A good outline for teaching Fate TTRPG?

[gomipile]

Is there a good outline or teaching materials for quickly introducing people to the Fate TTRPG system? For instance, if one wanted to demo it at a convention, how would one get the players up to speed as quickly as possible?

The official rulebooks are uniquely horrible in this regard, I've found. Even the Fate Accelerated book is awful if you want a really quick introduction. For example, the turn sequence isn't described until halfway into the book, and isn't even listed in the table of contents. A lot of interactions and combinations of rules don't make sense until reading through the rules twice because the ones explained earlier don't call forward to other rules they interact with. The quick reference at the back made no sense to me until I'd read through Accelerated twice, Core once, and watched a bunch of videos.

So, has someone made a good guide for quickly getting a demo game started?

I'd especially appreciate your opinions on said guides. I'm not just looking for names and links of resources, but your perspective on them.

[Eldan]

I've never actually found a non-horrible Fate rulebook. Dresden Files Accelerated is a stand-out for me, it starts with about 20 NPC statblocks, before even explaining what the rules mean, so those statblocks tell you absolutely nothing.

The basic fate system is very simple, and I think for a convention, you could simplify it even more. I'd start with Fate Accelerated, one of those versions that just has a few approaches instead of skills and four basic actions. Take that, give everyone 1-2 stunts and about three aspects, and I think you have a playable, simple system that can be explained in ten minutes with a handout. For aspects, go with something like High Concent (Who are you?), Additional Skill (What are you good at?) and Complication (What are you bad at/what's your character's biggest problem in life?)

[KaussH]

I hope linking another comic isnt a rule violation in this case but, for a quick and dirty fate teaching intro, I like https://www.uptofourplayers.com/ready-to-roll/fate-core-rules/ A short and sweet 2 page comic that is also informative.

[Eldan]

I hope linking another comic isnt a rule violation in this case but, for a quick and dirty fate teaching intro, I like https://www.uptofourplayers.com/ready-to-roll/fate-core-rules/ A short and sweet 2 page comic that is also informative.

That's really pretty good.

[KaussH]

I in fact have used their comics to send to a group for Fate and one for savage worlds.

[gomipile]

I hope linking another comic isnt a rule violation in this case but, for a quick and dirty fate teaching intro, I like https://www.uptofourplayers.com/ready-to-roll/fate-core-rules/ A short and sweet 2 page comic that is also informative.

I'll check that out. Thanks.

[kyoryu]

Well, I'm a bit biased, but I'd recommend:

https://bookofhanz.com/

It came about from trying to shove the square peg of my trad brain into the round hole of Fate. As I went through the process, i wrote a bunch of posts about it - and then somebody collected them. Then later Randy Oest of the Fate SRD decided to publish them.

The Inspiration Point "Fate School" series of episodes, starting at https://inspirationpoint.buzzsprout.com/1192916/11495630-s03-e37-fate-school-1-guests-robert-hanz-tiana-hanson

Also, Fate Condensed is a really good starting point.

Watching some decent APs is good, too. For brevity, I like any of Randy Oest's APs, but I'm going to again look at hte Book of Hanz Kickstarter APs: https://www.youtube.com/@FateSRD

[Psyren]

I hope linking another comic isnt a rule violation in this case but, for a quick and dirty fate teaching intro, I like https://www.uptofourplayers.com/ready-to-roll/fate-core-rules/ A short and sweet 2 page comic that is also informative.


That's really pretty good.

Seconded, this is the closest I've ever been to grokking Fate.

[Zuras]

Has anyone ever learned to play Fate from a book? I don’t know if the books are terrible or the system is just hard to understand without seeing it in action, but I would guess Fate benefits much more from actual plays being available to watch than something d20 based.

I was really fuzzy on how everything worked together after looking over the pdf rules, but watching an hour of an Atomic Robo actual play was more than enough to get clear on how the system worked.

For play at a convention, I’d imagine the key bits would be pre generated characters and using a genre with very familiar tropes and story beats. If I were showcasing it at a con, I’d probably either go with a swashbuckling swords and sorcery theme or a buddy cop movie theme. The pre-gens would be some stock movie characters or standard D&D classes written up in Fate terms, like the fast-talking, suave cop who doesn’t play by the book, or the grizzled seen-it-all veteran who doesn’t play by the book, and so on.

Then run them through a basic “Rob the temple of the snake cultists/bust the guy we’ve been gathering evidence against for two months” scene to show the power of the system in running adventures with well-understood genre conventions.

[Eldan]

I have. It all seemed pretty logical to me, but only after I had basically rewritten the entire book to get things into a logical order.

[kyoryu]

Has anyone ever learned to play Fate from a book?

I did!

I found a lot of the misunderstandings came from trying to apply previous assumptions from other games to Fate. However, I went into it assuming "I don't know what I'm doing, I'm here to learn, so I'm going to assume that the game works". It took a lot of thought around how stuff worked when it didn't make sense when I went on a number of dog walks, and I made a lot of posts on Google+ back in the day as I wrapped my head around various things.

They eventually got referred to so much that somebody collected them. And then they got published as a book. And that became (as I've pointed at before) https://bookofhanz.com/

Interestingly, I decided to get into narrative games and Fate specifically because of this forum. I erroneously claimed that narrative games and Fate were "roll to see how awesome you are" style games and then somebody told me all that had happened in a game... and it was a lot of getting beat up and bad things happening to characters, even though they won in the end (some PCs got killed, some got turned into NPCs, lots more had bad things happen to them). That was enough to pique my interest and make me realize my assumptions were wrong, and it was worth looking into it, as that style of game was very interesting to me!