of gumshoeing (that for some god-awful reason I had to lead, because nobody else in the party seemed to remember that social skills existed), we found out that this guy was working with those same Triad who had the book. In addition, those stolen bits from the museum were used in binding rituals for specific kinds of spirits, normally native to the far east.

We track them down to an herbal remedy shop in Chinatown, and John walks on in. He makes an offer to decode the book, since they obviously couldn't given that they didn't have a practitioner (or so we thought). They agree, and he goes with Eric into the back room to work on it. At the same time, Cerberus starts getting whiffs of horrible monster on the air, and starts flipping out to warn us. Looks like warlock-man was back, and he'd brought the guard blender – a great big fucking demon.

Like sensible people, we book it, book in tow. Demon chases after Eric, who's carrying the book. Warlock is chasing John, who ran the other way to confuse them, and the rest of us are delaying the mundane Triad in the shop with good ol' fashioned violence.

John gets away fine, and we manage to mop up the Triad without too much trouble. But Eric's in a bit of a pickle. No way he can outrun this thing, and it's getting hard to keep misdirecting it around the streets. Eventually he's running down a subway tunnel, with the thing dangerously close behind him. No way to run, no place to hide, nothing left to do but fight the two-ton monstrosity that had turned a sturdier man than him into a Jackson Pollock painting.

Of course, he had magic.

He cast his senses about, and it turned out (with the toss of a fate point) that this tunnel ran just above a minor ley line. Of course, even a minor ley line has fucking devastating power, assuming you can steer it accurately. Which Eric can. Sometimes. With a few hours of prep and a team of wizards helping. None of those to be had, but no better options either.

So he pulls a fuckload of power out of the ley line, and directs it all around the demon, into the tunnel. Thing's too fast to hit with a projectile, but no way in hell it'd be able to outrun the whole tunnel coming down on it. Shame that it'd mean the tunnel would come down on him, too. Several million dollars in property damage later, we have Eric half-buried in rock, the demon entirely buried in rock, and chaos all over the place. One doesn't just bring down a few thousand tons of rock right under a city without causing problems with silly little things like gas lines and streets.

We come by, marvel at the damage, and manage to find Eric, pulling him out of the wreckage. Now all that was left to do was kill the fuck out of that goddamn warlock.

We track him by his focus, and find him trying to do the same to us, tracking the book. He's on foot, with a small army of imps, walking down the middle of the street like it's nothing. We're in cars/on motorbikes, severely outnumbered, and mad as hell. In hindsight, he never had a chance.

Things open up with Cross ramming her big-ass SUV into him, sending him sprawling across the pavement with a broken limb or ten. I follow up by leaping off my motorbike for a high-speed curb stomp, which sends him right to the edge of death. Before we can get another hit in, he takes the desperation move to end all desperation moves. He opens a gate to the Nevernever, and dives on in away from us. Given that wherever he was ending up had a sky made of locusts, we figure he was as good as dead and choose not to try and chase the warlock into that hellhole.

With the book back in our hands, Eric can go ahead and break the enchantment on it. Turns out it's a ritual tome, about binding that same kind of spirit that the museum pieces were for. John sells it off to the White Court after taking pictures of the pages just in case, and we pocket the reward both from the Triad and the vampires. Not a bad couple days, all told.

Anyhow, that's how the first session went. I could tell more stories, but it seems like something that shouldn't just be shitting up this thread. Tell me if you wanna hear more and I will write more.

Fate Core is more fucking complicated than Gurps, the book is almost bigger Hero 5th edition and that's saying something.

Um. That's a lie?

I tried fate accelerated but once we got to a fight scene it broke down because any action you do is mechanically identical to anything else.

You have at least 2 or 3 different sort of actions to choose from, assuming you don't add any subsystems.

And the result is still important in-fiction so it's like... sure, breaking someone's arm and setting him on fire both just apply a tag, but they also affect your (and the target's) future actions differently, can interact with other tags differently, etc.

If _what's actually happening_ being different isn't enough of a difference, yeah, you are better off with some other game.

>posts with "um" or "sweetie" in them
didn't read lol, thanks for reminding me to filter

Hero's 5th Ed = 372 pages
Fate Core = 308
You guys are fighting over 64 pages. Is 64 pages a lot of pages?

Fate Core is also a half size book.

Its not really worst or better than a D20 style game in that respect. Instead of hitting something until it dies you stack up advantages until it dies. That does get you to describe the scene as being on fire and the person poisoned and insulted rather than just saying "I hit it again", but in d20 games you have lots of cool ways to hit things, so it balances out.