EN World Post

A few days ago I posted a question on the FATE gaming board over at EN World. I got some interesting feedback.

its here

finished

I have finished the FATE Core book.

It is my plan to move on immediately to FATE toolkit.

I think that extras are very cool. A system whereby the addition of new mechanics can be added to the game that only takes 10 pages to explain is a feat in itself.

As far as the book as a whole goes I loved it. I'll have more to say on this later, for now I just thought I would post to say I have reached my first milestone on my journey.

end in sight

I finished chapter 10. I might be able to finish this tomorrow, chapter 11 is only 21 pages.

I am really not sure I want to implement the skill pyramid. I like the skill selection at start but the idea that you have to have one skill stack on top of another is kinda silly to me. Maybe it will make more sense in game but right now I am considering changing it, even if it does make it easier for the characters to advance to high skill.

discouraged

I finished chapter 9.

I am not sure I like the aspects for scenes idea but I'll play it as written and see how it goes.

Before I read chapter 9 it was my plan to simply convert a small dungeon I designed to FATE and use that as an introductory scenario. I'm not sure that kind of adventure will even work in FATE. I'm not sure that my GM style will work in FATE. I hope it will but I am having difficulty with the concepts as I get deeper into the rules.

I am discouraged but how slowly I am reading and understanding this game. I plan to read the Tool Kit next but that might be a while.

Made of Twigs

I have made some but not much progress reading today. I made it to pg. 232.

The adventure creation rules are so different from other games I have played as to be almost alien. I have to read each page 3 times or so to get the gist of what is being said. I am catching on but its taking time. I haven't read a set of rules that I wasn't familiar with, at least in previous editions, in years - like ten years - and I am finding FATE to be a stretch of my understanding of what a pen and paper RPG can be.

Aspects are not only the basis for character creation but the basis of everything. Think about that a moment, it is as if the new edition of D&D had, as a part of its core mechanics a rule that said every dungeon had to have a Dexterity and Wisdom score. That is exactly what FATE has done with the ubiquity of aspects. A PC can, if he can figure out how to convince the DM that it makes sense, spend a fate point to get the house he is in to spontaneously catch fire if say, it has the Made of twigs and dried grass aspect. That's not the same as having his character lite the fire, that player gets the house itself to lite the fire!

That is a great game mechanic, I cant wait to play this game.

NPC veriety

I have finished Chapter 8.

I am struck by how easy it is to make up NPCs. A wide variety of challenges that look like people and be thrown at the PCs very easily. And they can be overcome in a variety of ways with or without killing. I tend to play bloodthirsty types but FATE seems to be designed to allow the range of combat and non-combat challenges that you get in movies. I think I like that. The idea that there is a mechanic for allowing the NPC's to be defeated in battle but not necessarily killed is cool.

collaborative storytelling

"Your main goal should be to enlist the players as partners in bringing the drama, rather than being the sole provider." - FATE Core pg. 212

So far as I can see this is the main thing that sets FATE Core apart from other games, certainly other games I have played. FATE players can get NPCs to do things through the spending of fate points. They can ask the GM to give them a fate point to do something that complicates things for their characters. In fact it is clear that the players are not always in their characters corner but, if playing FATE right, are in the corner of the story and making it cool. Not their characters story cool but the collaborative one.

I have played games like this in the past. A dear departed friend and the greatest Game Master I ever knew played endless hours with me and our group in a system that we never knew the rules for and cannot now replicate. We sometimes spent whole sessions, long ones, without a single die roll, by anyone. It was true collaborative storytelling and I did not realize how much I missed it.

FATE may well give me the tools to recreate the feel and excitement of those bygone games. It gives me hope that I can get back a piece of something that was special. It gives me a hope because someone wrote rules that allow for this kind of play and others have adopted it with delight.

now that I understand this I cannot wait to play.

slight progress

I'm up to page 206. The GM section is not hard but life is getting in the way of game again.

The main gist of the GM chapter is 'don't be a jerk'. Good advice for anyone, but especially true for GMs.

bad day

Made it to page 191, but this has been a bad day health wise. I'll try and get more read but not sure. Sitting and listening to old Rammstein.

of combat

I have made it to chapter 8... of 11. I will not be able to finish the FATE Core book as soon as I had planned but I'll get there in a day or two.

When I finished chapter 7 I was struck by the shortness of the Combat chapter. In most RPGs I've read the Combat chapter is one of the longest and almost always the most complicated. Combat in FATE is pretty simple and fast paced. The real kind of fast paced not the D&D kind where things can get bogged down if any character wants to do something out of the I-hit-you-you-hit-me mechanic.

In FATE the point of Combat is to make it as dramatic as possible not as realistic as possible. If you want realistic combat play Gurps, rules for everything and two, count'em, two, separate combat systems. In FATE just tell the GM what your character tries to do and the GM gives you what to roll and narrates what happens with the result.

I love the combat system, not sure how I feel about the stress and consequences, but though I have played FATE exactly one whole session at a con, none of the PCs ever took any damage of any kind. The dice loved us. But, this is not a good way to test a core mechanic of the system. I am planning to set up a test game in the world I am designing (the point of this blog) and trying to give my players a good taste of the injury and recovery systems.

Further Progress

I have made it to page 154, the beginning of the rules for what they call "conflicts".

In FATE a conflict is basically a combat, it's not called combat like most other games though. The reason for that is pretty cool. In FATE a conflict can be physical, mental and even emotional. A player can attempt to have his character harm the self esteem of another character and the harm can take the form of emotional injury called consequences that can last for a whole campaign.

The injury system sounds very cool but I haven't gotten to the deep explanation of how it works exactly. The FATE mechanics do not lend themselves to a simple sequence of this piece of the rules fits into that one and builds smoothly. A good example of a system that dose this is Gurps, the book can be read cover to cover and each rule discussed builds on the one before it. Instead FATE is a single system and parts are hard to separate from other parts.

Cool Referance

I fund a cool reference for FATE, I thought I'd post it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/17h3a2/a_mechanical_summary_of_fate_core/

Skills or Something

I have finished chapter 5 Skills and Stunts.

The thing that strikes me most is how not like skills the skills are. What I mean by that is that skills in FATE are a lot more like what you would call stats in other games. Your strength and dexterity are skills but so is your fighting ability.

The skill chapter goes out of its way to inform GMs that the skills listed are very fluid and can be adapted, split up, or added to in whatever way suits the setting the characters find themselves in.

I like systems that allow the GM to show the players what type of world they are in instead of telling them. Skill lists in FATE provide this exceptionally.

No Insight

I made it to page 103 today. Still not on track to make my goal of Thursday. Life, unfortunately, comes before game.

I think that the skills and stunts system is pretty cool. I don't have any real insights or observations today, I just need to get to reading.

Pacificon 1

I just made a GM account at Pacificon's site. I have the chance to just declare and describe my event now but I chickened out. its still like 6 months away and I haven't finished reading the rules let alone designing an adventure. I just feel like if I schedule early it will make it more likely that I will actually go. Patience, its good for GM's.

Reading

I knuckled down and finished chapter 4 before midnight. I think I'll have to read it again before I GM a game but for now I'm happy to be back on track to finishing the book before Thursday.

The next chapter is Skills and Stunts. It should be a lot easier as far as mechanics go.

Aspect Invocation = the cool

I got to page 70 today, I'll have to do better each day if I want to finish inside my one week goal. I am a slow reader and I had a bit of difficulty with the material today.

Today the idea of aspect invocation refused to resolve itself in my brain. I reread almost the whole first half of chapter 4 and I think I finally got it. Invocation of aspects allows a player to get a bonus on a conflict resolution roll but the thing that was confusing me was how this allows for the maintenance of suspense and tension.

Compelling aspects is how.

Compelling is the GM's way of getting the players to do things that he wants for the story. He offers FATE points as bribes for characters to invoke their aspects in a way that benefits the story and maintains suspense and tension. This antagonist relationship between the story and the characters creates a situation where it is in the players best interest to help the GM tell a story. Maybe not the story either of them envisioned, but a fun, suspenseful, and exciting one.

This is not to say its a perfect mechanic. It puts a lot of pressure on the GM to think on his feet and not rely on notes and maps that keep the players in line with the story he is trying to tell. As a long time GM I can say that it is very frustrating when a group of players do something outside the scope of the game you designed. Especially if you put your heart and soul into designing an element of the game that the PCs don't even look at for more than a second or two and then go on a quest to discover the meaning of a random encounter that had no purpose in your game but to put a bit of action in a session. And frustrated GM's do foolish things. This detracts form the fun of a game profoundly.

In a game Like FATE the players and the GM know that each has a bit of control of the others actions. Invocations and compels allow a kind of direct communication that in other games is oblique at best. The GM can point to aspects of his design that he wants the PCs to look at more closely and the players can tell him what they want expansion on.

I have always wanted to play a game like this and I think my gaming group has too.

Player Control

I finished chapter 3 and now have some thoughts.

FATE points work kinda like hero points in the old DC heroes rpg. I love the idea that the characters have some control of the Deus Ex Machina, but I'm not sure how I feel about giving them some control of the world.

I have always made my games in such a way that the events around the characters happen until the players interfere and the NPCs react to the changes. I'm not the kind of GM that has a specific story to tell and forces the characters to go through it my way. I have played 1st through 5th edition dungeons and dragons and have always had a partiality to Gygaxian adventure design. The bad guys should try to kill the PCs and TPK is always an option (it's only happened to me twice however). If the PCs know that they can decide that for a critical roll probability will be on their side it might change that dynamic and I am worried that this will detract from the suspense that is the source of a good bit of the fun of an RPG.

I'll have to read further and see if a different mechanic allows for the creation of suspense. There is something about the GM getting fate points to use for something, maybe its just for, what they call, compels? Got to keep reading.

determined

I made it to page 41 in the FATE Core book.

I think I love the character creation mechanics. they are different from anything I have ever encountered. All my gaming career I have played games with stats and numbers that define the character, FATE uses sentences. I know that this is not a huge revelation, but its interesting to me. I have played a FATE game but I did not see the ramifications of this mechanic. It ties the characters together and to the world around them in a way that the stat based games take a lot longer and more work to do.

As an example I spent the last three months making a detailed Star Trek game. Much of that time was spent making characters for the players to play. I decided that the players should have a choice of characters to play and so made three to five for each of the major positions on a Star Trek away team, each with detailed backgrounds so the players would know who these people were. That means that I made at lest 12 characters that would not be played.

If I had used FATE and created characters at the table I could have had the players do all that work and make characters that they wanted to play. I consider myself a good GM, but that game fell on its face. In large part due to me having to micromanage a group of players that didn't know the system I was running and didn't want that system to get in the way of the roleplaying that they were enjoying.

FATE could have saved that game. It could have made that game great.

I am determined to let roleplaying and storytelling be my guiding star.

Hello and Welcome

Hi,
My name is Daniel Woolery and this is my new blog. I have just returned from Dundracon, a game convention in the California bay area. I had my first experience playing the FATE Core system and I liked it a lot. This blog is going to follow my journey to learn to Game Master that system and then create a new campaign setting to run at the next convention I attend (probably Pacificon).

I have been playing and DMing roleplaying games since 1988. I was 14 and my mom bought me a copy of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness. it was a great game and I still play it sometimes. I'll probably post a longer gamer biography at some point.

I plan to update frequently and post all the things I do to reach the stated goal. My first goal along the way is to read the rules from cover to cover. I have begun but am not too far into it yet, what I have seen, I like. I am giving myself one week to finish the core book so by the 25^th I should be done.

I hope to post two or three times a day with updates to what I am reading, ideas and notes for my game, and observations on the mechanics I think are interesting.

This will be my second big project connected to gaming. First was a game set in the Star Trek universe using the GURPS 3^rd edition rules. This game was scheduled to run for 10 hours but only ran 8. I was prepared for one thing and got another. A mistake I do not intend to repeat. This will be the subject of a future post.