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.