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.
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