How do people feel about the FATE system?
What do people like about it?
Whad don't people like about it?
The reason I ask, is that my RL Wife has gone hard into the Dresden Files RPG.
Worse (or Better), she has gotten me the Mindjammer core book as an alternate to Starfinder.
I fear that she may be going overboard.
I tried it for the first time recently
(the iteration for Interface Zero specifically)
Like it so far.
I will come back and let you know of my finalized opinion when I finish the mini campaign :)
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I wished I had a wife like that...
Anyway I have not played it yet...I just remembered a friend of mine ran Dresden Files RPG...
The system is good if you have good players...if you have steal stealing glory hounds..,the system is not fun...that is why my friend had to stop running..,
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I really like the Fate Core system. However, I have only played in a demo session at our FLGS, and a failed one-shot with my regular group. I have run the city and character creation for the Dresden Files RPG with two groups, and a brief adventure with the second of these two. I had fun, but unfortunately only a few players from both groups are open to trying it again. One of the groups adamantly does not want to play anything but fantasy d20 games, so its a lost cause with them. The other group may be up for another try, but I have two Pathfinder campaigns to finish before that happens.
I feel like the biggest issue with the system is getting used to narrative control and the flow of Fate Points. I really want to play more so I am better equipped to run it again.
Fate is a wonderful game system that emphasizes narrative play. The rules are deliberately broad, and it uses a unified resolution system for everything. It is a VERY different play experience than Pathfinder... an experience that I find freeing.
I love the open-endedness and limitless possibilities of character design: You really are limited only by your imagination.
Fate is a skill-based system: There are no character classes. All options are open to anyone... as long as they make narrative sense.
In Fate, you design your character around what you want them to be good at, and you also define their flaws. This is done by defining Aspects, which are descriptions of your character's strengths, goals, and weaknesses. You use your Aspects in play to influence the direction of the narrative and/or your rolls.
Each character generally starts with three or four Aspects:
In my games I recommend that each PC come up with the following:
Your High Concept: A one-sentence summary of what makes the character tick.
(Examples: "Wise-cracking swordsman with a heart of gold;" "Demon-haunted occult investigator;" "Ace pilot for Stargazer Squadron")
Your Trouble: Something that gets your character into trouble. This could be a personal weakness, a deep dark secret, enemies from the past, etc.
(Examples: "Can't say 'no' to a pretty face;" "Owes gambling debts to 'Big Mikey' Hannigan;" "Why do ghosts keep talking to me?")
Your Goal: Something that your character is working to achieve or find.
(Examples: "I'm looking for the man who killed my Pa;" "I will master the Ultimate Conjuration;" "Just trying to get back home!")
One other Aspect of your choice.
Aspects come into play in two ways: You can Tap an Aspect to use it in your favor by spending a Fate Point. Or the GM can Compel you to take an action by offering your a Fate Point. (You can decline a Compel, but then you have to pay a Fate Point.)
For example, Say you are the Demon-haunted occult investigator who is fighting an animated skeleton. You could Tap this aspect, spend a Fate point, and say something like, "I chant an incantation that unravels undeath," granting you a bonus in combat. Later, your character finds a strange mirror. The GM says that, because you are haunted by demons, an infernal image appears in it, beckoning you to reach through the mirror. The GM offers you a Fate point if you grasp the demon's hand.
The other part of Fate is your set of skills. This differs whether you'r playing Fate Core or Fate Accelerated Edition (FAE).
Fate Core has a set of broadly-defined skills. Choose one skill to have a +3 bonus; two for a +2 each; and three for a +1 each. Honestly, I think that's too much bookkeeping, and prefer how FAE handles it...
FAE doesn't have defined skills. If it makes narrative sense for your character to know how to do something, then you do. Instead, you choose an Approach: How you are going to try to accomplish your task.
FAE has six approaches: Careful, Clever, Flashy, Foreceful, Quick, and Sneaky.
Choose to be Good at one Approach (+3), Fair at two Approaches (+2), Average at two Approaches (+1), and Poor at one Approach (+0).
So... let's say your character has to get through locked gate. You could try to climb the fence Quickly; your could try to be Clever and disable the lock; you could try to sweet-talk past the guard by being Flashy.
Fate paints with broad strokes, and gives players far more narrative control of the game than does Parhfinder. It's a very different experience. Honestly, now that I've gone pretty deep into narrative-style RPGs, I am finding it very hard to come back to rules-focused gamed like Pathfinder.
Fate is a wonderful game system that emphasizes narrative play. The rules are deliberately broad, and it uses a unified resolution system for everything. It is a VERY different play experience than Pathfinder... an experience that I find freeing.
I love the open-endedness and limitless possibilities of character design: You really are limited only by your imagination.
Fate is a skill-based system: There are no character classes. All options are open to anyone... as long as they make narrative sense.
In Fate, you design your character around what you want them to be good at, and you also define their flaws. This is done by defining Aspects, which are descriptions of your character's strengths, goals, and weaknesses. You use your Aspects in play to influence the direction of the narrative and/or your rolls.
Each character generally starts with three or four Aspects:
In my games I recommend that each PC come up with the following:
Your High Concept: A one-sentence summary of what makes the character tick.
(Examples: "Wise-cracking swordsman with a heart of gold;" "Demon-haunted occult investigator;" "Ace pilot for Stargazer Squadron")
Your Trouble: Something that gets your character into trouble. This could be a personal weakness, a deep dark secret, enemies from the past, etc.
(Examples: "Can't say 'no' to a pretty face;" "Owes gambling debts to 'Big Mikey' Hannigan;" "Why do ghosts keep talking to me?")
Your Goal: Something that your character is working to achieve or find.
(Examples: "I'm looking for the man who killed my Pa;" "I will master the Ultimate Conjuration;" "Just trying to get back home!")
One other Aspect of your choice.
Aspects come into play in two ways: You can Tap an Aspect to use it in your favor by spending a Fate Point. Or the GM can Compel you to take an action by offering your a Fate Point. (You can decline a Compel, but then you have to pay a Fate Point.)
For example, Say you are...
How do you work out the Aspect Trio with the players around the table? That is probably the most complex part that my players (and I) are not quite grasping. I have read and re-read the parts about this in Fate Core and Dresden, and it still doesn't really gel.
I like the FATE system (and have played in 2 Dresden Files campaigns and ran a 3rd one, with the plan to return to it again some day), as it's super easy to design critters and powers and whatnot in it.
The player Aspects system is definitely one of the hardest things for me, though - I'm not good at improvisation, and even after running a Dresden game for over 6 months I never got a hang of it - I had everyone's aspects on a sheet and I still almost never remembered to compel. (I wound up going with a partial refresh rule instead - the entire party recovering a point whem they cleared some mid-session objective.) The other GMs didn't have better luck with that.
Compels grant a player a fate point in exchange for causing some sort of disadvantage or derail for the player or party. Like the person getting pulled into a haunted mirror as Haladir described above. I.e., here's a fate point for a complication related to your character. (Another way to put it is that the GM gives you a Fate Point in exchange for messing with your character.)
The Aspect Trio+ is worked out collectively - especially in Dresdan Files, where the PCs are encouraged to incorporate each other into their back stories.
If it helps, think of the High Concept as your effective character class (like Werebear Vampire Hunter, to use one of my own characters as an example), the Trouble as your bane (ex. The Bear Hungers), and other aspects as double-edged swords. To continue the example, my character had "F*** You I'm a Bear" as an aspect that he could Tap to represent his combat prowess and power, and that the GM could Compel to represent his constantly simmering rage.
The High Concept is mostly or fully positive, the Trouble is purely negative, and other aspects should be usable both ways.
Aspects can be tapped to get bonuses on rolls or allow rerolls, or they can be tapped to break the rules in some way with the GM's permission. (Using another character as an example - she was a spellcaster with an aspect of Miracles Come at a Price, and I occasionally tapped it to perform some otherwise rule-breaking magical feat (like re-actively shielding the entire party) in exchange for, say, an immediate physical consequence.)
It's a neat system, but yeah, some aspects of it are much trickier than others.
My understanding is that the Aspects Trio is a feature of Dresden Files RPG specifically. I believe it's also mentioned as an alternate rule in the Fate System Toolkit, which I have but have not read extensively.
Weaving PCs' Aspects together at start of play really isn't all that different from coming up with a collective backstory that explains why the PCs know and trust each other. Regardless of ruleset, most GMs run a Session Zero to work out that stuff before start of play. In a system like Pathfinder, it's purely for flavor. But in a system like Fate, your Aspects have a direct impact on gameplay.
Cardinal rule of Fate: Focus on the narrative. The rules are there to provide just enough structure and substance to support the story. They shoukd never get in the way. If a PC's success on an action would be best for the narrative, don't make them roll... unless a failure would also make an interesting complication.
Fate does have some weaknesses.
1) Open-endedness
With Fate, options are limited only by the narrative... and that can be paralyzing. It's been my experience that we usually end up doing a LOT of world-building during Session Zero. In my last Fate game (a "weird west" campaign), we basically decided that there would be magic, and collectively designed how it would work in play during that session!
2) Pre-conceived campaigns
Fate works best if the GM releases a fair amount of narrative control to the players. As a system, it does not work as well to run a D&D-style module or campaign. I find it best for open-world sandbox-style gaming, when the GM and players work together to weave the story of the PCs, and to let the story go where it wants. It is not a good stsyem for GMs who prefer to tightly control the narrative. Don't go much beyond a general outline, and let the details develop in-play.
3) Compels
You have to be creative and spontaneous. You can Compel on positive Aspects, and a player can Tap a negative action when it makes narrative sense. PCs can Compel other PCs, trading Fate points, too. Award Fate points freely if a player does something special in-character that drives home the PC's personality.
Fate works best when Fate points are given and spent frequently.
GMing narrative-style games is qualitatively different from running "crunchy" systems.
Some people prefer more codified rules. That's fine... Fate Core/FAE might not be your system. In that case, you might want to check out Strands of Fate, which is a heavily-modified Fate system that puts a lot more "crunch" into the rules.
The Aspect Trio is a main component of character creation in Fate Core. Dresden's is the same, only with a couple more aspects. High Concept, Trouble, Where are they from?, What shaped them?, and the Aspect Trio, for a total of 7 Aspects to play with. That seems a bit much to me. I prefer the Fate Core way, plus any extras for setting flavor. My group had trouble passing around the index cards to show how they shared in another character's first adventure.
Another hack of Fate Core I want to try is the Fate Freeport Companion which is D&D-flavored Fate.
I own Fate Core, Fate Accelerated Edition, and the Fate Freeport Companion, but have only played one Fate game: Do: Fate of the Flying Temple, which uses FAE.
The premise of Do is that the PCs are Pilgrims from the Flying Temple. As monk-in-training, they travel frequently to help solve problems throughout the Many Worlds. They arrive home from one such mission to find the temple missing, and a newly-hatched dragon in its place. They have to solve that mystery while continuing to receive urgent requests for help.
Each PC has 6 Aspects: Avatar (high concept), Banner (an emotional pull), Dragon (which helps define the team's sidekick/mascot/charge), and 3 others. It definitely helps to form a solid character concept before trying to assign your Aspects. Bouncing ideas off the GM at this stage is essential, so that both of you have a clear idea why each Aspect is important and how it will come into play. For example, my PC was a former circus acrobat, so her aspects included things like The Ties That Bind (fancy rope tricks, but also friends and family), Throw Caution to the Winds (she was an impulsive daredevil), I Played in This Town Once (for background knowledge and contacts), and Good with Animals.
The Flying Temple's teachings that violence should only be a last resort makes Do a good game for younger players, or for anyone who prefers a non-combat-centric game. It definitely forced us to improvise creative solutions to the challenges we faced!
We used Google Hangouts to play online (the GM was an old friend in another state), with Google Docs to share character info and session notes, and another site to track any aspect cards created or discovered during play. Sadly, we were only able to play 6-8 short sessions before scheduling issues brought a halt to the campaign, so we never did quite finish our first story arc. I would have liked to play more, to get comfortable enough with the system to run it for my kids (who would *love* having a dragon go on adventures with them!).
I absolutely adore the system, the DF setting, and wish I knew people who would play them. I only played once for about three sessions when my group fell apart cause players stopped being available. It was awesome.
I highly recommend watching Geek and Sundry's Table Top episode for Fate Core on YouTube. One of the developers runs the game with Wil Wheaton, Felicia Day, and one of the creators of the Librarians and Leverage TV shows. It was nice to see that compels don't have to be all that complicated, and can just be used to flavor how a character responds to a specific event in-game. They use the on-the-fly character creation option, which was neat to see in action.
I hate the Fate System.
I love Harry Dresden and the only reason i don't play the Harry Dresden RPG is because it uses the Fate System.
.
I hate the Fate System.
I love Harry Dresden and the only reason i don't play the Harry Dresden RPG is because it uses the Fate System.
Good to Know.
Grand Magus, why do you hate FATE?