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.