Great Review for Fate. Though 26 minutes in, I'm surprised that no one stated that the system is for when you want your game to act like a adventure book or movie, rather then a tactical simulation.
27:38 *DIASPORA* (die-AA-spo-ruh) is based on the older FATE 3.0 edition rules, not the Fate Core System above. You have more skills, 10 Aspects per character to keep track of (usually only a good or bad aspect, not definable as both positive and negative) and more crunch in the Personal Combat, Platoon Combat, Social Combat and Spaceship Combat rules. The setting is a "cluster" of star-systems whose characteristics you generate, and civilization has risen and fallen several times on each world, so that the greatest weapons might be found by...an Archeologist. Interstellar travel is tough, and the rules are pretty good. The System Reference Document is readable for free, but keep in mind that it has differences from Fate Core. www.vsca.ca/Diaspora/diaspora-srd.html
@@kayosiiii Yeah, that's right. It's a lot of work to detail every planet or at least principal planet in a system, in games such as Traveller. So Diaspora talks only about a cluster of 6-12 systems and each player gets to generate 2 of them. It would make sense for their character to come from one of the worlds the player has generated.
Here's the way to take a marker and convert four white six-sided dice to Fate Dice (formerly called Fudge Dice): www.sinisterforces.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/BabysFirstFudgeDice.pdf
For what it's worth, there is a smooth (probably edited) game demonstration of Fate Core by Wil Wheaton and Felicia Day on the TableTop channel. New players should not expect the game to go this smoothly, as more time will be spent on, for example, developing Aspects and Stunts that are properly-worded to work well with the game. Here they seemed to blurt out perfect Aspects and Stunts on the first try. But have a look at an ideal game of Fate. (55 min.) th-cam.com/video/NOFXtAHg7vU/w-d-xo.html
Strange Ghoul Absolutely, with one caveat. If you want something with a Lovecraftian feel of Nihilism, you will need to be conscious of how you run the game. Certain parts WILL need modifications to give that feel. The FATE Toolkit book can help guide you with suggestions on how to keep the tension and feel of danger by changing certain parts of Fate, AND suggest which parts those might be.
Bones the Friendly Lich Alright cool and thank you for the help and suggestions, it will be my first time GM and I got the fate and genesys book so I'm was wondering which one would work best for the setting and me since I'm new. A buddy of mine told me savage world but for some reason I'm more drawn to fate or genesys system a little more lol.
The Fate System Toolkit supplement says Horror is hard to do in Fate. Fate sets up characters to be _proactive_ , _competent_ , and _dramatic_ . However, in horror settings, dark monstrosities will be over-powerful and there will be situations where characters become helpless, that's the essence of horror. So the expectations of the genre clash with the role of the characters. The Toolkit does offer useful suggestions for running even the horror genre properly. You can read it for free in the System Reference Documents. fate-srd.com/fate-system-toolkit/horror-paradox
Im doing a space/scifi/horror aliens kind of game for my first time gming. My "solution" to the heroes for my big bad alien is to increase the physical stress it can take and try to sort of hide it away while having multiple threats running sort of in the background i guess you could say. So the players can still feel like they are making progress and kicking ass while there are extra threats occurring which may or may not be out of their control based on what their priorities are
"Competent characters in a heroic universe". Well said. ...... that and "it's not a zero-sum game" ... I think that the better role playing sessions, in any system are not zero sum games. I would also say that if, in terms of the relationship between Players VS Gamemaster - it is a zero sum game, then there is a problem. Been there. Not pretty.
I played Fate Core extensively, and I wanted to like it more, but it has problems: 1) *The game is innumerate.* For most games there are attempts to model varying degrees of danger. For example, "falling damage", the damage from the energy of an impact, is directly related to distance fallen, up to a limit imposed by terminal velocity from air-resistance where people can't fall any faster. But there are no such numerical rules in Fate. There is a kind of damage system involving restorable physical and mental Stress Points and more serious Consequences, but how much damage a physical thing does is a dramatic construct loosely defined to suit the needs of the story -- that's all! So you don't have a sense your characters are in a physical world, with physical rules and consequences. It is more cinematic and dramatic, Planet of the Artsies in other words. 2) *There's less of an emotional stake.* Many RPGs feature adventure, risk and combat with deadly force. Your character-sheet may sometimes have DEAD written on it if things go bad. In classic D&D, one GM said his implementation of old-school D&D rules means one character in his large group of players will die every 3 sessions. Every 3 sessions! But in Fate, if you are close to the point of being Taken Out (they don't use the D-word, but it could mean you are inactive or inoperable short of death), you may Concede, and somehow the universe will keep you alive for another day, on disadvantageous terms or imprisonment or some trouble you'll have to get out of. Oh, and guess what, it will REWARD you for this failure, this submission, with extra Fate Points so you can come out swinging in the next act! 3) *The tactical advantages are not scalable.* Players can marshall their Aspects, Stunts, or Create an Advantage from the terrain or the social setting somehow, but the Aspects no matter what they are are all mechanically the same: they give a +2 or a chance to re-roll the dice. Disadvantages always give the opposition or difficulty a +2 (no re-roll). My favourite RPG had a table of various tactical modifiers, some great, and some small, which gave finely-graduated options about how to proceed, capped with a final percentile roll whose odds were immediately apparent. 4) *The settings are pretty gonzo.* Evil Hat has locked itself into a format of "World Books" of 50-60 pages in the same digest-size. They always put in a weird premise, and they always have to tinker with the rules (usually the Skills list) or introduce a rules gimmick to adapt to the setting of the world. The 3rd-party companies have written many excellent long-form game-settings for Fate, though, and I recommend 2 below. For the sake of a cinematic game that is simplified, that speaks in terms of dramatic effects rather than hard numbers, and that spares the feelings of their players, Fate Core veered away from traditional RPGs to the point where I feel a sense that a lot has been lost in the hobby, even though I have played Fate extensively and it has its dramatic and storytelling moments like any other game. Some larger setting books of 3rd-party companies can be really outstanding, such as BAROQUE SPACE OPERA (a far-future but corrupt setting similar to DUNE or The Metabarons) or UNWRITTEN (the approved tabletop RPG of the MYST computer-games). For the sake of some of these products, I really wanted to like Fate Core more.
A lot of what you say are, for some folks, reasons to choose this game system to address your points briefly: 1- The game is innumerate. If you want Detail, go play Harnmaster (which I do love). 2- Emotional stake - in the games I play - is a function of playing well, not a function of crappy antagonistic DMing (died every three sessions? gads, that's a problem with DMing skills). A good crew of players will become invested by playing. It's a process. 3- This complaint seems to be weird - as one item that is repeated over and over in the rules book is that you adjust as needed or desired there are a lot of ways to set up stunts - if you don't like "every stunt is +2 or reroll", then don't chose to play that way. I think that's a very poor use of a potentially imaginative system, so I doubt I'd do it that way. 4- Settings are Gonzo? No idea where you are going with this. Weird, highly variable potential settings is a benefit to this system, not a deficit.
I'd say that you can fix many of your complaints about the system. The falling damage example, give the mountain or whatever it is you'r climbing a Height or Danger skill, that goes up the higher the characters climb. Give it a stunt requiring consequences to be used on any damage received by falling. Death is certainly less of a worry in this game than in OD&D, but it can still be deadly. Use weapon rules, and make concession of battle hurt (the innocent was sacrificed, the kingdom was burned, the monster ate the child, etc) sure, the PCs didn't die, but they absolutely failed the mission, which brings a lot of emotional stakes to the table. Your complaint #3 I totally agree with, it's a weakness of the game. You could grant more relevant stuff a +3 bonus, and less relevant stuff a +1 bonus, but overall the system is weak in this department. Gonzo settings are absolutely accurate. I feel like their thought was that if you want to play a standard setting, then you just go with the tropes common to that, you don't need a setting book for something you're already familiar with.
Those aren't problems. Those are differences of perceptions and preferences. 1) The game is more about being cinematic and modeling fiction, not modeling reality. What makes sense is not about what would happen in reality, but might increase the drama or tension. The setting and genre would affect will make a difference here too. It doesn't make any more sense to attach numbers to this game than it would to make rules and guidelines for TV shows for how much people get hurt when characters in it fall. 2) What!? No emotional stakes!? Of course there are! The difference in this game is that players also participate in writer/director seat in this game. It can sometimes be more meta (and not in a negative way). Taking compels and negotiating losses is part of what helps create dramatic moments and arcs for characters. What this game allows is for you to help decide what the most important things are for the player and allow them to have a set back in order to have more narrative sway in the future. Again, this is about modeling fiction, not reality. It's like the Act 2 of a story / movie where the hero gets his ass kicked before makes his comeback. Think of the 3 parts of the original Star Wars trilogy. These are the things that help create emotional stakes where you are rooting for your character to have that comeback! Now death isn't something that happens by default, but death isn't forbidden. There's some protections and makes sure it's just not arbitrary and totally in the hands of the GM. And honestly, D&D with a death every 3 sessions!? The only time that ever happened for me is if I was playing a hack and slash brainless dungeon crawl with no story. Most DMs in D&D I've played with tend to more create the illusion of death being a threat more than the reality. 3) See #1. It's not trying to simulate reality (or more accurately, trying to create a model arbitrary model of reality). It's trying to simulate fiction. There's not a bunch of conditional modifiers. The actual rules give guidance that difficulties should be determined by how many significant reasons there are that might make something harder, not from some table. It shouldn't be seen as "all aspects are just +2", it's more than a Fate Point gives that bonus (or an invoke created by an Create an Advantage is worth the same). It's closer to say that players get about the same amount of bonus from performing an action, not based on trying to describe an Aspect that is way more powerful than another. 4) Some settings are gonzo. Some or not. The game works great with pulp action in a way that a lot of games don't but they don't have to play that way and not all of them do.
Great Review for Fate. Though 26 minutes in, I'm surprised that no one stated that the system is for when you want your game to act like a adventure book or movie, rather then a tactical simulation.
27:38 *DIASPORA* (die-AA-spo-ruh) is based on the older FATE 3.0 edition rules, not the Fate Core System above. You have more skills, 10 Aspects per character to keep track of (usually only a good or bad aspect, not definable as both positive and negative) and more crunch in the Personal Combat, Platoon Combat, Social Combat and Spaceship Combat rules. The setting is a "cluster" of star-systems whose characteristics you generate, and civilization has risen and fallen several times on each world, so that the greatest weapons might be found by...an Archeologist. Interstellar travel is tough, and the rules are pretty good. The System Reference Document is readable for free, but keep in mind that it has differences from Fate Core.
www.vsca.ca/Diaspora/diaspora-srd.html
Great setting but I think you are burying the lead. The players collaboratively create star systems that the story will take place in
@@kayosiiii Yeah, that's right. It's a lot of work to detail every planet or at least principal planet in a system, in games such as Traveller. So Diaspora talks only about a cluster of 6-12 systems and each player gets to generate 2 of them. It would make sense for their character to come from one of the worlds the player has generated.
Here's the way to take a marker and convert four white six-sided dice to Fate Dice (formerly called Fudge Dice):
www.sinisterforces.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/BabysFirstFudgeDice.pdf
Nice review. How about a comparison of Fate to Cortex Prime, now that it is out?
For what it's worth, there is a smooth (probably edited) game demonstration of Fate Core by Wil Wheaton and Felicia Day on the TableTop channel. New players should not expect the game to go this smoothly, as more time will be spent on, for example, developing Aspects and Stunts that are properly-worded to work well with the game. Here they seemed to blurt out perfect Aspects and Stunts on the first try. But have a look at an ideal game of Fate. (55 min.)
th-cam.com/video/NOFXtAHg7vU/w-d-xo.html
It's pretty good, I think. They look like they are having fun.
I'd make Indiana Jones' trouble be "I HATE SNAKES!"
Bookmark 28:00
could fate work with a silent hill or cry of fear style game?
Strange Ghoul Absolutely, with one caveat. If you want something with a Lovecraftian feel of Nihilism, you will need to be conscious of how you run the game. Certain parts WILL need modifications to give that feel. The FATE Toolkit book can help guide you with suggestions on how to keep the tension and feel of danger by changing certain parts of Fate, AND suggest which parts those might be.
Bones the Friendly Lich Alright cool and thank you for the help and suggestions, it will be my first time GM and I got the fate and genesys book so I'm was wondering which one would work best for the setting and me since I'm new. A buddy of mine told me savage world but for some reason I'm more drawn to fate or genesys system a little more lol.
The Fate System Toolkit supplement says Horror is hard to do in Fate. Fate sets up characters to be _proactive_ , _competent_ , and _dramatic_ . However, in horror settings, dark monstrosities will be over-powerful and there will be situations where characters become helpless, that's the essence of horror. So the expectations of the genre clash with the role of the characters. The Toolkit does offer useful suggestions for running even the horror genre properly. You can read it for free in the System Reference Documents.
fate-srd.com/fate-system-toolkit/horror-paradox
Im doing a space/scifi/horror aliens kind of game for my first time gming. My "solution" to the heroes for my big bad alien is to increase the physical stress it can take and try to sort of hide it away while having multiple threats running sort of in the background i guess you could say. So the players can still feel like they are making progress and kicking ass while there are extra threats occurring which may or may not be out of their control based on what their priorities are
"Competent characters in a heroic universe". Well said. ...... that and "it's not a zero-sum game" ... I think that the better role playing sessions, in any system are not zero sum games. I would also say that if, in terms of the relationship between Players VS Gamemaster - it is a zero sum game, then there is a problem. Been there. Not pretty.
I played Fate Core extensively, and I wanted to like it more, but it has problems:
1) *The game is innumerate.* For most games there are attempts to model varying degrees of danger. For example, "falling damage", the damage from the energy of an impact, is directly related to distance fallen, up to a limit imposed by terminal velocity from air-resistance where people can't fall any faster. But there are no such numerical rules in Fate. There is a kind of damage system involving restorable physical and mental Stress Points and more serious Consequences, but how much damage a physical thing does is a dramatic construct loosely defined to suit the needs of the story -- that's all! So you don't have a sense your characters are in a physical world, with physical rules and consequences. It is more cinematic and dramatic, Planet of the Artsies in other words.
2) *There's less of an emotional stake.* Many RPGs feature adventure, risk and combat with deadly force. Your character-sheet may sometimes have DEAD written on it if things go bad. In classic D&D, one GM said his implementation of old-school D&D rules means one character in his large group of players will die every 3 sessions. Every 3 sessions! But in Fate, if you are close to the point of being Taken Out (they don't use the D-word, but it could mean you are inactive or inoperable short of death), you may Concede, and somehow the universe will keep you alive for another day, on disadvantageous terms or imprisonment or some trouble you'll have to get out of. Oh, and guess what, it will REWARD you for this failure, this submission, with extra Fate Points so you can come out swinging in the next act!
3) *The tactical advantages are not scalable.* Players can marshall their Aspects, Stunts, or Create an Advantage from the terrain or the social setting somehow, but the Aspects no matter what they are are all mechanically the same: they give a +2 or a chance to re-roll the dice. Disadvantages always give the opposition or difficulty a +2 (no re-roll). My favourite RPG had a table of various tactical modifiers, some great, and some small, which gave finely-graduated options about how to proceed, capped with a final percentile roll whose odds were immediately apparent.
4) *The settings are pretty gonzo.* Evil Hat has locked itself into a format of "World Books" of 50-60 pages in the same digest-size. They always put in a weird premise, and they always have to tinker with the rules (usually the Skills list) or introduce a rules gimmick to adapt to the setting of the world. The 3rd-party companies have written many excellent long-form game-settings for Fate, though, and I recommend 2 below.
For the sake of a cinematic game that is simplified, that speaks in terms of dramatic effects rather than hard numbers, and that spares the feelings of their players, Fate Core veered away from traditional RPGs to the point where I feel a sense that a lot has been lost in the hobby, even though I have played Fate extensively and it has its dramatic and storytelling moments like any other game. Some larger setting books of 3rd-party companies can be really outstanding, such as BAROQUE SPACE OPERA (a far-future but corrupt setting similar to DUNE or The Metabarons) or UNWRITTEN (the approved tabletop RPG of the MYST computer-games). For the sake of some of these products, I really wanted to like Fate Core more.
A lot of what you say are, for some folks, reasons to choose this game system to address your points briefly:
1- The game is innumerate. If you want Detail, go play Harnmaster (which I do love).
2- Emotional stake - in the games I play - is a function of playing well, not a function of crappy antagonistic DMing (died every three sessions? gads, that's a problem with DMing skills). A good crew of players will become invested by playing. It's a process.
3- This complaint seems to be weird - as one item that is repeated over and over in the rules book is that you adjust as needed or desired there are a lot of ways to set up stunts - if you don't like "every stunt is +2 or reroll", then don't chose to play that way. I think that's a very poor use of a potentially imaginative system, so I doubt I'd do it that way.
4- Settings are Gonzo? No idea where you are going with this. Weird, highly variable potential settings is a benefit to this system, not a deficit.
I'd say that you can fix many of your complaints about the system. The falling damage example, give the mountain or whatever it is you'r climbing a Height or Danger skill, that goes up the higher the characters climb. Give it a stunt requiring consequences to be used on any damage received by falling. Death is certainly less of a worry in this game than in OD&D, but it can still be deadly. Use weapon rules, and make concession of battle hurt (the innocent was sacrificed, the kingdom was burned, the monster ate the child, etc) sure, the PCs didn't die, but they absolutely failed the mission, which brings a lot of emotional stakes to the table. Your complaint #3 I totally agree with, it's a weakness of the game. You could grant more relevant stuff a +3 bonus, and less relevant stuff a +1 bonus, but overall the system is weak in this department. Gonzo settings are absolutely accurate. I feel like their thought was that if you want to play a standard setting, then you just go with the tropes common to that, you don't need a setting book for something you're already familiar with.
Those aren't problems. Those are differences of perceptions and preferences.
1) The game is more about being cinematic and modeling fiction, not modeling reality. What makes sense is not about what would happen in reality, but might increase the drama or tension. The setting and genre would affect will make a difference here too. It doesn't make any more sense to attach numbers to this game than it would to make rules and guidelines for TV shows for how much people get hurt when characters in it fall.
2) What!? No emotional stakes!? Of course there are! The difference in this game is that players also participate in writer/director seat in this game. It can sometimes be more meta (and not in a negative way). Taking compels and negotiating losses is part of what helps create dramatic moments and arcs for characters. What this game allows is for you to help decide what the most important things are for the player and allow them to have a set back in order to have more narrative sway in the future. Again, this is about modeling fiction, not reality. It's like the Act 2 of a story / movie where the hero gets his ass kicked before makes his comeback. Think of the 3 parts of the original Star Wars trilogy. These are the things that help create emotional stakes where you are rooting for your character to have that comeback!
Now death isn't something that happens by default, but death isn't forbidden. There's some protections and makes sure it's just not arbitrary and totally in the hands of the GM. And honestly, D&D with a death every 3 sessions!? The only time that ever happened for me is if I was playing a hack and slash brainless dungeon crawl with no story. Most DMs in D&D I've played with tend to more create the illusion of death being a threat more than the reality.
3) See #1. It's not trying to simulate reality (or more accurately, trying to create a model arbitrary model of reality). It's trying to simulate fiction. There's not a bunch of conditional modifiers. The actual rules give guidance that difficulties should be determined by how many significant reasons there are that might make something harder, not from some table. It shouldn't be seen as "all aspects are just +2", it's more than a Fate Point gives that bonus (or an invoke created by an Create an Advantage is worth the same). It's closer to say that players get about the same amount of bonus from performing an action, not based on trying to describe an Aspect that is way more powerful than another.
4) Some settings are gonzo. Some or not. The game works great with pulp action in a way that a lot of games don't but they don't have to play that way and not all of them do.
Did you really play that much? because your concerns seems vERY weird or answered in the rule book.
Baroque Space Opera is amazing.
Best Fate setting I've seen, and it fills out some of the weaknesses of Fate Core with more detail.