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Mighty_Chicken
2013-12-27, 08:45 PM
I'm planning to reunite my old gaming gang, and though I'd love to play D&D with a more hardcore group, it is too complicated and slow for men reaching their 30's with too little time to, well, do anything.

I'm reading Fate Core's ebook and it seems to me I could go straight to the fun part with it (roleplay, dramatic situations, fun stories). I like D&D's simulationism of fantasy, but I think all the rules get in the way of what my friends like the most.

So, what are your experiences with Fate? Do you miss anything from D&D when you play it? Does it work as intended?

WbtE
2013-12-27, 09:02 PM
I doubt that FATE is going to fill the bill of "lighter D&D". Try Swords and Wizardry or one of the Microlites if you want fantasy dungeoncrashing without stacks of books.

CombatOwl
2013-12-27, 09:21 PM
I'm planning to reunite my old gaming gang, and though I'd love to play D&D with a more hardcore group, it is too complicated and slow for men reaching their 30's with too little time to, well, do anything.

I'm reading Fate Core's ebook and it seems to me I could go straight to the fun part with it (roleplay, dramatic situations, fun stories). I like D&D's simulationism of fantasy, but I think all the rules get in the way of what my friends like the most.

I strongly, strongly suggest you use the Freeport Companion for Fate. It provides a lot of rules that make it more D&Dish.


So, what are your experiences with Fate? Do you miss anything from D&D when you play it? Does it work as intended?

Yes, it does, provided that the players can work their head around it. It usually takes then stumbling through a campaign to really get the idea.

Zavoniki
2013-12-27, 11:18 PM
I have some serious issues with FATE Aspects. The fact that every Aspect is mechanically identical makes the game seem boring and dull. I've found that pretty much every other Rules Light generic system is better than FATE for doing anything in any genre due to making characters feel mechanically more distinct.

That's a pretty gamist difference however and despite the fact that I personally don't like FATE, I do think its quite a good system for those that just want a more narrativist approach to gaming.

Kol Korran
2013-12-28, 03:54 AM
I have ambuiguous feelings towards FATE: My group have recently tried playing it, exactly due to the time constraints and D&D's rule complexity that you mention.

I made a log of my experiment (In my sig if interested. Warning- it's a long read), but here are the major points I came up with:
1) FATE's frame of mind isn't "D&D light", it's something different alltogether. D&D is a simulationist system, trying to give rules on how to do everything from a "realistic" point of view. FATE is a more narrative one, which tries to see what makes for a cooler story, reality be damned. :smallbiggrin: This is a big point for FATE in my opinion, but it's also a sort of weakness. It makes it less a game of overcoming challenges, and more a game of telling a cool story. It's quite important to relay that to the group, and choose what fits your group better. Some like the challenge of overcoming mechanical obstacles, some want to make a story worth of a movie. You need to figure it out.

2) I HIGHLY (Can't recommend it enough) trying to play the game with people who know the right mind set. We didn't, and it gave rise to lots of issues and problems, the two main ones about the use of Compels (What is worthy compel? when is it too little? too much? Players became afraid of compels, while this is a force that drivesthe game in FATE really). The second one is the amount of added rules, in the forms of extras- what adds to the game, what makes it too complex?

3) FATE is immensely easy to prepare a session for, and it's fantastically easy to improvise with. I REALLY loved that about the system. You could create an NPC, a character or such to fit exactly what you want in about 1-2 minutes top, even on the fly. You can estimate the difficulty of a task within a few seconds, and not worry about checking rules, tables and such. This gave the party a lot of room to maneuver and try out crazy ideas, as well as keep up the flow of the game.

4) Some players however resented the relative lack of complexity. We played in a post apocalyptic setting, and some players were really interested in better gear and such. FATE simplifies the effect of gear greatly, and they resented this. We tried accommodating to it by creating a sort of an "equipment and weapons" extra, but it felt lacking. Also, if you're players like "Phat Lewts" Then this is not the game for it.

5) Conflicts: This became a major issue in my party. As one of my readers said it, conflict in a FATE game is largly a game of betting and "who's chicken". The party usually learns to stack up advantages or invokes on 1-2 characters that deals a massive effect against the enemy, and people just add up more and more on each side, till they areafraid to use fate points or can't create any more advantages.

This made most battles quite boring after a point. Note that I have very little experience in how to prepare cool battles in FATE, so theremight be quite a bit more to go into.

I did however loved social conflicts, especially the Contest mechanic, which gave a nice dramatic progression of the conflict. It's my favorite mechanic of the game which I incorporated to my D&D game.

6) Choices and possibility of Failure:While all RPGs are about choices, FATE and other narrative based RPGs are much more so. The game revolves about choosing between various choices, with no clear one, and giving up something to gain another. FATE is driven as much by failure to do taks as it is by succeeding in them. While in D&D the party "MUST" defeat the dragon, in FATE it's quite plausible for them to fail- it takes the story in a different way, and drives it. You need to make it clear to the palyers that failure IS a viable option at times. It's just another crossroad in the story. I love that, but it takes getting used to.

I think this covers my main issues. I would love to try FATE again (My group returned to playing Pathfinder for now), but hopefully with someone who understands it better, learn it from someone who knows how to THINK Fate.

Good luck to you!

Black Jester
2013-12-28, 04:12 AM
Fate is the current candidate for the seasonal wave of hype that comes and goes and proclaims one system the greatest ever before those who fall for that hype actually play it for more than few sessions and are disappointed because the system cannot fulfill the exaggerated expections. Nothing new there, but Fate is a particularly overrated game in this context.

have played it more than once and this is about the nicest thing I can say about this game. I am not too willing to try out that experience again. It is also one of the few games (the Harry Dresden version, that is), that I sold again without any reluctance or hesitation (just if it hasn't been clear before: I am a bit of a system junkie and own about 40 to 50 different games, not counting various editions of the same game or different systems using the same setting).
Fate might very well be the most pretentious game I have ever suffered through, and the way the aspects work, benefitting mostly from vagueness and double-talk because it is only the quantity, not the quality of an aspect that counts… it is just a really odd (an bad) design decision. Adding the overtly abstract nature of the rules and the usual resulting disassociation of events through vague and unsupportive abstractive mechanics (you know, like darkness that only actually obfuscates vision if someone decides it does) just makes it a game a chore of aspect-heaping and distasteful haggling for resource points (which strictly speaking have no true equivalent within the actual setting, and therefore lack any right to exist except as ugly metagaming pollution).
In the consequence, you stop playing the game, you merely play the system - and for me, that is a one-way trip to the garbage bin.
I would strongly recommend to avoid Fate. In two years, only a few hardcore fans will continue to play it and the whole hype will probably have disappeared anyway.

Actana
2013-12-28, 06:02 AM
I like Fate, though I've only ran a single around 30 hour game with it (in around 10 sessions). This was with the Spirit of the Century ruleset, which is an older and more unpolished version than the new Fate Core. We played a steampunk 1920s post WWI adventure game and by all accounts I'd call it a success. The game did suffer from people being new to the system though; while Fate may seem a simple game to play, aspects are a lot more difficult to run in practice than they sound. Combat in particular felt fairly unfulfilling overall, though I'd pin that on both the lack of experience with the system and the system itself partially, as SotC doesn't have that many optional rules in play for combat.

With Fate Core out, it does feel a far more streamlined and better version of the game, and I'd love to try it out sometimes. The only problem is getting people into the mindset that Fate requires. It's a highly different beast than any D&D and requires calibration of expectations even more than many other games. Aspects can be hard to wrap your head around if you come from a strictly gaming/simulationist background, and the fact that you actually need to talk to the other players when creating your character has single-handedly destroyed any and all attempts to run Fate since my first foray into the system.

There are some criticisms I could deal to it, but most are easy to houserule away, like the requirement of two character-tying aspects. Not a huge fan of that amount, as it does rather force characters into certain things. It's easy to just change though, and Fate does encourage that.

Overall, I'd like to play in a game with a more experienced Fate GM, to see how things work, especially on the aspects part. But, for now I'm just content trying to get yet another Fate game going. I wonder how people would react to a fantasy adventure type of game...

erikun
2013-12-28, 10:00 AM
I've played Fate several times, and have enjoyed the game. I haven't played the newest Fate Core system yet, although it certainly looks good. Using Aspects to represent facets of a character that are both positive and negative are nice, as it gives mechanics that the players have control over for their important background events.

Fate is not a substitute for D&D, though. D&D is based on the idea of a DM throwing up a challenge (combat, trap, obstacle) and the party overcoming it. Fate is much more about the GM throwing up an situation and the party interacting with it. They could overcome it as in D&D, but they also have the option by default of working with it, or going around it, or most other things that the players can think of.

This different mindset is perhaps the biggest change in switching from D&D to Fate; if the players or GM think that the only solution is to fight off a challenge, then a lot of challenges will feel the same. Using Aspects requires a much more proactive approach from the players, meaning that some groups will ignore that aspect of the game in favor of just rolling the same attack every turn. And some people seem to prefer a system that sets out the skills available for players to choose from, rather than create a character's skills from nothing - Fate can do this (Dresden Files does) but it isn't the default.


If you're looking for another system similar to D&D but lighter, might I suggest looking into some of the retro-clones? These are systems based off the (simplier) earlier versions of D&D, although with more cleaned up mechanics. Trust me, an AD&D character sheet is a lot easier to manage than a D&D3e one! Plus, since they are generally quicker to setup and play, it wouldn't be so bad to spend just one session or two putting together characters and giving it a playthrough, to see how you like it.

The Mormegil
2013-12-28, 10:37 AM
Great system if your party is in it with the right mindset. Horrible system otherwise. Objectively, it is worth a read just because the design ideas inside it pretty much revolutionize the standard RPG formula and may impact your DMing greatly.

The whole idea of making a game system that strongly rewards and encourages the behavior you want your players to have, instead of modeling it, is a powerful one. Of course, if that behavior is not what you want your characters to have... it falls flat. Also I kind of dislike the excessive simplicity of the battle system (it does get a bit boring after a while), which is why I'd recommend low focus on "fighting" (in general, conflicts) and more on moving the story forward.

Grod_The_Giant
2013-12-28, 11:42 AM
I very much agree with everyone who's been talking about different mindsets. As Zavoniki pointed out, it's a narrativist system, rather than a gamist/simulationist one. The darkness isn't a constant issue, because it's usually not a constant issue in a book or movie-- hindrances appear once (the Tag) and then tend to remain as a sort of background coloration, because it's not exciting to keep harping on Jack Action's bullet wound. They'll only appear again at a particularly important moment (when you spend a Fate point)
Speaking personally, that bugged me. No so much that I hated the system or anything, environmental issues in particular I wound up houserulling to grant a repeatable "half-tag."

So... yes. FATE works as it intends, but its intention is pretty different from D&D-style games.

Pluto!
2013-12-28, 12:27 PM
I've played Fate 3.0 (the minimalistic PDF that's basically just Fudge+Aspects+Pyramid), Spirit of the Century, Diaspora and Starblazer, and enjoyed all of them.

The game is not well-suited to the D&D design of "kill a thing, take its stuff, kill another thing, take its stuff..." In fact, the most compelling part I found of the later non-generic versions of the game was that they came packaged in books that promoted the particular flavor of hammy action that the system does manage relatively well.

What I didn't like about Starblazer and Spirit especially was that in fleshing out the specific flavor of the stories the games would support, the system, which I'd heard talked up for its lightness, started to get bogged down under add-on rules (the Stunts are what I'm thinking about especially, where the GM starts needing more rote system knowledge to play the "judge's" role). Diaspora mostly escaped this complaint because its subject matter and expectations didn't come with such rules-light expectations, and the core system got by because it was more or less what I'd expected.

CombatOwl
2013-12-28, 01:06 PM
I have some serious issues with FATE Aspects. The fact that every Aspect is mechanically identical makes the game seem boring and dull.

Aspects are not, in fact, mechanically identical. They can't be used in all situations, and certainly different aspects are used for different sorts of compels and complications. The fact that they all can be used for a certain set of functions does not mean that they can all be used at the same time or for anything you do.

You're looking at this from the perspective of "oh, since it can be used to give a +2 bonus to any action it can be tagged during, it must be the same as all other aspects." But that's certainly not the case, since only some aspects can be tagged for any given action. "Bull In A China Shop" may be good for breaking down doors, but you're not going to be able to tag it for rewiring a security system. In fact, that will almost certainly be tagged by the GM to make such delicate work more difficult. That's very different from, say, "Part-Time Stage Magician" which would have utility in almost precisely the opposite situations.

That's setting aside the fact that the majority of what aspects do isn't mechanically defined at all. They're used for way more than the mechanical bonuses you can get by invoking them with fate points or free invocations.


I've found that pretty much every other Rules Light generic system is better than FATE for doing anything in any genre due to making characters feel mechanically more distinct.

Probably because you've been using aspects incorrectly.

Zavoniki
2013-12-28, 06:14 PM
Aspects are not, in fact, mechanically identical. They can't be used in all situations, and certainly different aspects are used for different sorts of compels and complications. The fact that they all can be used for a certain set of functions does not mean that they can all be used at the same time or for anything you do.

You're looking at this from the perspective of "oh, since it can be used to give a +2 bonus to any action it can be tagged during, it must be the same as all other aspects." But that's certainly not the case, since only some aspects can be tagged for any given action. "Bull In A China Shop" may be good for breaking down doors, but you're not going to be able to tag it for rewiring a security system. In fact, that will almost certainly be tagged by the GM to make such delicate work more difficult. That's very different from, say, "Part-Time Stage Magician" which would have utility in almost precisely the opposite situations.

That's setting aside the fact that the majority of what aspects do isn't mechanically defined at all. They're used for way more than the mechanical bonuses you can get by invoking them with fate points or free invocations.



Probably because you've been using aspects incorrectly.

No I understand that Aspects cannot always be used, that is not the problem. The problem is WHEN you use an Aspect it will always have the same mechanical effect. That's really bad design and makes everything seem the same. I really like in theory what FATE is trying to do. I just don't like the execution. Honestly just adding something to differentiate aspects mechanically a little more would probably do it.

Comparing FATE to my personal gold standard of Generic Rules Light Systems, Cortex. Cortex can literally do almost every single thing FATE can do, but better. I vastly prefer its skill system, it has FATE Points in Plot Points(they even work the same way) and you have Traits(Positive/Negative) that work like Aspects, except they are mechanically distinct from each other due to being represented as a dice number. If you wanted Enviromental Aspects you could easily add that in and let people spend Plot Points to use them. Cortex also has working rules for gear and equipment. About the only thing FATE can do better is track someone's mental stress due to actually having mechanics for that and it doesn't seem like that would be too hard to house rule.

However, I didn't think of doing a lot of these things in Cortex until I had read FATE. I like what FATE is trying to do, I just don't like its execution.

Airk
2013-12-28, 09:52 PM
No I understand that Aspects cannot always be used, that is not the problem. The problem is WHEN you use an Aspect it will always have the same mechanical effect. That's really bad design and makes everything seem the same. I really like in theory what FATE is trying to do. I just don't like the execution. Honestly just adding something to differentiate aspects mechanically a little more would probably do it.

It's not "bad" design, it's just design you don't agree with; Clearly, it works very nicely for some people.

That said, I'll just reiterate what most people have already said, and what some people can't wrap their heads around. It's NOT LIKE D&D. It's not a "challenge" game, where the objective is to overcome obstacles, it's an "interesting things" game, where you may well fail at some challenges, and that's fine. It doesn't have serious "Gear" and "levelling up" so people who want to see their character "improve" may be frustrated. People who like seeing their character's story evolve will not. (Did Indiana Jones "level up" between the first and third films? Was it ever important what he had in his backpack?)

I wouldn't precisely recommend it for people who WANT to play D&D. There are PLENTY of games that are basically "D&D with less rules" that you can play for that. On the other hand, if your old D&D games never quite scratched the itch you wanted them to, or if you'd rather not spend so much time fighting goblins to level up, or if you just want a different type of gaming experience, GO FOR IT, because it's a very interesting system for some purposes.

PairO'Dice Lost
2013-12-28, 10:40 PM
D&D is based on the idea of a DM throwing up a challenge (combat, trap, obstacle) and the party overcoming it. Fate is much more about the GM throwing up an situation and the party interacting with it. They could overcome it as in D&D, but they also have the option by default of working with it, or going around it, or most other things that the players can think of.


It's NOT LIKE D&D. It's not a "challenge" game, where the objective is to overcome obstacles, it's an "interesting things" game, where you may well fail at some challenges, and that's fine.

So Fate is a game where you can fight creatures, avoid creatures, talk to creatures, or fail to do any of the above? Like, say, every RPG ever? :smallwink:

Fate and D&D are certainly different in many respects, but the idea that D&D is a linear series of fights in a dungeon thrown in front of you by a DM that you need to overcome while Fate is an open-ended sandbox that you can explore is completely mistaken. In fact, it's just as likely that a D&D game is run as a sandbox (see: hexcrawl games, modules like the Caves of Chaos, high-level PCs having the ability to be proactive about traveling around and changing the world, etc.) while a Fate game is run as a more linear plot due to the group wanting to do things that would make a good story and the Fate point economy letting the GM and players nudge things into line with that single narrative.

Neither approach is better than the other in either game. You can do a straightforward dungeon crawl or a political sandbox in either game, it's just a question of whether you accomplish them with lots of complex rules and mechanical variety or fewer streamlined rules and mechanical simplicity--and yes, you can "do D&D" in Fate with appropriate tweaking, though there are enough pseudo-D&D games out there that it wouldn't be my first choice to do so.

Airk
2013-12-29, 12:11 AM
So Fate is a game where you can fight creatures, avoid creatures, talk to creatures, or fail to do any of the above? Like, say, every RPG ever? :smallwink:

Yeah, but how many D&D games actually involve LOSING fights? Be serious. And regardless, the decision motivators are completely different.

In a D&D game, players are going to decide to fight or not fight based on potential rewards, risks, resupply, who has how many spells left, or whatever. In a FATE game, whether the fight happens is going to be determined pretty much by whether it sounds interesting to fight this stuff. Risk/Reward basically doesn't enter into it.

D&D is a game about overcoming challenges. That's what it is. You get XP by killing/looting/defeating/completing quests. The incentive is to overcome things. That's not the incentive in FATE.



Fate and D&D are certainly different in many respects, but the idea that D&D is a linear series of fights in a dungeon thrown in front of you by a DM that you need to overcome while Fate is an open-ended sandbox that you can explore is completely mistaken.

Wow, you missed the point entirely.


In fact, it's just as likely that a D&D game is run as a sandbox (see: hexcrawl games, modules like the Caves of Chaos, high-level PCs having the ability to be proactive about traveling around and changing the world, etc.) while a Fate game is run as a more linear plot due to the group wanting to do things that would make a good story and the Fate point economy letting the GM and players nudge things into line with that single narrative.

The hex crawl is still about overcoming the challenges that you encounter in those squares, and that's still NOT what drives the 'linear' FATE story along.

FATE would be a stupid game to run a hex crawl in, IMHO.

PairO'Dice Lost
2013-12-29, 12:56 AM
Yeah, but how many D&D games actually involve LOSING fights? Be serious.

...if you've never lost a fight in your D&D games, your games are very different from any I've ever heard of.

The lethality of the low levels (1-6ish in AD&D, 1-3ish in 3e) is legendary, almost every player has their favorite TPK story or player death story ("Remember that time Dave decided to sneak up on the great wyrm red dragon as a 4th level thief?"), and every D&D forum has seen long threads about whether a DM should fudge rolls to save players from SoDs and such. And that's just talking about PCs losing by dying, when I could go on and on about pricesses that fail to be saved, monsters who make lucky saving throws and escape to wreak havoc elsewhere, parties who are knocked unconscious and captured, and so forth.


And regardless, the decision motivators are completely different.

In a D&D game, players are going to decide to fight or not fight based on potential rewards, risks, resupply, who has how many spells left, or whatever. In a FATE game, whether the fight happens is going to be determined pretty much by whether it sounds interesting to fight this stuff. Risk/Reward basically doesn't enter into it.

So in Fate, you've never decided on an in-game approach to take based on how many consequences each PC has, whether you can afford the hit to Resources that a bribe would require, whether you have the time to pull off a ritual in DFRPG, whether being taken out would prevent accomplishing your objectives in time, or anything similar? Or perhaps you've wanted to talk things out instead of fighting, but your GM has compelled your Scottish character's Dinnae Question Me Honor aspect when someone insulted him, and you have to weigh the pros and cons of fighting or paying a Fate point to avoid it?

I mean, seriously, claiming that risk/reward doesn't enter into a decision regarding combat in any system is kind of ridiculous.


D&D is a game about overcoming challenges. That's what it is. You get XP by killing/looting/defeating/completing quests. The incentive is to overcome things. That's not the incentive in FATE.

Ah, yes, I'd forgotten that you have no incentive in Fate to reveal significant plot details, defeat a major villain, shake up the campaign world, or do other quest-completion-like things. It's not like those are specific examples given in the Advancement chapter of the Fate Core book or anything. :smallamused:


Wow, you missed the point entirely.

Not at all. Erikun's exact words were:
Fate is much more about the GM throwing up an situation and the party interacting with it. They could overcome it as in D&D, but they also have the option by default of working with it, or going around it, or most other things that the players can think of.
If that's not a claim that D&D only involves overcoming DM-designated challenges while Fate (and not D&D) involves roleplaying and exploration, I don't know what it is.


The hex crawl is still about overcoming the challenges that you encounter in those squares, and that's still NOT what drives the 'linear' FATE story along.

FATE would be a stupid game to run a hex crawl in, IMHO.

I'm not sure you're very familiar with hexcrawls, because they're as much (or more) about exploring new places and getting along in the wilds while conserving and intelligently using resources than they are about walking into a hex, killing what's there, walking to the next one, killing what's there, and repeating ad infinitum.

Fate would be great for hexcrawls. Its stress tracks let you represent lack of sleep, enduring day-long treks in the hot sun, getting diseases from a fetid swamp, and so forth; it has very few combat-focused skills and plenty of mobility and roleplaying skills; Create Advantage and terrain aspects can liven up climbing very tall mountains, sneaking through goblin-infested mines, and other scenery-centric missions; and its lack of detail for gear means you can focus on the exploration and not on whether you brought two torches instead of three.


As I said before, Fate is not specifically tailored for a D&D style of play, nor is it the best system to use if you want to "play D&D" using another system. But a lot of wonderful benefits are being ascribed to Fate in this thread that literally every RPG does (like "allowing you to roleplay things out"), and some blatantly false things are being claimed about D&D and Fate (like "Fate doesn't incentivize you to overcome challenges" and "you don't lose fights in D&D"), and in a thread about whether Fate is usable for D&D-style games I think it's important that those misconceptions be cleared up.

Rhynn
2013-12-29, 01:00 AM
I'm planning to reunite my old gaming gang, and though I'd love to play D&D with a more hardcore group, it is too complicated and slow for men reaching their 30's with too little time to, well, do anything.

Check out my sig for links to retroclones of D&D, including many free ones that cost nothing to try out! Most of them fit the bill for "lighter D&D" perfectly! :smallbiggrin:

Zavoniki
2013-12-29, 02:23 AM
It's not "bad" design, it's just design you don't agree with; Clearly, it works very nicely for some people.

That said, I'll just reiterate what most people have already said, and what some people can't wrap their heads around. It's NOT LIKE D&D. It's not a "challenge" game, where the objective is to overcome obstacles, it's an "interesting things" game, where you may well fail at some challenges, and that's fine. It doesn't have serious "Gear" and "levelling up" so people who want to see their character "improve" may be frustrated. People who like seeing their character's story evolve will not. (Did Indiana Jones "level up" between the first and third films? Was it ever important what he had in his backpack?)

I wouldn't precisely recommend it for people who WANT to play D&D. There are PLENTY of games that are basically "D&D with less rules" that you can play for that. On the other hand, if your old D&D games never quite scratched the itch you wanted them to, or if you'd rather not spend so much time fighting goblins to level up, or if you just want a different type of gaming experience, GO FOR IT, because it's a very interesting system for some purposes.

Yes it is bad design. Aspects are identical entities in terms of the mechanical effects they have which means that it is impossible for them to mechanically add anything to the narrative of a game because there is no difference between invoking Plot Magnet! and It's Rather Dark!. FATE is trying to be a narrativist system that keeps mechanical complexity low and trying to encourage better story telling through FATE points/Aspects. The problem here is two assumptions, one that mechanics and story telling take up the same space so if you want a lot of one you have to have little of the other, and two that FATE points/Aspects encourage better story telling.

For the first assumption, I think most people can see this is clearly wrong. Mechanics can get in the way of the story, but there is nothing inherent about mechanics or rules in general that makes people tell worse stories. I've been playing a lot of Wild Talents recently which can get quite mechanically complex when you start building super powers but this makes those powers unique and adds to the ability of both the player and the game master to tell an interesting story.

For the second, Fate Points and Aspects encourage people to use their Aspects as much as possible which encourages characters to be only about their Aspects which produces shallow characters that lack depth and complexity. They are defined by these few "talking points" and maybe their skills. It seems like FATE is trying to provide a framework to run freeform roleplaying but if that's the case why have mechanics at all? Just run a freeform game. If your going to have mechanics, at least have decent mechanics that do something not... whatever Aspects end up doing. I wish Aspects were better because in Theory they sound like a really cool idea.

My problem with FATE is that it is a bad Narrativist system and even worse at everything else. If you want to play a narrativist game, play a different system(Cortex off the top of my head, either Core or Plus) that has good narrativist mechanics that reward you for having a character and playing through a story. My other problem is that FATE is so close to actually being a great game. All it needs is something to make Aspects mechanically distinct from one another and it would be very good.

NichG
2013-12-29, 07:43 AM
I have to concur on the aspects thing - as written, they actually have a tendency to reduce some interesting RP possibilities into a very bland mechanical effect.

I would advise basically throwing out the current mechanical system for tagging aspects and instead say 'When you tag an aspect, you gain the ability to take an action related to that aspect that has the corresponding, logical storyline consequences'. This requires a bit more work from the GM (they have to be ready to improvise 'what the logical storyline consequences' are, and they have to also make sure that players all take aspects that are reasonable and around the same degree as eachother).

So, for example, if there's a rockfall on the other side of a chasm and someone has the Aspect 'Student of the Great Wizard', tagging the aspect allows them to interact directly with the rocks on the other side of the chasm (e.g. through implied magic). If someone has the Aspect 'Never Sleeps' then tagging the aspect would let them, say, completely avoid the effects of a sedative dose. If someone has the Aspect 'A friend in every port' then they could tag the aspect to find a friend on the spot, regardless of circumstances.

Basically you really want to push the idea to the players that aspects are more than just 'I can sometimes get a +2 or reroll things'. It really isn't a system that is interesting if you focus on the mechanics, so you have to make sure everyone understands that there's more to focus on and that the things on their sheet have meaning beyond just determining bonuses on dice rolls.

Zavoniki
2013-12-29, 08:02 AM
Well I guess the question then becomes why use FATE at all? If the mechanics aren't doing it then I might as well pick another system and play that. If its all up to DM fiat anyway... then that's not a system I want to play.

Kalmageddon
2013-12-29, 08:47 AM
It seems like FATE is trying to provide a framework to run freeform roleplaying but if that's the case why have mechanics at all? Just run a freeform game. If your going to have mechanics, at least have decent mechanics that do something not... whatever Aspects end up doing.


Well I guess the question then becomes why use FATE at all? If the mechanics aren't doing it then I might as well pick another system and play that. If its all up to DM fiat anyway... then that's not a system I want to play.

See, that's exactly what I don't get about all these "rules lite" games, which FATE is a good example (but far from the worst) of.

All these systems do is giving technical terminology to things that a good roleplaying game should already have and calling it game mechanics.
I mean, take Aspects. These are not some revolutionary mechanics nobody has ever thought of, they are just characterization. Every character and setting should have characterization, it's not suddendly FATE's exclusive just because it happened to slap a capitalized name on it.
Second, Aspects as they are presented are fairly shallow and limitated game mechanics. A +2 bonus or a reroll, while certanly useful enough to justify working on your Aspects, are not interesting. At the same time, this greatly limits what Aspects can do, creating shallow characters that only have aspects that have some practical purpose, instead of minor psychological quirks and backstories that might never come up but that help immersion nonetheless.

Which brings us to the next point: why are people praising rules lite systems when playing freeform is an option? At the level of simplicity that FATE rules present (but again FATE is far from being the only example of this) you might just as well run only on a few gentlemen's agreement and the occasional dice roll.
I get the intention of FATE, it's nice that it tells you that the most important part is having fun and making some cool stories instead of "winning", but that's not what makes a system worthwile to me. I'm not buying rolplaying games on their "intention", I'm buying them because I think I can put my ideas into practice better through some intresting and balanced rules I couldn't come up with on the fly.
Otherwise what they are selling us is not a system, it's a guide, a set of guidelines that we might want to follow regardless of what system we are playing.

Just to give you an example, you could very easily slap the Aspect and Fate Points system of FATE in D&D and it would work just fine. An occasional +2 on a roll would not be much in D&D, but a reroll would. Just give an arbitrary number of FATE points instead of tiyng them to Stunts and you're all set.
Aspects are houserule-level of complexity, something anyone could come up with. In fact, mechanically, Aspects already have you doing all the work. All the Aspects system does is telling you "when it makes sense with your character's characterization you should be able to have a reroll or a bonus, provided you can't just spam it all the times. Ocasionally they might provide you with a challenge instead". Uh... Yeah, nice idea. But not really complex enough to warrant calling it a "system". It's basically trademarked common sense.
And yet, that's their gimmick, that's what they are pointing at to sell their product.

The only thing in FATE that approaches the level of complexity and thought I would expect from a ropleplaying game system are Stunts, which are basically circumstancial D&D-like feats, hardly an innovative concept.

Knaight
2013-12-29, 10:23 AM
I like Fate, but it's not my favorite system by any stretch of the imagination - largely because I'm not a huge fan of aspects, partially because Fate is Fudge based and I just like Fudge better. In short, I think they went a little too far in getting rid of modifiers, and I find creating aspects for scenes tends to slow down the game, though character aspects are fine by me.

As far as rules light systems in general - I actually quite like them. Freeform is very much not my style, and having rules for task and conflict resolution, or turn order, or whatever else is something I find helps a game. If you really want built in tactical depth in combat or whatever (as opposed to emergent tactical depth from terrain not being a flat featureless field), a rules heavy system is necessary, but a light one works otherwise.

Alroy_Kamenwati
2013-12-29, 12:14 PM
My group plays FATE as a regular group activity. Here is what I noticed.

FATE is really quick. You get a lot done in a small amount of time.

FATE has no real shopping. This simplifies the game, but takes out the enjoyment of shopping.

FATE has narrative combat. You're supposed to describe your actions in a cool way. I play a shooter, so this is hard, but describe the tactics.

FATE has really simple mechanics as it's base with some add ons adding complexity. This isn't a great thing though, I prefer more structure to my games.

Try Dungeon World for a simple D&D style game. It's got moderate rules, 1337 lootz, narrative combat and the like. But the classes are archetypes with specific rules and you'd have to make your own to be unique.

I hope I helped some :smallsmile:

Delwugor
2013-12-29, 12:51 PM
I'm a big fan of Fate and one of the reasons is obvious just by looking at character sheets.
My Pathfinder Inquistor character sheet is filled with endless numbers, for this and that and whatever. I use a spreadsheet to keep it all straight. This sheet screams this is a system where my character is just a series of numbers.
A Fate Core sheet is a series of statements that show what is important to my character and how he interacts within a game. There are some numbers for skills but everything else is geared towards what my character is all about.

So for Pathfinder my character interacts with a scene by numbers, I have alot of control over what he does but the numbers really control how the interaction works.
Since my Fate character is not a spreadsheet, who and what he is interacts directly with a scene. My character's High Concept of XenoArcheologist matters when attempting to run to the bridge before the ship explodes. He's had to do that many times in the past and is well experienced with get there or die.

Of course it's not that cut and dry and both numbers and character can have similar impact in the different systems. But it is designed into the Fate system where it has to be ruled upon in Pathfinder. (BTW the PF game is a blast and the flexible GMing helps bring more characterization into play)

Aspects are the most misunderstood and mis-played portion (dare I say aspect) of Fate. Yes mechanically speaking they just a +2 or reroll, but there is also the affect (narrative) portion that tends to be underused.
For example (contrived but relevant) take a scene Aspect of a zone with "Swampy mire". Now as in Pathfinder I can use it directly in Fate to slow advancing enemies or force them to Overcome Action to get through. OK that can be fun and interesting in any system but...
In Fate I can also do a Create Advantage and turn "Swampy Mire" into "Quicksand Pit" and lure the enemies through. The mooks end up getting caught by the quicksand but now the main NPC enemy faces me and my companions alone, with a loud racket of yells for help coming behind him.
To me that is a much more interesting interaction of "Swampy Mire" than a mere terrain slowing movement.
With a flexible GM this could be done in Pathfinder also but the point is that Fate directly lets me interject an Aspect into the narrative of the scene as my character sees fit.

Fate does require a different mindset in the players, concentration on the events (narrative) instead of the numbers (mechanical) when faced with a situation. I also think Fate works best with that are truly invested in the game and how they impact it, just sit back and following a scene doesn't work well.

CombatOwl
2013-12-29, 04:12 PM
No I understand that Aspects cannot always be used, that is not the problem. The problem is WHEN you use an Aspect it will always have the same mechanical effect.

So what? When you use a skill point, it always has the same mechanical effect in D&D. When you spend CP in GURPS, it always has the same mechanical effect. If I add another dot in a skill in Storyteller, it has the same mechanical effect. Every time. That's what makes these collections of rules systems. The system defines what mechanical effects result a certain expenditure of resources in a predictable way.

If I'm playing D&D, and my character cast a fireball, it's always got the same predictable mechanical effect. <caster level> in d6s, up to 10. Is that a problem? I don't really think so.

These mechanical differences gain variety and differences in utility by being used in different circumstances. A skill point has a predictable effect, but if I put it into Bluff it isn't useful for Use Magic Device. If I put my points in Science! in GURPS, it has the same mechanical effect as if I had put it into Guns!, except I can only use it when doing science stuff--as opposed to gun stuff. In Fate, you are filling a finite number of Aspect slots--yes, all Aspects have the same root functions, but when those functions apply and what consequences follow from them differ greatly.

Are you suggesting that other games are boring because they attach certain class features to certain levels, or that those class features work the same every time you use them? Or that they treat every skill in the game with the exact same system? Do you levy the same criticism at every game system that treats broad classes of actions with the same mechanical treatment--like Savage Worlds, Cortex, D&D, GURPS, Storyteller, Palladium, etc?

I mean, you've got to define aspects as something. What should they be defined as doing if not the rather broad utility of being used to; gain a bonus on rolls, rerolling a test, providing allies a bonus, increasing the difficulty of resistance, initiating compels, and providing complications? What additional feature do you feel would "fix" the implementation of aspects? Or is it a matter of aspects being useful for too many different things that is the problem? There's an awful lot of things you can do with them, besides getting a +2 bonus, and their variety drives immense variation in utility for compulsions and compels--a major part of the game.


That's really bad design and makes everything seem the same.

It's no worse than any other system which defines character features mechanically.


I really like in theory what FATE is trying to do. I just don't like the execution. Honestly just adding something to differentiate aspects mechanically a little more would probably do it.

How do you differentiate them more than "completely different"? The Fate method of handling aspects can easily result in one character getting a +6 to some specific sort of action and another not only getting no benefit from his aspects, but actually taking a penalty to their attempt to do that same action. That's a pretty wide variation in utility. A pretty wide mechanical difference, as it were.

Setting aside the fact that at least half the point of aspects is for initiating compels and inspiring complications, which you haven't even touched on. When one set of aspects leads to a quick fate point economy and another set leads to fate point depletion, there's a fairly substantial difference in mechanical effect too. But you're not talking about that part either.

That's not even getting into the alternative uses for aspects discussed in the system toolkit.


Comparing FATE to my personal gold standard of Generic Rules Light Systems, Cortex. Cortex can literally do almost every single thing FATE can do, but better.

...What? You're criticizing fate aspects for being mechanically boring, but hold up a system where literally everything is done by attribute dice + skill dice + assets - complications? Literally, everything you do in Cortex is exactly the same mechanically. You don't even get choices like you do in Fate--whether to invoke an aspect or leave it be. You can't create assets on the fly in cortex, you can create aspects on the fly in fate (either by spending fate points or using a skill to do it).

I mean, I could see where you were going if you were pointing at GURPS and saying that Fate falls short of the mechanical rigor of a system that tries to define everything. There's a reasonable argument to be made that narrativist games like Fate are mechanically uninteresting because most actions work pretty much the same way. An argument mind you, not absolute truth. But Cortex? I don't get why you would insist that Fate's aspects are less mechanically interesting than assets and complications in Cortex. The fact that Fate aspects are simultaneously helpful and harmful alone makes them more mechanically interesting than traits in Cortex.

Cortex plays basically the same as Savage Worlds. The only major differences are the published settings, how you do initiative, and the fact that cortex has you rolling two dice and adding them, where Savage Worlds has you rolling two dice and taking the higher result. Savage Worlds is a bit more stingy with the bennies than Cortex is with plot points, but Savage Worlds is also more forgiving in general.

Neither of these play like Fate does, and aren't intended to. Fate is probably heavier on the narrativist end than any game with an actual system behind it.


I vastly prefer its skill system, it has FATE Points in Plot Points(they even work the same way) and you have Traits(Positive/Negative) that work like Aspects,

No they don't. They're added or subtracted from rolls. That's it. You don't get to choose when they're invoked, you don't get to create them when they're needed with skills, they don't drive compels or complications, you can't use them to increase other character's difficulties. You don't regenerate them in the same way either.

That's actually a rather notable point. Aspects don't just provide you with a bonus on some skill checks sometimes, they're also the means by which you acquire fate points.

John Smith
"Man With a Mission"
"Notable Enemies"
"License To Kill"
"Master Of Disguise"
"Strange Relationship With Destiny"

Not all of those aspects have the same mechanical purpose. Three of them are there for providing bonuses sometimes. One of them is there for basically the sole purpose of regaining fate points by offering easy fodder for compels and complications (Notable Enemies). Another is there because it's sometimes helpful, sometimes a way to get fate points (Strange Relationship With Destiny).

You don't get any of that with Cortex assets and complications. All Cortex gives you are things that either give a bonus or provide a penalty on a check--and never something that does both at different times. Unlike Cortex assets and complications, aspects are dual-faceted--sometimes a benefit, sometimes a hindrance. If you're "Brave Beyond Measure" that helps you when you need to stand your ground, but hurts you (by being fodder for compels) when you really ought to run. Cortex has nothing even approximating that dual-natured function of an aspect. Cortex doesn't even try to link game mechanics to narrative imperatives--that's beyond the scope of that system entirely.

Note also that Cortex's plot points may allow you to shape the direction of the story somewhat, but it doesn't do so in any mechanically definable way other than adjusting NPC behavior. Unlike Fate, where spending a fate point to define an aspect on a scene (or character) actually does result in a mechanical difference. Moreover, players are encouraged by the Cortex system not to use plot points to actually do anything unless they have to, because they get converted into character advancement later. Fate doesn't do that at all. Fate point collection isn't linked to character advancement at all, meaning that they get used a lot more often (and regenerated a lot more often). A good character in Fate will have a quick fate point economy; and therefore aspects that have a mechanical function other than providing you with bonuses.


Cortex also has working rules for gear and equipment.

So does Fate. The system doesn't presuppose what equipment model is best for how you play, leaving it up to the group to decide how they want to handle equipment. But it certainly does explain how to do so. It even provides complete systems for it. The fate books (Fate Core and the Fate System Toolkit) provide at least four ways.

1) It can be a prop with its own aspects and equipment stunts.
2) It can be defined as a character in its own right--everything in Fate can be built as a character if needed.
3) It can be built as an Extra.
4) It can be an aspect of a character or a scene.

You can pretty seamlessly mix all of those in the way that works best for the style of game you're playing. If you're playing a game about mecha pilots, you probably define those mecha as characters. If you're playing a game about mad scientists, you probably define your mad inventions as extras. If you're playing a game about fantasy adventurers questing for treasure, you probably define your gear as props with aspects and stunts. If you're playing a game where equipment doesn't matter very much, you probably just leave it to aspects of characters and scenes. You mix and match that as required to achieve the style of play your group is looking for. Unimportant equipment can lose a great deal of emphasis, essential gear can be defined in a manner as detailed as you would like. I mean, if you wanted to, you could just define every pieces of gear or equipment in the game with its own character sheets, with a special list of skills applicable to the weapon. That's an awful lot of work that most groups won't do, but the rules do support it. You can even give particular pieces of gear unique aspects relating to its history or personal significance, etc.

You actually have a very wide range of options on how to do equipment in Fate. There isn't a standard model for equipment, but there are quite a lot of examples of workable models for handling gear and equipment. Some very simple, some incredibly detailed. The System Toolkit in particular has a lengthy discussion on how to do different types of equipment.


About the only thing FATE can do better is track someone's mental stress due to actually having mechanics for that and it doesn't seem like that would be too hard to house rule.

Fate's method of doing equipment is probably better than any vaguely rules-light system I have ever seen, simply because it scales to any degree of detail. It's certainly better than D&D's method of "+1 Weapons." It's a hell of a lot more interesting to have;

King Harold's Sword (Weapon: 2)
"Symbol of Authority"
"Breaks Upon My Dishonor"
"Supernaturally Keen"
Rally The Troops: By holding this sword aloft, its legendary provenance may be used to inspire nearby troops. The wielder may use his Fight skill in place of Rapport to inspire soldiers in the same zone.

than to have;

+2 Longsword of King Harold

Wouldn't you agree? The first is an example of a special weapon in fate; its aspects give a clue to what it's useful for (and in what circumstances it might be a hindrance). Those aspects can be tagged like any other. Its stunt gives it something unusual that it can do, beyond that of a normal sword. Other than being "Supernaturally Keen", the fate version of that sword could fit just fine into a nonmagic fantasy setting and still be interesting and mechanically distinct from other swords of the same type. By contrast, the D&D version of that sword is quite boring and wouldn't work at all in any setting that didn't presuppose magic.


However, I didn't think of doing a lot of these things in Cortex until I had read FATE. I like what FATE is trying to do, I just don't like its execution.

My point is that you seem to be misunderstanding or ignoring wide swaths of its execution.

NichG
2013-12-29, 04:21 PM
I would say Aspects are (trying to be) more than just 'characterization'. Aspects aren't just 'happy-go-lucky' or 'suffering from great loss in the past' or 'hates fish', they can also be concrete things 'Missing a leg', narrative things 'the guy who gets things done', or just weird random stuff 'Berlin 1942'. Not to mention aspects applied to scenes 'On fire', 'Dense smoke', etc.

The issue is that basically, Aspects are a great idea for a rules heavy game, but they're kind of underwhelming for a rules light game. The big insight in Aspects is a conceptual framework to treat everything like a label, and then allow those labels to be 'activated' at need - basically, they're taking a whole bunch of things which conceptually you might be tempted to created specific subsystems for and saying 'look, all of these things are basically modifiers on the basic situation, so lets just make a system where these modifiers can be activated in a consistent way and then do their thing'.

Its similar to 4e D&D's heavy use of descriptors. By specifying rules terms with a syntactic cue, the game system explicitly differentiates between those things that are merely window dressing and those things that have attached crunch. A room could be warm, but only if it is [Warm] can it interact with powers that cue off of the [Warm] descriptor. Aspects do the same thing, kinda - you could be a friendly person, but if you're a [Friendly] person, conceivably you have powers/interactions that are different because of it.

In FATE, though, these [Labels] don't have explicit rules for interactions (and they hardly could, since the system is trying to be open-ended enough that you can use a random phrase as an Aspect). Thats kind of where the Aspects fall flat - when it comes to narrative consequences, how do I know that me being a [Mover and shaker] would let me cause a building to fall down? Or is the GM going to interpret the narrative consequences of that differently, so I can get a bill pushed through congress but I can't do demolition. Or maybe I only ever get the +2 from it.

So I think if one made a version of FATE where there were a specific list of Aspects, both for characters and for scenes, that gave examples of how they interacted and also what sorts of narrative consequences - not mechanical ones - they could create, then that would be a 'rules medium' game where the Aspects would have a bit more bite. It'd also be a lot easier to shift that towards 'rules light' by encouraging off-the-cuff homebrew of new Aspects than to shift people out of the mindset of 'Aspects = +2 to roll or reroll and thats it' that the rules seem to encourage.

Scow2
2013-12-29, 04:34 PM
The reason to prefer Lures Right games over Freeform is a pretty simple one: Freeform completely lacks mechanical tension or ways to arbitrate 'chance of failure' and 'chance of success' actions. Giving mechanical weight to characterization allows someone's characterization to actually matter: As FATE puts it, it's the difference between Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, and Chuck Norris, who all have same/comparable skill sets but different style.

CombatOwl
2013-12-29, 04:55 PM
See, that's exactly what I don't get about all these "rules lite" games, which FATE is a good example (but far from the worst) of.

I'm not sure I would even call Fate "rules-light". Fate Accelerated Edition certainly is rules-light, being a complete usable system in 43 pages of a $5 book. But Fate Core weighs in at 302 pages for the core book and that really ought to include the 182 pages of the System Toolkit (which anyone wanting to run Fate ought to read). And yet with 484 pages of rules, a lot of players still don't even recognize that it has models for basic functions of a game like handling equipment and such. Not just one model for equipment, but multiple models for how to handle equipment. Models that can overlap. It's actually a pretty hefty system, but it's very internally consistent so it doesn't require hundreds of pages of specific exceptions like most rules-heavy systems do. It's not nearly so rules-heavy as something like D&D, Palladium, or GURPS... but it's certainly not on the level of genuine rules-light systems either. Fate is somewhere inbetween.


All these systems do is giving technical terminology to things that a good roleplaying game should already have and calling it game mechanics.
I mean, take Aspects. These are not some revolutionary mechanics nobody has ever thought of, they are just characterization. Every character and setting should have characterization, it's not suddendly FATE's exclusive just because it happened to slap a capitalized name on it.

Fate is pretty unusual for providing a mechanical characterization of abstract character qualities. Do you know of another system that does so well? Most of them rely on a merits/flaws system that aren't nearly so good at encapsulating what a quality actually means. A lot of systems have a merit that makes you brave, but very few systems simultaneously insist that bravery can be a problem too. That a quality is a quality for good or bad, and that the important facets of a character are always important to the direction of the story. Fate does that, but comparatively few other systems outside of the Fudge family can say the same.

From a system design standpoint, fate/fudge's aspects are an unusual innovation. Not because role-players weren't playing out these things, but because it actually provides mechanical support for that style of play. Not many game systems do so.


Second, Aspects as they are presented are fairly shallow and limitated game mechanics. A +2 bonus or a reroll, while certanly useful enough to justify working on your Aspects, are not interesting. At the same time, this greatly limits what Aspects can do, creating shallow characters that only have aspects that have some practical purpose, instead of minor psychological quirks and backstories that might never come up but that help immersion nonetheless.

And that description of aspects leaves out quite literally the majority of their function. Aspects can also be used to give other people a bonus, or to increase passive resistance. They can also be used to create aspects on a scene, or to arrive immediately on a scene, or any other declaration of detail on a scene. Aspects are also the means by which you acquire more fate points--you spend fate points on aspects and sometimes stunts, but you also regain fate points by having aspects compelled. Aspects also direct what sort of complications arise in a scene or over an adventure. Aspects can also be used to assure that a character always has a particular piece of equipment.

You actually want aspects that both help and hinder. Otherwise you run out of fate points. You need aspects that can not only be used to help you sometimes, but can also be used by the GM to compel an aspect. This is something that multiple people on this thread have completely ignored in favor of this notion that all they do is provide a +2 bonus. If that's how you're playing Fate, aspects must be pretty boring, but it's also not a fair characterization of how Fate actually works.


Which brings us to the next point: why are people praising rules lite systems when playing freeform is an option? At the level of simplicity that FATE rules present (but again FATE is far from being the only example of this) you might just as well run only on a few gentlemen's agreement and the occasional dice roll.

Fate's system has a simple premise, but it's actually fairly mechanically nuanced if your group bothers to set it up that way. The system supports a very wide range of play. Your group can play Fate with the mechanical complexity set on low, or you can play it with an immense amount of mechanical detail. That's why people use Fate--because they can use a system that's tuned to the level of complexity they want without having to relearn a whole new set of rules from the ground up. Some groups like something easy, some groups like something complex, some groups like something in between. Fate lets you run any of those--that's why it's got a lot of attention.


I get the intention of FATE, it's nice that it tells you that the most important part is having fun and making some cool stories instead of "winning", but that's not what makes a system worthwile to me. I'm not buying rolplaying games on their "intention", I'm buying them because I think I can put my ideas into practice better through some intresting and balanced rules I couldn't come up with on the fly.

Perhaps you should actually read Fate Core and the System Toolkit? A lot of people build opinions on its complexity by sitting a session with a GM who's not bothering with the bells and whistles (Fate is very much a modular game, the group picks which it wants to use). Some GMs don't bother to do much with aspects (leaving them as little more than a way to occasionally gain a bonus), some GMs actually follow the book's advice and build the game almost completely around them. It plays very differently in either case. Some GMs don't bother to use any equipment model, others will define everything. Most will be somewhere inbetween.


Otherwise what they are selling us is not a system, it's a guide, a set of guidelines that we might want to follow regardless of what system we are playing.

They have an actual system underneath all the advice. One that is very easy to learn, very internally consistant, and which allows for a lot more nuance than people give it credit for--if the fate point economy is quick.


Just to give you an example, you could very easily slap the Aspect and Fate Points system of FATE in D&D and it would work just fine. An occasional +2 on a roll would not be much in D&D, but a reroll would. Just give an arbitrary number of FATE points instead of tiyng them to Stunts and you're all set.

You'd have to do a hell of a lot more than that to move aspects and fate points to D&D, but yes you can house rule the hell out of D&D and cram them in.


Aspects are houserule-level of complexity, something anyone could come up with.

I guess, but D&D would be very difficult to run with aspects. "I declare that the Balor is missing his Vorpal Sword today," "You're being attacked by Solars tonight because the party cleric took "Hated By The Celestial Host"..."

D&D would be awfully cumbersome with aspects. You could do it, for sure, but I don't understand why you would.


In fact, mechanically, Aspects already have you doing all the work. All the Aspects system does is telling you "when it makes sense with your character's characterization you should be able to have a reroll or a bonus, provided you can't just spam it all the times. Ocasionally they might provide you with a challenge instead". Uh... Yeah, nice idea. But not really complex enough to warrant calling it a "system". It's basically trademarked common sense.

You seem to be quite literally neglecting to mention most of the functions of an aspect in Fate.


The only thing in FATE that approaches the level of complexity and thought I would expect from a ropleplaying game system are Stunts, which are basically circumstancial D&D-like feats, hardly an innovative concept.

That you get to define. That's a fairly notable difference.


In FATE, though, these [Labels] don't have explicit rules for interactions (and they hardly could, since the system is trying to be open-ended enough that you can use a random phrase as an Aspect). Thats kind of where the Aspects fall flat - when it comes to narrative consequences, how do I know that me being a [Mover and shaker] would let me cause a building to fall down? Or is the GM going to interpret the narrative consequences of that differently, so I can get a bill pushed through congress but I can't do demolition. Or maybe I only ever get the +2 from it.

Depending on how silly you want the game to be, it could be either. On a highly silly game based on wordplay, "mover and shaker" could mean that you could get a +2 on both attempts to cause an earthquake and attempts to get a bill through congress. Where it starts and ends is mainly a matter of group consensus, and discussion ahead of time about what it means with the GM.

It's why most Fate games have you describing the origin and definition of an aspect as a phase during creation. But yes, you could just do a comedy game based on clever wordplay with Fate.

AMFV
2013-12-29, 04:58 PM
That you get to define. That's a fairly notable difference.

I'm pretty sure that the Oberoni Fallacy right there. Just because you can customize something in a game, doesn't mean that the game comes with that as a feature.

Edit: I've only briefly skimmed FATE, but it seemed to have many of the same problems as many such "lite" systems where the mechanics are almost irrelevant and I feel like I'd be better off playing a freeform game.

CombatOwl
2013-12-29, 05:02 PM
I'm pretty sure that the Oberoni Fallacy right there. Just because you can customize something in a game, doesn't mean that the game comes with that as a feature.

It's explicitly a feature of the game. There are only a handful of actual stunts mentioned in the book, and they are to a one examples to illustrate what a stunt might be. Skills have three stunts listed as examples of stunts linked to that skill. There isn't even a list of stunts to pick from in Fate, you literally make the stunts that best fit your character.

Some settings have actually created lists of stunts (Dresden Files, for example), but even those aren't exhaustive.


Edit: I've only briefly skimmed FATE, but it seemed to have many of the same problems as many such "lite" systems where the mechanics are almost irrelevant and I feel like I'd be better off playing a freeform game.

I dunno, there's a pretty big difference between needing 6 shifts and coming up two short on the roll and saying "Oh, I do this because I want it to happen."

AMFV
2013-12-29, 05:03 PM
It's explicitly a feature of the game. There are only a handful of actual stunts mentioned in the book, and they are to a one examples to illustrate what a stunt might be. Skills have three stunts listed as examples of stunts linked to that skill. There isn't even a list of stunts to pick from in Fate, you literally make the stunts that best fit your character.

I wouldn't call that a feature, anymore than "assembly required" is a feature... yes, if you enjoy building furniture it might be alright. But it's not a feature it's a hassle, and it may be really frustrating if you don't like building furniture.

CombatOwl
2013-12-29, 05:05 PM
I wouldn't call that a feature, anymore than "assembly required" is a feature... yes, if you enjoy building furniture it might be alright. But it's not a feature it's a hassle, and it may be really frustrating if you don't like building furniture.

So "the system doesn't support the character I want to play" is a feature of D&D? Because I'm quite certain that the problem exists in games with finite lists of feats and such.

Scow2
2013-12-29, 05:10 PM
If you can play a freeform game that DOESN'T quickly devolve into arguments over who's capable of what and what sort of thing happens in response to a particular event, I want to know what fairytale world you live in.

Rhynn
2013-12-29, 05:11 PM
I wouldn't call that a feature, anymore than "assembly required" is a feature... yes, if you enjoy building furniture it might be alright. But it's not a feature it's a hassle, and it may be really frustrating if you don't like building furniture.

When the specifics of an ability boil down to "it does what it sounds like" plus general mechanics, that's not "assembly required." I have no FATE experience, but HeroQuest works pretty much exactly the same: all mechanics are equal, and almost no ability has any rules besides from how they work for tests. "Strong 19" lets you do things that strength lets you. (It's probably functionally identical to "Incredibly Strong 19", but that sounds more impressive, which has value in itself.)

Actually, HeroQuest seems to have some similarities here. In HQ, "Stubborn 18" can be a hindrance or a help, depending on what the GM thinks appropriate. (Something like "Sword & Shield Fighting 17" probably can't be a hindrance, though.) The abilities aren't as mechanically deep, nor usually as broad, as Aspects seem to be, though.

AMFV
2013-12-29, 05:13 PM
So "the system doesn't support the character I want to play" is a feature of D&D? Because I'm quite certain that the problem exists in games with finite lists of feats and such.

It's not marketed as a feature, it's also a problem with the system. But the ability to homebrew things in D&D to make a concept is not a feature. In this case they're selling a bug (not enough of they system done) and they're calling it a feature. The ability to create your own things because the developers didn't isn't and will never be a feature. Now easily modularity, that might be a feature, but the fact that there isn't much there almost definitively is not.


When the specifics of an ability boil down to "it does what it sounds like" plus general mechanics, that's not "assembly required." I have no FATE experience, but HeroQuest works pretty much exactly the same: all mechanics are equal, and almost no ability has any rules besides from how they work for tests. "Strong 19" lets you do things that strength lets you. (It's probably functionally identical to "Incredibly Strong 19", but that sounds more impressive, which has value in itself.)

Actually, HeroQuest seems to have some similarities here. In HQ, "Stubborn 18" can be a hindrance or a help, depending on what the GM thinks appropriate. (Something like "Sword & Shield Fighting 17" probably can't be a hindrance, though.) The abilities aren't as mechanically deep, nor usually as broad, as Aspects seem to be, though.

...And we're in freeform but with NUMBERS. If there's no rule and it's just the DM call, it might as well be freeform. Just now we have numbers.

Tengu_temp
2013-12-29, 05:14 PM
The difference between FATE (and other very rules-light systems) and freeform is that the former offers a form of conflict resolution other than DM judgement. Combat is generally more fun when it's accompanied by dice rolling, even if it's heavily narrative combat.

I think FATE is a pretty neat system. It requires a fairly specific approach, but if you ask me that approach is fairly easy to grasp by people who never played RPGs before, and by those who have an open mind. It's hard to understand only by people who only played DND and DND-like games, are diehard DND fans and not willing to learn other systems, and cannot comprehend a game that focuses more on creating a fun story and less on killing monsters and taking their stuff, or on creating challenges for the players to overcome.

Also, Spirit of the Century is free, and the rules are very simple and quick to learn. So I recommend checking it out for everyone; even if you don't like the game, you don't waste much time by learning it, and at least you broaden your horizons by reading a system with a very different approach than DND.

Rhynn
2013-12-29, 05:19 PM
...And we're in freeform but with NUMBERS. If there's no rule and it's just the DM call, it might as well be freeform. Just now we have numbers.

I guess you can pretend that hundreds of pages of system mechanics (FATE, HeroQuest) is freeform, but that's not a definition anyone else is likely to agree on, especially when the systems are pretty rigorous. (And turning a discussion into a semantical argument when your definition isn't common usage is a bit discourteous and achieves nothing.) There's nothing freeform about how abilities work in HeroQuest: you have a chance of success, you have augments, you have mechanical consequences, simple and extended tests, etc. They just work on a paradigm significantly different from that of D&D and its descendants.

Scow2
2013-12-29, 05:20 PM
I'm pretty sure that the Oberoni Fallacy right there. Just because you can customize something in a game, doesn't mean that the game comes with that as a feature.No, it's not an Oberoni fallacy. You keep using that term. It does not mean what you think it means.

If the rules for creating custom aspects didn't work, or if the premade aspects/stunts/skills didn't work as intended and needed you to replace them, that would be Oberoni Fallacy.

However, a game that provides guidelines/toolkits for homebrewing and encouraging use of them is NOT a case of the Oberoni Fallacy.

AMFV
2013-12-29, 05:27 PM
No, it's not an Oberoni fallacy. You keep using that term. It does not mean what you think it means.

If the rules for creating custom aspects didn't work, or if the premade aspects/stunts/skills didn't work as intended and needed you to replace them, that would be Oberoni Fallacy.

However, a game that provides guidelines/toolkits for homebrewing and encouraging use of them is NOT a case of the Oberoni Fallacy.

I disagree, D&D provides example of adaptations, which could be called feature. If rule zero, or DM involvement is needed to make a system work as intended (as it is in the case, since the features are not present) that is Oberani Fallacy to argue that the system is working as intended. Don't pee on my leg and my leg and tell me it's raining, and don't sell me something I have to develop a large portion of, and call it a feature. It's not a feature, even if it's got the best guidelines in the world, it's still "Some Assembly Required". Just because the directions are really good and all the parts are simple, doesn't make it not something you have to do.

Now, some people like that, I personally like building things that are some assembly required. I even like developing stuff for game systems. But it isn't a feature, and the fact that people are marketing as such is a problem.


I guess you can pretend that hundreds of pages of system mechanics (FATE, HeroQuest) is freeform, but that's not a definition anyone else is likely to agree on, especially when the systems are pretty rigorous. (And turning a discussion into a semantical argument when your definition isn't common usage is a bit discourteous and achieves nothing.) There's nothing freeform about how abilities work in HeroQuest: you have a chance of success, you have augments, you have mechanical consequences, simple and extended tests, etc. They just work on a paradigm significantly different from that of D&D and its descendants.

If something can have a positive or negative effect completely at the discretion of the DM, then it might as well not be there. The problem with rules-light system is that they are more likely to devolve into arguments not less. When you spend several hours arguing over whether being strong is a benefit or a detriment in a particular scenario, that is certainly something I could see happening.

Now it could work for some groups, but those with a heavy focus on the rules and arguing, probably less so, you'd be at about the same level as a freeform group in that case.

Rhynn
2013-12-29, 05:29 PM
GM involvement is needed to make any RPG with a GM role work as intended, though.

Oberoni Fallacy involves changing the rules to fix them and make the system work.

Neither HeroQuest nor FATE appear to need anyone to change the rules. In FATE, you may have to pick which rules to use, but that's a feature of many, many RPGs, none of them freeform.

CombatOwl
2013-12-29, 05:29 PM
I have to concur on the aspects thing - as written, they actually have a tendency to reduce some interesting RP possibilities into a very bland mechanical effect.

I would advise basically throwing out the current mechanical system for tagging aspects and instead say 'When you tag an aspect, you gain the ability to take an action related to that aspect that has the corresponding, logical storyline consequences'. This requires a bit more work from the GM (they have to be ready to improvise 'what the logical storyline consequences' are, and they have to also make sure that players all take aspects that are reasonable and around the same degree as eachother).

So, for example, if there's a rockfall on the other side of a chasm and someone has the Aspect 'Student of the Great Wizard', tagging the aspect allows them to interact directly with the rocks on the other side of the chasm (e.g. through implied magic). If someone has the Aspect 'Never Sleeps' then tagging the aspect would let them, say, completely avoid the effects of a sedative dose. If someone has the Aspect 'A friend in every port' then they could tag the aspect to find a friend on the spot, regardless of circumstances.

Basically you really want to push the idea to the players that aspects are more than just 'I can sometimes get a +2 or reroll things'. It really isn't a system that is interesting if you focus on the mechanics, so you have to make sure everyone understands that there's more to focus on and that the things on their sheet have meaning beyond just determining bonuses on dice rolls.

This is how aspects actually work in the core system. Aspects are always used for more than what you can do by invoking them. People have focused heavily on what happens when you invoke an aspect, but they have neglected to mention other basic functions of aspects. Among the more basic functions is that an aspect is always true. If your character "Never Sleeps," he literally does not sleep. No roll required. It doesn't require you to invoke it for a +2 on a skill test not to sleep. You automatically don't sleep. You skip the mechanics, automatically succeed on not sleeping. If a character has "My Father's Sword" then they always have it when they want it. That may change through play--maybe it gets broken, or lost over the course of play. But until that aspect is removed (either as a consequence or by changing it at a milestone) the sword is always available.

It's entirely within the bounds of the core system to use aspects in place of extras for magic. One of the magic systems the core book describes has a character taking magic as an extra which grants a bunch of extra utility to the Lore skill, but another system that would work just as well is for a person to cast a spell by invoking a magical aspect during the use of a skill to make it implicitly magical. Want to move a rock with telekinesis? Roll Athletics and tag "Wizard Of The Tower Arcane" while doing it. Making that change doesn't break anything, it just means that wizards are paying an Aspect slot rather than Refresh. If you want to learn a spell to do it better, take stunts to let you use Lore in place of other skills for certain kinds of tests, then stack Lore.

AMFV
2013-12-29, 05:35 PM
GM involvement is needed to make any RPG with a GM role work as intended, though.

Oberoni Fallacy involves changing the rules to fix them and make the system work.

Neither HeroQuest nor FATE appear to need anyone to change the rules. In FATE, you may have to pick which rules to use, but that's a feature of many, many RPGs, none of them freeform.

In FATE you have to construct the system from things that are missing. I would call that Oberoni Fallacy, since I would call homebrewing 'changing the rules' however I could see that somebody might disagree with that definition. In any case, my objection still stands even if it may not be called the same thing.

Scow2
2013-12-29, 05:37 PM
If FATE is Unplayable/Oberoni Fallacy, then so is D&D 3.5 because it doesn't come with any playable characters (And those it does come with break the rules).

(Though games like GURPS and Ironclaw and Savage Worlds are even more "Broken" in this regard, since they're point-buy instead of having premade packets of capability)

Rhynn
2013-12-29, 05:40 PM
In FATE you have to construct the system from things that are missing. I would call that Oberoni Fallacy, since I would call homebrewing 'changing the rules' however I could see that somebody might disagree with that definition. In any case, my objection still stands even if it may not be called the same thing.

I have to admit that between reading your posts and CombatOwl's posts, I have to conclude you're misrepresenting the system here (probably out of not understanding it fully).

Again, using HeroQuest as an example, "Strong" does what it says. There are many rules for abilities (including a very limited set of modifiers for the most powerful uses of magic, e.g. teleportation), there's just no list of abilities.

And it's not that the GM is needed to interpret abilities; the GM just decides that in this test, your trait X is a hindrance. Players have enormous power in using their abilities: you can have "Bag of Seven Winds 18" as an ability (a magical item), and that does what you say it does, so long as everyone agrees.

If you play with people who can't get over trying to use the rules to prevail against each other, yes, you need a game that works on the D&D 3E/4E paradigm (not actually shared by older editions). That's very sad for you, but many people are clearly more fortunate.

AMFV
2013-12-29, 05:42 PM
If FATE is Unplayable/Oberoni Fallacy, then so is D&D 3.5 because it doesn't come with any playable characters (And those it does come with break the rules).

(Though games like GURPS and Ironclaw and Savage Worlds are even more "Broken" in this regard, since they're point-buy instead of having premade packets of capability)

It's not unplayable, just it is as written. 3.5 does come with starting characters... I'm saying that to say that requiring a large amount of constructive work to start is not a feature, and shouldn't be marketed as one, it's a question of marketing appropriately.

I don't mind that sort of thing myself, but it's not a feature, it's a bug, it's poor form to put something flawed or unfinished out and then say: "Well you can finish it so it's however you want!" As though that were an intended feature, I have no doubt that in this case it was an intended feature. But I disagree strenuously with it actually being a feature.

I'm not sure how point-buy factors in here... In Savage Worlds you can construct a character from scratch without having to invent any rules. The same is true of GURPS, of Ironclaw, of 3.5 D&D, of AD&D... if you cannot build a character without having to invent rules, it is a broken system, while some people may like it, it doesn't make it less a broken system.


I have to admit that between reading your posts and CombatOwl's posts, I have to conclude you're misrepresenting the system here (probably out of not understanding it fully).

Again, using HeroQuest as an example, "Strong" does what it says. There are many rules for abilities (including a very limited set of modifiers for the most powerful uses of magic, e.g. teleportation), there's just no list of abilities.

And it's not that the GM is needed to interpret abilities; the GM just decides that in this test, your trait X is a hindrance. Players have enormous power in using their abilities: you can have "Bag of Seven Winds 18" as an ability (a magical item), and that does what you say it does, so long as everyone agrees.

If you play with people who can't get over trying to use the rules to prevail against each other, yes, you need a game that works on the D&D 3E/4E paradigm (not actually shared by older editions). That's very sad for you, but many people are clearly more fortunate.

The problem is that "as long as everyone agrees" is less a rules system and more a freeform agreement, just with numbers tacked on. There's no problem with playing that way. It's like playing a different version of a card game or inventing your own houserules. But for things to work they require houserules, which is a problem as far as design goes. I personally don't mind inventing and coming up with houserules. But the fact that they are necessary to interpret the system is to my mind a design flaw.

Rhynn
2013-12-29, 05:48 PM
The problem is that "as long as everyone agrees" is less a rules system and more a freeform agreement, just with numbers tacked on. There's no problem with playing that way. It's like playing a different version of a card game or inventing your own houserules. But for things to work they require houserules, which is a problem as far as design goes. I personally don't mind inventing and coming up with houserules. But the fact that they are necessary to interpret the system is to my mind a design flaw.

They require rulings, which is e.g. a central tenet of OSR D&D: "rulings, not rules."

Just because a RPG works on a different paradigm from what you're used to doesn't make it freeform. All RPGs rely on social contracts to work to begin with.

The systems are robust and defined, and take up hundreds of pages. D&D 3.X involves much more rule-wrangling because of the amount of rules and their complexity. Rulings are a much simpler approach. Of course you'll have problems with players who insist on creating them, e.g. by arguing (the solution there, incidentally, is the same in all systems: "GM makes ruling, player shuts up or walks").

Scow2
2013-12-29, 05:52 PM
It's not unplayable, just it is as written. 3.5 does come with starting characters... I'm saying that to say that requiring a large amount of constructive work to start is not a feature, and shouldn't be marketed as one, it's a question of marketing appropriately.

I don't mind that sort of thing myself, but it's not a feature, it's a bug, it's poor form to put something flawed or unfinished out and then say: "Well you can finish it so it's however you want!" As though that were an intended feature, I have no doubt that in this case it was an intended feature. But I disagree strenuously with it actually being a feature.

I'm not sure how point-buy factors in here... In Savage Worlds you can construct a character from scratch without having to invent any rules. The same is true of GURPS, of Ironclaw, of 3.5 D&D, of AD&D... if you cannot build a character without having to invent rules, it is a broken system, while some people may like it, it doesn't make it less a broken system.You don't have to invent rules for FATE, either. You do have to invent the aspects, skills, and stunts... but those follow rules that are just as much "Invention" as making a character.

AMFV
2013-12-29, 05:53 PM
They require rulings, which is e.g. a central tenet of OSR D&D: "rulings, not rules."

Just because a RPG works on a different paradigm from what you're used to doesn't make it freeform. All RPGs rely on social contracts to work to begin with.

This is true, but acknowledging that not all groups could function with a certain paradigm is important. Many rules dense system would work for a greater variety of more diverse groups than a rules light system. I personally like a moderate amount of rules, having to make a judgement call in a room full of engineering students and science majors tends to always provoke an argument, in my experience.



The systems are robust and defined, and take up hundreds of pages. D&D 3.X involves much more rule-wrangling because of the amount of rules and their complexity. Rulings are a much simpler approach. Of course you'll have problems with players who insist on creating them, e.g. by arguing (the solution there, incidentally, is the same in all systems: "GM makes ruling, player shuts up or walks").

And that's not a feature, saying: "The Houserules can be enforced and are required to be created" is Oberoni Fallacy, because the system doesn't work without external ruling applied to it. That's a problem to my mind, a system should be just that, a working system of rules that can be applied without having to construct any kind of personal ruling on most issues before continuing.


You don't have to invent rules for FATE, either. You do have to invent the aspects, skills, and stunts... but those follow rules that are just as much "Invention" as making a character.


I disagree and if they are then we're back to them having little to no mechanical significance. Inventing all of those things is having to homebrew something. I don't think that there's anything wrong with that sort of game, or with enjoying it. But I do feel that marketing that as a feature rather than a half-finished system is a problem. A system should be fairly universal and require little adjustment to start, and I'm just not seeing that here. Now many of the later created settings for FATE, fix that problem, but the core rules themselves don't.

Scow2
2013-12-29, 05:57 PM
The problem with an exhaustive system is that it ends up like 3.5, and most of the rules made ARE broken, requiring fixing, then invoking the Oberoni Fallacy.

You can't have an Oberoni Fallacy if there are no rules to be broken (But you can if the lack of a rule doesn't work.

Tengu_temp
2013-12-29, 05:57 PM
This is true, but acknowledging that not all groups could function with a certain paradigm is important.

And that's different from every RPG ever, how? I've yet to encounter a game paradigm that would fit all groups well. Standard DND approach sure as hell doesn't count.

AMFV
2013-12-29, 06:02 PM
And that's different from every RPG ever, how? I've yet to encounter a game paradigm that would fit all groups well. Standard DND approach sure as hell doesn't count.

Well but standard D&D can work without too much creativity as written. FATE simply doesn't, and that's not to say that people can't play FATE but the core rules as written aren't really a complete system they're more of a skeleton. I have issues with people marketing that as a completed system.

Or saying that things that are clearly a problem with the system are a feature. I mean that's pretty much my opinion regarding the issue.


The problem with an exhaustive system is that it ends up like 3.5, and most of the rules made ARE broken, requiring fixing, then invoking the Oberoni Fallacy.

You can't have an Oberoni Fallacy if there are no rules to be broken (But you can if the lack of a rule doesn't work.

I think all systems require some fixing, as written. I'm arguing that the fact that it needs fixing isn't a feature, but a negative. To my mind, and marketing it as a feature is problematic at best.

Scow2
2013-12-29, 06:29 PM
It's easier to make something than fix something. How many houserules get traction across D&D games? The broken rules create expectations about the game that takes more than just houseruling to fix.

You also assume that every game system is allowed to be tweaked and remain that system.

FATE feels like FATE regardless of what rulesets you're using. Changing the rules of D&D can **** up the entire game, and breeds attitudes of entitlements to the rules (Or bitterness toward the system from broken rules).

Zavoniki
2013-12-29, 06:40 PM
So what? When you use a skill point, it always has the same mechanical effect in D&D. When you spend CP in GURPS, it always has the same mechanical effect. If I add another dot in a skill in Storyteller, it has the same mechanical effect. Every time. That's what makes these collections of rules systems. The system defines what mechanical effects result a certain expenditure of resources in a predictable way.


But its not the same mechanical effect. If I spent a skill point to raise a skill from 2 to 3 I am now getting a +3 on a roll not a +2. There's a scaling bonus there and Aspects don't have that. They always do the same thing.



If I'm playing D&D, and my character cast a fireball, it's always got the same predictable mechanical effect. <caster level> in d6s, up to 10. Is that a problem? I don't really think so.


But you don't get the same mechanical effect because caster level changes. Aspects don't change, they stay the same. Also, even if Fireball stayed the same, it does more than an Aspect mechanically. It covers an area and deals damage to everyone in it. You want to have it hit enemies not friends, but sometimes you don't get that option if you want to hit enough enemies.



These mechanical differences gain variety and differences in utility by being used in different circumstances. A skill point has a predictable effect, but if I put it into Bluff it isn't useful for Use Magic Device. If I put my points in Science! in GURPS, it has the same mechanical effect as if I had put it into Guns!, except I can only use it when doing science stuff--as opposed to gun stuff. In Fate, you are filling a finite number of Aspect slots--yes, all Aspects have the same root functions, but when those functions apply and what consequences follow from them differ greatly.


But Aspects aren't covering the same things as skills. FATE has a skill system to do that. Aspects are covering Advantages/Disadvantages/Feats/Maybe Magic/Maybe Superpowers/etc... or all the stuff thats not covered by skills. So having every single one of these things produce the same mechanical effect on the game is bad.



Are you suggesting that other games are boring because they attach certain class features to certain levels, or that those class features work the same every time you use them? Or that they treat every skill in the game with the exact same system? Do you levy the same criticism at every game system that treats broad classes of actions with the same mechanical treatment--like Savage Worlds, Cortex, D&D, GURPS, Storyteller, Palladium, etc?


Huh?



I mean, you've got to define aspects as something. What should they be defined as doing if not the rather broad utility of being used to; gain a bonus on rolls, rerolling a test, providing allies a bonus, increasing the difficulty of resistance, initiating compels, and providing complications? What additional feature do you feel would "fix" the implementation of aspects? Or is it a matter of aspects being useful for too many different things that is the problem? There's an awful lot of things you can do with them, besides getting a +2 bonus, and their variety drives immense variation in utility for compulsions and compels--a major part of the game.


The issue is not what you can do with Aspects. Its that every Aspect does the same set of things when it comes up.



How do you differentiate them more than "completely different"? The Fate method of handling aspects can easily result in one character getting a +6 to some specific sort of action and another not only getting no benefit from his aspects, but actually taking a penalty to their attempt to do that same action. That's a pretty wide variation in utility. A pretty wide mechanical difference, as it were.

Setting aside the fact that at least half the point of aspects is for initiating compels and inspiring complications, which you haven't even touched on. When one set of aspects leads to a quick fate point economy and another set leads to fate point depletion, there's a fairly substantial difference in mechanical effect too. But you're not talking about that part either.

That's not even getting into the alternative uses for aspects discussed in the system toolkit.


I would add something that makes Aspects cost/give more Fate Points and change the numerical bonus they provide(maybe extra dice for some) at a minimum. Basically something to make not all Aspects equal.



...What? You're criticizing fate aspects for being mechanically boring, but hold up a system where literally everything is done by attribute dice + skill dice + assets - complications? Literally, everything you do in Cortex is exactly the same mechanically. You don't even get choices like you do in Fate--whether to invoke an aspect or leave it be. You can't create assets on the fly in cortex, you can create aspects on the fly in fate (either by spending fate points or using a skill to do it).


I'm going to compare Aspects and Complications/Assets. Fate's skills cover Cortex's Attribute+Skill and I don't think either one of those systems is particularly better or worse than the other. I feel like you haven't read the Cortex rules... because they work exactly the way Aspects do with some additions. Most Assets have a benefit that requires plot points and whenever a Complication comes up you get a plot point(unless the Complication is always on, like say overweight). If an Asset would hurt you not help you get a plot point and you can spend plot points when a Complication would hurt you. For example I was running a Cortex game where one of the players was an Overweight cat who was being pushed off a building. There Overweight lets him better resist being pushed off because he's a Fat Cat.

I think your misunderstanding my objection to Aspects. My problem is not that they play out the same way mechanically every time. That's actually a good thing and a result of good design. If I've implied that this was otherwise than I apologize, that was not my intention. My issue is that Aspects are identical in terms of what they do in the specific. A Cortex Asset can be differentiated from another by its die size at a minimum. Aspects don't have that.



But Cortex? I don't get why you would insist that Fate's aspects are less mechanically interesting than assets and complications in Cortex. The fact that Fate aspects are simultaneously helpful and harmful alone makes them more mechanically interesting than traits in Cortex.


The core rulebook for Cortex states that when Assets would hurt you they work like Complications and when Complications would help you they work like Assets. Or if it doesn't then I'm seriously misremembering the rules.



No they don't. They're added or subtracted from rolls. That's it. You don't get to choose when they're invoked, you don't get to create them when they're needed with skills, they don't drive compels or complications, you can't use them to increase other character's difficulties. You don't regenerate them in the same way either.

That's actually a rather notable point. Aspects don't just provide you with a bonus on some skill checks sometimes, they're also the means by which you acquire fate points.

John Smith
"Man With a Mission"
"Notable Enemies"
"License To Kill"
"Master Of Disguise"
"Strange Relationship With Destiny"

Not all of those aspects have the same mechanical purpose. Three of them are there for providing bonuses sometimes. One of them is there for basically the sole purpose of regaining fate points by offering easy fodder for compels and complications (Notable Enemies). Another is there because it's sometimes helpful, sometimes a way to get fate points (Strange Relationship With Destiny).

You don't get any of that with Cortex assets and complications. All Cortex gives you are things that either give a bonus or provide a penalty on a check--and never something that does both at different times. Unlike Cortex assets and complications, aspects are dual-faceted--sometimes a benefit, sometimes a hindrance. If you're "Brave Beyond Measure" that helps you when you need to stand your ground, but hurts you (by being fodder for compels) when you really ought to run. Cortex has nothing even approximating that dual-natured function of an aspect. Cortex doesn't even try to link game mechanics to narrative imperatives--that's beyond the scope of that system entirely.


... Actually yes Cortex Traits do work that way. That's one of the big things they are there far, creating a Plot Point economy.



Note also that Cortex's plot points may allow you to shape the direction of the story somewhat, but it doesn't do so in any mechanically definable way other than adjusting NPC behavior. Unlike Fate, where spending a fate point to define an aspect on a scene (or character) actually does result in a mechanical difference. Moreover, players are encouraged by the Cortex system not to use plot points to actually do anything unless they have to, because they get converted into character advancement later. Fate doesn't do that at all. Fate point collection isn't linked to character advancement at all, meaning that they get used a lot more often (and regenerated a lot more often). A good character in Fate will have a quick fate point economy; and therefore aspects that have a mechanical function other than providing you with bonuses.


Plot Points being linked with advancement was part of the Serenity roleplaying system and is notably missing from Cortex Core for reasons you have pointed out I assume.



So does Fate. The system doesn't presuppose what equipment model is best for how you play, leaving it up to the group to decide how they want to handle equipment. But it certainly does explain how to do so. It even provides complete systems for it. The fate books (Fate Core and the Fate System Toolkit) provide at least four ways.

1) It can be a prop with its own aspects and equipment stunts.
2) It can be defined as a character in its own right--everything in Fate can be built as a character if needed.
3) It can be built as an Extra.
4) It can be an aspect of a character or a scene.

You can pretty seamlessly mix all of those in the way that works best for the style of game you're playing. If you're playing a game about mecha pilots, you probably define those mecha as characters. If you're playing a game about mad scientists, you probably define your mad inventions as extras. If you're playing a game about fantasy adventurers questing for treasure, you probably define your gear as props with aspects and stunts. If you're playing a game where equipment doesn't matter very much, you probably just leave it to aspects of characters and scenes. You mix and match that as required to achieve the style of play your group is looking for. Unimportant equipment can lose a great deal of emphasis, essential gear can be defined in a manner as detailed as you would like. I mean, if you wanted to, you could just define every pieces of gear or equipment in the game with its own character sheets, with a special list of skills applicable to the weapon. That's an awful lot of work that most groups won't do, but the rules do support it. You can even give particular pieces of gear unique aspects relating to its history or personal significance, etc.

You actually have a very wide range of options on how to do equipment in Fate. There isn't a standard model for equipment, but there are quite a lot of examples of workable models for handling gear and equipment. Some very simple, some incredibly detailed. The System Toolkit in particular has a lengthy discussion on how to do different types of equipment.


I did not know that. Despite reading the FATE core book multiple times. Well now I feel a little silly.



King Harold's Sword (Weapon: 2)
"Symbol of Authority"
"Breaks Upon My Dishonor"
"Supernaturally Keen"
Rally The Troops: By holding this sword aloft, its legendary provenance may be used to inspire nearby troops. The wielder may use his Fight skill in place of Rapport to inspire soldiers in the same zone.

than to have;

+2 Longsword of King Harold

Wouldn't you agree? The first is an example of a special weapon in fate; its aspects give a clue to what it's useful for (and in what circumstances it might be a hindrance). Those aspects can be tagged like any other. Its stunt gives it something unusual that it can do, beyond that of a normal sword. Other than being "Supernaturally Keen", the fate version of that sword could fit just fine into a nonmagic fantasy setting and still be interesting and mechanically distinct from other swords of the same type. By contrast, the D&D version of that sword is quite boring and wouldn't work at all in any setting that didn't presuppose magic.


I agree the first weapon is better. I don't see how its a unique construct of the FATE system.



My point is that you seem to be misunderstanding or ignoring wide swaths of its execution.

WHERE?!?!? I want to like FATE. I really do. I have this sneaking suspicion that if you were to compile all of the variations of FATE together you'd have a really cool rules light system. The problem is Aspects. Aspects are identical to one another. That is my one and only narrativist complaint with the system. I have gamist complaints but the correct answer to all of them is Fate is narrativist and they aren't nearly as large as my problem with Aspects.

Let me explain and state it clearly and you(or someone else) can explain what I'm missing. Aspects are mechanically identical to one another. There is nothing, in the mechanics that differentiate Aspects from one another. Whenever you invoke one you will always get to choose from the same exact set of benefits and spend a Fate Point. Whenever you are compelled on one you will suffer from the same exact set of drawbacks and get a Fate Point. There isn't anything to denote that Destined to be a Hero! is different from Greedy! aside from when it can be used. Compare this to a Cortex trait, which at least has dice that change in size, or a GURPS advantage/disadvantage which can have wildly different mechanical effects. That's what I feel like Aspects should do beyond what they already do.

NichG
2013-12-29, 06:43 PM
Depending on how silly you want the game to be, it could be either. On a highly silly game based on wordplay, "mover and shaker" could mean that you could get a +2 on both attempts to cause an earthquake and attempts to get a bill through congress. Where it starts and ends is mainly a matter of group consensus, and discussion ahead of time about what it means with the GM.

It's why most Fate games have you describing the origin and definition of an aspect as a phase during creation. But yes, you could just do a comedy game based on clever wordplay with Fate.

See, this is my problem with it. +2 to 'attempt to cause an earthquake' doesn't mean anything, because by default a character can't just 'cause an earthquake'. There's no skill I can roll for 'causing an earthquake'.

The result is that Aspects mostly act to modify what can already be done with skills, rather than introducing actual new features to the character.

Consider: if I have the aspect 'I am literally god', it doesn't let me create new species from nothing or shape landforms or create worlds or cause souls to transmigrate or summon angels. It lets me get +2 to any skill check I can convince the GM that 'being god' would help with. In that vein it is exactly the same as 'I have a banana and am not afraid to use it'.

But 'being god' and 'having a banana' being basically equal in their function causes dissonance - it causes Aspects to be perceptually devalued, because you realize that no matter how awesome an idea you come up with, the practical consequence of that idea is basically the same (modulo your ability to argue a way for it to apply to a given situation).


This is how aspects actually work in the core system. Aspects are always used for more than what you can do by invoking them. People have focused heavily on what happens when you invoke an aspect, but they have neglected to mention other basic functions of aspects. Among the more basic functions is that an aspect is always true. If your character "Never Sleeps," he literally does not sleep. No roll required. It doesn't require you to invoke it for a +2 on a skill test not to sleep. You automatically don't sleep. You skip the mechanics, automatically succeed on not sleeping. If a character has "My Father's Sword" then they always have it when they want it. That may change through play--maybe it gets broken, or lost over the course of play. But until that aspect is removed (either as a consequence or by changing it at a milestone) the sword is always available.


I think this needs to be emphasized much much more strongly than it seems to be in the system as I've read through it/played it. Thats kind of why I think having a bunch of example Aspects and specific things that they do (like 'Never sleeps') would be a boon.

The +2 is actually irrelevant and distracting. I would actually consider removing the +2/reroll mechanics, because they 'explain away' the need for an Aspect to do anything above and beyond that to the reader. Instead say 'the player should come up with an example for each of their aspects of a way in which it would let them do something they could not otherwise do', sort of how Nobilis asks you a questionnaire to help narrow down what exactly your Domain covers and what kinds of effects you can produce by Preserving/Destroying/Changing it.

Anyhow, I am far more in favor of FATE run this way, with Aspects acting as actual character abilities rather than numerical modifiers, than I am of the 'apparent' mechanical system of +2/reroll (which is basically how it went in the two FATE games I've played)

Scow2
2013-12-29, 06:45 PM
You use Stunts for the more flamboyant things you can do, not Aspects. Aspects are the subtle traits about your character. "Cause an earthquake" would be a stunt, not an Aspect. But an aspect DOES let your Earth Wizard cast, affect, survive, and control earth-related spells better than anyone else.

Fireball would be a Stunt. Skills are skills. Aspects are context-sensitive Action Points.

NichG
2013-12-29, 07:31 PM
You use Stunts for the more flamboyant things you can do, not Aspects. Aspects are the subtle traits about your character. "Cause an earthquake" would be a stunt, not an Aspect. But an aspect DOES let your Earth Wizard cast, affect, survive, and control earth-related spells better than anyone else.

Fireball would be a Stunt. Skills are skills. Aspects are context-sensitive Action Points.

Well, suffice to say I think this interpretation makes for a much dryer and more boring game of FATE than the sort of game CombatOwl is talking about.

CombatOwl
2013-12-29, 08:03 PM
Anyhow, I am far more in favor of FATE run this way, with Aspects acting as actual character abilities rather than numerical modifiers, than I am of the 'apparent' mechanical system of +2/reroll (which is basically how it went in the two FATE games I've played)

Both are supposed to be in play at the same time. To use the aforementioned "My Father's Sword" aspect, you not only have the sword whenever you want it, but you can also invoke "My Father's Sword" in instances where it's dramatically appropriate. To use an OOTS reference, Roy would have "The Greenhilt Family Sword" which is an aspect that not only provides the sword, but also lets him tag it for a +2 when he's fighting Xykon, the bloodsworn enemy of the Greenhilt family.

They do a lot of things, but a lot of people apparently think its just about a +2 bonus.

erikun
2013-12-29, 08:17 PM
Let me explain and state it clearly and you(or someone else) can explain what I'm missing. Aspects are mechanically identical to one another. There is nothing, in the mechanics that differentiate Aspects from one another. Whenever you invoke one you will always get to choose from the same exact set of benefits and spend a Fate Point. Whenever you are compelled on one you will suffer from the same exact set of drawbacks and get a Fate Point. There isn't anything to denote that Destined to be a Hero! is different from Greedy! aside from when it can be used. Compare this to a Cortex trait, which at least has dice that change in size, or a GURPS advantage/disadvantage which can have wildly different mechanical effects. That's what I feel like Aspects should do beyond what they already do.
Perhaps I'm confused, but is this the problem? The fact that Fate Aspects give a +2 bonus while Cortex Traits give a +dX bonus? This sounds a lot like the d20 vs 3d6 discussion, and while the two may produce different results with different variables, that doesn't mean that one is necessarily better (or worse) than the other.

You've apparently equated everything else in Cortex to Fate (except the versatility of Aspects) and so if the biggest difference is that Cortex gives an extra die to roll, I'm not really seeing any significant difference.


Oberoni Fallacy
The Oberoni Fallacy pretty much states that the rules of the system either fail to cover a situation or handle it poorly. If I may ask: What situation might you encounter that the rules of the Fate system fail to cover?

Zavoniki
2013-12-29, 09:26 PM
Perhaps I'm confused, but is this the problem? The fact that Fate Aspects give a +2 bonus while Cortex Traits give a +dX bonus? This sounds a lot like the d20 vs 3d6 discussion, and while the two may produce different results with different variables, that doesn't mean that one is necessarily better (or worse) than the other.

You've apparently equated everything else in Cortex to Fate (except the versatility of Aspects) and so if the biggest difference is that Cortex gives an extra die to roll, I'm not really seeing any significant difference.


The difference is this. In Cortex if you are not given a Traits name you can still see the difference between traits through dice size and mechanical effect. If you remove an Aspects name it becomes the same as every other Aspect.

CombatOwl
2013-12-29, 09:29 PM
The difference is this. In Cortex if you are not given a Traits name you can still see the difference between traits through dice size and mechanical effect. If you remove an Aspects name it becomes the same as every other Aspect.

If you remove the name of "My Father's Sword," you don't have a sword anymore. If you remove the name of "Never Sleeps," you have to sleep again. If you remove the name of "Wizard of the Tower Arcane," you can't cast magic anymore. These seem like notable differences.

The fact that all of them can, under certain situations, be tagged for +2 to a check or for a reroll doesn't detract from their differences. Nor the extreme differences in how they're compelled or what consequences arise from them.

Scow2
2013-12-29, 10:11 PM
The difference is this. In Cortex if you are not given a Traits name you can still see the difference between traits through dice size and mechanical effect. If you remove an Aspects name it becomes the same as every other Aspect.FATE is not strictly a numbers-based game. It is nearly-freeform, while still laying out enough ground rules to avoid the pits of freeform (Namely, fair conflict resolution and meaning to actions... mostly.)


If you remove the name of "My Father's Sword," you don't have a sword anymore. If you remove the name of "Never Sleeps," you have to sleep again. If you remove the name of "Wizard of the Tower Arcane," you can't cast magic anymore. These seem like notable differences.

The fact that all of them can, under certain situations, be tagged for +2 to a check or for a reroll doesn't detract from their differences. Nor the extreme differences in how they're compelled or what consequences arise from them.Actually, if you remove the name of "Wizard of the Tower Arcane"'s name, you merely lose the tower, prestige, place in the world, spellcasting style, and other trappings that make you a character, but keep your Magic skill and its applications.

CombatOwl
2013-12-29, 10:12 PM
FATE is not strictly a numbers-based game. It is nearly-freeform, while still laying out enough ground rules to avoid the pits of freeform (Namely, fair conflict resolution and meaning to actions... mostly.)

Actually, if you remove the name of "Wizard of the Tower Arcane"'s name, you merely lose the tower, prestige, place in the world, spellcasting style, and other trappings that make you a character, but keep your Magic skill and its applications.

Depends on how you're doing magic, but possibly.

NichG
2013-12-29, 10:27 PM
I think the Oberoni thing is a little out of place - we're talking about a subclass of game-systems whose attractive point is basically that they're as close to freeform as you can get without cowboys and indians. Saying 'they don't cover this case' isn't really a flaw, because if they did exhaustively cover cases then they wouldn't actually be serving their intended design goal. That's a different matter than saying 'well, the DM can fix it' for something that is actually trying to be rules-heavy.

That said, I question whether the mechanics that FATE does have are actually beneficial towards what FATE is trying to achieve.

Zavoniki
2013-12-29, 10:57 PM
If you remove the name of "My Father's Sword," you don't have a sword anymore. If you remove the name of "Never Sleeps," you have to sleep again. If you remove the name of "Wizard of the Tower Arcane," you can't cast magic anymore. These seem like notable differences.

The fact that all of them can, under certain situations, be tagged for +2 to a check or for a reroll doesn't detract from their differences. Nor the extreme differences in how they're compelled or what consequences arise from them.

Maybe remove is the wrong word. How about hide? If your not allowed to know the name of an Aspect, can you differentiate it from other Aspects? No, and to me that is a problem because it produces strange and boring characters.



FATE is not strictly a numbers-based game. It is nearly-freeform, while still laying out enough ground rules to avoid the pits of freeform (Namely, fair conflict resolution and meaning to actions... mostly.)


Cortex is not a strictly numbers-based game. DnD is not a strictly numbers based game. GURPS is not a strictly numbers based game. My issue here with Aspects is I don't see what they add to the system. They aren't mechanically distinct from one another and there doesn't seem to be a reason why they aren't.

NichG
2013-12-29, 11:34 PM
Maybe remove is the wrong word. How about hide? If your not allowed to know the name of an Aspect, can you differentiate it from other Aspects? No, and to me that is a problem because it produces strange and boring characters.


Under CombatOwl's style of FATE, evidently you could tell the difference. I think thats where the disagreement is coming from.

Under CombatOwl's style of FATE, at least based on his response to my posts, if you have the Aspect 'Telepath', then that lets you read someone else's mind. If you hid the name, it would still let you do so. That is differentiable from e.g. 'Master Swordsman', which would not let you read someone's mind, so its a qualitative difference.

Zavoniki
2013-12-29, 11:53 PM
Under CombatOwl's style of FATE, evidently you could tell the difference. I think thats where the disagreement is coming from.

Under CombatOwl's style of FATE, at least based on his response to my posts, if you have the Aspect 'Telepath', then that lets you read someone else's mind. If you hid the name, it would still let you do so. That is differentiable from e.g. 'Master Swordsman', which would not let you read someone's mind, so its a qualitative difference.

If there are rules in FATE to support that beyond DM Fiat then I will withdraw my objection to FATE Aspects and probably play FATE because that system, with the FATE rules and mechanically different Aspects sounds really awesome.

NichG
2013-12-30, 12:19 AM
If there are rules in FATE to support that beyond DM Fiat then I will withdraw my objection to FATE Aspects and probably play FATE because that system, with the FATE rules and mechanically different Aspects sounds really awesome.

If you mean, are there specific Aspects with specific functions, then no (at least as far as I'm aware).

Calling it 'DM fiat' is misleading I think. Basically, in something like D&D, the dungeon map, specific encounters, builds of the enemies you face, what artifacts do, etc are all in the hands of the DM. That's basically what the DM's role is. In a rules-light narrative game, the DM's role is larger and includes adjudication of 'narrative scenarios' that would be covered by mechanics in a more rules-heavy game.

So yes, the DM and player will end up negotiating about what each specific Aspect does and does not let the player do, and the DM will end up with the final say. But I don't think its quite the same thing as 'DM fiat' is in something like D&D, which has overtones more of overriding the system than having a role with a certain job outlined by the system.

Rhynn
2013-12-30, 12:27 AM
So yes, the DM and player will end up negotiating about what each specific Aspect does and does not let the player do, and the DM will end up with the final say. But I don't think its quite the same thing as 'DM fiat' is in something like D&D, which has overtones more of overriding the system than having a role with a certain job outlined by the system.

I think many people have problems coming to grips with the obviously quite different base assumptions FATE is built on... including the difference between loosely (FATE) and narrowly/precisely (D&D 3.X/4E) defined abilities.

Scow2
2013-12-30, 01:09 AM
Also, @AMFV - Calling FATE's "Some Assembly Required" nature and half-built examples a flaw is like calling LEGO or K'nex sets inferior to a model airplane.

AMFV
2013-12-30, 01:21 AM
Also, @AMFV - Calling FATE's "Some Assembly Required" nature and half-built examples a flaw is like calling LEGO or K'nex sets inferior to a model airplane.

I disagree, since there aren't really a lot of tools for constructing things, we're looking at a section that basically says "build it yourself," that's pretty patently inferior to a system that shows you multiple ways to construct your own abilities, for example Mutants and Masterminds and the Hero System are actually quite good in this regard (though they are most certainly not rules light) the problem is that customizable and rules light don't necessarily coincide as well as people would intuitively expect them to. At least not in my experience. LEGOs come with the tools to construct the different things, which is significantly more than just some base guidelines for construction.

Zavoniki
2013-12-30, 03:25 AM
I think many people have problems coming to grips with the obviously quite different base assumptions FATE is built on... including the difference between loosely (FATE) and narrowly/precisely (D&D 3.X/4E) defined abilities.

I would like a happy medium for roleplaying that's between FATE(which I don't like) and D$D 3.X(Which for very different reasons I've come to not like). There is a difference between a loosely defined system and one that leaves a fundamental part of its system, Aspects, unclearly defined. What I've read suggests that Aspects pretty much do what the FATE books mechanically say they do and that's it, if it's supposed to do more/be different from other Aspects then its actually a stunt. If people are playing it differently, then either their rules are extremely unclearly written, or there's an awesome houseruled FATE system that I would like to be in on.

Rhynn
2013-12-30, 03:29 AM
I would like a happy medium for roleplaying that's between FATE(which I don't like) and D$D 3.X(Which for very different reasons I've come to not like).

Fortunately, it almost certainly exists among the hundreds of RPGs out there! I don't have any experience with or really understanding of FATE, and I intensely dislike D&D 3.X for its pointless complexity.

But between games like Unisystem, HarnMaster, RuneQuest, and all those retroclones in my signature, I find I'm pretty well covered for anything that strikes my fancy.

Really, though, I don't get why some people are so hung up on defining abilities beyond their name. That's elegance in design right there.

Maybe you should check out Burning Wheel and/or Mouse Guard? I don't know, though - I think you'll run into the same problem with e.g. Wises.

CombatOwl
2013-12-30, 06:42 AM
If there are rules in FATE to support that beyond DM Fiat then I will withdraw my objection to FATE Aspects and probably play FATE because that system, with the FATE rules and mechanically different Aspects sounds really awesome.

That's Fate as intended under Fate Core. It's not my personal hack. Why they put it under this section I don't know, but this is discussed on Page 76 in Fate Core under "using aspects for roleplaying." As mentioned, aspects are themselves always true about a character. If you have an aspect, it's always about something that's an important facet or feature of a character. As the other poster pointed out, if you have "Telepath" as an aspect written down on your sheet, you're always a telepath, and therefore have some means of reading people's minds. Depending on how your group wants to implement telepathy, that can range anywhere from being so simple you just invoke it for effect occasionally (pay a fate point, read a mind), or as complex as qualifying you for a special Telepathy extra. It depends on what the group chooses to do with special power aspects like that.

The System Toolkit explicitly talks about how to do this sort of thing with the invoking for effect rules, where you invoke a related aspect in order to flat out achieve an effect you're looking for. Are you a "Wizard-For-Hire"? You can invoke that aspect to succeed at casting a spell. Are you "The Greatest Swordsman In The World?" You can invoke that to land a strike. No roll, just do it. Because by having that aspect, and because aspects are always true, an important feature of the character is that he's quite literally the greatest swordsman in the world. If you're a "Samurai Wannabe" that becomes a two-edged thing, where it could be invoked by you to successfully block a strike, but by your enemies to have you miss with a sword swing.

Important mechanical distinctions, discussed in the core book. At length. It's also implied heavily in earlier sections on aspects, and used explicitly in the examples littered throughout the book.

erikun
2013-12-30, 03:00 PM
The difference is this. In Cortex if you are not given a Traits name you can still see the difference between traits through dice size and mechanical effect. If you remove an Aspects name it becomes the same as every other Aspect.
I don't find that to be true at all. A "Fast Driver" aspect is only going to relate to driving, and only when driving quickly. Even if you hid the name of the aspect, the places where it would apply are still going to be the same. This sounds identical to a "Fast Driver" trait in Cortex, with the only difference being that the Cortex rulebook spelled out "Fast Driver will only be applied when driving, and only when driving quickly."

That's primarily a difference in how the system works: requiring a trait to be mechanically defined by the system Vs. allowing the players to mechanically define the aspect.


I would like a happy medium for roleplaying that's between FATE(which I don't like) and D$D 3.X(Which for very different reasons I've come to not like). There is a difference between a loosely defined system and one that leaves a fundamental part of its system, Aspects, unclearly defined. What I've read suggests that Aspects pretty much do what the FATE books mechanically say they do and that's it, if it's supposed to do more/be different from other Aspects then its actually a stunt. If people are playing it differently, then either their rules are extremely unclearly written, or there's an awesome houseruled FATE system that I would like to be in on.
Well, there is Mutants & Masterminds. AMFV, above you, mentioned Hero as well. I suppose Gurps could work as well, depending on what you are looking for. On the other hand, you already have Cortex, and it seems that system already does what you want it to do.

Airk
2013-12-30, 04:09 PM
If there are rules in FATE to support that beyond DM Fiat then I will withdraw my objection to FATE Aspects and probably play FATE because that system, with the FATE rules and mechanically different Aspects sounds really awesome.

It's not 'fiat' it's how the game works. If you have an Aspect that says "Descended from the Line of Numenor" that means you live a damn long time relative to other men. Or to take it to a simpler level, if you have an Aspect "Old" then you ARE OLD. The Aspect is self defining. It IS what it says on the tin.

The mechanical bonuses are there for when it comes down to "My guy has Mighty Thewed. How much of an advantage does that give me when wrestling a normal dude?" but it doesn't change that the Aspect is what it says it is.

Also, you'd think this question would've been better discussed on the FATE forum, where they'd probably have been able to give you a much firmer answer much more quickly.

Werewindlefr
2013-12-30, 04:50 PM
That's setting aside the fact that the majority of what aspects do isn't mechanically defined at all. They're used for way more than the mechanical bonuses you can get by invoking them with fate points or free invocations
In particular, what I consider to be the golden rule of aspects: "Aspect are Always True™"
In other words, aspects are first and foremost branches of the Fate fractals ("characters", in the broad sense) with skills, stunts, stress and aspects of their own.

The mechanical difference between aspects will lie in what things are attached to them, and the circumstances in which they arises, disappears, and is used.


FATE forumThere's a Fate forum?


Depending on how your group wants to implement telepathy, that can range anywhere from being so simple you just invoke it for effect occasionally (pay a fate point, read a mind)Some (many) aspects have mechanical effects without paying a fate point. If telepathy is something you can't turn off, for instance, or at least an at-will thing. Think of it as having a stunt attached to it.

Airk
2013-12-30, 10:05 PM
There's a Fate forum?

Er... it's only the first hit in Google if you type in the words "Fate Forum (http://forum.wildgames.com/forum/54-fate/)" ?

There ARE other forums on the internets besides Giant in the Playground. :smallbiggrin:

Werewindlefr
2013-12-30, 10:15 PM
Er... it's only the first hit in Google if you type in the words "Fate Forum (http://forum.wildgames.com/forum/54-fate/)" ?

There ARE other forums on the internets besides Giant in the Playground. :smallbiggrin:

Damn, I tried "Fate Core forums" and I didn't get anything :(.

Edit: this isn't the right "Fate", it's a video game. I rest my case. If you know of a fate forum, I'm interested.

Airk
2013-12-30, 10:41 PM
Damn, I tried "Fate Core forums" and I didn't get anything :(.

Edit: this isn't the right "Fate", it's a video game. I rest my case. If you know of a fate forum, I'm interested.

Wow. I am CLEARLY not awake. Sorry about that. -_-

Apparently there really isn't one yet. Consider my mind blown. x.x

RedWarlock
2013-12-31, 12:47 AM
Damn, I tried "Fate Core forums" and I didn't get anything :(.

Edit: this isn't the right "Fate", it's a video game. I rest my case. If you know of a fate forum, I'm interested.

Apparently they have a Yahoo group and a Google+ group. (and prefer to use those rather than needing to run their own costly-and-vulnerable architecture for one.)

Scow2
2013-12-31, 01:31 AM
There ARE other forums on the internets besides Giant in the Playground. :smallbiggrin:

Lies. Lies and slander. :smalltongue:

CombatOwl
2013-12-31, 06:51 AM
Damn, I tried "Fate Core forums" and I didn't get anything :(.

Edit: this isn't the right "Fate", it's a video game. I rest my case. If you know of a fate forum, I'm interested.

Evil Hat usually just uses Google+ for that.

https://plus.google.com/communities/117231873544673522940

If you want questioned answered by the folks who wrote it, that's where you post the question.

Airk
2013-12-31, 09:44 AM
Evil Hat usually just uses Google+ for that.

https://plus.google.com/communities/117231873544673522940

If you want questioned answered by the folks who wrote it, that's where you post the question.

Apparently this is the new in thing for small game support. Not a bad idea, really.

Kalmageddon
2014-01-01, 12:12 PM
Right, so, in order to help you understand what we are criticizing about FATE, let me present my own "rules-lite" system:

It's called "EVERYTHING", all caps because it's cool, and because that's what it allows you to do, everything.
I bet you are intrigued.

In this system your character is made of "Things". Things (capitalized please), are a highly flexible and innovative mechanic that can represent what your character is, what he chan do and how he can do it.
Like, for example, you may want to roleplay a swordman, so you will create a Thing called "Swordman", write down what it does, like for example providing you with a sword and the ability to use it, and, if everyone at the tables agree, then that Thing is now in play and you can use it whenever it Makes Sense.

The "Makes Sense" is what allows EVERYTHING to represent any kind of situation. To use Makes Sense you should talk between the players at the gaming table about what is going to happen in the game and/or what your character does. If everyone agrees that it's fun and doable then you write it down as a Makes Sense and from now on it's legal and 100% rules covered by EVERYTHING.

During your game you may want to resolve some challenge with a bit more randomeness and with a faster resolution then what a Makes Sense would allow. In that case you should use the Roll Any Dice mechanic. Roll Any Dice allows you to choose a kind of dice (d6, d10, d20 or whatever is FUN!) and roll it to determine how a conflict is resolved. The higher the dice the more in favour of your character the result is. Alternatively, you may use the Wathever optional rule and make it so that the lower the result the better is the roll.
If you really want to spice things up, you might use the Do We Even Care At This Point optional rule and make it so that every face of th dice makes different Things happen to your character, like complications, different degrees of success and so on!

As you can see with just this few mechanics EVERYTHING can cover all situations and playstyles, all kinds of setting and all kinds of groups!

But wait, there's more!
If you want you can purchase the "Do Our Job For Us" supplement, which allows you to create a variety of rules that you might find useful to represent the finer details we didn't care about in your campaign!

... Now, this is clearly an exaggeration, but that's basically what a lot of rules-lite system do and what FATE explicitly does. Instead of providing with an accurate framework of rules to handle your game you are instead provided with some useful input that you're supposed to use to build said framework.
Yes, FATE determines things like skills, what kind of dice to roll, how you should make your character, etc, but it does so in the vaguest, most simplistic way possibile, something which I have every confidence anyone with a bit of roleplaying experience could do for himself if he put the time in it.
There is no skill involved, no careful balancing, just a neat idea masked as a functional rule system that tricks you into making the rules yourself so that you may then congratulate the system for how well the rules you custom made yourself work.

erikun
2014-01-01, 03:50 PM
Right, so, in order to help you understand what we are criticizing about FATE, let me present my own "rules-lite" system:

It's called "EVERYTHING", all caps because it's cool, and because that's what it allows you to do, everything.
I bet you are intrigued.

In this system your character is made of "Things". Things (capitalized please), are a highly flexible and innovative mechanic that can represent what your character is, what he chan do and how he can do it.
Like, for example, you may want to roleplay a swordman, so you will create a Thing called "Swordman", write down what it does, like for example providing you with a sword and the ability to use it, and, if everyone at the tables agree, then that Thing is now in play and you can use it whenever it Makes Sense.

The "Makes Sense" is what allows EVERYTHING to represent any kind of situation. To use Makes Sense you should talk between the players at the gaming table about what is going to happen in the game and/or what your character does. If everyone agrees that it's fun and doable then you write it down as a Makes Sense and from now on it's legal and 100% rules covered by EVERYTHING.

During your game you may want to resolve some challenge with a bit more randomeness and with a faster resolution then what a Makes Sense would allow. In that case you should use the Roll Any Dice mechanic. Roll Any Dice allows you to choose a kind of dice (d6, d10, d20 or whatever is FUN!) and roll it to determine how a conflict is resolved. The higher the dice the more in favour of your character the result is. Alternatively, you may use the Wathever optional rule and make it so that the lower the result the better is the roll.
If you really want to spice things up, you might use the Do We Even Care At This Point optional rule and make it so that every face of th dice makes different Things happen to your character, like complications, different degrees of success and so on!

As you can see with just this few mechanics EVERYTHING can cover all situations and playstyles, all kinds of setting and all kinds of groups!

But wait, there's more!
If you want you can purchase the "Do Our Job For Us" supplement, which allows you to create a variety of rules that you might find useful to represent the finer details we didn't care about in your campaign!
Well I do like that you could potentially run any campaign in your EVERYTHING system. This is far preferable to something like D&D at times, which is limited to only to the ideas the creators thought up. It's also better when grabbing a campaign and playing, as if the campaign isn't already a D&D campaign - and a correct edition D&D campaign - then you'd be forced to literally rewrite the entire thing to match.

The problem is the mechanics, though. When I play HeroQuest, I have a set of mechanics that allows me to give meaningful bonuses and penalties for the resolution type. There are rules for large-scale encounters and exchanges against multiple opponents. There are rules for long-term penalities, such as when the Swordsman injures an arm and is forced to use their off-hand or injured arm. There are rules for presenting challenges beyond just guessing at random numbers.

When I play Fate, I have guidelines for clearly understanding what a skill of a specific level actually means in the system. I can tell the difference between a Great Swordsman and a Legendard Swordsman, know which is better, and by how much better. I get rules for how frequently the in-game Aspects can be used, and to what extent. I get rules for managing different characters, events, and objects within a scene so that characters can interact with them meaningfully.


... Now, this is clearly an exaggeration, but that's basically what a lot of rules-lite system do and what FATE explicitly does. Instead of providing with an accurate framework of rules to handle your game you are instead provided with some useful input that you're supposed to use to build said framework.
Yes, FATE determines things like skills, what kind of dice to roll, how you should make your character, etc, but it does so in the vaguest, most simplistic way possibile, something which I have every confidence anyone with a bit of roleplaying experience could do for himself if he put the time in it.
There is no skill involved, no careful balancing, just a neat idea masked as a functional rule system that tricks you into making the rules yourself so that you may then congratulate the system for how well the rules you custom made yourself work.
Except that literally nobody is pretending that Fate is an identical system to D&D. In fact, the entire first page is filled with people giving caution that Fate is NOT like D&D, and that there are some very meaningful differences between the two.

Nobody is misunderstanding your position. Statements like "why praise rules lite systems when freeform is an option?" make it quite clear what your opinion is. I think, though, that my opinion (and that of others) is not being understood properly. A rules-heavy game like D&D and Gurps creates rules and mechanics for every possible situation, with the intent of using those rules if the situation comes up - but it has no way of resolving an issue if there isn't a ruleset or mechanic for a particular situation. Rules-light games like Fate or HeroQuest instead create rules and mechanics that work together and then create guidelines for taking and idea and making it work well with those mechanics.

The point is that BOTH TYPES OF SYSTEMS HAVE THEIR USES. D&D is good for campaigns set in D&D, but is bad for any setting outside the D&D frame or for campaigns that weren't intended for D&D. Fate is good for taking any campaign from any source and running it on a set of functional mechanics, but is bad at replicating a specific set of mechanics found somewhere (such as D&D spellcasting).

The fact that I can take a D&D campaign and run it in Fate, with roughly the same prep time as running it in D&D, with a set of resolution mechanics which works just as well, is not a bug. It's not a problem with the Fate system. It's the reason for using the Fate system, and the reason that I choose Fate over D&D.

You said on the first page:

I'm not buying rolplaying games on their "intention", I'm buying them because I think I can put my ideas into practice better through some intresting and balanced rules I couldn't come up with on the fly.
Well, that's why I buy Fate. It's a system with interesting and balanced rules that can put my ideas into practice better than what I could come up with on the fly. It is at least as good as a lot of over systems I've run across. Plus, I am not forced to purchase another system simply because I don't want to play D&D, or I want to play a setting in space, or I want to play a modern horror game - and am left with the risk of picking up a system with poor mechanics. I have Fate. I know Fate has good mechanics. And I can play all the above in Fate, even when the campaign books are from other systems.

This is why I choose Fate.

Knaight
2014-01-01, 06:46 PM
Right, so, in order to help you understand what we are criticizing about FATE, let me present my own "rules-lite" system:

It's called "EVERYTHING", all caps because it's cool, and because that's what it allows you to do, everything.
I bet you are intrigued.

In this system your character is made of "Things". Things (capitalized please), are a highly flexible and innovative mechanic that can represent what your character is, what he chan do and how he can do it.
Like, for example, you may want to roleplay a swordman, so you will create a Thing called "Swordman", write down what it does, like for example providing you with a sword and the ability to use it, and, if everyone at the tables agree, then that Thing is now in play and you can use it whenever it Makes Sense.
If the entirety of FATE was the aspects system, then you might have a point. There's a skill system under it which does have modifiers in it, and that right there is a concrete system. It has the stunts, which in their simplest form consist of a big bonus to a small thing, a small bonus to a big thing, some extra stress boxes for particular effects (roughly equivalent to DR in D&D), and altering which skill gets used where. So, let's take your "Swordman" example, and see how that might actually play out.

First thing first, you've got a skill. Exactly what skill depends on which iteration of Fate, but there is some sort of concrete skill. You probably have a different skill for fighting at range (at default level at least), and that right there is more mechanical complexity than D&D has on the subject (BAB applies to everything). Added to that is at least one stunt. You probably have a stunt to the effect of +1 to your combat skill when using a sword. It's equivalent to picking Weapon Focus and Weapon Specialization in D&D, if they didn't both suck. Then you have a whole bunch of things which let you differentiate your swordsman from others. Maybe you take a stunt which gives you +2 when fighting at least 2 enemies with a sword. That lets you handle groups well, and will play differently than a similar character who has the same combat skill and generic +1 with a sword stunt who instead takes the option to defend against ranged attacks with their sword skill instead of dodging.

Sure, Fate doesn't explicitly spell out exactly what conditions get you your +2, and exactly what get you your +1, and exactly what skills can be used in lieu of what other skills in what conditions - though Dresden Files and Spirit of the Century both have huge stunt lists of examples. Doing this is not remotely the same as homebrew, the end results are not remotely the same as freeform, and in all honesty it often takes less time than browsing through some titanic list.

Then, on top of all that, you have Aspects. So, perhaps you can see how some of us find "It's basically freeform" to be a ludicrous complaint? Even before the whole matter of several hundred pages of rules comes into it?

Heck, lets flip this around? Why would I buy a rules heavy system when a large chunk of the rules consists of a bunch of big long lists which could easily be constructed from a well made set of guidelines? I mean, do we really need eight pages of feats that come down to "you get a +4 to do this special action, and it doesn't provoke an attack of opportunity" in D&D? Do we really need tons of pages of nearly identical damage spells? I think not.

Actana
2014-01-01, 07:10 PM
I'd also like to add that there are a lot of supplemental Fate* books out there. There was a Bundle of Holding deal that had a lot of different Fate systems, for fantasy, sci-fi and other things. And they all had rules for the things that the genres think important. For example, the fantasy book has detailed rules for equipment and magic, and the sci-fi one for guns, armor, cybernetics, psionics and vehicles, to name a few. The systems are also stand-alone products and don't require any additional books to function, containing all the rules required to play.

In that way, I think it's a bit disingenuous to say that Fate requires you to do "all" the work. Because of the massive amount of settings and genres the system can do, you couldn't fit detailed mechanics of everything into a single product (and then hand it out for essentially free!). But those rules exist, and if you want to get rules for them, they are available for purchase. And since the core rules of Fate Core (heh) are free, you'll only technically need to buy a single book anyway, if even that (Spirit of the Century also has a free SRD which has a long list of example stunts, so you can just go from there to create your own). Compared to other possible systems which might divide the detailed rules into many different books. The rules are simple, but that's the point: it's a rules light system. You can't hope to expect a detailed simulation from the system.


* The name of the new iteration of the system is Fate Core, with no excessive capitals. The old one was FATE, which I believe was short for Fantastical Adventures Something-Something.

Kalmageddon
2014-01-02, 07:01 AM
If the entirety of FATE was the aspects system, then you might have a point. There's a skill system under it which does have modifiers in it, and that right there is a concrete system. It has the stunts, which in their simplest form consist of a big bonus to a small thing, a small bonus to a big thing, some extra stress boxes for particular effects (roughly equivalent to DR in D&D), and altering which skill gets used where.

Hold it right there.
That's exactly what I've been saying. The only thing that approaches legit gaming system mechanics are Skills and Stunts, which you'll agree are hardly revolutionary enough to justify FATE popularity.

So please, take my "having a point" and apply it to Aspects and all the blank spaces you have to fill in FATE and you just got to the same conclusion I did. Their gimmik, their main feature is not really there. The game tricks you, or convinces you if you want to be less harsh, to buy into the idea of it without providing a worthy execution, thereby making said idea only as good as you and your group are able to.

Customization may be a great feature to have in a game, but customization can have many aspects. Selecting from a lot of details and carefully crafted mechanics to build what you want is a great way to implement customization. But FATE doesn't do that.
What FATE does is basically giving you a blank sheet and tell you to write what you want. There are no details or carefully crafted mechanics, you are supposed to come up with them with your group.
FATE only manages to get away with it because it was clever enough to have you share this workload with the whole group. Players aren't used to shape a campaign like in FATE, so they didn't call the bluff and bought into the idea like there's no tomorrow.
I insist that this proves that FATE doesn't provide with real game mechanics any more then four wheels provide you with a car. Sure, four wheels are essential if you want to build a car, but they are still not a car.
FATE does the bare essential, meaning deciding on details such as what dice to roll and what you should add to said roll, and leaves you to do the rest.
Of course the few mechanics of FATE work. Four wheels still work, right? All they need to do is be round, after all. FATE mechanics are so simple that it would be astounding if they didn't work.
But again: not a real car/game system.

The fact that, with enough patience and work, you can build any car from those four wheels doesn't change the fact that they didn't provide you with said car from the start.
The fact that with enough patience and work, you can run any campaign in FATE doesn't change the fact that they didn't provide you with the means to do it from the start.
That is what's wrong with FATE.

Scow2
2014-01-02, 07:28 AM
Nothing wrong at all. They give you plenty of 'cars' to build, but it's an entire car kit that you can use to make any car in less time and hassle than it takes to assemble a go-cart.

Knaight
2014-01-02, 01:19 PM
So please, take my "having a point" and apply it to Aspects and all the blank spaces you have to fill in FATE and you just got to the same conclusion I did. Their gimmik, their main feature is not really there. The game tricks you, or convinces you if you want to be less harsh, to buy into the idea of it without providing a worthy execution, thereby making said idea only as good as you and your group are able to.

Customization may be a great feature to have in a game, but customization can have many aspects. Selecting from a lot of details and carefully crafted mechanics to build what you want is a great way to implement customization. But FATE doesn't do that.

It's one way to implement customization, sure. However, it's not the only way, and another way is to have blank spaces you fill in, which integrate with the rest of the system once filled. The aspects do that through their connection to the skill and roll system, through their connection to the fate point economy, and through the miscellaneous uses of them along with the time scales on the scenes.

In short, aspects are fine implemented on top of a functional engine, and Fate has a functional engine. Dealing with the aspects is far from homebrewing a whole game (on account of said functional engine) and far from freeform (again, on account of there being concrete mechanics and said functional engine).

CombatOwl
2014-01-02, 02:55 PM
Hold it right there.
That's exactly what I've been saying. The only thing that approaches legit gaming system mechanics are Skills and Stunts, which you'll agree are hardly revolutionary enough to justify FATE popularity.

Fate is popular because it's been combining all of these things into a system that is internally consistent. It straddles a fine line between being rules-light and being rules-heavy. It's heavy enough that it has a structured system that can accommodate most situations with mechanics. It's light enough that the system works in predictable ways, without a huge number of rules exceptions and long lists of crap.

It's certainly not even remotely "playing freeform." Yet it is flexible enough to handle pretty much any setting.


So please, take my "having a point" and apply it to Aspects and all the blank spaces you have to fill in FATE and you just got to the same conclusion I did. Their gimmik, their main feature is not really there. The game tricks you, or convinces you if you want to be less harsh, to buy into the idea of it without providing a worthy execution, thereby making said idea only as good as you and your group are able to.

I'm sorry, but what does any of that matter? Obviously the game is only as good as the group running it. That's true of literally every role-playing game that has existed.


Customization may be a great feature to have in a game, but customization can have many aspects. Selecting from a lot of details and carefully crafted mechanics to build what you want is a great way to implement customization.

I guess, but then you end up with GURPS where it takes hours to scan through the books for the specific things you actually want. And even then the rules may be somewhat questionable. GURPS does a good job of that, but lots of other systems (I'm looking at you, Palladium and D&D) do an absolutely horrible job of actually creating sane rules for how feats, skills, and equipment are used.

Fate's follow-our-formula method works way better than long lists of crap in practice. It takes less time, results in a system with predictable rules, and supports a much wider range of settings and tones than systems with long lists of rules.


But FATE doesn't do that.
What FATE does is basically giving you a blank sheet and tell you to write what you want. There are no details or carefully crafted mechanics, you are supposed to come up with them with your group.

Wrong. What it actually does is present a model for how to do the things you want to do. You're given a system where you can add features, guidelines on how to implement those features so that it works with the rest of the system, and a system flexible enough that it's easy to figure out how to implement the things your group's setting needs. Need to do magic? You don't have to roll it up out of whole cloth. The group decides which of the magic models they want to use, because there are quite a few described. Only if the group decides that none of those models presented are suitable for what they want to do that they need to venture into coming up with something themselves. And even if they do that, Fate as a system is so consistent that it's easy to predict how an unknown feature would need to be structured to interact cleanly with the rest of the system.

It's not like, say, D&D, where a house-ruled feat can cause bizarre and stupid interactions with published feats. If you follow the guidelines in the core book, it will work together with everything else built along those guidelines. That's actually a notable point in favor of Fate.


FATE only manages to get away with it because it was clever enough to have you share this workload with the whole group. Players aren't used to shape a campaign like in FATE, so they didn't call the bluff and bought into the idea like there's no tomorrow.

It's easier to homebrew a setting (and the rules to go along with it) in Fate than it is to prepare just a single sizable dungeon in D&D 3.5e. That's the point that people have been trying to make to you--it's no effort to do this in Fate. If the group's answer to this is to say "Hey, GM, do all of this for us. Make our characters for us," it's not much work on the GM's part to do that. He could almost certainly be done with a party of five characters in Fate Core before he'd be done with a single high level character in D&D. He'd be done in Fate many times over before he'd be done with a Palladium or GURPS character.

The point about Fate is that your group ends up with the game your group wants. If you want the GM to do everything, it's easier on the GM than most other GM-driven games. If the group wants a say in how the game is setup, that's supported too.


I insist that this proves that FATE doesn't provide with real game mechanics

It doesn't prove anything. All you've done is make an assertion. No examples whatsoever. You haven't even defined what a "real game mechanic" means.


FATE does the bare essential, meaning deciding on details such as what dice to roll and what you should add to said roll, and leaves you to do the rest.

It describes the guidelines on when to roll and when not to roll, it gives guidelines for building the things that provide modifiers. It describes the economy that underlies the utility of those modifiers, and how and when they're applied. That sure sounds like real game mechanics to me. It describes when to roll, how to roll, what to roll, and what the roll means. It describes how to judge the relative success of an effort based on those rolls, what to do if they fail, how failures across multiple actions interact with each other, etc.

It was a conscious design decision to divorce the mechanics (what's described in the Fate system books) from the fluff (what the group decides upon for themselves). Fate certainly provides the mechanics, and it certainly does not provide the fluff. It does so in a fairly elegant and simple manner, in a way easily understood and extended by the players.


Of course the few mechanics of FATE work. Four wheels still work, right? All they need to do is be round, after all. FATE mechanics are so simple that it would be astounding if they didn't work.
But again: not a real car/game system.

Alright, provide an example of an interaction between two characters that the Fate system provides no mechanics for resolving. To make it easier, define two characters according to the defaults. Follow the character creation rules in Fate Core--starts on page 29. You can get the PDF here if you don't have it: http://www.evilhat.com/home/wp-content/uploads/FateCore.zip

I'm genuinely curious about what mechanics you think it is lacking, and I can see no other way to explore this subject. Obviously you feel strongly enough about this to keep insisting that Fate has no real mechanics, despite multiple people arguing otherwise. Show us what you mean with a concrete example. It shouldn't take very long--Fate characters are pretty easy to make. Because I don't think that abstract theory is going to cut it for illustrating what is clearly a very nuanced issue.


The fact that, with enough patience and work, you can build any car from those four wheels doesn't change the fact that they didn't provide you with said car from the start.

You can show all of this more easily with a concrete example. Follow the creation rules in Fate Core to provide us with two example characters, then pose an interaction between them that you feel it does not provide mechanics for resolving. You need not create anything that the game does not give you clear guidelines for creating. If you feel that the book does not provide sufficiently clear guidelines on how to build a stunt or select an aspect, note that and leave the slot blank.


The fact that with enough patience and work, you can run any campaign in FATE doesn't change the fact that they didn't provide you with the means to do it from the start.
That is what's wrong with FATE.

You seem to be implying that this takes a substantial amount of time, but I would contend that this is not the case. I've rarely seen people take more than half an hour to make a Fate character, but there are relatively few D&D players who can reliably do the same with D&D characters.

Werewindlefr
2014-01-02, 02:57 PM
Hold it right there.
That's exactly what I've been saying. The only thing that approaches legit gaming system mechanics are Skills and Stunts, which you'll agree are hardly revolutionary enough to justify FATE popularity.

It's not the only thing, though. Frankly, I think Fate's main advantage is the fractal. It provides a very efficient structure for improvisation and world building.