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.