Dresden Files RPG--How Many Novels Do You Have to Read?

[Amaril]

So I recently started reading The Dresden Files after hearing about it from a few people. I really love what I've seen of the series so far (I'm currently about two thirds of the way through Fool Moon), and I know there's an RPG for the setting that I'm pretty interested in trying. I have a couple questions, though. First, is it generally a pretty good game; and second, how far into the novels does one have to be to understand the game and avoid major world spoilers?

If anybody can help me out, I'd really appreciate it :smallsmile:

[Xefas]

First, it's a fantastic game.

Second, I wouldn't be too scared of spoilers. The core book (Your Story) was actually so well written that it's what convinced me to get into the novels in the first place, and I haven't regretted reading it first.

The other book (Our World) is probably more prone to spoilers, as it lists pretty much all the antagonists, with statistics and descriptions, up to the point in the novels when the RPG came out. However, 'Our World' isn't necessary to play the game; in fact, it's only really useful if you're planning on playing in Chicago - I got it only because the RPG books are entertaining to read as a fan of the Dresden Files, and just to support Evil Hat in some small way.

edit: As far as 'how far you need to be to understand it', I'd say just reading Storm Front will give you a good enough idea of how magic works and the tone the world is meant to convey. The Dresden Files RPG is all about telling your own story, not just parroting Harry's, so intuitive knowledge of his adventures is not necessary.

[Amaril]

First, it's a fantastic game.

Second, I wouldn't be too scared of spoilers. The core book (Your Story) was actually so well written that it's what convinced me to get into the novels in the first place, and I haven't regretted reading it first.

The other book (Our World) is probably more prone to spoilers, as it lists pretty much all the antagonists, with statistics and descriptions, up to the point in the novels when the RPG came out. However, 'Our World' isn't necessary to play the game; in fact, it's only really useful if you're planning on playing in Chicago - I got it only because the RPG books are entertaining to read as a fan of the Dresden Files, and just to support Evil Hat in some small way.

That all sounds really encouraging to me--I wasn't planning on buying Our World anyway (I like playing self-insert characters, which in this case would mean somebody just finding out about the supernatural world), so the information in there wouldn't be of much interest. Not sure I'd want to play in Chicago anyway.

[Grod_The_Giant]

I think there'd be more in the line of "references you don't get yet" than out-and-out spoilers.

Also, yes, it's a great game. Good rules, and an amazing fit to the world. If you like FATE/narrative systems-- speaking personally, I can't run them to save my life. I love playing FATE, but I can't run it-- then you'll be happy. Even if you don't, there's a lot of great advice about running games, playing games, worldbuilding, and the like.

[Amaril]

Ok, I have a couple more questions now that I'm virtually certain I'll be making the investment. The website blurb for the rulebook mentions that it has rules for playing full-fledged magic-users like Harry, normal humans like Murphy, and supernatural creatures like Tera West (and I still don't know what her deal is, so please don't give it away), and having them all be able to make equal contributions to the game. First, is that claim really true; and second, do the rules allow for characters to specifically be apprentice magicians just beginning to discover their abilities, and/or hexenwulfen?

[Xefas]

Yes! It's true. It's all true. I would say Pure Mortals take a little bit more comfort with the system, but once you get how Aspects, Compels, Declarations, and so on work, you can be just as ridiculously awesome (I would argue, potentially more so), than a Wizard (who are ludicrously powerful, as they should be).

Mortals don't get bigger stats or anything, either. They just... well, you'll understand when you read about Refresh. Lets just say that character agency might not be balanced, but player agency is. And that leads to a lot of interesting things. John Marcone can't redirect lightning with his naked buttcheeks. But he can do a lot of things Harry can't (like use a cellphone).

And yes, the rules cover everything in the books. And do so very well. Using the aforementioned currency that manages player agency, you can easily transition from being pure mortal, to being an apprentice spellcaster (either to a PC or an NPC), to being a full-fledged caster of whatever flavor you desire, while still maintaining the same level of power as the rest of the party. Same with going from pure mortal to one of the flavors of werewolf, or to vampire, or... say, even going from something supernatural back to pure mortal (which is kinda rare, but happens).

[Amaril]

Ok, then I have only one more question:

Anyone want to play it with me? :smallamused:

[Xefas]

Anyone want to play it with me? :smallamused:

Depending on the times that you're available, an internet accomplice and I are planning on putting together a weekly (or bi-weekly, depending on how schedules shake out) Skype game via voice chat. Probably ~4 hours each weekend (Saturday or Sunday, depending, again, on scheduling needs).

If that sounds interesting (to anyone reading this, I guess; we're hoping for a total group size of 4-5 people), PM me. :smallsmile:

[Philistine]

Ok, I have a couple more questions now that I'm virtually certain I'll be making the investment. The website blurb for the rulebook mentions that it has rules for playing full-fledged magic-users like Harry, normal humans like Murphy, and supernatural creatures like Tera West (and I still don't know what her deal is, so please don't give it away), and having them all be able to make equal contributions to the game. First, is that claim really true; and second, do the rules allow for characters to specifically be apprentice magicians just beginning to discover their abilities, and/or hexenwulfen?

One of the major benefits of a "rules-light" system is that you can generally do anything you can think of a way to describe.

That said, it's not free-form; inevitably, some concepts are easier to pull off than others. For example, there's not really* a reduced-cost/capability Apprentice version of the basic (and required!) Wizard power suite that I've seen, making "Apprentice Wizard" = "Wizard" for most purposes.

* There sort of is, but the option is geared much more toward powerful but narrowly-focused practicioners (Sorcerers) rather than fledgling generalists.

[Grod_The_Giant]

One of the major benefits of a "rules-light" system is that you can generally do anything you can think of a way to describe.

That said, it's not free-form; inevitably, some concepts are easier to pull off than others. For example, there's not really* a reduced-cost/capability Apprentice version of the basic (and required!) Wizard power suite that I've seen, making "Apprentice Wizard" = "Wizard" for most purposes.

* There sort of is, but the option is geared much more toward powerful but narrowly-focused practicioners (Sorcerers) rather than fledgling generalists.
You could arguably use a Focused Practitioner as an apprentice Wizard, like when Molly was just starting out and could only really do Spirit evocations-- veils, illusions, and the like.* From there, you can buy up to full-on Evocation and Thaumaturgy as the level of the game increases.

Also, I think Sorcerer in the Dresdenverse has a specific, black magic-y meaning.

But yes, as Xefas said, you can have any manner of characters-- the last group I played in had a terramancer, a pyromancer, a were-fox, and a changling (half-fey). I ran a sci-fi hack of the game for even longer with a "psion" (evocation, but no thaumaturgy), a cyborg (bunch of monster powers), an alien (different monster powers) and a pure mortal, and it worked great.

*Spoilers whited out.

[Xefas]

One of the major benefits of a "rules-light" system is that you can generally do anything you can think of a way to describe.

This isn't relevant to anything in particular, just wanted to say "D=" at 'rules light'. Our metrics for rules density are so differently calibrated I was momentarily incapacitated. If a 400pg rulebook is 'light', what term do you use for Primetime Adventures or Lady Blackbird? (Pilgrims of the Flying Temple, Kagematsu, Murderous Ghosts, etc)

I'm not trying to be judgmental, I'm just always interested in learning a little bit more about RPG culture.


For example, there's not really* a reduced-cost/capability Apprentice version of the basic (and required!) Wizard power suite that I've seen, making "Apprentice Wizard" = "Wizard" for most purposes.

* There sort of is, but the option is geared much more toward powerful but narrowly-focused practicioners (Sorcerers) rather than fledgling generalists.

Page 86 has an entire sidebar devoted to playing an apprentice.

Basically, you just start out with The Sight, Wizard's Constitution, and either Ritual or Channeling. Then gradually buy up the other Ritual/Channeling, then upgrade to Evocation/Thaumaturgy, then get some Refinement. Bam, you just went from knowing one thing, to a few things, to a bunch of things, to the whole shebang.

[kyoryu]

At its heart, DFRPG *is* a simple, rules-light game. Evil Hat has a tendency of filling their books with an absolute ton of advice and commentary on the rules, in addition to the rules themselves.

You can fit the core of Fate onto about three pages.

That said, it's the crunchiest of the Evil Hat Fate games. But even then, consider that the DFRPG universe is basically "everything White Wolf made in one city", and that you can create pretty much any type of supernatural critter with the included rules.

[Sir_Mopalot]

At its heart, DFRPG *is* a simple, rules-light game. Evil Hat has a tendency of filling their books with an absolute ton of advice and commentary on the rules, in addition to the rules themselves.

You can fit the core of Fate onto about three pages.

That said, it's the crunchiest of the Evil Hat Fate games. But even then, consider that the DFRPG universe is basically "everything White Wolf made in one city", and that you can create pretty much any type of supernatural critter with the included rules.

All of this is very true, and nowhere is it more obvious than the new Fate Accelerated Edition. It takes all of 10 minutes to teach someone the game, and if they're pretty good at concepting characters, you can take someone from never having heard of it to playing inside of an hour. It's the ultimate universal system. I have a game I'm concepting up that is designed to be the crossover to end all crossovers, have Superman fighting alongside Harry Potter, James Bond along with Commander Shepard. And that would be balanced!

[Need_A_Life]

Well... I'd recommend reading them all, but I'm hooked on the series, so you can probably skip it, if you choose. As for understanding the setting, I'd argue that Fool Moon actually does a better job of it than Storm Front, at least in the terms of the tone and pacing I found works best at the table.

Pure Mortals are ridiculously powerful, when played properly (Fate Points = narrative control and PMs have more Fate Points).
I'd say that the weak points of the system are Evocation/Channelling (which let's you make a pure blaster who can steam-roll anything pretty easily), Thaumaturgy (too easy to make it without risk to pull off major rituals; there are fan-made fixes if you don't want to just pull a "GM says") and the Speed powers (combined with high Athletics and you're dodging bullets even on a bad roll).

Personally, I want to play the game with the "Cassandra's Tears" power as my only supernatural advantage. I love that power from both a mechanical and a flavour perspective and want to see just how awesome a high-Refresh character with prophetic ability can be.

[Drachasor]

I don't think you need to have read any books. They are nice for background knowledge (up to just before Changes anyhow), but certainly not needed.

I have some gripes with the game system. I think it is generally easier to have a really imbalanced party compared to D&D 3.5. For while the potential imbalance is a lot bigger in 3.5, a lot of groups don't see it due to relatively low levels of System Mastery (outside Druids, perhaps, who very easily achieve a high optimization level).

Part of this, I think, is because each skill point is a really big deal because of the bell curve. With 3+ defense, 3 stress, various attack stats, and then all the other skills, this makes it very hard to achieve character balance. This is a bit exacerbated by the low stress levels most characters have -- low defense/stress can get you eliminated in one round. Then you have some insane stuff possible with magic, OP item creation (sadly), and the system encourages you to go as crazy with each spell as you can due to the low number of casts. Naturally a lot of ability pricing is a bit wonky in terms of costs.

There's also a frequently encountered problem with realism that people complain about. Fixed defensive structures, like walls, only work if you spend resources on them, declare them, or whatever, and after that just don't work anymore -- this is because they're all aspects you have to tag. A lot of times this isn't a big deal, but it occasionally can be. There are some optional rules (fan-made and not) you can dig up to try to work around this.

The combat system is a bit abstract, but works well, imho. It strikes a good balance between grid-based play like D&D and free form "the DM makes up what is going on" systems.

Regarding the skill system, it can be hard if you make a character "badly" to even interact in some encounters. IIRC, even creating an aspect someone else can use to tag is a DC 3 by default, so if you have no social skills that are at least a 3, then you'll have a hard time doing anything in social scenes.

The game does have some really, really great stuff. Aspects are generally very cool. Character and city creation are great. And the system provides a huge amount of variety. There are just several things you have to be careful about.

Aspects do take some getting used to. And some people will have trouble with them. I have friends that like doing things directly, so they found making an aspect for someone else to tag very difficult to do.

Humans can be good with their extra fate points, though it also depends a bit on how often you get fate points back. If your sessions are longer, then those fate points have to be spread out more. I know our human character often ran out, and so found things a bit difficult. This can potentially be handled by the GM having refreshes during the session, but as I recall that game doesn't give good guidelines on when a GM should do this.

I don't mean to say the DFRPG is a bad game. I'm just tend to look at the flaws in systems a lot. I did enjoy playing it, even though my character had a hard time interacting in social encounters.


Personally, I want to play the game with the "Cassandra's Tears" power as my only supernatural advantage. I love that power from both a mechanical and a flavour perspective and want to see just how awesome a high-Refresh character with prophetic ability can be.

Yeah, one semi-problem I also noticed was that if you take a really weak supernatural power, like Cassandra's Tears, you lose out on the extra refresh humans get. It would be nice if the system was a little forgiving with such things.

[Need_A_Life]

Cassandra's Tears means being able to exercise extreme narrative control (seriously, that vision I have of dying in my bed at age 90 surrounded by great-grandchildren can be invoked EVERY time someone tries to prevent that from occurring and justify, on its own, surviving "almost certain death" scenarios).

I think giving up the Pure Mortal bonus is a fair trade-off, though I admit it is a bit wonky (my favourite example is: Cassandra's Tears [+0], Wizard's Constitution [+0] in an Item of Power [+1; minimum total cost -1].
Yes, putting two +0 powers into an Item of Power is more expensive than having them yourself :smalltongue:

[Drachasor]

Cassandra's Tears means being able to exercise extreme narrative control (seriously, that vision I have of dying in my bed at age 90 surrounded by great-grandchildren can be invoked EVERY time someone tries to prevent that from occurring and justify, on its own, surviving "almost certain death" scenarios).

I think giving up the Pure Mortal bonus is a fair trade-off, though I admit it is a bit wonky (my favourite example is: Cassandra's Tears [+0], Wizard's Constitution [+0] in an Item of Power [+1; minimum total cost -1].
Yes, putting two +0 powers into an Item of Power is more expensive than having them yourself :smalltongue:

Yeah, but Cassandra's Tears means no one believes you (well, a -2 to convince people), which can ALSO be compelled or invoked against you. And it isn't like it gives you free tags. And the GM gets to decide what visions you have, not you -- so I doubt you get any vision of you being alive. Since it also requires an aspect, that's an aspect that could have been used for something else (like something that could be invoked to keep you alive).

Wizard's Constitution doesn't mean much, but Item of Power is pretty huge -- that's probably worth the lost of the pure mortal bonus by itself.

I'm just saying if you made someone that JUST had Cassandra's Tears and/or Wizard's Constitution, or any number of other really weak powers, then you suffer disproportionately compared to what you are getting. At that point you'd really be much better off spending at least another 3 points or more.

[Need_A_Life]

Unbelievable Predictions. You are able to make precognitive predictions or receive them from the GM.
Nope, you get to make them as well.

And on p. 324 it adds:

[Predictions] manifest as aspects that are placed on the “world”—the campaign itself—and remain in effect until the events they pertain to have played out.

Now, there's nothing to say that you're not going to have a really ****** time getting to those 90 years, dying in bed (nor anything saying that every prediction will necessarily come true), but the aspect will help you get there.

As for the GM giving me visions? Well, isn't that a compel on my "Mind-splitting headaches and visions. Isn't life fun?" aspect? Yay! A Fate Point and something cool happens? Done and done.


Ok, then I have only one more question:

Anyone want to play it with me? :smallamused:
If it's online, then sure. Skype might be a possibility?

[Amaril]

If it's online, then sure. Skype might be a possibility?

I personally prefer text games, at least when playing with people I've never met. If it was up to me, I'd probably want to just play on the forums--but it's all moot if not enough people are interested, anyway.

[Drachasor]

Nope, you get to make them as well.

My mistake. I missed that. Well that's completely insane. I don't think they ever really though through the implications of that.

[neonchameleon]

This isn't relevant to anything in particular, just wanted to say "D=" at 'rules light'. Our metrics for rules density are so differently calibrated I was momentarily incapacitated. If a 400pg rulebook is 'light', what term do you use for Primetime Adventures or Lady Blackbird? (Pilgrims of the Flying Temple, Kagematsu, Murderous Ghosts, etc)

Ultimately only slightly lighter than Fate. If you want a preview of the system as opposed to "An adventurers' guide to the setting" and "A GM's guide to the setting", either take a look at the Spirit of the Century SRD (http://www.faterpg.com/dl/sotc-srd.html) (Spirit being the dry run for the Dresden Files RPG) or get a copy of the Fate Core rules (http://www.evilhat.com/store/index.php?main_page=advanced_search_result&keyword=fate+core&categories_id=&inc_subcat=1&manufacturers_id=&pfrom=&pto=&dfrom=&dto=&x=29&y=13) (a much better presented and slightly streamlined version of the system, doing things like trimming the ten aspects to five because the GM can manage that much more easily).

[Regitnui]

The only objection I have to the system is that while everything else is alright and very intuitive, the Spellcasting rules are really heavy. I (a 3.5 player and Legend homebrewer) just don't get it. Thank heavens for helpful GMs.

[kyoryu]

Part of this, I think, is because each skill point is a really big deal because of the bell curve. With 3+ defense, 3 stress, various attack stats, and then all the other skills, this makes it very hard to achieve character balance. This is a bit exacerbated by the low stress levels most characters have -- low defense/stress can get you eliminated in one round.

Really? I haven't worked it out for Dresden, but in Core, it would take around 24 stress to one-hit a character, after applying all possible Consequences.

(2+4+6+8 stress for the consequences to soak 20 stress, and then four more to go over the default stress track of 3)

I've found one-hitting a character in any version of Fate to be really, really tough.


Then you have some insane stuff possible with magic, OP item creation (sadly), and the system encourages you to go as crazy with each spell as you can due to the low number of casts. Naturally a lot of ability pricing is a bit wonky in terms of costs.

Yeah, haven't played with that super much, so can't really speak to it.


There's also a frequently encountered problem with realism that people complain about. Fixed defensive structures, like walls, only work if you spend resources on them, declare them, or whatever, and after that just don't work anymore -- this is because they're all aspects you have to tag. A lot of times this isn't a big deal, but it occasionally can be. There are some optional rules (fan-made and not) you can dig up to try to work around this.

The easiest way is to just apply parts of Fate Core, and let the wall provide a passive resistance that's appropriate. But I'd be hesitant to combine that with any kind of active resistance.

The overall "only get one free tag" is a stumbling block in peoples' thinking about the system, for sure. I look at it as "cinematic", and the bonus applying means it's called out in a camera shot/whatever.

It's part of how Fate is different - it's not really about adding up as many static bonuses as you can get, where that's a big part of most games.

Fate's not really about "realism", and Core has the tagline "fiction, not physics". So it's best to approach examples or ideas not from "reality", but rather in terms of movies/TV/books, and camera shots, narration, and whatnot.


Regarding the skill system, it can be hard if you make a character "badly" to even interact in some encounters. IIRC, even creating an aspect someone else can use to tag is a DC 3 by default, so if you have no social skills that are at least a 3, then you'll have a hard time doing anything in social scenes.

I'll have to check, but IIRC, it's either a 2 or 1. The "official" advice in Core is 1, I know that, but it may be 2 for Dresden.

At any rate, that's what Maneuver (Create Advantage) is for - figuring out ways to use those skills that aren't obviously appropriate to the scene to have an influence, or to target skills that the target has at a low level.

There's also a charop thing going on there where you generally optimize Fate differently than you would D&D - it's not so much about min-maxing one thing as it is making sure you have reasonable breadth of abilities. Having your three peak skills be combat-oriented isn't *that much* more effective than having your peak (+5) skill be combat, and then the next two (+4) be non-combat, and then putting the rest of the combat stuff at +3. But it makes a far, far more versatile character.


Aspects do take some getting used to. And some people will have trouble with them. I have friends that like doing things directly, so they found making an aspect for someone else to tag very difficult to do.

That's certainly true. I wrote the following to help with some of that:

https://plus.google.com/108546067488075210468/posts/2hHTAEucYRW

https://plus.google.com/108546067488075210468/posts/RiPHDaSa6Yg

You can also tag your own aspects, of course. You don't *have* to just pass them to others.


Humans can be good with their extra fate points, though it also depends a bit on how often you get fate points back. If your sessions are longer, then those fate points have to be spread out more.

There's also nothing saying you can't have mid-session refresh. I'd certainly consider it for sessions that were > 4 hours.


I know our human character often ran out, and so found things a bit difficult. This can potentially be handled by the GM having refreshes during the session, but as I recall that game doesn't give good guidelines on when a GM should do this.

I'd probably argue that four hours = refresh, in general. It's probably better to do it based on what happens in the game, but I think that's a good guideline.

If I had an idea of how long the game would be, I'd probably use that to figure out how many total refreshes I'd have, and divide the time roughly evenly.

If I didn't have an idea, I'd start looking for a point to refresh at the three hour mark, and as soon as a significant accomplishment/whatever happened, go from there. It's an area where I think too little refresh is probably a bigger problem than too much, so long as you don't go to extremes (refresh every hour!)


I don't mean to say the DFRPG is a bad game. I'm just tend to look at the flaws in systems a lot. I did enjoy playing it, even though my character had a hard time interacting in social encounters.

Sometimes it's not even just system flaws, but adjustments - you do some things in Fate differently than you would in D&D. Some things that are good strategy/good optimization in D&D aren't in Fate.

Writing good aspects is, itself, a bit of an art that takes a bit of adjustment.


Yeah, one semi-problem I also noticed was that if you take a really weak supernatural power, like Cassandra's Tears, you lose out on the extra refresh humans get. It would be nice if the system was a little forgiving with such things.

I'd probably just let the player get away with that, myself.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

I feel like the magic is poorly explained. Basically, it lets you set the difficulty of a spell higher in order to make it more powerful. Then you have to get enough of a success to meet that difficulty. If you manage that, use the difficulty of the spell as a base effect rating.

[Drachasor]

Really? I haven't worked it out for Dresden, but in Core, it would take around 24 stress to one-hit a character, after applying all possible Consequences.

(2+4+6+8 stress for the consequences to soak 20 stress, and then four more to go over the default stress track of 3)

I've found one-hitting a character in any version of Fate to be really, really tough.

It's not an issue of one hitting people. Rather, it is the fact that unless you take toughness, then you'll be quickly racking up consequences in any combat. And outside of your one mild consequence, the others stick around for a while, making you that much more vulnerable for the rest of the combat or the next combat. This also has the effect of making you more vulnerable in social conflicts and the like.

While it is hard to die in one hit, it is pretty easy to take a consequence every hit.


The easiest way is to just apply parts of Fate Core, and let the wall provide a passive resistance that's appropriate. But I'd be hesitant to combine that with any kind of active resistance.

The overall "only get one free tag" is a stumbling block in peoples' thinking about the system, for sure. I look at it as "cinematic", and the bonus applying means it's called out in a camera shot/whatever.

It's part of how Fate is different - it's not really about adding up as many static bonuses as you can get, where that's a big part of most games.

Fate's not really about "realism", and Core has the tagline "fiction, not physics". So it's best to approach examples or ideas not from "reality", but rather in terms of movies/TV/books, and camera shots, narration, and whatnot.

That's my point really. There are aspects that are very unrealistic.




I'll have to check, but IIRC, it's either a 2 or 1. The "official" advice in Core is 1, I know that, but it may be 2 for Dresden.

Must be 2 in Dresden, which I wasn't remembering well. That means that if you don't have at least a 2 in the skill, then you'll have a hard time creating an aspect due to the curve.



At any rate, that's what Maneuver (Create Advantage) is for - figuring out ways to use those skills that aren't obviously appropriate to the scene to have an influence, or to target skills that the target has at a low level.

No need to target an enemy when you make an aspect. That usually makes it harder. Creating an aspect can be necessary if your skill isn't high enough to reliably hit the enemy. In my experience it was pretty easy for players to make characters that had trouble here.



There's also a charop thing going on there where you generally optimize Fate differently than you would D&D - it's not so much about min-maxing one thing as it is making sure you have reasonable breadth of abilities. Having your three peak skills be combat-oriented isn't *that much* more effective than having your peak (+5) skill be combat, and then the next two (+4) be non-combat, and then putting the rest of the combat stuff at +3. But it makes a far, far more versatile character.

If you put your defense at +3 rather than +4, then that's a pretty big difference in combat. Since a hit will deal multiple stress if the enemy is using a weapon, it can dramatically increase the damage you are taking. Similarly, if you have a attack skill of 3, then you can have a lot of trouble hitting anything.

The same reasoning can apply to social and mental conflicts, but since they lack weapons a low defense is not AS bad.

And if you want to have a high skill in something not directly related to social/mental/combat conflicts, then it can really hurt you. Overall I'm not a big fan of the skill system. It has a lot of game mastery embedded in it.


You can also tag your own aspects, of course. You don't *have* to just pass them to others.

True, but in my experience waiting a whole round for a tag is a LONG time. And usually if you are making an aspect to tag, then you probably aren't very skilled in this particular combat.


There's also nothing saying you can't have mid-session refresh. I'd certainly consider it for sessions that were > 4 hours.

I'd probably argue that four hours = refresh, in general. It's probably better to do it based on what happens in the game, but I think that's a good guideline.


True, but the GMing guidelines aren't very good here, imho. It would be good if they stated something like this. Or a guideline about a refresh every X scenes or something.


Sometimes it's not even just system flaws, but adjustments - you do some things in Fate differently than you would in D&D. Some things that are good strategy/good optimization in D&D aren't in Fate.

Writing good aspects is, itself, a bit of an art that takes a bit of adjustment.

True. And I didn't mean to imply D&D was perfect. I'm just saying that FATE has its own significant flaws as well. Aspects take some time to adjust to, but I think balancing skills is probably something that would always be difficult.




I'd probably just let the player get away with that, myself.

Oh granted, but it would be nice if the rules made it so they didn't have to get away with anything.

Though the other poster did show Cassandra's Tears, as written, seems ridiculously abusable.

[kyoryu]

It's not an issue of one hitting people. Rather, it is the fact that unless you take toughness, then you'll be quickly racking up consequences in any combat. And outside of your one mild consequence, the others stick around for a while, making you that much more vulnerable for the rest of the combat or the next combat. This also has the effect of making you more vulnerable in social conflicts and the like.

Well, taking a Consequence is always a player choice, and you can always Concede out of a conflict. So it's not like you're "forced" to take Consequences in most scenario.

And losing is something that *should* happen in a Fate game, and frequently.

As far as the one-hit, I was responding to your "one round", which I guess I misinterpreted. Still, it's a pretty jerk move to focus fire on one PC like that.


While it is hard to die in one hit, it is pretty easy to take a consequence every hit.

If you have no Fate Points, and the opponents have weapon ratings above your armor rating, absolutely. If those things aren't true... not so much.


That's my point really. There are aspects that are very unrealistic.

A) Realism isn't a design goal
B) Any examples, beyond the "wall" which I explained how is handled in Core, which I think relieves some of the issue?

Again, Fate isn't really about "stacking bonuses" in the way that a lot of more traditional games are. So whether it's a realism issue or an expectation issue is probably a matter of interpretation - for instance, from playing paintball and the like, I don't find the idea of cover granting a static bonus to dodging projectiles to make any sense whatsoever. If you're using cover, you're *not* moving around!

I've also got a thing I wrote a while back on why the single use/etc. makes sense, if you accept "fiction, not physics" as a design goal.


Must be 2 in Dresden, which I wasn't remembering well. That means that if you don't have at least a 2 in the skill, then you'll have a hard time creating an aspect due to the curve.

And with a peak skill of +5, you've got six skills *over* a +2, and ten skills at +2 or higher.

If you can't find a single skill at +2 or higher to use in a given situation, you've either got a character that's way too specialized, or you've got a jerk GM that won't let you use your skills.

You should *always* be trying to find a justification to use one of your three peak skills. And if you can't, you should grudgingly go to the next three. Anything beneath that is mostly for static bonuses or extremely tight circumstances.

Erk, now that I re-read Dresden, I notice it doesn't have the skill pyramid, which I think is a great idea just to help avoid unintentionally making inept characters.


No need to target an enemy when you make an aspect. That usually makes it harder.

And if it doesn't because the enemy has a weakness, then target the enemy and exploit it.

If the enemy doesn't have a weakness you can figure out and exploit, target the environment. I fail to see the problem.


Creating an aspect can be necessary if your skill isn't high enough to reliably hit the enemy. In my experience it was pretty easy for players to make characters that had trouble here.

... right. And that makes sense. The dorky guy doesn't walk up to the bruiser and hit him. He analyzes him, watches his movement, figures out his patterns as best he can, and then uses that to hit the bruiser where it'll hurt.

That's modeled in Fate by doing a bunch of Maneuver/Create Advantage with some combination of Notice and perhaps some kind of Lore or other knowledge skill, and then using those free invokes to back up a relatively weak Fighting skill.

Ironically, against a strong opponent, it can often be the "combat-optimized" characters that actually have the hardest time of it.


If you put your defense at +3 rather than +4, then that's a pretty big difference in combat. Since a hit will deal multiple stress if the enemy is using a weapon, it can dramatically increase the damage you are taking. Similarly, if you have a attack skill of 3, then you can have a lot of trouble hitting anything.

And a combat character should definitely have a combat skill as their peak. No argument there. The question then is how much you should specialize - and my experience is that the additional combat prowess you gain with heavy specialization isn't worth the loss of utility outside of combat.


And if you want to have a high skill in something not directly related to social/mental/combat conflicts, then it can really hurt you. Overall I'm not a big fan of the skill system. It has a lot of game mastery embedded in it.

Then you just use Maneuver/Create Advantage to exploit your good skills, and either use them to set up your big hitters, or use them yourself to set up hits.

If you have a low Fight skill, then it's not a good idea to just spam it against someone with a higher Fight skill. That makes sense - the skinny guy doesn't go swinging against the bruiser if he wants to win the fight - he moves the fight to *his* terms and uses the things he's good at to get an advantage.


True, but in my experience waiting a whole round for a tag is a LONG time. And usually if you are making an aspect to tag, then you probably aren't very skilled in this particular combat.

Totally not my experience. Create Advantage/Maneuver are like the mainstay of combat. It's usually worth it to get some free invokes and blow past whatever defenses the opponent has.

Spamming Attack is usually only viable if you've either got Fate Points to burn, or if your opponent isn't as skilled as you, or if weapon ratings in your game are typically significantly higher than armor ratings.


True, but the GMing guidelines aren't very good here, imho. It would be good if they stated something like this. Or a guideline about a refresh every X scenes or something.

This is me not disagreeing with you.


True. And I didn't mean to imply D&D was perfect. I'm just saying that FATE has its own significant flaws as well. Aspects take some time to adjust to, but I think balancing skills is probably something that would always be difficult.

I think that the skills are pretty much fine. I just find that a lot of new people to Fate underestimate the utility of Maneuver/Create Advantage, and assume that hitting "Attack" over and over is optimal strategy. It rarely is, except (in some cases) for heavily combat-optimized characters, or perhaps in cases where weapon ratings seriously outmatch armor ratings.

Seriously, read that first link I posted.

And I wasn't really trying to criticize D&D so much as say that if you try to play Fate "like D&D", it doesn't work very well at all. You do different things for different reasons.

[Kuroshima]

First, word of advice, get Fate Accelerated and Fate Core (http://www.evilhat.com/home/fate-core-downloads/). They're free after all. Read Accelerated, seriously. While I like ultra-crunchy systems (being a GURPSoid), I find accelerated to be an awesome system to start with Fate, and it really works well with narrative causality games (despite Discworld being a GURPS book, and as a a playtester, I recommend it to ANYONE who likes the books and/or wants to go into GURPS). Dresden is basically the precursor of Core (Many of the changes Dresden introduced to Fate have been integrated into the core system). There are fan made (but officially blessed) conversions to the Core rules, that are imho more polished (find some here (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ROi60imuEUKg3jL75M1RmADIAC_SI4aqvy4KSFZieek/), here (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wdDSLo9voAUbjTbDnKkbIW7LMWVKOnifHmwiFqw6A8c/), here (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1z_uUBgMbFFBKvpaNDhRd0wI-4p3hGlzq1WkK4_2eCZQ/) and here (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lepc_X546Z4ogWBU1bPIHoCAPk89YuNzxsKMWLfdBYM/) - Hope the links work, they should not require you to use your Google account)

Remember, with Fate, you're not simulating reality, you're telling a story. The characters are not balanced in what they can do, but in how much the add to the story. It's a pretty hard break if you come from physics simulation oriented games (GURPS), or from clasical RPGs (D&D, retroclones, Hero, BRP,...).

Also, the GM advice in Fate Core is pure gold for EVERYONE. Anyone who ever wants to game master should read it. It is really that good and applicable to every game. The Game Creation/City Creation minigame is mostly system agnostic, is great to get the players engaged with the setting.

As for the novels, I believe that the RPG covers up to Small Favor. It's mostly on the Our World book, but there are also spoilers before, in the Your Story book. Personally, I would get both. Our World is also the bestiary, with many of the creeps that appear in the books and comics. There's going to be a 3rd book, Paranet Papers, that both adds RPG only content and includes content for some extra books, I don't remember which.

[kyoryu]

First, word of advice, get Fate Accelerated and Fate Core (http://www.evilhat.com/home/fate-core-downloads/).

Yeah, I'll +1 this. Core is cleaner than Dresden - not as much of an improvement as SotC to Core, but still a significant improvement.

You can use the conversions listed, or just port some of the Core concepts to DFRPG (the Four Actions, the Four Outcomes, etc.) directly without much issue.


Remember, with Fate, you're not simulating reality, you're telling a story. The characters are not balanced in what they can do, but in how much the add to the story. It's a pretty hard break if you come from physics simulation oriented games (GURPS), or from clasical RPGs (D&D, retroclones, Hero, BRP,...).

Agreed. Also, it's worth thinking of things in terms of screen time and other movie/TV/novel metaphors, rather than what's "really" happening.

Here's something I wrote a while ago about this idea: https://plus.google.com/108546067488075210468/posts/1x8MtdJRWH9


Also, the GM advice in Fate Core is pure gold for EVERYONE. Anyone who ever wants to game master should read it. It is really that good and applicable to every game. The Game Creation/City Creation minigame is mostly system agnostic, is great to get the players engaged with the setting.

Well, it's pure gold for any game that's based on "this party of adventurers going through this adventure". It doesn't work quite so well for really old school games, but that's a minor point :)

One of the big things for new Fate GMs is playing *hard*. Success in Fate isn't so much "can I mechanically twiddle the system and win" so much as "how much am I willing to give up for this?" And, in a certain way, that can only be measured by the things you *do* give up. So every die roll and conflict should have a significant, real, chance of failure.

But the trick is that Fate characters can, in general, do *anything* they want. They just can't do *everything* they want. Unless you really go crazy with the enemies, they can win just about any conflict if they're willing to spend enough Fate Points and take enough Consequences. But that drain of Fate Points/Consequences means that they're less likely to win the next fight. And that's a good thing - those hard choices are what makes a game of Fate really sing.

My post on failure in Fate:
https://plus.google.com/108546067488075210468/posts/CpvrfJUz8du

The comment by Mark Lewis further down has a link to an io9 article that has great advice about action scenes in movies, that is *absolutely* applicable to framing action scenes in Fate.

[Kuroshima]

Yeah, I'll +1 this. Core is cleaner than Dresden - not as much of an improvement as SotC to Core, but still a significant improvement.
While the official numbering is that SotC and Dresden are Fate 3 and Core is Fate 4, I personally see SotC as Fate 3.0, Dresden as 3.1, and Core as 3.2. Core basically built on what changes Dresden added to SotC and went further with them.

You can use the conversions listed, or just port some of the Core concepts to DFRPG (the Four Actions, the Four Outcomes, etc.) directly without much issue.
Or just play in the Dresden universe using Core or even FAE and gloss over the details. Mind you, there's a Dresden FAE in the works IIRC.

It's only when it comes to converting weird powers/creatures that the conversions actually come into play.

Agreed. Also, it's worth thinking of things in terms of screen time and other movie/TV/novel metaphors, rather than what's "really" happening.
Indeed. I tried to move away from those metafors because they don't work that well for me, and I find them played out, but YMMV. Again, IMHO, Fate gamifies narration, while "traditional systems" gamifie simulation. Fate is my go to system for over the top anime-esque/VG-esque action, where characters fight foes the size of mountains, destroy 10' robots with swords, etc and then lose to other human sized characters with slender builds. Or for games where unpowered humans in spandex with domino masks fight aliens that can move planets and withstand nuclear explosions in hand to hand combat and do not get pulped into pink mist. Or games where slender blond girls fight much more dangerous supernatural monsters in hand to hand combat, while a bunch of second string characters actually move the action forward/find clues, and everything is interspeced by character melodrama. Basically for games where fridge logic is given free rein, and the laws of physics are not invited.

It is also obviously suited for other kinds of games, but IMHO, these is where it works best.

Well, it's pure gold for any game that's based on "this party of adventurers going through this adventure". It doesn't work quite so well for really old school games, but that's a minor point :)
I feel that it's also pure gold for these games, though not as much. It helps understand GM to player interactions, and how to keep players motivated, at the very least. Hell, the baseline does assume that there is no predefined plot, but that it instead emerges from the interactions between players and environment, and so sandbox play is definitively supported. What it doesn't support well is games where PCs are disposable sacks of numbers, where you will simply roll a new PC if yours dies, and where you command a troupe of faceless henchmen and a marginally more competent PC in something barely removed from a wargame, and where the only reason your character is in is because "it's the adventure/I want to kick doors, kill things, and take their stuff".

Varsuvius as a Fae character:
:vaarsuvius: Varsuvius :vaarsuvius:
Aspects
High Concept: Elf Wizard Obsessed with Arcane Power
Trouble: I'll never understand social interactions
Aspect: My gender is something you're not cleared to know
Aspect: My raven familiar is my conscience
Aspect: Dealt with the gentlemen below, and will now pay the price.

(I could have given him the trouble of being long winded to the extreme, but I feel that this works better for MY image of the character)
Approaches:

+3: Forceful
+2: Clever, Flashy
+1: Careful, Quick
+0: Sneaky

Stunts:
Wielder of Magical Might
Because I'm a Wielder of Magical Might, I get a +2 when I Forcefully Attack when I command the energies of creation to crush my foes.

Walking Library
Because I'm a Walking Library, I get a +2 when I Cleverly Create Advantages when I have read about it.

Walking Display of Magical Fireworks
Because I'm a Walking Display of Magical Fireworks, I get a +2 when I Flashily Create Advantages when I make gratuitous displays of magical power to cower lesser minds.

[kyoryu]

Indeed. I tried to move away from those metafors because they don't work that well for me, and I find them played out, but YMMV.

I find them very useful for describing some of the less traditional aspects of Fate that are hard for people used to more traditional gaming to wrap their heads around.

Example from real play: Using a Fate Point to create a story detail of a tree near a barn that the player was on, so that he could jump to it.

Player: "What, the tree just suddenly is there where it wasn't before?"
Me: "Not at all. The camera just never focused on it."

Incredibly easy to explain from a TV/camera POV, nearly impossible to reconcile in other ways.

Why do aspects not do anything unless invoked: More easily explained from a prose/TV show POV than anything resembling "realism":

https://plus.google.com/108546067488075210468/posts/EDqaCxsjobL

Hell, any Fate Point usage can pretty much be mapped to camera focus.


Basically for games where fridge logic is given free rein, and the laws of physics are not invited.

It is also obviously suited for other kinds of games, but IMHO, these is where it works best.

I think it's more about the 'physics of fiction' than anything - how do things work in stories? How does the ebb and flow of a story work? How is it that most stories end up with the hero getting their butt kicked, but then come back and manage to win?

The real analogy I use for Fate is pretty much any TV show. It's almost ideally set up for that format.

You can run it as realistic or unrealistic as you want, through a combination of narration, dials, and setting task difficulties.


What it doesn't support well is games where PCs are disposable sacks of numbers, where you will simply roll a new PC if yours dies, and where you command a troupe of faceless henchmen and a marginally more competent PC in something barely removed from a wargame, and where the only reason your character is in is because "it's the adventure/I want to kick doors, kill things, and take their stuff".

That's exactly what I meant by "really old school games".


Varsuvius as a Fae character:
snip

Great writeup of V, and a great example of how Fate does a good job of capturing a lot of the feel/story of a character that most games don't model well.

[Kuroshima]

I find them very useful for describing some of the less traditional aspects of Fate that are hard for people used to more traditional gaming to wrap their heads around.
Different metaphors work best for different persons. For me, it's more of an issue of literary metaphors.

Example from real play: Using a Fate Point to create a story detail of a tree near a barn that the player was on, so that he could jump to it.

Player: "What, the tree just suddenly is there where it wasn't before?"
Me: "Not at all. The camera just never focused on it."

Incredibly easy to explain from a TV/camera POV, nearly impossible to reconcile in other ways.
It wasn't important before, and the author had not yet described it.

Why do aspects not do anything unless invoked: More easily explained from a prose/TV show POV than anything resembling "realism":

https://plus.google.com/108546067488075210468/posts/EDqaCxsjobL

Hell, any Fate Point usage can pretty much be mapped to camera focus.
Or to narrative spotlight, that is basically the same.

Indeed, aspects only matter when they matter. They are true all the time, but they only make the difference when they make the different. I feel like a tautologist, but I completely agree with you.

I think it's more about the 'physics of fiction' than anything - how do things work in stories? How does the ebb and flow of a story work? How is it that most stories end up with the hero getting their butt kicked, but then come back and manage to win?

The real analogy I use for Fate is pretty much any TV show. It's almost ideally set up for that format.

You can run it as realistic or unrealistic as you want, through a combination of narration, dials, and setting task difficulties.
Fate runs best in games where "narrative causality" reigns supreme. I prefer that Pratchett created term to "the physics of fiction" but both ultimately mean the same.

That's exactly what I meant by "really old school games".
And I feel that at least IME, those weren't actual old school games, at least not past the chainmail stage. Players always became emotionally invested into their characters after a few sessions, if only because those characters had survived! Games could start that way, but things changed fast, or the games simply imploded. I see some retroclones trying to recreate that "old school" flavor, but IMHO, they fail because they try too hard. Of course, that's only my humble opinion, and doesn't apply to anyone else, but I vote with my wallet.

Great writeup of V, and a great example of how Fate does a good job of capturing a lot of the feel/story of a character that most games don't model well.
I had to make some hard choices, and i deliberately picked 3 stunts so (s)he would have a refresh of 1, and would be always fishing for compels. There are other equally valid writeups though, ones that focus on different Aspects of the character. If you merge the ambiguous gender into elf (and you definitively can) you can have "My Voice is the thing I most like hearing". If you feel that the lack of interpersonal skills is too minor to be the Trouble, you can have the "Obssessed by power" part of the high concept merged with the nether debts as the actual trouble. In the end, you've got to ask yourself: "What are the things that the writer would emphasize if he described the character"

[kyoryu]

Different metaphors work best for different persons. For me, it's more of an issue of literary metaphors.

Ah, I misunderstood. Yeah, narrative focus works just as well as camera focus. Sorry about the misunderstanding.


Fate runs best in games where "narrative causality" reigns supreme. I prefer that Pratchett created term to "the physics of fiction" but both ultimately mean the same.

Absolutely agree. "Realism" is orthogonal, not opposed.


I had to make some hard choices, and i deliberately picked 3 stunts so (s)he would have a refresh of 1, and would be always fishing for compels.

I know Core updated to a default of 3 Refresh, 3 Stunts. Is FAE not the same? I thought it was.


Games could start that way, but things changed fast, or the games simply imploded. I see some retroclones trying to recreate that "old school" flavor, but IMHO, they fail because they try too hard. Of course, that's only my humble opinion, and doesn't apply to anyone else, but I vote with my wallet.

I was in a campaign that worked that way that lasted... maybe 30 years? I came into it somewhere around the middle/end of it. To get an idea of how old it was, it was based on The Fantasy Trip. I'm 41, and the guy running it was my friend's father, to give you an idea of how "old school" I'm talking. And yeah, you did get attached to your characters, and yeah, sometimes they died.

If retroclones fail, it's because the original rules were suited to a particular campaign style and set of assumptions (number of players, number of characters per player, persistence of players, what the focus was), that isn't necessarily obvious in the rules, and that is totally counter to how most people play today.

Old-school is, to me, more about those assumptions than a particular ruleset. I could run an old-school game in D&D 4e if I wanted to (but Fate would be a stretch).


In the end, you've got to ask yourself: "What are the things that the writer would emphasize if he described the character"

EXACTLY. I've also used "think of <xyz character>. What are the first five things you think about him/her?". Showing the disconnect between those things and the writeup of that character in most systems is a great way to highlight what Fate focuses on.

[Kuroshima]

Ah, I misunderstood. Yeah, narrative focus works just as well as camera focus. Sorry about the misunderstanding.
hey, no worries, English is my 4th language, and sometimes I am clear as mud.

Absolutely agree. "Realism" is orthogonal, not opposed.
Realism is a word that should not be used describing RPG. It's a loaded word. It means different things to different people. For some, "realism" means "verosimilitude". For others, it means "grittyness". For most, it's like what a SCOTUS Justice Potter Stewart once said "I know it when I see it".

I know Core updated to a default of 3 Refresh, 3 Stunts. Is FAE not the same? I thought it was.
That will teach me to base my opinions on what I remember from the playtest ;) I need 2 more stunts then/broaden some of the stunts to include attack and create advantage or attack/defend ;)

I was in a campaign that worked that way that lasted... maybe 30 years? I came into it somewhere around the middle/end of it. To get an idea of how old it was, it was based on The Fantasy Trip. I'm 41, and the guy running it was my friend's father, to give you an idea of how "old school" I'm talking. And yeah, you did get attached to your characters, and yeah, sometimes they died.
I'm 33, and I started gaming at 11, on one of my friends father's OD&D games. I might have missed the real "old school", but things were different on this side of the pond. Again by the time I was 13, I had outgrown that sort of games, and RPGs have always been a "you're the heroes in the novel" thing. Mind you, for me it was a transition from "Choose yourown adventure" books, to Fighting Fantasy books, to RPGs.

If retroclones fail, it's because the original rules were suited to a particular campaign style and set of assumptions (number of players, number of characters per player, persistence of players, what the focus was), that isn't necessarily obvious in the rules, and that is totally counter to how most people play today.

Old-school is, to me, more about those assumptions than a particular ruleset. I could run an old-school game in D&D 4e if I wanted to (but Fate would be a stretch).
I gues I didn't explain myself properly here, again. I'm not saying that they fail as games, I'm saying that they fails as "recreations of what the actual old school" was. I feel that clunky rules can add to the experience, they make you get that special feeling I get when I select non-weapon proficiencies in an AD&D. The rules feel... venerable. Trying to puzzle out what sort of individual the bunch of statistics you just randomly generated is can be interesting.

EXACTLY. I've also used "think of <xyz character>. What are the first five things you think about him/her?". Showing the disconnect between those things and the writeup of that character in most systems is a great way to highlight what Fate focuses on.
:thog:

[kyoryu]

Realism is a word that should not be used describing RPG. It's a loaded word. It means different things to different people. For some, "realism" means "verosimilitude". For others, it means "grittyness". For most, it's like what a SCOTUS Justice Potter Stewart once said "I know it when I see it".

Actually, I pretty much *do* mean realism, though verisimilitude is also appropriate (though a separate but semi-related concept).

You can have very realistic fiction. If it's still fiction, it still obeys narrative causality. You can have unrealistic fiction, and it will still obey narrative causality.

Verisimillitude is pretty much universally appropriate, though.


I'm 33, and I started gaming at 11, on one of my friends father's OD&D games. I might have missed the real "old school", but things were different on this side of the pond.

Oh, I'm not trying to pull an "I'm more experienced than you". My point was more like "hey, I'm relatively old for this hobby, and even *I* only barely managed to catch one of these games".


Again by the time I was 13, I had outgrown that sort of games, and RPGs have always been a "you're the heroes in the novel" thing. Mind you, for me it was a transition from "Choose yourown adventure" books, to Fighting Fantasy books, to RPGs.

Yeah, by the mid 80s, at least, it was definitely the dominant "model" of a campaign. The DragonLance module series really sealed it.

Obviously I don't think "characters in a story" is a bad game model, or I wouldn't play Fate! It's *different* from the old-school stuff, and that's awesome! The only thing I don't like is the super-linear style of "story" game, but again, that's a matter of taste.


I gues I didn't explain myself properly here, again. I'm not saying that they fail as games, I'm saying that they fails as "recreations of what the actual old school" was.

I agree. And while the clunkiness of the rules may be part of that, I think just as much of it is approaching them from the "characters in a story" mentality.


Trying to puzzle out what sort of individual the bunch of statistics you just randomly generated is can be interesting.

I agree! Making do with what you have (aka, what the dice give you) was a recurring theme in old school games, and one that's almost entirely absent in "modern" (in quotes because this really dates back to the mid 80s) campaigns.

[Kuroshima]

Actually, I pretty much *do* mean realism, though verisimilitude is also appropriate (though a separate but semi-related concept).

You can have very realistic fiction. If it's still fiction, it still obeys narrative causality. You can have unrealistic fiction, and it will still obey narrative causality.

Verisimillitude is pretty much universally appropriate, though.
Again, the problem with "realism" is that in an RPG context, it's a loaded word. Hell, each time I see "the most realistic X" or "realistic Y" in a marketing material or back cover blurb for an RPG, I know I have 99% chances of being in front of a <censored />. Didn't "The game that must not be named" FATAL pride itself as "the most realistic RPG"? Taken with it's true meaning, that now I see you used, it's a perfectly appropriate term, but it's too likely to be misread so I avoid it.

Oh, I'm not trying to pull an "I'm more experienced than you". My point was more like "hey, I'm relatively old for this hobby, and even *I* only barely managed to catch one of these games".
I didn't read that into your words. Still, I guess my reply was a bit unfortunate.

Yeah, by the mid 80s, at least, it was definitely the dominant "model" of a campaign. The DragonLance module series really sealed it.
Missing those modules still pains me, but my group went through them during a time where I could not play with them.

Obviously I don't think "characters in a story" is a bad game model, or I wouldn't play Fate! It's *different* from the old-school stuff, and that's awesome! The only thing I don't like is the super-linear style of "story" game, but again, that's a matter of taste.
Indeed, I have little tolerance to railroads.

I agree. And while the clunkiness of the rules may be part of that, I think just as much of it is approaching them from the "characters in a story" mentality.
Personally, I feel that retroclones sometimes try too hard to recreate the superficial elements of old school, while forgetting that, as you said, old school was emergent behavior from not only the game rules but the context in which they were played.

I agree! Making do with what you have (aka, what the dice give you) was a recurring theme in old school games, and one that's almost entirely absent in "modern" (in quotes because this really dates back to the mid 80s) campaigns.
I still remember the thrill of rolling dice in order, and hoping I could play a paladin...

[Drachasor]

Kyoryo, I'm going to respond without quoting you since I think after an exchange or two breaking down a post into 10 quotes usually results in less clarity. People start getting repetitive and focusing on tiny bits of arguments rather than the big picture. Tell me if I missed anything important though.

First, see page 65 of the DFRPG for the rules on the skill pyramid. It does indeed use one.

Hmm, here's a list of what I think the FATE issues are:


1. Weapons doing a minimum damage on a successful hit (as well as magical strength) heavily encourages having a high defensive combat stat. Mental and Social Conflicts don't have weapons (save potentially magic), so defenses matter less. There's a huge difference between taking 0 or 1 stress because an attack matched or exceeded a defense by 1 and taking 3 or 4 stress with the exact same rolls and skills.


2. While conceding a social and mental conflict usually doesn't screw you over -- it just makes life more difficult, giving up in a physical fight will probably kill you. If you choose not to take a consequence in a physical fight, then you are Taken Out and that probably means you're dead with many opponents (the enemy chooses what Taken Out means).


3. Looking at stress and consequences as hit points is misleading. If you have 3 stress boxes, you do not have 6 hit points with another 20 hit points from consequences. If you take a 4 stress hit, you MUST take a consequences or be Taken Out -- you can only cross off one stress box at a time. If you take a Minor Consequence and cross off the 2-stress box, then the next 4+ stress hit you take will be a Moderate Consequence, then a Severe, then Extreme.


4. Given Weapons, multi-stress hits in combat are pretty easy to come by. A pistol hits for 2 stress quite readily if the defense and attack rolls match. A shotgun does 3. A creature with inhuman strength and claws does 4. A creature with supernatural strength and claws does 6. Claws may be replaced by a melee weapon, of course, and many two-handed weapons like a greatsword would do a base of 3 stress (plus the strength bonus). So hits that deal 6+ stress are quite possible even with a good defense. (And armor is limited in what it works on and the best stuff is just using magic or magic items).


5. Characters have very low stress pools in the DFRPG, even the designers have commented on this. You have 2-4 stress boxes, and getting 4 requires a Skill Rank of 3 in a skill that usually doesn't have a lot of uses compared to other skills. AFAIK, most non-DFRPG FATE games have more stress boxes.


6. Overall this heavily encourages investment in combat skills. Mental skills aren't as important (unless you are a wizard/sorcerer/whatever, which means your mental skills can be combat skills). Social skills are more significant than mental skills, but much less important than combat, because failing a social encounter doesn't kill a character. And again, it is important to note that given the bell-curve-like nature of the resolution system, even a +1 is a pretty huge deal -- You have about a 61% chance of rolling your skill or lower, and an 81% chance of rolling Skill+1 or lower.


7. Using maneuvers or the like to make aspects in combat is not nearly as helpful as it seems. This takes up a turn of time, so you're effectively acting half as much as everyone else. (Potentially a good house rule here might be to allow the creation of an aspect if you make an attack that fails to hit, but is high enough to create an aspect).


8. Declarations can potentially help if you have the right skill to declare something is in the area (like a table or whatnot) -- assuming there's something that is reasonable useful. Potentially using this all the time can get very repetitive -- so I don't think it is a great way to make up for a low skill and is very dependent on player creativity (which can vary depending on the player) and the DM being okay with the proposal (which can also vary).


9. If you guys prefer verisimilitude for stuff like cover and walls in combat, then let's use that. The game does like verisimilitude here. "Narrative physics" doesn't work if it becomes immersion-breaking. After at most one free tag, you have to spend a special resource to make use of something like cover -- or weirdly, declare cover somewhere else and use that because the wall you were using no longer works against guns. It's weird, unnatural, and can indeed take people out of the game. This is a real problem with Aspects (which are generally quite awesome).


10. It probably doesn't need to be said, but the game balance is pretty awful. I'd say the power disparity with new characters can easily exceed that in D&D -- it can be pretty crazy. I'm not sure about higher Refresh though, since I haven't played past 10 Refresh. Playing a guy with lots of magic items -- perfectly valid concept, can easily be insanely powerful. A non-pure mortal that isn't careful about what supernatural abilities they pick, can be quite underpowered. The right supernatural abilities can be just the opposite (and that's ignoring magic, which can be exceedingly good).


11. You've already agreed that the Refresh rules can be a bit wonky in longer games, putting Pure Mortals at a disadvantage, but I though I might as well list it again.

I'm not saying it is a bad game. I enjoyed it. I'm just saying it is good to be aware of what sort of problems the game has. Some of the stuff has some easier ways to handle it if you give it some thought.

Other things, like the skill issues, seem much trickier and I am not sure about the best way to handle those. The skills themselves aren't bad really, but they aren't all equally useful yet they are priced the same, and the pyramid structure doesn't work very well for balanced play, imho.

Hmm, not sure if anyone thinks I'm approaching this too much like D&D or something. I don't believe I am. Balance is still really important in a story-focused game. While some players don't care (regardless of genre), those that do will feel frustrated if they are lacking in narrative power. Heck, they might be bothered if they have too much.

Overall I'd say the idea of a lot of things in the game are brilliant and I enjoy Butcher's setting a lot (love the books overall). It just has some glaring issues. I think I said this before, but I do tend to mostly focus on problems in a system rather that extol the great things about it -- that's only because I like to look at what needs adjustment.

PS. In general I'd say D&D is probably just as bad and harder to learn.

[Drachasor]

I haven't looked at FATE much in the last year, but I can't help but feel there's a better way to balance aspects based on how much they come up in play. Properly creating your character's aspects is probably the most difficult thing to do in the game.

[Kuroshima]

Kyoryo, I'm going to respond without quoting you since I think after an exchange or two breaking down a post into 10 quotes usually results in less clarity. People start getting repetitive and focusing on tiny bits of arguments rather than the big picture. Tell me if I missed anything important though.
Each to it's own, but I find that actually not quoting at all leads to less clarity, after 2-3 exchanges, because quite often it results in people just reading a few sentences, and replying, without realizing that the answers can be found in the rest of the messages. It also makes it much easier for the topic to drift as people can take a very small part of the argument and run with it, creating strawmen. In forums, I find it almost as bad as top-posting in emails, but it must be my 90s old fashioned netiquete speaking.

First, see page 65 of the DFRPG for the rules on the skill pyramid. It does indeed use one.
Dresden does not force skill pyramids, it forces skill columns. Pyramids are valid in Dresden, just not mandatory. Previous incarnations of Fate forced pyramids. Core recommends pyramids during character creation but allows for columns in play.

Hmm, here's a list of what I think the FATE issues are:
Technically the points you raise are from the Dresden Files incarnation of Fate.


1. Weapons doing a minimum damage on a successful hit (as well as magical strength) heavily encourages having a high defensive combat stat. Mental and Social Conflicts don't have weapons (save potentially magic), so defenses matter less. There's a huge difference between taking 0 or 1 stress because an attack matched or exceeded a defense by 1 and taking 3 or 4 stress with the exact same rolls and skills.
Indeed, weapon ratings can have that effect. They are however required if the opposition has armor, and serve to create "tiers" of combat. Mind you, the fact that there are almost no social or mental weapon effects is supposed to be balanced by the fact that there is almost no mental armor effects either


2. While conceding a social and mental conflict usually doesn't screw you over -- it just makes life more difficult, giving up in a physical fight will probably kill you. If you choose not to take a consequence in a physical fight, then you are Taken Out and that probably means you're dead with many opponents (the enemy chooses what Taken Out means).
Conceding is a term of art, and allows you to exit a conflict on your own terms, so you only die if you actually want to. Also, social or mental conflicts can be as lethal as physical ones, though it's often not the case:
A trial can be represented by a social conflict, and the white council doesn't have that many levels of punishment, meaning that it usually goes for decapitation. A mental conflict against a black court vampire can end up turning you into a Renfield!


3. Looking at stress and consequences as hit points is misleading. If you have 3 stress boxes, you do not have 6 hit points with another 20 hit points from consequences. If you take a 4 stress hit, you MUST take a consequences or be Taken Out -- you can only cross off one stress box at a time. If you take a Minor Consequence and cross off the 2-stress box, then the next 4+ stress hit you take will be a Moderate Consequence, then a Severe, then Extreme.
Stress and consequences ARE NOT hit points. They are more like D6 or WoD wound levels than actual hit points (things might have changed, been a LONG while since I played WoD). All the stress is the lowest level, and represents trivial damage. Each level of consequences represents a greater degree of real injury. Now, mind you, to take out a character in ONE HIT, you need to inflict more damage than 2 (minimum stress track length)+2+4+6+8 (minimum amount of consequences), or 22 points of damage. Fate characters are thus very hard to kill IN ONE HIT, and much more vulnerable to death by a thousand cuts. This actually models fiction quite well, with characters either gritting up after a big hit, but eventually coming down after multiple such hits, or requiring taking absolutely massive hits to put down. Fate characters are easy to hurt, but hard to permanently kill.


4. Given Weapons, multi-stress hits in combat are pretty easy to come by. A pistol hits for 2 stress quite readily if the defense and attack rolls match. A shotgun does 3. A creature with inhuman strength and claws does 4. A creature with supernatural strength and claws does 6. Claws may be replaced by a melee weapon, of course, and many two-handed weapons like a greatsword would do a base of 3 stress (plus the strength bonus). So hits that deal 6+ stress are quite possible even with a good defense. (And armor is limited in what it works on and the best stuff is just using magic or magic items).
Again weapon ratings are actually important if you need to deal with creatures with supernatural durability, because they're the way for people with only mundane offensive capabilities to even the odds. Still, Core recognizes this issue, and doesn't recommend such a thing without careful analysis.


5. Characters have very low stress pools in the DFRPG, even the designers have commented on this. You have 2-4 stress boxes, and getting 4 requires a Skill Rank of 3 in a skill that usually doesn't have a lot of uses compared to other skills. AFAIK, most non-DFRPG FATE games have more stress boxes.
Core uses the same stress model as DFRPG, and I agree with it. Of course it allows for longer stress tracks, because for some games, it makes sense to have the heroes and villains ditch it out for a while without inflicting lasting harm on one another. It also merges mental and social stress and consequences (personally, I only see social stress and consequences working in a game where you have a LOT of social maneuvering and where a loss of face is actually worse than a permanent physical injury, such as an L5r court game)


6. Overall this heavily encourages investment in combat skills. Mental skills aren't as important (unless you are a wizard/sorcerer/whatever, which means your mental skills can be combat skills). Social skills are more significant than mental skills, but much less important than combat, because failing a social encounter doesn't kill a character. And again, it is important to note that given the bell-curve-like nature of the resolution system, even a +1 is a pretty huge deal -- You have about a 61% chance of rolling your skill or lower, and an 81% chance of rolling Skill+1 or lower.
That only works that way IF it's a combat heavy game and your character is going to be in combat most of the time. Also, I find that it's often more appropriate to have one combat specialist, and have the rest of the characters have other apex skills who can contribute to combat with maneuvers/create an advantage actions, and also move the plot forward outside of combat.

As for the bell curve, that's the beauty of it. It makes skilled people very unlikely to fail at what they do, it makes every point of skill matter, and it makes unskilled or amateur level people unlikely (unless they really want to, and so spend fate points) to do challenging things. I find that dice mechanics that use bell curves work much better, and more intuitively to people who aren't into statistics, because they have more granularity where it matters, that is, in the extremes. You only have 1/81 (aprox. 1.2%) chance to roll a +4 or -4, while you have a 5% chance to roll a 1 or 20 in d20.


7. Using maneuvers or the like to make aspects in combat is not nearly as helpful as it seems. This takes up a turn of time, so you're effectively acting half as much as everyone else. (Potentially a good house rule here might be to allow the creation of an aspect if you make an attack that fails to hit, but is high enough to create an aspect).
Using maneuvers and then capitalizing them is often not a good deal, that's true. Unless you have the time to do so (you make your maneuvers pre-conflict, by aiming at the foe), but the real gold on doing maneuvers is to have the non-combat characters use their non-combat skills to create advantages (by remembering the foes' weak points "Aim for the right side of the chest, they have their hearts there", by altering the environment,...).

Also, core makes any attack that succeeds but inflicts no stress (tie, does not defeat armor, etc) grant a fragile aspect (called Boost in Core). Also, attacks that suceed by enough (called Success with Style) can accept a -1 damage penalty to instead gain a boost.


8. Declarations can potentially help if you have the right skill to declare something is in the area (like a table or whatnot) -- assuming there's something that is reasonable useful. Potentially using this all the time can get very repetitive -- so I don't think it is a great way to make up for a low skill and is very dependent on player creativity (which can vary depending on the player) and the DM being okay with the proposal (which can also vary).
Indeed, Fate is very dependent on player creativity, but it is by design. It's a framework to tell stories, and delegates much more on the players than other systems.


9. If you guys prefer verisimilitude for stuff like cover and walls in combat, then let's use that. The game does like verisimilitude here. "Narrative physics" doesn't work if it becomes immersion-breaking. After at most one free tag, you have to spend a special resource to make use of something like cover -- or weirdly, declare cover somewhere else and use that because the wall you were using no longer works against guns. It's weird, unnatural, and can indeed take people out of the game. This is a real problem with Aspects (which are generally quite awesome).
Core also handles this well: You can accumulate multiple free invokes (tags in Dresden). In fact, a success with style in the Create an Advantage action (maneuvers in Dresden) gives you 2 free invokes. You can also keep using Create an Advantage to get further free invokes on existing aspects. If you take cover, for example, that might help you once or twice, but unless you expend some effort to maintain cover, your foe will find a way to shoot you through cover (either by degrading it, by finding weak spots in it, or in the case of cover that grants concealment only, by looking at where you pop up to attack and predicting where you'll hide). It's a different way of considering it, one that is superficially shocking, and that takes some effort to get used to it, specially if you come from other systems.

D&D style hit points, that aren't actually hit points, but instead represent luck, dodging in the last moment, short term fatigue (except when they don't, such as poisons, attacks that deal extra damage if they hit, such as flaming auras where you suffer the effect even if you never got actually hit), having heavy armor make you harder to hit, but making hits that go through no less damaging, or other D&D quirks cause me a greater suspension of disbelief than aspects. Of course, for many, it's the standard, so it's assumed, but consider that a Str 20 Dex 3 character has a greater chance to hit an unarmored man than a Dex 20 Str 3 one.


10. It probably doesn't need to be said, but the game balance is pretty awful. I'd say the power disparity with new characters can easily exceed that in D&D -- it can be pretty crazy. I'm not sure about higher Refresh though, since I haven't played past 10 Refresh. Playing a guy with lots of magic items -- perfectly valid concept, can easily be insanely powerful. A non-pure mortal that isn't careful about what supernatural abilities they pick, can be quite underpowered. The right supernatural abilities can be just the opposite (and that's ignoring magic, which can be exceedingly good).
Fate doesn't try to balance character capabilities, it tries to give them all the same narrative weight. Of course, it's possible to make inept characters under any system. Mind you, the supernatural powers often require synergies to take proper advantage of, but they are often extremely powerful if used properly.



11. You've already agreed that the Refresh rules can be a bit wonky in longer games, putting Pure Mortals at a disadvantage, but I though I might as well list it again.
Pure mortals eventually pale when compared to the rest, because their advantage is a static +2 refresh, and that can matter less and less. However, they have one thing that is very hard for others to have, and it's the capability to go nova and succeed at any task by pumping huge amounts of fate points. They can also be much more selective in what compels they take, while supernaturals usually end up needing to fish for compels to have enough fate points for when they need them.

Also, in the source material, pure mortals usually end up gaining some sort of supernatural boon anyway.

I'm not saying it is a bad game. I enjoyed it. I'm just saying it is good to be aware of what sort of problems the game has. Some of the stuff has some easier ways to handle it if you give it some thought.

Other things, like the skill issues, seem much trickier and I am not sure about the best way to handle those. The skills themselves aren't bad really, but they aren't all equally useful yet they are priced the same, and the pyramid structure doesn't work very well for balanced play, imho.
The pyramid structure works better than you think, and provides some niche protection (no one can be equally good at everything, so you need to specialize). As for not all skills being equally good, tell me, how useful are a bodyguard's combat skills in the social scenes of a court game? How useful are the courtier's manipulation skills in the combat scenes of that same game? It's the players' task to put the characters in situations where they can take advantage of their apex skills, and it's the GM's task to make sure those situations exist. Fate is not designed for adversarial play, the GM and the players are all going for the same goal, that is have a good time and tell a good story.

Hmm, not sure if anyone thinks I'm approaching this too much like D&D or something. I don't believe I am. Balance is still really important in a story-focused game. While some players don't care (regardless of genre), those that do will feel frustrated if they are lacking in narrative power. Heck, they might be bothered if they have too much.
You are approaching it too much from a D&D PoV. The balance you're looking for is the wrong sort of balance. Of course anyone can design inept characters under any system, but the system must allow you to make bad choices if it's to also allow you to make interesting choices. Otherwise, it's just a railroad of another kind.

Overall I'd say the idea of a lot of things in the game are brilliant and I enjoy Butcher's setting a lot (love the books overall). It just has some glaring issues. I think I said this before, but I do tend to mostly focus on problems in a system rather that extol the great things about it -- that's only because I like to look at what needs adjustment.
I'm not saying it doesn't have it's quirks. It is VERY different from what most people are used to. It's a system where one character can play Buffy, one can play Spike, one can play Willow, and one can play Xander. They are balanced by narrative focus/screen time, and by how much their nature and issues control their lives.

PS. In general I'd say D&D is probably just as bad and harder to learn.
D&D (pre 4e) is actually worse, balance-wise, because mechanical balance is assumed, and there is no other way to gain narrative balance. The wrong choices in class, class features and feats can have dramatic effects. It is also much harder to represent many valid character concepts, often requiring complicated or intuitive builds, or fishing for usually badly balanced classes in a mountain of splatbooks. 4e on the other hand falls on the opposite side of the line. It works hard to get mechanical balance, but at the cost of making things bland, and it still has glaring balance issues and splatbook creep.

I haven't looked at FATE much in the last year, but I can't help but feel there's a better way to balance aspects based on how much they come up in play. Properly creating your character's aspects is probably the most difficult thing to do in the game.
Check Core, it is free and I believe that it will help you with most of your issues with the system. Oh, and I completely agree that the hardest thing with the system is proper aspect creation.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

Fate, especially in the current community, is really moving towards the idea of "Aspects are always true", with Aspects gaining focus when you spend Fate Points on them. (Sorta like spending Edge in Shadowrun, it represents those times that things break just right because you're the hero.)

So if you're behind a wall, that by default makes it harder for people to get at you. Because it's a wall. That just goes back to the central tenet of "how difficult should it be to do this?" (In DFRPG terms, I would just treat the wall as a literal Block, strength assigned to how sturdy and covering it is.)

Aspects are supposed to quantify the unquantifiable (or the stuff we don't want to bother modeling), not replace the concretely measurable. Invoking a brick wall's Aspect (depending on the Aspect) doesn't mean you're diving for cover; it means you're exploiting a unique feature of that wall. It also represents the "there's no way the designers could've come up with this wacky edge case" element.

That's my personal take/interpretation, anyhow. I find it's actually fairly interesting and creative.

[kyoryu]

1. Weapons doing a minimum damage on a successful hit (as well as magical strength) heavily encourages having a high defensive combat stat. Mental and Social Conflicts don't have weapons (save potentially magic), so defenses matter less. There's a huge difference between taking 0 or 1 stress because an attack matched or exceeded a defense by 1 and taking 3 or 4 stress with the exact same rolls and skills.

Agreed. I dislike weapon ratings in general for this reason, and rarely use them (or at the minimum, tone them down) when playing Core.

It's a big disadvantage for Pure Mortals, but that's why they have insane Refresh.



2. While conceding a social and mental conflict usually doesn't screw you over -- it just makes life more difficult, giving up in a physical fight will probably kill you. If you choose not to take a consequence in a physical fight, then you are Taken Out and that probably means you're dead with many opponents (the enemy chooses what Taken Out means).

Conceding in a physical fight will not kill you. Ever. That's what concessions *do*.


A concession is basically a special form of being taken out—you lose the conflict, but you get to decide your character’s fate on your own terms instead of your opponent’s. That way, your character doesn’t have to take any consequences you’re not willing to take and can avoid fates that might arise from being taken out by the opponent, such as getting captured, killed, humiliated, etc

So if conceding in a fight could cause a death in your game, somebody had a poor understanding of the rules, and in fact the *purpose* of Concessions.

Also, the lethality of being Taken Out is really up to the group - the winning player *can* choose to kill a player that's Taken Out, but it's not *required*.

It's probably more common if you have fights just to have fights, like you might in D&D. It works better in Fate if you have fights *about* something, some stakes beyond "kill the other guy" in the majority of cases. And those stakes, and the potential lethality of the Conflict, should be pretty well understood by all.

Think about the books - how often does Dresden *lose* a fight? Pretty frequently. He doesn't die from those losses, though.

In practice, I've found it's hard to Take Out a character, as they'll almost certainly Concede before it gets that far - sticking around to the point where being Taken Out is a possibility is really a statement that this *is* that important to you, and you *are* going to stick around that long.



3. Looking at stress and consequences as hit points is misleading. If you have 3 stress boxes, you do not have 6 hit points with another 20 hit points from consequences. If you take a 4 stress hit, you MUST take a consequences or be Taken Out -- you can only cross off one stress box at a time. If you take a Minor Consequence and cross off the 2-stress box, then the next 4+ stress hit you take will be a Moderate Consequence, then a Severe, then Extreme.

Fate is not D&D. I don't see this as a problem.



4. Given Weapons, multi-stress hits in combat are pretty easy to come by. A pistol hits for 2 stress quite readily if the defense and attack rolls match. A shotgun does 3. A creature with inhuman strength and claws does 4. A creature with supernatural strength and claws does 6. Claws may be replaced by a melee weapon, of course, and many two-handed weapons like a greatsword would do a base of 3 stress (plus the strength bonus). So hits that deal 6+ stress are quite possible even with a good defense. (And armor is limited in what it works on and the best stuff is just using magic or magic items).

Yes, fights are paced quickly.

But enemies that have a total of 6+ Weapon ratings are very tough, and should be relatively infrequent. We're talking about the uber-ghouls and, Toad Demons, and Elder Gruff here. Things that *should* scare *anybody.*

And, again, most people should have at least some armor to counter. Even Pure Mortals should be able to get their hands on some armor, and that's why you keep distance when possible, and use Fate Points when necessary to *not get hit*.

And "normal" armor is certainly available - the game even suggests that a standard bulletproof vest in Armor:1 and a reinforced Kevlar vest would be Armor:2. Based on their descriptions, I think that they should probably be higher.

I mean, basically, if your GM is throwing insanely powerful stuff at you, yeah, combat is going to hurt. This is not D&D, where you just shrug off multiple blows or stand toe to toe with trolls.



5. Characters have very low stress pools in the DFRPG, even the designers have commented on this. You have 2-4 stress boxes, and getting 4 requires a Skill Rank of 3 in a skill that usually doesn't have a lot of uses compared to other skills. AFAIK, most non-DFRPG FATE games have more stress boxes.

Core has the same stress as DFRPG. SotC was higher, and that's pretty much been recognized as a mistake by the designers. Two stress as a default isn't terrible, especially if you're playing at a higher refresh rate (which, presumably you would be if you're facing Weapon:6 opponents). If your peak skill is a +5, it's a lot more feasible to drop a +3 in one of the stress-increasing skills than it would be in Core with a peak skill of +4 (assuming an actual pyramid distribution, that is).

The bigger issue, to me, is what weapon ratings you're dealing with.

But again, combat is quick, and that's pretty deliberate. It's not supposed to be a slogfest. That's what SotC did, and it's not pretty. The point of combat is mostly how much you're willing to sacrifice in terms of Fate Points or Consequences to win. You *should* lose on occasion, if not frequently, and if your GM makes "lose = death", then a) that's a misunderstanding of Conceding, and b) I think he's missed part of the point.



6. Overall this heavily encourages investment in combat skills. Mental skills aren't as important (unless you are a wizard/sorcerer/whatever, which means your mental skills can be combat skills). Social skills are more significant than mental skills, but much less important than combat, because failing a social encounter doesn't kill a character. And again, it is important to note that given the bell-curve-like nature of the resolution system, even a +1 is a pretty huge deal -- You have about a 61% chance of rolling your skill or lower, and an 81% chance of rolling Skill+1 or lower.

Again, failing a combat shouldn't kill a character in the vast, vast majority of cases. It's not required if you're Taken Out, and isn't even on the table if you Concede. Having every fight be "win or die" is, I think, a poor way to play Fate of any flavor, and is a result of trying to play "D&D with Fate rules" if you will.

The importance of combat skills is entirely dependent on the campaign style and the opposition your GM throws at you.



7. Using maneuvers or the like to make aspects in combat is not nearly as helpful as it seems. This takes up a turn of time, so you're effectively acting half as much as everyone else. (Potentially a good house rule here might be to allow the creation of an aspect if you make an attack that fails to hit, but is high enough to create an aspect).

Did you even read the link I sent you? Maneuver/Create Advantage is *incredibly* useful, mathematically. The most effective strategy is generally to have the non-combat-focused characters Maneuver to get free tags, and then to pass those to a more effective combat character who then cashes them in for a big hit.

It's also how you bring your peak skills into the mix, using them to Maneuver and target weaker skills of your opponent or passive opposition.



8. Declarations can potentially help if you have the right skill to declare something is in the area (like a table or whatnot) -- assuming there's something that is reasonable useful. Potentially using this all the time can get very repetitive -- so I don't think it is a great way to make up for a low skill and is very dependent on player creativity (which can vary depending on the player) and the DM being okay with the proposal (which can also vary).

Same as Maneuver, above, as well as Assessment. In Core these have been coalesced into Create Advantage, as they all mechanically do the same thing just with slightly different flavor.



9. If you guys prefer verisimilitude for stuff like cover and walls in combat, then let's use that. The game does like verisimilitude here. "Narrative physics" doesn't work if it becomes immersion-breaking. After at most one free tag, you have to spend a special resource to make use of something like cover -- or weirdly, declare cover somewhere else and use that because the wall you were using no longer works against guns. It's weird, unnatural, and can indeed take people out of the game. This is a real problem with Aspects (which are generally quite awesome).

Actually, you can just maneuver for the same cover again. It doesn't bug me quite as much, because, again, I think of it in terms of things like camera shots or narration in a book or whatnot. That and the fact that Fate isn't really an 'add up the static bonuses' game.

If you're in a place that you just can't be hit at, then you shouldn't be open to fire at all - but that should also seriously limit what you can do.

Also, I definitely agree that there's a little weakness in here - in Core, you'd probably handle cover by letting it grant an appropriate level of passive defense, though I'd be hesitant to combine that with an active defense.



10. It probably doesn't need to be said, but the game balance is pretty awful. I'd say the power disparity with new characters can easily exceed that in D&D -- it can be pretty crazy. I'm not sure about higher Refresh though, since I haven't played past 10 Refresh. Playing a guy with lots of magic items -- perfectly valid concept, can easily be insanely powerful. A non-pure mortal that isn't careful about what supernatural abilities they pick, can be quite underpowered. The right supernatural abilities can be just the opposite (and that's ignoring magic, which can be exceedingly good).

Example? And don't underestimate the power of having a refresh of 10 or more.




11. You've already agreed that the Refresh rules can be a bit wonky in longer games, putting Pure Mortals at a disadvantage, but I though I might as well list it again.

No, I'm saying that there could be more explicit guidelines for handing out additional Refreshes in longer sessions. That's a far cry from saying the rules are 'wonky'. This is the advice given, and it's certainly not concrete:


If the GM left things with a cliffhanger, she is entitled to say that no refresh has occurred between sessions. By the same token, if the GM
feels that a substantial (i.e., dramatically appropriate) amount of downtime and rest occurs in play, the GM may allow a refresh to occur midsession.
(Check out the optional Partial Refresh rule in Running the Game, page 317.)

So, yeah, a little more guidance would be useful, or at least a note that "hey, if you run a marathon session, be aware that not having an additional Refresh in the middle will cause issues for Pure Mortals".


Other things, like the skill issues, seem much trickier and I am not sure about the best way to handle those. The skills themselves aren't bad really, but they aren't all equally useful yet they are priced the same, and the pyramid structure doesn't work very well for balanced play, imho.

Actually I think the pyramid structure is flippin' genius. And the skills aren't that unbalanced, unless you have a campaign that is primarily combat-oriented.

If your claim is that you shouldn't use Maneuver/Assess/Declare because they don't make sense and it isn't a good way to make up for "weak skills", then you're cutting out the very tool that makes those skills viable.


Hmm, not sure if anyone thinks I'm approaching this too much like D&D or something. I don't believe I am. Balance is still really important in a story-focused game. While some players don't care (regardless of genre), those that do will feel frustrated if they are lacking in narrative power. Heck, they might be bothered if they have too much.

I think there's some D&D assumptions in there, and I've tried to lay those out. Some of those also appear to be on the part of your GM.

It's not really about balance. It's more about how certain things work in the game and what tactics should be viable. And I only say this because they're common issues for people new to Fate games, and hell, I went through them.

Fate also isn't a great game if you're just having a party of characters go from combat to combat. There's not really enough tactical depth in the system to make that interesting - conflicts and scenes in general should be more about "what do you really want, and what will you give up for it" than "how good are you tactically". It's just kind of the way the game works well.

Attacking vs. Maneuver/Declare/Assess/Create Advantage is a good example - a lot of people (I was one of them, and I've seen this a lot) presume that Attack is inherently better. It's not, and attacking someone with better fighting skills than you have is just a bad idea. So you treat it like someone in a book - use your strengths to set the odds up in your favor, and then work from that. But the tactic of "getting a good skill matchup" isn't obvious for people coming from a lot of systems, and the absolute utility of the various Create Advantage stuff isn't so obvious either at first.

I put up a lot of links about stuff I've "figured out" playing Fate - did you read any of them? A lot of it details *my* adjustment process coming from more traditional games.

I don't want to sound condescending or anything here. I just think that some of the issues you've had are really a matter of expectations, and I think you could have a lot more fun with the game if you learn the way that Fate/DFRPG "work".

Let me give you an example: You've said that characters are too flimsy, and used an example of a Weapon:6 rating as an example. Fair 'nuff. Let's translate that into fiction.

Karrin Murphy going up against the Giant Scarecrow - an incarnation of a horror movie monster that's an 8-foot-tall plus scarecrow with giant claws. This is a guy that Harry Dresden ran screaming from. Tougher than the Chlorofiend. As tough as the loup-garou.

Existing stress/consequence rules would mean that Karrin could only take a couple of full blows from this guy before being knocked out. From a giant, supernatural scarecrow.

For some reason, I don't think this is a problem.

Another example, back to the Maneuver/etc. issue. You say that if you maneuver/etc., you're only acting every other turn, and you basically should be able to attack every turn.

Again, let's put this in fiction terms. I'm going to use Butters here, since he would presumably have low fighting skills, unlike Murph.

Harry Dresden is facing and fighting a ghoul. Butters is there! What does Butters do?

A) Punch the ghoul in the face
B) Distract the ghoul, so that Harry can blindside it
C) Use his scientific knowledge to point out a weak spot in its anatomy
D) Get some holy artifacts to give to Harry
E) Try to find some way to destabilize the ground the ghoul is on
F) Some other sort of indirect way of helping Harry

I think the answer is clearly "anything except A". And all of those other things are represented by Maneuver/Assess/Declare. I'd personally go for B, which would make sense, but the others would work well. And that's how DFRPG also represents team-ups and assistance. One character Maneuvers, the other uses the free tag.

The idea that characters should be directly impacting the bad guys via attack/whatever is pretty much a D&D (and other traditional games to some extent) assumption. It doesn't work in Fate. There are other things that *do* work to make characters effective in situations outside their specialty, and the system does a good job of modeling that. But the weak guy just punching the tough one in the face is usually a pretty poor idea.


Overall I'd say the idea of a lot of things in the game are brilliant and I enjoy Butcher's setting a lot (love the books overall). It just has some glaring issues. I think I said this before, but I do tend to mostly focus on problems in a system rather that extol the great things about it -- that's only because I like to look at what needs adjustment.

I don't deny there are some issues - I've even pointed some of them out. I just disagree with you that they're all system issues. I think a number of them are expectation issues, and a number of them probably stem from a mismatch between your GM and the campaign style you had, and the campaign style the game is really intended to be played in.


PS. In general I'd say D&D is probably just as bad and harder to learn.

It's different. I'm not concerned about better or worse. I like D&D, I like Fate. They're two different games that do different things, and I'm glad I have them both, because sometimes I want one thing, and other times I want a different thing.

As far as writing aspects goes, I put together this, and it seemed to resonate with a lot of folks:

https://plus.google.com/108546067488075210468/posts/RiPHDaSa6Yg

Also, remember that part of the GM's job is to pull your aspects into the game, and also that your aspects can and *should* change over time, to reflect the changes in your character's story.

[Kuroshima]

Agreed. I dislike weapon ratings in general for this reason, and rarely use them (or at the minimum, tone them down) when playing Core.

It's a big disadvantage for Pure Mortals, but that's why they have insane Refresh.

Personally, if I played Dresden using Core, I would nuke the Pure Mortal bonus, and then go over all the powers (and stunts), and rebuild them under Core rules (Some are IMHO underpriced under Dresden rules). I would probably try and keep the cost the same, even if I reduced the benefits. Everyone gets the same refresh. Again, the pure mortal bonus is huge in a 5 refresh game, but IMHO not that great in a 15 refresh game that has been going for a while...

Another option is to turn it into +20% refresh, minimum 2.

Warning, spoiler from the books
Mind you, the poster girl for pure mortal is Karrin Murphy, and even Butcher is more or less giving her a sword of the cross (though she has yet to truly accept it) so she isn't out of place next to Harry Dresden...

[Drachasor]

Each to it's own, but I find that actually not quoting at all leads to less clarity, after 2-3 exchanges, because quite often it results in people just reading a few sentences, and replying, without realizing that the answers can be found in the rest of the messages. It also makes it much easier for the topic to drift as people can take a very small part of the argument and run with it, creating strawmen. In forums, I find it almost as bad as top-posting in emails, but it must be my 90s old fashioned netiquete speaking.

I find that going back and forth with a broken up posts can also lead to just repeating the same thing over and over and over, which is bad.


Dresden does not force skill pyramids, it forces skill columns. Pyramids are valid in Dresden, just not mandatory. Previous incarnations of Fate forced pyramids. Core recommends pyramids during character creation but allows for columns in play.

I see, a nomenclature confusion on my part then.


Technically the points you raise are from the Dresden Files incarnation of Fate.

Yes.


Indeed, weapon ratings can have that effect. They are however required if the opposition has armor, and serve to create "tiers" of combat. Mind you, the fact that there are almost no social or mental weapon effects is supposed to be balanced by the fact that there is almost no mental armor effects either

And yet normal armor is only supposed to work against certain attacks. Chain Mail isn't supposed to help against getting shot at. Of course, Supernatural and Magic Defenses don't have this problem, generally -- Toughness has a Catch, but that's usually uncommon.

I'd grant that waiving this restriction does help things out quite a bit, but it can be odd if your "Giles" or a Cop is going around in platemail. Thematically odd, but mechanically sane.

Of course, magic can give you mental and social armor too, but I guess that's a side point.

So weapons generally have the upper hand. Unless you use magic or supernatural defenses. Even then, it is easier to get higher weapon ratings than armor ratings, generally.


Conceding is a term of art, and allows you to exit a conflict on your own terms, so you only die if you actually want to. Also, social or mental conflicts can be as lethal as physical ones, though it's often not the case:
A trial can be represented by a social conflict, and the white council doesn't have that many levels of punishment, meaning that it usually goes for decapitation. A mental conflict against a black court vampire can end up turning you into a Renfield!

I didn't mean to imply Concessions mean you die. I was talking about getting Taken Out in combat almost always means death -- because in combat most things are trying to kill you in the Dresdenverse. That's almost never the case in social or mental conflicts. While there are exceptions to this, it is a sound general rule to look out what play is like and how character creation affects play.

The problem with conceding in physical combat is that the one big thing you are trying to avoid taking Consequences, but you'll probably need to take a Consequence if you Concede. Also, the enemy/GM has to basically agree to the Concession. It's tricky to properly use because combats are so short. It's a bit like running away in D&D -- half the time when you realize you need to run, it is too late. Half the time when you might realize you should have conceded, the damage has been done. At least that's my experience.


Stress and consequences ARE NOT hit points. They are more like D6 or WoD wound levels than actual hit points (things might have changed, been a LONG while since I played WoD). All the stress is the lowest level, and represents trivial damage. Each level of consequences represents a greater degree of real injury. Now, mind you, to take out a character in ONE HIT, you need to inflict more damage than 2 (minimum stress track length)+2+4+6+8 (minimum amount of consequences), or 22 points of damage. Fate characters are thus very hard to kill IN ONE HIT, and much more vulnerable to death by a thousand cuts. This actually models fiction quite well, with characters either gritting up after a big hit, but eventually coming down after multiple such hits, or requiring taking absolutely massive hits to put down. Fate characters are easy to hurt, but hard to permanently kill.

I know they aren't hit points, which is why talking about how much damage it takes to kill someone is rather silly. You can die in a 4 stress hit if you decide to take no Consequences. You can die after taking 15 stress of damage if you just have 2 stress boxes and those are 5 hits, or 7 1-stress hits will do it. Talking about the total stress one attack needs to Take Out someone isn't how the combat works.

Further, Consequences stick around, and the more damage they soak, the longer they stick around. People without some supernatural ability to help have it really rough here, since it makes them much easier to take out in the next few combats.

And let's compare how much of a difference you can have between two characters. Super has Inhuman Toughness and Inhuman Recovery can get them for just 2 Refresh with a +2 Catch (so they'll rarely face up against their Catch). If Super have Great Endurance, that means they have 5 physical stress boxes, and reduce all physical damage by 1. So 1-stress hits do nothing to them, 3 stress hits are 2, etc. They also can get rid of a minor consequence once per combat and heal everything one step faster. A pure Mortal named Norm, on the other hand, would have 3 stress boxes with Great Endurance, and no special ability to heal.

Let's say they both take seven 4-stress hits over the course of a session in two combats. Super treats these as 3 stress hits, and can take two minor consequences each combat to turn two of them into 1 stress hits. So he'd take two 1 stress hits each combat (box 1 and 2), and then have three more 3 stress hits (boxes 3, 4, and 5 if they all happened one combat). He heals up at the end of each combat because he never took significant damage.

Norm has it much rougher. Let's say Norm uses two Fate Points to turn two of these hits into misses. He's still taking five 4-stress hits. They all cause consequences, because he doesn't have a 4 and 5 box. We'll assume at least one scene between the combats (which Super doesn't need), so he can reduce two of these hits by taking Minor Consequences into 2 stress hits. The other three 4-stress hits give him a Moderate, Severe, and Extreme Consequence. If he took anther hit in either combat, he's DEAD. The next session, he still has the Severe and Extreme Consequence.

Meanwhile, Super is good as new after each of those battles.

It can also be very easy for enemies to hit in DFRPG if you don't worry about defense -- and not worrying about defense just makes hits bigger.

DFRPG probably has one of the biggest toughness disparities I've seen in an RPG at low "levels." And this matters because combat is an important element of the game AND consequences impact everything.


Again weapon ratings are actually important if you need to deal with creatures with supernatural durability, because they're the way for people with only mundane offensive capabilities to even the odds. Still, Core recognizes this issue, and doesn't recommend such a thing without careful analysis.

But we aren't talking about CORE, we're talking about the DFRPG and its problems.


That only works that way IF it's a combat heavy game and your character is going to be in combat most of the time. Also, I find that it's often more appropriate to have one combat specialist, and have the rest of the characters have other apex skills who can contribute to combat with maneuvers/create an advantage actions, and also move the plot forward outside of combat.

A Dresden Files game is going to have quite a bit of combat. That's one reason why there's so much about combat in the book. The disparity with how much combat matters to your character because of the mechanics means everyone needs a good bit of combat focus to survive well and then be able to function well in later non-combat encounters.


As for the bell curve, that's the beauty of it. It makes skilled people very unlikely to fail at what they do, it makes every point of skill matter, and it makes unskilled or amateur level people unlikely (unless they really want to, and so spend fate points) to do challenging things. I find that dice mechanics that use bell curves work much better, and more intuitively to people who aren't into statistics, because they have more granularity where it matters, that is, in the extremes. You only have 1/81 (aprox. 1.2%) chance to roll a +4 or -4, while you have a 5% chance to roll a 1 or 20 in d20.

It also means that if you don't focus in combat, then huge stress attacks are going to be hitting you regularly. Taking even one point away from defense matters a great deal.


Using maneuvers and then capitalizing them is often not a good deal, that's true. Unless you have the time to do so (you make your maneuvers pre-conflict, by aiming at the foe), but the real gold on doing maneuvers is to have the non-combat characters use their non-combat skills to create advantages (by remembering the foes' weak points "Aim for the right side of the chest, they have their hearts there", by altering the environment,...).

Yes, but non-combat characters doing that is inherently much less effective than if those characters were actually decent at combat. An added 2 stress on an attack isn't as good as another attack that does 3+ stress or more (and more attacks produce more consistent combat results as well, also good for PCs)


Also, core makes any attack that succeeds but inflicts no stress (tie, does not defeat armor, etc) grant a fragile aspect (called Boost in Core). Also, attacks that suceed by enough (called Success with Style) can accept a -1 damage penalty to instead gain a boost.

But that's not the DFRPG.


Indeed, Fate is very dependent on player creativity, but it is by design. It's a framework to tell stories, and delegates much more on the players than other systems.

But it can also lead to a player using the same trick repeatedly if they have to use a trick every round of every combat. That gets old quick.


Core also handles this well: You can accumulate multiple free invokes (tags in Dresden). In fact, a success with style in the Create an Advantage action (maneuvers in Dresden) gives you 2 free invokes. You can also keep using Create an Advantage to get further free invokes on existing aspects. If you take cover, for example, that might help you once or twice, but unless you expend some effort to maintain cover, your foe will find a way to shoot you through cover (either by degrading it, by finding weak spots in it, or in the case of cover that grants concealment only, by looking at where you pop up to attack and predicting where you'll hide). It's a different way of considering it, one that is superficially shocking, and that takes some effort to get used to it, specially if you come from other systems.

Well, that's not the DFRPG, now is it? And it doesn't really get rid of the immersion-breaking aspects.


Fate doesn't try to balance character capabilities, it tries to give them all the same narrative weight. Of course, it's possible to make inept characters under any system. Mind you, the supernatural powers often require synergies to take proper advantage of, but they are often extremely powerful if used properly.

The idea that story games don't have to worry about balance is completely wrong-headed. Because without balance you don't have the same narrative weight. In fact it is very easy in the FATE system in general, but the DFRPG in particular, to make a character with tremendous narratively weight or very little. It's very easy to do this unintentionally. There's a lot of system mastery required to make good aspects, pick good abilities, etc, and all those matter to balance and they hence matter to narrative weight.


Pure mortals eventually pale when compared to the rest, because their advantage is a static +2 refresh, and that can matter less and less. However, they have one thing that is very hard for others to have, and it's the capability to go nova and succeed at any task by pumping huge amounts of fate points. They can also be much more selective in what compels they take, while supernaturals usually end up needing to fish for compels to have enough fate points for when they need them.

Depending on the Supernatural. If you have Thaumaturgy (and some other abilities) then you can MAKE bonuses ahead of time.


Also, in the source material, pure mortals usually end up gaining some sort of supernatural boon anyway.

Well, then end up becoming non-pure Mortals, if that's what you mean.


The pyramid structure works better than you think, and provides some niche protection (no one can be equally good at everything, so you need to specialize). As for not all skills being equally good, tell me, how useful are a bodyguard's combat skills in the social scenes of a court game? How useful are the courtier's manipulation skills in the combat scenes of that same game? It's the players' task to put the characters in situations where they can take advantage of their apex skills, and it's the GM's task to make sure those situations exist. Fate is not designed for adversarial play, the GM and the players are all going for the same goal, that is have a good time and tell a good story.

A skill structure like that CAN be good, except when it prevents players from being COMPETENT at the main types of play. It just isn't very fun to have to sit back and do little during social scenes or combat scenes. I think it would be better if the system guaranteed competence in social, mental, and combat fields. The manner of competence, playstyle, and how to leverage that competence should vary.

"Have a good time" is the goal of every RPG. Adversarial play is the manner of play of almost no RPG -- certainly not D&D (which you seem to think I'm too seated in).


You are approaching it too much from a D&D PoV. The balance you're looking for is the wrong sort of balance. Of course anyone can design inept characters under any system, but the system must allow you to make bad choices if it's to also allow you to make interesting choices. Otherwise, it's just a railroad of another kind.

Bad and good choices must exist, yes. But generally it is better if bad and good choices in Character Creation are minimized. Instead the meaningful choices should be concentrated within play. This is a problem with the DFRPG.


I'm not saying it doesn't have it's quirks. It is VERY different from what most people are used to. It's a system where one character can play Buffy, one can play Spike, one can play Willow, and one can play Xander. They are balanced by narrative focus/screen time, and by how much their nature and issues control their lives.

Yeah, and how important was Xander 95% of the time? Not at all except for a laugh. Even Giles couldn't keep up well, though at least his knowledge come in handy a lot of the time. All this also meant that having them all adventure around together didn't happen, because some of them would just be liabilities in certain arenas. This kind of highlights the problem more than anything, imho.


D&D (pre 4e) is actually worse, balance-wise, because mechanical balance is assumed, and there is no other way to gain narrative balance. The wrong choices in class, class features and feats can have dramatic effects. It is also much harder to represent many valid character concepts, often requiring complicated or intuitive builds, or fishing for usually badly balanced classes in a mountain of splatbooks. 4e on the other hand falls on the opposite side of the line. It works hard to get mechanical balance, but at the cost of making things bland, and it still has glaring balance issues and splatbook creep.

At low levels though, I'd say it is much easier to get things to balance out pretty well, and the disparity is less. At mid levels they are probably about the same. But high mid-levels and above the disparity is probably worse.

4E manages balance, but doesn't leverage that balance properly for creative play. Rather than focus on the idea you could just MAKE UP POWERS that are thematically appropriate (which their balance would have allowed), then instead wanted the monies, so they had to nail everything down. Heck, the PHB is even written so that players think they aren't supposed to be creative. Good example of how to badly misuse balance though.


Check Core, it is free and I believe that it will help you with most of your issues with the system. Oh, and I completely agree that the hardest thing with the system is proper aspect creation.

Perhaps, but it doesn't fix the DFRPG problems.

Well, I can't respond to both of you in a timely manner. My apologies.

Edit: Also, anytime you say "Doing this or following that other system will fix it" then you admit there is a problem with the DFRPG. I am not saying the problems are unfixable (though some of them are difficult to address) merely that they exist.

[Drachasor]

Personally, if I played Dresden using Core, I would nuke the Pure Mortal bonus, and then go over all the powers (and stunts), and rebuild them under Core rules (Some are IMHO underpriced under Dresden rules). I would probably try and keep the cost the same, even if I reduced the benefits. Everyone gets the same refresh. Again, the pure mortal bonus is huge in a 5 refresh game, but IMHO not that great in a 15 refresh game that has been going for a while...

Another option is to turn it into +20% refresh, minimum 2.

Warning, spoiler from the books
Mind you, the poster girl for pure mortal is Karrin Murphy, and even Butcher is more or less giving her a sword of the cross (though she has yet to truly accept it) so she isn't out of place next to Harry Dresden...

Well, Karren isn't USELESS next to Harry, but she's a LOT less effective than he is. This becomes more and more true as the books continue. When she gets a supernatural boost this isn't the case, but she's not really being a Pure Mortal then.

I'd probably say a +20% bonus is too small. Hmm, lean towards saying maybe giving Pure Mortals a free Refresh each session would do the job (the player chooses when). I can't remember if getting Refresh back is called a Refresh or not, but that's what I meant. That would do a lot.

[Kuroshima]

And yet normal armor is only supposed to work against certain attacks. Chain Mail isn't supposed to help against getting shot at. Of course, Supernatural and Magic Defenses don't have this problem, generally -- Toughness has a Catch, but that's usually uncommon.
Unless it's kevlar backed mail. Advanced layered military armor ought to also give protection against cut and guns.

As for supernatural defenses, unlike mundane ones, they have a cost in refresh.

I'd grant that waiving this restriction does help things out quite a bit, but it can be odd if your "Giles" or a Cop is going around in platemail. Thematically odd, but mechanically sane.
Doing the laundry or shopping for groceries in plate (platemail is a term that is meaningless, it was invented by Victorian scholars. Chainmail is simply mail.) is obviously insane, but going into a black court vampire nest? You'd better get all the protection you can find. You can be ambushed and sucker punched (random hobo turns into a ghoul) but that's the benefit of surprise after all.

Of course, magic can give you mental and social armor too, but I guess that's a side point.
Mental, maybe, social, not so sure I would allow it.

So weapons generally have the upper hand. Unless you use magic or supernatural defenses. Even then, it is easier to get higher weapon ratings than armor ratings, generally.
Defense is usually outmatched by offense. That's true in real life and in games. The reason why it happens in games is because spending an hour with two combatants failing to hurt one another is boring.

I didn't mean to imply Concessions mean you die. I was talking about getting Taken Out in combat almost always means death -- because in combat most things are trying to kill you in the Dresdenverse. That's almost never the case in social or mental conflicts. While there are exceptions to this, it is a sound general rule to look out what play is like and how character creation affects play.
So don't get taken out! Concede before that happens! Also, depending on the game, being taken out in a social or mental conflict, while not lethal, can have extremely serious consequences.

Oh, and Dresden loses fights often. He doesn't get killed for it, he gets captured, left for dead, runs away,... You've got to break away from the D&D mindset of "fight until the biter end". It's hard, I know, but that sort of thinking is not very appropriate for a Dresden game.

The problem with conceding in physical combat is that the one big thing you are trying to avoid taking Consequences, but you'll probably need to take a Consequence if you Concede. Also, the enemy/GM has to basically agree to the Concession. It's tricky to properly use because combats are so short. It's a bit like running away in D&D -- half the time when you realize you need to run, it is too late. Half the time when you might realize you should have conceded, the damage has been done. At least that's my experience.
Minor consequences heal fast. Moderate consequences heal in reasonable time. Once you're taking moderate consequences, and it seems that the fight is not going your way, even if you could win, you should consider conceding. Pyrrhic victories are not sustainable.

<snip>
Norm has it much rougher. Let's say Norm uses two Fate Points to turn two of these hits into misses. He's still taking five 4-stress hits. They all cause consequences, because he doesn't have a 4 and 5 box. We'll assume at least one scene between the combats (which Super doesn't need), so he can reduce two of these hits by taking Minor Consequences into 2 stress hits. The other three 4-stress hits give him a Moderate, Severe, and Extreme Consequence. If he took anther hit in either combat, he's DEAD. The next session, he still has the Severe and Extreme Consequence.
Norm should have conceded before taking the severe and extreme consequences, unless something BIG was at stake. He is outmatched in this fight.

Meanwhile, Super is good as new after each of those battles.

It can also be very easy for enemies to hit in DFRPG if you don't worry about defense -- and not worrying about defense just makes hits bigger.

DFRPG probably has one of the biggest toughness disparities I've seen in an RPG at low "levels." And this matters because combat is an important element of the game AND consequences impact everything.
Combat monster is a combat monster. Now, mind you, in a fight, will the thing that goes bump in the night attack the more or less apparently harmless Norm, of the much more apparently dangerous Super? remember, the opposition should be played like intelligent beings with a sense of self preservation, unless it has NO sense of self preservation. That means that "I'll kill the bystander because it's a PC, even if it means I don't survive this fight" is not an option they should take.

But we aren't talking about CORE, we're talking about the DFRPG and its problems.
Dresden has problems, but they're fixable, and Core provides examples on how to fix them. Are they game breaking? not IMHO, the game is still very playable.

A Dresden Files game is going to have quite a bit of combat. That's one reason why there's so much about combat in the book. The disparity with how much combat matters to your character because of the mechanics means everyone needs a good bit of combat focus to survive well and then be able to function well in later non-combat encounters.
A Dresden game will have combat, yeah, but it should not be a slugfest. Look at how combat is shown in the books: No one goes for fair fights if he can avoid it. Once combat has started, things are dangerous and unpredictable, so the real emphasis is avoding combat until you can enter it with overwhelming advantage or there's no other option.

It also means that if you don't focus in combat, then huge stress attacks are going to be hitting you regularly. Taking even one point away from defense matters a great deal.
If you don't focus on combat, unless it's an ambush, you should not be in the frontlines, and you should be trying to look as nonthreatening as possible. It's much better to now have to roll defense than to have a halfway decent defense.

Yes, but non-combat characters doing that is inherently much less effective than if those characters were actually decent at combat. An added 2 stress on an attack isn't as good as another attack that does 3+ stress or more (and more attacks produce more consistent combat results as well, also good for PCs)
Non-combat characters are less effective in combat than combat characters. Duh! Who would have guessed. However, they are much more effective in areas where the combat characters are not that effective. Quick, someone call captain obvious!

But that's not the DFRPG.
I doubt that the gaming police will kick your door and arrest you if you import that rule (or use the Core ruleset whole cloth) in your DFRPG game.

But it can also lead to a player using the same trick repeatedly if they have to use a trick every round of every combat. That gets old quick.
It depends on the trick. Some get old fast, some take a little longer. Again, Fate depends on the players being creative and proactive.

Well, that's not the DFRPG, now is it? And it doesn't really get rid of the immersion-breaking aspects.
Again, importing rules from Core is both easy, and officially supported. As for immersion-breaking aspects, I do not find them more immersion-breaking than many other mechanics. It's just that you're not used to them. Fate is different from other systems, until you put yourself in the right frame of mind, it will seem strange, but you can get used to it and it's no worse than many other things.

The idea that story games don't have to worry about balance is completely wrong-headed. Because without balance you don't have the same narrative weight. In fact it is very easy in the FATE system in general, but the DFRPG in particular, to make a character with tremendous narratively weight or very little. It's very easy to do this unintentionally. There's a lot of system mastery required to make good aspects, pick good abilities, etc, and all those matter to balance and they hence matter to narrative weight.
You're putting words in my mouth that I didn't say. Did I mention that Fate doesn't have to worry about balance, full stop? No, I said that Fate does not worry about character balance, it worries about narrative balance. It isn't perfectly balanced, partly because that's an impossible goal. Fate devotes a lot of pages to help you pick appropriate aspects. Also, again, every system ought to allow you to create inept characters, because unless that's possible, it's not possible to create different, interesting characters. Fate depends on the players capitalizing their narrative advantages if they don't have mechanical advantages. Again, this is alien to most games, so that's why it's hard to swallow at first.

<snip>
Well, then end up becoming non-pure Mortals, if that's what you mean.
That's what I mean, yeah. Transitioning from Pure Mortal to supernatural is not only possible, but can be even expected in long games.

A skill structure like that CAN be good, except when it prevents players from being COMPETENT at the main types of play. It just isn't very fun to have to sit back and do little during social scenes or combat scenes. I think it would be better if the system guaranteed competence in social, mental, and combat fields. The manner of competence, playstyle, and how to leverage that competence should vary.
Being competent and having something to do is often a matter of having a single +2 skill and being imaginative enough to maneuver with it. You won't grab the spotlight, but you'll contribute. Requiring that everyone character is as competent as every other character in every aspect leans to characters that are copycats with different paint coats, and that's bland and uninteresting IMHO.

"Have a good time" is the goal of every RPG. Adversarial play is the manner of play of almost no RPG -- certainly not D&D (which you seem to think I'm too seated in).
D&D has ranged from full on adversarial (1st editions, where the rules where there to limit GM agency) to semi-adversarial. This is parodied in games such as Hackmaster. It's not 100% true that D&D is an adversarial game, but there's a kernel of truth. Adversarial-ness is not a binary state, there's shades of grey from full adversarial to full collaborative.

Fate is on the full collaborative side of the line. The GM's task is to make sure the characters shine and are awesome, and the players' task is to help the GM in this endeavor. I paraphrase "if you can't find an interesting outcome to both success and failure in an action, don't roll, and make success automatic". It takes some getting used to, but Fate is different from most RPGs here.

Bad and good choices must exist, yes. But generally it is better if bad and good choices in Character Creation are minimized. Instead the meaningful choices should be concentrated within play. This is a problem with the DFRPG.
So player agency should be limited to the color they want to paint their walls/cars? Character creation should not contain meaningful choices?

Yeah, and how important was Xander 95% of the time? Not at all except for a laugh. Even Giles couldn't keep up well, though at least his knowledge come in handy a lot of the time. All this also meant that having them all adventure around together didn't happen, because some of them would just be liabilities in certain arenas. This kind of highlights the problem more than anything, imho.
Important for the action at hand, or for the story overall? because I liked the character a lot, and I believe it added to the story, both by providing comic relief and by providing a more human counterpoint of the progressively inhuman protagonists.

At low levels though, I'd say it is much easier to get things to balance out pretty well, and the disparity is less. At mid levels they are probably about the same. But high mid-levels and above the disparity is probably worse.
The problem is that there's no mechanism to compensate for mechanical imbalances with increased/decreased narrative focus, so all balance hinges on mechanical balance. Supernaturals in Dresden might be able to do things that mortals will never be able to (unless they become supernaturals themselves) but have to surrender to compels to gain narrative currency (fate points). Mortals have much greater control over compels. This, along with the fact that the supernaturals tend to be focused in a single endeavor, while mortals can be jack of all trades, provides narrative balance. Compel soon, compel often, and compel a lot. Introduce balance in the same way as Rich introduces balance with V, when he finds that V's presence would make the story he wants to tell irrelevant. This is something that is hard to spot only from reading the books, and hard to internalize when playing them, but it's what makes Fate hum. In fact, Fate should almost always play on the interactions of the PCs and setting aspects.

4E manages balance, but doesn't leverage that balance properly for creative play. Rather than focus on the idea you could just MAKE UP POWERS that are thematically appropriate (which their balance would have allowed), then instead wanted the monies, so they had to nail everything down. Heck, the PHB is even written so that players think they aren't supposed to be creative. Good example of how to badly misuse balance though.
I didn't play or even read D&D4 much beyond the core books, as I found that the game wasn't for me. My information might be out of date. However, my impression (possibly wrong, as i didn't delve deeper or seek system mastery) is that at least at first, balance was obtained by keeping the differences between characters at little more than superficial or aesthetic special effects. Mind you, I also noticed that creativity wasn't in the menu, for players.

Perhaps, but it doesn't fix the DFRPG problems.

Well, I can't respond to both of you in a timely manner. My apologies.

Edit: Also, anytime you say "Doing this or following that other system will fix it" then you admit there is a problem with the DFRPG. I am not saying the problems are unfixable (though some of them are difficult to address) merely that they exist.
And I accept that there are problems and that the system isn't perfect. If there was a perfect system, everyone would play it and only it, and there would be no diversity. There would not be any further editions of that system, because it would be perfect, nor need of house rules. (</sarcasm> I have a certain system in mind when I say this, and it's not D&D, but I'll not name it. If you know about it, you'll catch the reference, if not, feel free to ignore it, and yes, I admit this is slightly trollish/flamebait)

Core goes a long way to fix those problems, but Evil Hat is not going to create a Dresden Files, Revised/Core Edition, because a) it's not in their contract with Jim Butcher, and b) it would piss off fans if they had to go and rebuy everything because there were some minor changes in the rules (WotC called, and they want their .5 editions back).

Now, some of the issues you mention are not actually issues with the system, as much as approaching the system from the wrong angle. That's why I recommend that you read Core. Not only it fixes some of the very real issues you have, but it provides a very good insight on what angle to use to approach the game.

Spoilered because I want to respect the OPs with to avoid spoilers to the books

Well, Karren isn't USELESS next to Harry, but she's a LOT less effective than he is. This becomes more and more true as the books continue. When she gets a supernatural boost this isn't the case, but she's not really being a Pure Mortal then
Indeed, and I noted it. It's substantial character development. Murphy find herself in a world where she can't cope, where her skills are insufficient or plain inappropriate, and where she realizes that the has to step back into the background, while Harry acts as the bruiser, or accept supernatural aid to remain in the frontlines.

Look at Butters though. Waldo is perfectly ok with remaining in the background, acting as a support character. He does things that Dresden would never be able to do. He doesn't TRY to be a combat character. There's no need to have everybody kick ass and take names. He is awesome in his own right. It would actually detract to the story is Waldo was as good combatant as Harry, and Harry as good with tech and medicine as Waldo.



I'd probably say a +20% bonus is too small. Hmm, lean towards saying maybe giving Pure Mortals a free Refresh each session would do the job (the player chooses when). I can't remember if getting Refresh back is called a Refresh or not, but that's what I meant. That would do a lot.
Hell, a +40% bonus might be reasonable, if you accept that the best balance is when you're playing a 5 refresh game. I still find the pure mortal bonus to be an ugly hack, and that it would be better to make sure "everything costs what it costs" by rebuilding everything under Core guidelines.

[1of3]

I didn't mean to imply Concessions mean you die. I was talking about getting Taken Out in combat almost always means death -- because in combat most things are trying to kill you in the Dresdenverse. [...]

Hmmm. Let's see.

- Bianca wanted to disgrace Dresden. Killing was just a bonus. If killing were the primary goal, Dresden would be dead.
- The Summer Princess thought she had to kill Dresden, as he was about to expose her.
- Nicodemus never tried to kill Dresden. He handed out presents.
- Lea wanted to 'hound' him.
- Ortega wanted to end the war. He would have been happy about Dresden's surrender. (Same for the Eeebs and the rest of the Red Court.)
- Mavra switched from killing to blackmail, when that appeared more benefical. She would probably have settled for Turning.
- The Phobophages were not interested in Dresden. There was tastier food of the easy to scare goth kind around.
- The necromancers wanted to do their ritual. Several of them stated they would prefer Dresden's cooperation.
- The Erlking is trigger-happy, but easy to impress.
- The gruffs were ordered to kill Dresden. They didn't want to. Dresden exploited that difference.
- Shagnasty would like to kill Dresden, but would probably settle for torture, as he did with Thomas.
- The Outsiders do want to kill Dresden very much.

Did I forget anyone? Otherwise there is only one kind of antagonist in 14 books, intent on killing Dresden without alternative.

[kyoryu]

And yet normal armor is only supposed to work against certain attacks. Chain Mail isn't supposed to help against getting shot at. Of course, Supernatural and Magic Defenses don't have this problem, generally -- Toughness has a Catch, but that's usually uncommon.

Michael's armor, from the books, is structured in a way to be effective against most attacks, supernatural or other. There's no reason a PC in a high refresh campaign wouldn't have some way to access similar.


I'd grant that waiving this restriction does help things out quite a bit, but it can be odd if your "Giles" or a Cop is going around in platemail. Thematically odd, but mechanically sane.

Depends on the scenario. Somebody who's just a beat cop? Okay, sure. But a "Over Your Head" level character is someone that I'd expect to know what they're up against, and take appropriate precautions, especially when deliberately going up against nasties, and given a chance to prep.


So weapons generally have the upper hand. Unless you use magic or supernatural defenses. Even then, it is easier to get higher weapon ratings than armor ratings, generally.

This is generally true. And, as I pointed out before, the idea that a pure mortal should be standing toe-to-toe with something like the Elder Gruff is a bit crazy. They're not going to be able to. Those are nasty scary things, like standing toe to toe with a dragon in D&D.

No, a mortal in that point does some combination of four things:

1) Use their narrative weight to prevent the fight in the first place
2) Let the supernatural guys with their toughness take the brunt of the attack, while they use range and weaponry to contribute
3) Use their other skills to help set up the heavy hitters
4) Spend FP to ensure that they don't get splattered

That's how Fate generally works, and it's pretty much how the books work, too. It's just not compatible with how many RPGs handle things.


I didn't mean to imply Concessions mean you die. I was talking about getting Taken Out in combat almost always means death -- because in combat most things are trying to kill you in the Dresdenverse.

The trick to good combats is to not have them just be a "fight", but to have them be *about* something. There should be some goal, something at stake.

http://io9.com/why-you-should-never-write-action-scenes-into-your-tent-511712234

It's not about RPGs, but the advice, in general, holds.


That's almost never the case in social or mental conflicts. While there are exceptions to this, it is a sound general rule to look out what play is like and how character creation affects play.

I'm pretty sure if you manage to offend the Erlking in his hall, you'll be pretty dead. If your games set up mental/social conflicts as being inherently low-stakes (which is *not* generally true in the books), then yeah, they'll be low stakes.

Also, if the only real "stake" at play is "dead", then your statement comes closer to true.


The problem with conceding in physical combat is that the one big thing you are trying to avoid taking Consequences, but you'll probably need to take a Consequence if you Concede. Also, the enemy/GM has to basically agree to the Concession. It's tricky to properly use because combats are so short. It's a bit like running away in D&D -- half the time when you realize you need to run, it is too late. Half the time when you might realize you should have conceded, the damage has been done. At least that's my experience.

Taking a consequence as a concession bit is not guaranteed. And what you're trying to avoid in a Conflict is being Taken Out, more than the Consequences.

And what you're really trying to do in a Conflict is get whatever it is that's at stake. And at a higher metalevel, what you're really doing is figuring out how much that thing is worth to you, and what you're willing to spend to get it.


I know they aren't hit points, which is why talking about how much damage it takes to kill someone is rather silly. You can die in a 4 stress hit if you decide to take no Consequences. You can die after taking 15 stress of damage if you just have 2 stress boxes and those are 5 hits, or 7 1-stress hits will do it. Talking about the total stress one attack needs to Take Out someone isn't how the combat works.

It's entirely relevant when you make the point of how easy it is to take someone out in one round.


Further, Consequences stick around, and the more damage they soak, the longer they stick around. People without some supernatural ability to help have it really rough here, since it makes them much easier to take out in the next few combats.

That's what Consequences do. You're also ignoring the fact that if a pure human is taking lots of damage, it's because they're not prepared, they aren't letting the tougher guys take the damage, and they're not spending Fate Points.

Yeah, in a lot of ways mortals are squishier. You don't want them going toe to toe with the big heavies. And?


And let's compare how much of a difference you can have between two characters. Super has Inhuman Toughness and Inhuman Recovery can get them for just 2 Refresh with a +2 Catch (so they'll rarely face up against their Catch). If Super have Great Endurance, that means they have 5 physical stress boxes, and reduce all physical damage by 1. So 1-stress hits do nothing to them, 3 stress hits are 2, etc. They also can get rid of a minor consequence once per combat and heal everything one step faster. A pure Mortal named Norm, on the other hand, would have 3 stress boxes with Great Endurance, and no special ability to heal.

Yes, superhuman toughness makes you tougher. Pure mortals aren't good at being damage sponges, especially against epic badguys.


Let's say they both take seven 4-stress hits over the course of a session in two combats.
...
Norm has it much rougher.

Yes, in general stunts offer more than a 1:1 utility with Fate Points. That's by design. Because if the next session has no combat, all that Inhuman Toughness and Recovery is utterly irrelevant. The general advice given for stunts (at least in Core) is that they should be equivalent to 2-3 fate points spent in a session. It's a tradeoff of flexibility for specialization.

If your game is one where it is either:

a) primarily combat driven
b) the critical things are all in combat, and the non-combat stuff doesn't have much long term impact

Then yes, you're better off spending stunts on combat. Refresh grants flexibility over a certain amount of "raw power". If that flexibility is unnecessary due to your campaign structure, then it's a bad tradeoff.

That's not really a system issue, so much as it is a campaign type/system mismatch issue. It would be just as possible to imagine a game where combat was very infrequent, and so the combat stunts would be less useful.

Also, in *reality* what will generally happen is that Super will have lots of supernatural powers and thus poor refresh, in which case Norm will avoid lots of hits by using those Fate Points.

Your example is kind of an extreme edge case - testing for one thing (resilience), and then putting refresh only into things that increase resilience. Of *course* that's going to show the specialization in a good light.

So in most cases it's Pure Mortal with a flexible pool of Fate Points that can use those for anything (including damage avoidance) vs a supernatural critter that has some amount of their points allocated to resilience. In general, you're not going to have characters that *just* have supernatural abilities in resilience, so the Pure Mortal will have far more than an additional two Fate Points over the supernatural critter.

It's possible, sure, but then *realistically* you should be comparing SuperTough to Norm with an additional *four* fate points - two for the refresh spent, and two for the Pure Mortal bonus. Even that case makes the comparison less lopsided.


It can also be very easy for enemies to hit in DFRPG if you don't worry about defense -- and not worrying about defense just makes hits bigger.

Er, what do you mean by that, not having a good defensive skill? That's part of it. Keeping at range is another. Having your supernatural friends beat on the tough guys so they're not focusing on you is also a part of it.


DFRPG probably has one of the biggest toughness disparities I've seen in an RPG at low "levels." And this matters because combat is an important element of the game AND consequences impact everything.

Combat is less of a focus in DFRPG than in most games, at least the way I'd run it, and the way I run Fate in general. It's not a matter of non-combat just being a gateway to the "real game" when people start hitting each other.

And, really, one of the biggest? Man, that is not really my experience. I can think of a ton of games where a weaker/magey type character is a lot weaker out the gate. I mean, I can easily make a GURPS character that's more utterly useless in anything resembling a fight than just about anything you could come up with in DFRPG. I'm pretty sure I could do the same in Savage Worlds.


A Dresden Files game is going to have quite a bit of combat. That's one reason why there's so much about combat in the book. The disparity with how much combat matters to your character because of the mechanics means everyone needs a good bit of combat focus to survive well and then be able to function well in later non-combat encounters.

And there's a lot of non-combat as well. I think if you're really running the game true to the spirit of the book, the non-combat should be at least as relevant as the combat, and combat certainly shouldn't be the primary focus of the game.

If it is, and if the non-combat bits are really just about setting up the next fight, then your statements are pretty well on the money.


It also means that if you don't focus in combat, then huge stress attacks are going to be hitting you regularly. Taking even one point away from defense matters a great deal.

Why? Why aren't you sticking at range, and letting the tough guys take the brunt of it? Like what you'd do in every other RPG?


Yes, but non-combat characters doing that is inherently much less effective than if those characters were actually decent at combat. An added 2 stress on an attack isn't as good as another attack that does 3+ stress or more (and more attacks produce more consistent combat results as well, also good for PCs)

"Combat monster characters are better in combat than non-combat-monster characters. News at eleven."

And yes, in many cases, an extra +2 on a stress *is* as good as another attack. Plus the fact that those extra tags can help on offense, defense, or whatever else is appropriate.


But it can also lead to a player using the same trick repeatedly if they have to use a trick every round of every combat. That gets old quick.

Actually, no. If the opponent spends a turn to Overcome an aspect on them, well, that's gone. No more doing it. After someone's dealt with the sand in their eye, you can't keep on doing the same thing.

And what you're saying is primarily true if you're approaching the game from a mechanics-first, rather than a fiction-first POV. The Maneuvers that a player uses should be based on the scene, the opposition, and what's happening. If not, if you're primarily looking at your character sheet, then pretty much any version of Fate gets really dry, really fast.


A skill structure like that CAN be good, except when it prevents players from being COMPETENT at the main types of play. It just isn't very fun to have to sit back and do little during social scenes or combat scenes. I think it would be better if the system guaranteed competence in social, mental, and combat fields. The manner of competence, playstyle, and how to leverage that competence should vary.

Half of the reason to Maneuver/Assess/Declare is to get a skill matchup that favors you. In this way, even a non-specialized character can contribute in scenes that aren't their specialty. I've seen *less* issues with non-contributing characters and too-strict specialization in Fate than I have in other games, to be honest.

The only way that this isn't true is if you super-specialize in one area so that you have absolutely nothing else. I don't recommend that. The only way that would make sense to me is if you're playing in a super-combat-focused game, and if the GM is throwing opponents at you that are always at the top of the food chain. To which my answer is "don't do that".


Bad and good choices must exist, yes. But generally it is better if bad and good choices in Character Creation are minimized. Instead the meaningful choices should be concentrated within play. This is a problem with the DFRPG.

"Good" and "bad" choices are also subject to what happens in the game itself. If you have a game that's 100% focused on combat (not saying your game is or was), then non-combat choices are "bad". That doesn't mean that they're bad in the system as a whole.

Look, it seems that your biggest issue about DFRPG can be summed up as follows:

1) Pure mortals don't make good combat monsters
2) If you play in a game that's heavily combat-focused, you need combat monsters
3) Combat's the only thing that really matters

I can't disagree with points one and two. I think point one is fine, and I think the answer to point two is one part "Fate's not an awesome game for heavy combat focus" and one part "if your game is going to be mostly combat, people should know that going into it".

As far as point three, I totally disagree. The idea that the game is combat encounters with "stuff" in the middle is common in more traditional games, but I think it's pretty much an anti-pattern for Fate. There's no reason in any Fate game that the things outside of combat can't be as, or more, tense and important than what happens once people throw down.

[Person_Man]

I would encourage you to read all the Dresdon File novels first, before reading the game.

You don't have to read them in order to play the game, and reading the Your Story game book won't spoil the novels directly. But the Dresdon Files are mysteries. Although the setting is "All Myths are True (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AllMythsAreTrue)" urban fantasy (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UrbanFantasy), the plot follows classic mystery tropes. Author introduces characters and a mystery. Conflict occurs, which drives the plot. The plot slowly reveals personality traits and (usually magical) abilities of the characters. The answer to the mystery is revealed and the plot is resolved, due to the actions and abilities of the characters.

A big part of the fun and suspense of mystery novel is thinking through the personalities and abilities of the characters, and trying to guess what will happen based on the internal logic of the story. Reading Your Story gives you a detailed account of pretty much every ability that you'll find in the Dresdon File books, and a lot of jokes and hints in the margins. If you remember these things and then later read the books, then you're a lot more likely to figure out the mystery and plot line quickly. Which can inadvertently spoil them.

Plus they're just great books, and you can probably get all of them used for $30-40ish dollars. There's no reason you shouldn't read them first, and in the order they were published.

[Troven]

I had no problems jumping from the RPG into the Novels. But that's just me. :smalltongue: