Have you guys ever used the Fate system?
If no, why not?
If yes, what did you like? What not?
Any stories to share?
>>44340065
Could you make a less relevant thread?
I know, it seems impossible, but you can try!
>Have you ever rolled dice?
>If no, why not?
>If yes, what did you like? What not?
>Any stories to share?
I've GMed some Fate Accelerated, played some as well. Our campaign was about urban fantasy demon hunters, with tongue-in-cheek presentation.
>Pros
The system is insanely adaptable, and it handles improvisation well. If you have players who can think on the fly you'll have a good time.
>Cons
The mechanics are all the same under the hood, so it doesn't feel like you accomplish anything by narrating differently.
The game falls flat if players are bad at thinking up aspects and controlling the narrative.
You need a shitton of sticky notes for everything.
>>44340065
Haven't played it. Didn't find the concepts appealing. I don't like it for the same reasons I don't like GURPS, except flip "simulation" to "narrative" in most cases. Too many rules that aren't intuitive and require too specific of a mindset. You don't "get" the system until you understand the entire thing: lots and lots of very specific terms and rules that don't mesh nicely at first. Tons of backtracking to previous chapters to understand how they link up. And until everyone gets it, everyone is on board, and the group is working together, it's just a big ball of suck.
ive never role played before but someone turned me to pic related. Ive been trying to make a setting for it but the game itself doesnt really seem like it would fit with fate. Maybe a tabletop instead of a pen and paper.
Thoughts?
>>44340065
I've played Fate three times: once was a near-future sci-fi setting the group made up, partly as we went, and that was a train wreck.
The second was based on the 1990s X-Men cartoon, and that was pretty fun.
The third was a Star Wars campaign, and that was amazing. Everybody involved had a great familiarity with how a Star Wars story should 'feel', so everybody knew how to spin things off of every development in a way which felt very genuine.
If you're playing a game in a preexisting setting that everybody enjoys and has a firm grasp on, Fate can be damn good. It's tricky with things outside of that.
I'm intermittently GM'ing a Dresden Files game. It's taking a little bit of time for the players to get the system, and I'm still having to push them a bit to use/make aspects well. Once we're in the swing of things the game has been really fun though. It's really shown that having the group sit down together to make characters and making them all have backstory links makes everyone more invested in the group.
I had to kick my flatmate out, so I'm down a player though.
>>44340065
I'm in a game set in the Worm universe using the FATE system.
>>44342867
Is right, it really, really helps to use a pre-existing setting with FATE, rather than sing it for a game in a setting of your creation
I used it for a campaign (Core) and two one-shots (Accelerated) so far.
My issue with it was how the Core book was laid out (the rules can be put on 3-4 pages, MAX), and with some of the unnecessary and oftentimes pretentious terminology. But once the players and I got past that, it was more or less smooth sailing.
I say more or less because the fun of a game run with Fate entirely depends on player participation. They need to be able to come up with Aspects, but more importantly, they need to put themselves in harm's way to really make the game work. It took a few sessions, but the players realized that being rewarded for risk-taking made for a much more interesting story than if they played it safe and hoarded their fate points.
Now preparing a small campaign with Accelerated, as I've come to like that more. The Approaches give players a little more leeway in developing how their character acts and what they do as a result, and it gives me more leeway in making sub-rules that are specific for whatever campaign I'm running.
Though to be honest, I think I'm gonna want to sink my teeth into other systems after this campaign is done. I'm gonna need something a little more crunchy after a year and change worth of Fate.
Atomic Robo is the shit. FATE in general is very good, and doles out it's narrative control very well.
>>44343103
I would kill to play a Worm game, but getting friends to read that monstrosity is proving to be difficult.
>>44343461
It's hard to start reading, but even harder to stop reading.
>>44343398
Atomic Robo is fun, but you need to make sure that everyone is on the same page for brainstorming. We had several brainstorms get horribly derailed by one player who has a bad habit of being randumb.
>>44343495
It would be so much easier if it were in a format other than a blog. Even a PDF or eBook version would mean I could throw the file at everyone.
>>44340722
Half the threads on this board are barely even related to gaming. Why worry about it?
>>44340065
>what did you like?
The versatility is good. You can do pretty much anything with it. It also has a good way of balancing things by making everything equal in terms of mechanics, but infinity unequal in terms of fluff. You really can have a wizard and a jedi and a firefighter and a computer nerd on the same team and they will all be on the same level. Social characters truly are just as powerful as combat characters.
It's also very simple in terms of mechanics, easy to learn and teach the basics of how things work. It's especially good for new players. And it emulates genre fiction, rather than emulating "reality". Games feel more like movies or TV shows, and less like you're playing Diablo, and just sort of whittling down health bars and gathering loot.
>What not?
The Fate point system never really works how it's supposed to. Its hard to keep points flowing to the characters, because most people don't have enough or good enough flaws, and everyone kind of forgets them. It also, in a weird way, can discourage roleplaying, because players get used to the idea that they should only stay true to their character when they are being bribed to do so. Players also tend to stockpile Fate points rather than spend them, making them virtually untouchable when they need to be, and its hard to prevent stockpiling without also slowing the point economy as a whole, which is already often a problem.
The lack of gear or money in the basic rules is also troublesome, especially since it's hard to add them in a meaningful way without really contradicting the mechanics. It makes a lot of things feel pointless to players when they know they won't truly be rewarded in a material sense. It especially makes the game feel useless for players who are more focused on "leveling up" or "gearing up", which is a lot of players.
>>44344484
The biggest flaw of the game, though, is the lack of a good master list of Aspects. Making players create their own Aspects means that the majority of them come up with shitty, useless, or barely applicable Aspects. After playing and running this game for a few years, I find that most players struggle immensely with this part of the system. Very few of them can come up with even a single really good Aspect, one that has positive and negative connotations, which helps define their character, and which comes up with some regularity.
Most people end up with Aspects so narrow they rarely come into play, so broad they are effectively meaningless, or so random they don't apply to the game at all. Very few people can even manage the doubled edged sword concept, and even when you explain it to them, most don't really buy into the idea that flaws are better, or at least as important, as boons, and end up with limited opportunities to gain Fate points.
Aspects make character creation essentially into a creative writing course. People who aren't good at designing a fully realized, three dimensional character, with strengths and weaknesses and narrative goals, struggle with Fate. It's really frustrating, too, because the mechanics lend themselves so well to new players, yet the storytelling demands for really making characters good are more than most people can get hold of. It's amazing to me that the creators of Fate don't put out whole books of prewritten Aspects for people to choose from. Asking people to make up their own is akin to opening a Dungeons and Dragons book and being told you need to make up your own Feats. Some players can do it easily, but most struggle, and many are incapable.
Fate is a fantastic game if every person at the table is a skilled storyteller and experienced game master. If anyone isn't, they are going to struggle to really take part in the game, and I think that's a shame.
>>44340065
i avoid it like the plague solely because fate and gurps are the first thing you're redirected to when anyone asks about any kind of mechanic barely and distantly similar to fate and gurps mechanics
>>44343179
Dude, the book.
The fucking book and its Create-Your-Own-Adventure pageflipping crap. The content doesn't make a bad SRD, but I wish they'd keep similar topics together.
>>44344653
Some people don't like compelling because it makes their Mary Stu look bad, and it can be really hard for them to keep track of proposing their own compels.
Granted, my players are coming from D&D so I understand their gamist perspective on "winning" an RPG.I just want to play this game system instead of GM it seldom in semi-despair.
>>44344653
>>44344653
I'm glad that most of the people in my group understood that the game wasn't really about leveling or getting loot from the outset, so I was lucky to avoid the gear or money woes. However, I'm with you on the Aspect problem.
As much as I personally love the character/game generation process in how it gets the players involved before the first dice are even rolled, there's points where that process is slowed down to a crawl because it's just hard to make Aspects other than your Main Concept and Trouble. Even once that gets squared away, I found some of the Aspects either too difficult to convincingly compel, or the players found few opportunities to actually invoke them. And then there's the one player who wanted to spam a particular Aspect because it was so generalized.
And let's not get into making Stunts. That shit is easier to break than anything. Though at least the SRD has a nifty tool to help make Stunts. Wonder if they can do that for Aspects.
>>44344992
Yes. The book. So much bloat, so little organization, such a GIGANTIC FUCKING FONT! The SRD however is fantastic and I can run off of that alone. Really wish I didn't buy the book, but at least my copy wasn't too expensive.And admittedly, the book just FEELS good to hold. It's small enough to hold. Has a good weight. And the cover feels good against my fingers.
Furthermore, I had a problem getting my players into self-compelling, but they eventually got it when I presented them with situations that (barring some spectacular rolls) forced them to burn fate points at crucial moments.
Why do people say FATE isn't suitable for horror games? I think it would be easy to add horror themes and disabilities through aspects when a stress track hits certain thresholds.
So if it gets to -2, you get a minor one ("The walls are always watching") and it resets to 0.
If something brings you to -4, you get a moderate one ("I've had a god in my head") and it resets to 0.
And if you get anything higher, you get a serious one ("Stark raving mad").
>>44345278
I've been hoping to integrate some survival horror into my campaign after people start getting too comfy
>>44342043
"tabletop" and "pen and paper" are the same thing, bro, unless you're thinking of making a board game or war game or something.
I like fate narrative ideas but as a basic mechanic I'm not a fan for it. It's too mechanically weak. Also The dice have an incredibly steep number range. A single plus and minus throw the balance out massively
Hey mate still the games and work it into some thing with a bit more crunch
>>44342043
When I was doing playtesting for this, the setting that was played in was the sort of people-playing-a-game of Sword Art Online, and beyond that basically just Monster Hunter with Pokémon instead. Though there were some definite Attack on Titan moments; I don't know enough about the series to say if there were other influences from it.
I'd actually recommend looking at the supplement books for PTU called "A Game of Throhs" and to a lesser extent "The Blessed and the Damned." They have a fair bit of writing on setting and such that are pretty applicable.
>>44345278
It's not that you can't do it, it's that as it's presented in the book, the characters will be a little too successful and competent for horror. You have to tweak it.
>>44347784
I find this makes Fate pretty tough to hack things into, because giving +1s or -1s to rolls has exponential results. It's well designed but the design space there is very small.
It might work better if you do 1d6-1d6 instead of 4dF but that's already tinkering with the results of basic rolls.
What are the differences between Fate and GURPS?
>>44350560
I assume you haven't been to these discussions much before and don't know much about Fate. GURPS is a "traditional" RPG whereas Fate is a narrativist, fiction first, system. Rules are much lighter and quite a bit depends on players being proactive, not just the GM.
>>44350280
Yeah I just can't get over how freaking bizarre the 4d3-8 bell curve is.
I'm a big fan of the D6-D6 it wides up the numbers range and gives it bit more swing. 5% chance for the +/-5. As God intended
>>44350560
They are totally different games?
They're both universal systems but but I'm either side of the story versus realism coin. GURPS is a roll under 3d6. Dem some natural curves.
FATE is definitely narrative focused arguably at the expense of everything else while GURPS pushes simulation hard.
