Posts Tagged ‘fate’

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.

In Fate, your degree of success over a difficulty is measured in shifts. When you roll equal to the difficulty, you have zero shifts. Roll one over the difficulty, and you have one shift. Two over means two shifts, and so on.

As I am reading over Fate Core, I started thinking hard about that assumption. And how that needn’t always be the case.

Imagine it the shifts generated were exponential, like so:

• Meeting the difficulty = 0 shifts
• Beating by 1 = 1 shift
• Beating by 2 = 2 shifts (so far, the same)
• Beating by 3 = 4 shifts
• Beating by 4 = 8 shifts
• Beating by 5 = 16 shifts
• etc, doubling each time.

Master Fencer: (Weapons) When you are fighting off a horde of mooks, your shifts are exponential.

Master Engineer: (Engineering) When you are building or fixing something, your shifts are exponential.

Master Against the Dark Arts: (Wizardry) When you are fighting against the dark arts (necromancy, curses, and other evil magics), your shifts are exponential.

If that seems too large, it could be unlocked by spending a Fate point. No idea if this works, but it came to mind, so I thought I would throw it out there.

(Incidentally, stuff like this won’t be in Core, because it’s not, well, core to Fate. But I am considering it for a Fate build I’m tinkering with.)

- Ryan

You may have noticed that this is a week where I’m throwing out half-ideas. I wrote about doing this quite a bit ago, but found myself not doing it as often as I feel I should.

Over the last years or so, I’ve been playing Smallville & Technoir, which have interesting coin economies. Smallville’s Plot Points are infinite from the perspective of the GM, but when people get them, they aren’t immediately available–which is key to making the PvP elements sing. Technoir’s Push Dice is a table-wide closed system, where spending it means it goes to the person affected–player or GM–for them to use in the future. And that makes me think about one way to tweak Fate Points.

Fate Points as Closed Economy

Imagine if, when a game starts, the PCs have their refresh in Fate Points, and the GM has none to use. At the players spend Fate, the GM keeps them (unless you’re talking PvP, in which case the affected player keeps them instead). Later, the GM can use those Fate Points to compel the PCs or invoke aspects for her NPCs. This tackles one common question about Fate: does the GM have any?

Because the GM has none to start, she cannot right away compels. If that’s not desired, either the GM should start with a couple, or some compels (perhaps all) should come from the ether rather than from her pool. This means it’s no longer a closed economy, but semi-closed.

Similarly, the refresh mechanic at the start of a session or crucial point makes the economy semi-closed, since if you have more than your refresh in Fate Points, you keep all you have. Not sure how I’d want to tackle that inflation, but it’s something to consider.

Fate Points Delayed

Fate Points that you gain are not immediately available, but become available after the current conflict or scene. This is a necessary component for a closed system to work; otherwise, you can keep something going by throwing Fate Points freely back and forth.

Now, this isn’t something for every Fate game. My gut says (as I just thought of this and haven’t tried it) that this will be a somewhat grittier game.

What do you think?

- Ryan

Fate’s been able to handle aspects for campaign theme, mood, setting tropes, all that jazz since aspects were created. We handle some of the with Dresden’s City Creation, with the Themes and Threats of the city and locations in it, but it can go farther. A good friend of mine, Morgan Ellis, pushes the envelope here with aspects he’ll put down about the theme of a game. Some that we’ve come up with in conversation or in play:

• “Training montages”, for spy or thriller games
• “Kirby dots“, for comic book-inspired games
• “True Love Conquers All”, for romance-infused games

etc. He was talking to us about wanting to do a Shadowrun Fate game, because when he first picked up Shadowrun 2/e as a kid, he fell in love with the cover. He wanted to play the cover. For various reasons, the game in ended up playing wasn’t the game from the cover.

Shadowrunners in all their glory

Here’s where it gets all crazyhouse. We started deconstructing it, figuring out what aspects would work well, when another friend of ours, Carl Rigney, suggested just making the cover image an aspect. It might have been a joke at first, but it got us thinking hard about the idea. It isn’t actually too far a leap from some of the very high-concept aspects like “Sins of the Past” or anything like that. With those aspects, a bit of conversation about what an invocation or compel is makes for smoother play. Same goes here; what conversation could be had about invoking this cover image? Compelling it?

I wouldn’t go crazy with images for aspects all the time, but a cover image, that’s some interesting thinking. Haven’t played with it yet, but I’m certainly going to at some point. I’ll let you know how it turns out. Or, if you try it, let me know!

So, for the audience participation portion of the week: How would you invoke this cover image aspect? How would you compel it?

- Ryan

Back in Fate 2, aspects were rated. That was ditched in Fate 3, to good measure. Making aspects mechanically equal allows them to be situationally divergent. (Which is to say: they’re an example of a good method of Use Anywhere Stats.) But lately, I’ve been feeling like there should be some sense of rating, to prioritize some over others.

The reason I keep feeling this is because I like people creating aspects through skill roll-based declarations. My Emerging Threats Unit campaign frame runs off of this idea — you roll Unnatural Sciences to “discover” things about the horror you’re fighting, or Survival to “find” things like cover or advantageous environment bits. You make your roll, and you declare the aspect.

Julianne uses her Great (+4) Unnatural Sciences skill to analyze residue at the initial scene. She picks up one of the victim’s limbs left behind by whatever horrible creature did this, and uses her portable lab. She rolls +3 on the dice, bringing her total to Epic (+7). She makes up that the residue suggests the entity is vulnerable to uranium shot, based on the “saliva profile.”

Normally, this is a single aspect, “Vulnerable to Uranium Shot,” and it’s worth one free tag. After that, it’s a normal aspect. And I’m always a bit dissatisfied with this approach. One solution my good friend and accomplished Fate GM Morgan Ellis used was to allow creative multiple aspects on a high roll. I liked the idea in principle, but when I was a player in one of his games in a situation where I rolled high in creating an aspect, that second one was phoned in. I didn’t have a good idea, one that was equal to what I was thinking of for the first one.

In talking after Dresdacon, we came up with this idea: aspects created in play are rated in the number of free tags you can get. That way, they still have the strength of being like normal aspects, rather than giving a +3 or whatever. But rolling high is still rewarded with something awesome.

When declaring an aspect with a skill, the player’ll roll against a target the GM comes up with — typically Fair (+1), though a block in place could change that. Getting your target exactly means it’s a one-time free aspect, and afterward goes away (the “not sticky” idea in Dresden). Beating it means the aspect has a free tag and remains around afterward (“sticky”). Every two above that means the aspect gets another free tag. Just as with other aspects, you can only tag or invoke it once per roll, so you can’t blow all those tags at once.

This means the “Vulnerable to Uranium Shot” has three free tags — one for making it at Fair (+2), then it’ll remain because it’s at Good (+3), one more for making Superb (+5), and one for Epic (+7).

A simple enough idea. Now to put a little spin on it, we can add two types of stunts (which assumes Typed Aspects):

• Sherlock Holmes: When you use Unnatural Sciences to declare aspects, gain +2 to your roll.
• Monster Hunter: In combat, when you invoke Unnatural Sciences aspect, you may use more than one free tag for multiple benefit. Or you may use a free tag and pay a point for multiple benefit. This counts as a single invocation.

The great thing about this idea (potentially, since it hasn’t been playtested) is that two different people can take that stunt pair. The operative with the high Unnatural Sciences skill makes aspects, and the one with the high Violence skill uses that knowledge to blow away threats.

Later, not this week, I should talk about the power of declaring that an aspect is “wrong.” Because in an investigative game, I want that to happen. “Wait, it’s not affected by uranium shot. Retreat!” And I want the players to not only want that to happen, but trigger it with glee.

- Ryan