Fate Core

Good morrow to all you hepcats out there!

Some of my friends are getting together a Fate Core group. I know nothing about it, can someone give me the Readers Digest version? Strengths weaknesses of it and the system as an RPG?

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Fate Core is like Java, it can do anything and everything! But it can't do it quite well.

Be easy on it, don't take it too seriously.
It's a loose set of rules that guide a game of imagination.

Should be fun as long as everyone understands the rules. I'd read the rules man. It's a weird game.

I was very disappointed with it. It is very nice and flexible "assemble by yourself", easy to add whole new mechanics, and many cool settings pops-up after kickstarter.
But in actual game there too many encounters, unfortunately, comes down to "we need to stack more free invokes on main actor or reduce enemy skill with them". Oh, and social characters in combat are capable to outdamage plain fighters, cuz mental damage, muthafucka. Do you ever see BBEG run away and cry like bitch?

Aspects are a bit strange and knowing how to use them in a way that helps gameplay instead of "farming" fate points is something that is best learned through observing another group.
It is the most difficult component of the system to understand from a traditional D&D-like perspective, requiring more agency than one may be used to.

I have to agree with a lot said here, if not all. It prompted me to increase the tactic elements of Conflicts to avoid what people call the "Blind Sniper" scenario. (Some players do not find it to be an issue at all.)

I'll break it down. The game is about four things: Aspects, Skills, Stunts, and Fate Points, the metacurrency fuel for it all. Aspects are a very general way of defining unique parts of your character and also the environment and the story and... well, whatever. They're literally just phrases. They can range from, "Overly-Protective Father" to "House Fire!" to "The Mafia's Got a Finger in Everybody's Plates."

GMs and players interact with Aspects by invoking them for a roll (basically saying, "because [aspect], [action] would be easier"), invoking them for effect (saying, "because [aspect], [unique action] is possible" (which is something you'd already do in an RPG automatically, it's just codified to help you connect the dots in Fate)), or compelling them (basically spending a Fate Point to appeal to the group for a plot development based on an aspect which is out of the hands of the other players or GMs (something like, "Because you have the aspect 'Clean Freak', you refuse to go through the sewer.")).

Skills are as normal. Just a list of... skills that a character has proficiency in. They're literally just direct roll modifiers. The skill list is pretty nice and tight, I'd say. They offer that you add skills as you need, but it's usually best to just do a stunt.

Stunts are basically unique ways your character can use skills. They're things like "Night Terror: When in total darkness, you can use Provoke to make Shoot rolls." or "Daddy's Boy: Gain +2 to any Wealth or Contacts rolls you make under the pretense of being in direct service to your father, The President, with anybody who would care."

The main thing to note about the game is that they can be used extremely poorly, making a person think, "This game is so completely retarded, wtf, it doesn't do anything." or extremely well, making a person think, "Wow, this game can do fucking anything, even a teaspoon of tactical combat if I work it the right way." It's a very unique tool that you have to really immerse yourself in for a bit to understand, but it can move mountains.

You really goto think of it as a cooperative storytelling game. Players can force plot developments and the GM has to roll with it, anybody could force a character to do something almost without the consent of their player and you have to just roll with it. Choosing what the game is about, the setting, the problems, chargen, ground zero stuff; that's all built into the game. You've got to do it collaboratively. If your GM sends you a setting document and expects you to show up with a character sheet then it's time to worry, homie don't know Fate. The main thing that'll trip you up is how much control everybody has over everything about the game at any given time.

A good example of this is right here (follow the link, don't use embed) youtu.be/NOFXtAHg7vU?t=37m40s . Felicia's character gets stabbed by a knife, the GM says that the knife does extra damage to magical beings, Wil likens that to psychic damage, Felicia uses this as grounds to take a mental consequence to avoid some of the stress, they call the aspect "Knife of Self Loathing", and then the GM describes the consequence as a piece of Felicia's character's goodness getting cut. That type of collaboration is exactly what Fate is about. They took a simple knife attack and made it a knife that cuts the minds of magical beings, and now she has that consequence written down and in front of her. (This video is full of this shit, it's a pretty great video for seeing how the game is played. you can also play it harder if you want).

This all seems very gimmicky...

>Not giving the BBEG Superb Will

It can do _some_ things quite well. For starters, pick-up games and ensembles of varying power levels.

It's no more gimmicky than any other TTRPG's rulesets. Honestly, Fate is pretty honest with you about what it is. It's a bare-bones system that lets you do just about anything with it with very little effort.

What that user isn't telling you is that to change the game-world in some way, you have to spend Fate points. While they're in no way limited because you get them back fairly often, you only have 3. So in his example with that knife, that's at least one Fate point from two different characters, who now only have 2 more each for getting bonuses, and they have no idea what else the thing they're fighting does.
Other than that, the game is very rules-lite in the way that the skills are the only REAL central mechanic of the game. Aspects? They modify skills. Stunts? Special ways you can use skills. Skills? They're your skills. In that way, Fate is very easy to learn. It's when you start to realize how versatile and useful Fate points are that you go deeper. And that can go very deep indeed.

I wouldn't say it's an 'easy to learn, hard to master' system, exactly, but it's definitely more complicated than it seems at first glance just because of how you can use Fate points. I think the best way Fate's ever been described here on Veeky Forums is that Fate is a TTRPG made by GMs for GMs. It expects you to create and build the world alongside the GM, rather than just playing in it. That might seem gimmicky, but it's literally something that TTRPGs have been basically trying to tell players in every 'so what is an RPG' chapter ever.