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.