Posts Tagged ‘fate core’

I’ve been replaced.

I was reading Jason Pitre’s brilliant A Spark in Fate Core, which is an alternate take on the Game Creation chapter I wrote in Core. I recommend you read that if you like world-building systems. At the bottom of the first page:

This replaces chapter 3 in Fate Core.

It’s happened time and time again. I’m nearly 35, and I’ve held a number of jobs over a couple different careers. I’ve been replaced as a programmer in Californian government, as a writer or editor at a number of places, and so on. And it will continue to happen. That’s the cycle of creative works. And it’s awesome.

Let me tell you why:

I replaced Rob Donoghue as the make-a-setting guy in Fate, at least as far as writing about it in products went. He started City Creation in Dresden, and I finished the re-design. (And thank fuck for Clark Valentine, who helped finish the text on that chapter that I didn’t have the brain for.) You can see his DNA in the stuff I wrote in City Creation and Fate Core.

Now Jason’s written a replacement for that that has my DNA and Rob’s DNA in there. He made something that’s pretty interesting, building on what we did. We indirectly contributed to someone else’s awesome thing, and we didn’t have to do any further work to enjoy that. That’s pretty cool.

But that’s not even the coolest part. The part that is: by being replaced, we become free to explore and do other things. Leonard Balsera & I replaced Rob & Fred as “the Fate system guys,” freeing those two to focus on other things they were more passionate about: running a company and being fathers. Now Mike Olson & Brian Engard have replaced Lenny & I, allowing us to do work in day jobs unrelated to Fate. Someone will at some point replace them, and so on.

To be replaced it to be freed to grow as a creative person. And to be replaced is to give someone else a chance to grown in a spot you filled. You need both, because once you’re replaced, you’re liking to replace someone else in some other space.

Now, there are two kinds of replacement: one where your works are built upon and one where your works are scrapped. You might think only one kind is welcome, but fuck that noise — both are great. The former is great on a personal level, because you can look upon your works’ longevity, even as it changes hands. But the latter is also key, because people will make something that still reacts to what you did, even if they go a different route.

That’s effectively what I’m doing with the Technocracy. The old Convention books are (more or less) about them being villains. I’m writing about them being heroes. I’m not denying former canon or whitewashing, but I am scrapping quite a bit of the pure-villainy themes.

Nothing says that when you’re replaced, people won’t still love what you did. Fuck knows there are a bunch of Mage fans out there who hate what we’re doing with the Technocracy because we’re replacing what they loved (in some cases because of what we’re replacing it with, and in some cases simply because it’s being replaced).

So when I look at that note in Jason’s document, I don’t fell despair or disappointment. I feel pride; someone has built something on top of my thing and is getting praise for it. Good on him. Now I shall go do the next thing, and maybe in the future build on his works.

Replacement is necessary for the cycle of creative growth. And you can see how the converse is true: look at those who jealously fight against being replaced, and how they’re more often than not stagnant, making the same shit they made twenty or thirty years ago.

Allow yourself to be replaced, and you allow yourself to transcend. And you allow your field to become better for it.

- Ryan

Are you a fan of pulpy, WWII horror action? Then you might already be aware of the Achtung! Cthulhu Kickstarter campaign. The wonderful Chris Birch of Modiphius Entertainment contacted me a few months back to talk about a Fate version of this idea. The Kickstarter campaign reached £80,000, which means the Fate Core version is unlocked! And Chris announced that I’ll be the one doing the conversation! :D

Long-time fans and astute readers will remember that I wrote some time about about how Fate can’t do horror. Since Chris contacted me, I’ve been thinking about what one would do to Fate to make it closer to that style of game and how much you can bend that style of game to fit with Fate.

The thing about action horror & Fate is peppered with moments of powerlessness, both in ability and in knowledge. Fate is a game that gives a lot more pulpy-scale power to the characters and narrative power to the players. And when it comes to me looking at a Fate conversion, I look at what dials can be tweaked to get Fate to deliver something more than just “here are all the skills and some sample aspects.”

And folks, after pondering this for some time, I gotta say, I have ideas…

I won’t get into it much now, since things are still being developed (and at the moment I’m under the gun for other projects, as fans are likely aware), but what we’re looking at right now is:

[Caveat: we might be smarter in the future and try something different; this is just an initial approach.]

• Just as the Savage Worlds editing is pulpier than the Call of Cthulhu one, the Fate one will naturally be even pulpier still. So, the Fate one would start with us not messing around with too many Fate assumptions, since people like Fate for a reason. Which means it is a bit closer to the “here are all the skills and some sample aspects” take on conversion.
• Add optional bits to bring the rules down at different moments, actually changing the Fate experience to be closer to action horror, while not eschewing Fate’s core promises.

As to the latter, I noted down a few things. Here’re a couple (that may or may not work out in the end):

• Since Fate points allow you to buy your way out of failure, having moments where you can’t use Fate points in that manner so efficiently works. When you’re dealing with Wehrmacht mooks, Fate points could work normal. Dealing with the undead? The game changes — you can spend like normal to reroll dice, but to add +2 gets expensive. So buying your way out of dealing with horrific situations isn’t as simple (and will ideally drive creating more preemptive advantages).
• Massive, unfightable entities don’t have aspects or skills or anything like that, and in fact they never roll dice. What they have are pseudo-skills like “Devour investigator [8],” where that’s just the static result for whenever that situation comes into play.

In any case, I’m excited by this prospect. It’ll be an interesting and fun project! There’s still time for you to get in on the Kickstarter, if this sounds up your alley.

- Ryan

I’m happy to say that Fate Core’s Kickstarter has launched! Of course, by now everyone reading this has probably seen it, but still worth me pointing out.

When I left Evil Hat, Core was late in development. Lenny & I spent quite a bit looking at every point where people complained about rules confusing, every point where we were found that we were explaining around things when playing at conventions, and language use in general.

Fate Core’s math isn’t dramatically different — it didn’t need to be. But we kept finding problems with its language, and because of that, we re-designed parts. Back it and you’ll see; the playtest draft is available upon backing.

I used to joke that Core was Lenny & I writing a book on how language affects mechanics. (Because language affects conception and perception, and that affects when we use mechanics and how we interpret them.)

The rest of the Core team’s pretty rocking, as well. Jeremy Keller is solid people, and I can’t think of two people better suited to be the next leaders of the Fate community than Mike Olson & Brian “Lord Danger” Engard. And, of course, Fred Hicks will make it look good, both in an aesthetic sense and in an information transmission/cohesion sense.

So, if Fate’s even remotely your thing, or it was once and grew not to be, check it out. We didn’t just rehash Fate 3′s text for generic purposes. And I’m pretty proud of that, even if I didn’t carry it over the finish line.

- Ryan

When you’re writing a book, it’s crucial to know who your audience is and to write for them.

That sound obvious, right? It’s harder than you think. Many indie peeps will write to the audience immediately around them, the folks I call alpha fans. They’re super easy to write to, because they already have a buy-in to what you think. You can engage in minimalism with them to a lazy degree. And if they’re the only people who you expect will ever buy your book or play your game — like you’re just making something for your friends — cool.

But a writer honest with him- or herself has to go farther than that, to imagine what other people outside of the alpha fan group will likely be checking this out. After all, how else are you going to grow that group? (I should point out that you’re doing this for two sets of folks: you, as a creator showing that you care about a broader group of people; and your alpha fans, who probably want more great people to play with.) So then you have to consider who, realistically, is going to check out your fan, should for some reason you break out of a small circle of folks who know about your thing and into a the notice of a larger population.

This isn’t just fantasy land. Look at Wil Wheaton pimping Fiasco. Something like that could happen to you, perhaps at that scale, perhaps smaller but still larger that your own sphere of influence.

So, who is that group? That’s something we had a discussion about with Fate Core, which ended with to following notions of audience:

• There are a lot of alpha fans of Fate. They get the ideas, which is to our benefit. So we shouldn’t write solely to them. We’re still writing for them, but we should be writing to their friends, folks they want to introduce to Fate.
• There’s a non-insignificant who want to get away with reading as little as possible, until they’re sure they’ll like something. These folks are more focused on kinesthetic learning (whether due to preference of brain makeup, whatever). So let’s make it so they only need to read the short Basics chapter, as long as someone (ideally the GM) reads the rest of the thing. And we’ll declare that to be the case upfront.
• The Fate veterans will need to have spelled out some of the terminology & rules cleanup we’re doing for Core. Since there are a bunch of different implementations of Fate right now, we don’t know which ones someone will have in mind when they’re reading Core for the first time, so we’ll have to make sure we don’t confuse them while writing to their friends.
• We will not be writing to an audience not aware of roleplaying games. Evil Hat doesn’t have the sort of advertising budget to reach out to totally new people. Like with almost every other RPG producer, we rely primarily on word of mouth & exposure to get new people to try out games. Very few people are actually exposed to our hobby directly from a book these days; they are from friends who have already been exposed. So we’re not going to waste time trying to explain our hobby to someone completely new.
• And because a game can live and die by the loudness of its alpha fans, we’re definitely still writing for them. Just not solely to them.

This conversation about audience came after some of Fate Core was written, and Lenny & I had a sit-down to talk about how we need to reflect to our audience. This solidified which of the two approaches for Core we were looking at:

• The first was a purely toolkit model. After the Basics & Aspects chapter, every single thing in Fate is entirely modular. We were going to focus solely on how to built your own Fate game from that modularity.
• The second was to take a slim setting example and build around that, so we had some finalized Core rules that embodied Fate Core, the sort of thing we could use to start with, and then drift from that central point in future discussions of toolkitting.

Because we realized the primary text focus should be to folks new to Fate, not new to roleplaying, and likely have a friend around who knows this but not necessarily, we went with the second approach. Once we understood this model, we were able to put the toolkit element — which is critical to Fate Core — in context.

What that means for the text, well, we’ll show you when we can. But for now, I just wanted to write a bit about thinking on your audience.

- Ryan

P.S. This is the core of my problems with I used to talk about Apocalypse World’s text. Which I stopped doing because rather than actually engage in conversation, the fans I talked with just said “Well, I don’t see that” and shut conversation down. Of course you don’t, you’re in the alpha group. But that’s a possibly future post, about how that phrase is toxic slime in various geek cultures.