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Terratina posted:Seeing as there is activity here, just wanna ask if some stuff is okay: You're close to the actual rules for mobs of coordinated enemies. If they're acting as a single unit, you give the pack +1 to rolls per member beyond the first, but they only get one collective "turn" per round. Taking out a pack member reduces this accordingly. This is an abstraction for their abilities to coordinate flanking attempts and other things like that. You should take some care with balance in this case. A pack of 6 wolves would be insanely dangerous because they would get a whopping +5 to all actions that the wolves are skilled at (probably they normally have +2 notice, +1 fight, +1 sneak, or something), so you should break that up into 2 teams of 3, maybe, unless it's important for at least one player character to get a Consequence while they travel through the woods. The only way for the pack to get multiple turns is to split into subgroups or individuals.
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Jul 16, 2018 16:32
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deadly_pudding posted:You're close to the actual rules for mobs of coordinated enemies. The number will probably not go beyond three really. In any case I was just trying to think of a case where positioning would be important, for instance, the players could seperate the pack by pushing one wolf into a difference zone.
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Jul 16, 2018 16:36
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Terratina posted:The number will probably not go beyond three really. In any case I was just trying to think of a case where positioning would be important, for instance, the players could seperate the pack by pushing one wolf into a difference zone. This is probably viable, depending on what skills the wolves are using. A wolf in a different zone from the rest of the pack can't really contribute to a melee Fight attack. But also, your difference zones in an outdoor area should still be marked by borders that would require "traversal". If that border is just "distance", then you have to examine what sort of action would be required to force a wolf to move so far away that they're no longer in the same zone. It's much easier to force a wolf to switch zones by, for example, sparta kicking it off of a small cliff, which separates two otherwise nearby zones.
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Jul 16, 2018 16:41
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deadly_pudding posted:This is probably viable, depending on what skills the wolves are using. A wolf in a different zone from the rest of the pack can't really contribute to a melee Fight attack. But also, your difference zones in an outdoor area should still be marked by borders that would require "traversal". If that border is just "distance", then you have to examine what sort of action would be required to force a wolf to move so far away that they're no longer in the same zone. It's much easier to force a wolf to switch zones by, for example, sparta kicking it off of a small cliff, which separates two otherwise nearby zones. Yeah, of course there would be a variety of areas to enable such actions. In essence it seems I am complicating the mob rules a tad more complicated but thank you for pointing out the action titbit as I can see how a 2 action per turn mob with a decent health track and skills can get very scary. Terratina fucked around with this message at 16:51 on Jul 16, 2018 |
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Jul 16, 2018 16:48
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Yeah I'll just nix that particular stunt. I can just compel when she's in a vulnerable state.
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Jul 16, 2018 17:19
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deadly_pudding posted:No, don't give her bonus FATE for compels. That's the whole point of having something compelled. Other characters get other personal issues compelled. She gets vampire instincts compelled. Atomic Robo has Signature Aspect as a stunt that basically does that, though? You get one free invoke on it every session and when the GM compels it they start at 2. Nothing about it really seemed that broken.
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Jul 16, 2018 20:39
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Glazius posted:Atomic Robo has Signature Aspect as a stunt that basically does that, though? You get one free invoke on it every session and when the GM compels it they start at 2. Nothing about it really seemed that broken. Yeah, I forgot about that one. I dunno, I still don't like it a lot. It's extra cruft on top of the system, and failing to resist a compel against something like Struggles to contain the monster within seems like it should have a pretty heavy aftermath in a lot of cases. That sounds like an argument for making it more powerful, but it's also an argument against making it harder to reject the compel. I'm approaching this from the stated angle, which is that they're a bunch of anime teens battling monsters, so I feel like there's a question of, how far will this character go if she can't control her inner demons? Is that worth 2 Fate Tokens? Is that worth 2 Fate Tokens to resist? If she frequently doesn't have the 2 tokens to resist the compel on her inhuman thirst for blood or whatever, then what arc does she travel down, and is that a good fit for the game? Is she resisting her urge to kill and eat a person, or does she always catch herself at the last moment and it just results in a lot of hurt feelings and distrust toward her? I wanna examine this because there's only so many times you can use "Oh, she's gone berserk during the conflict and now she's a danger to herself and others" before the seams start to show. deadly_pudding fucked around with this message at 21:23 on Jul 16, 2018 |
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Jul 16, 2018 21:14
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More context on this: In Valor, she had the Malevolent Entity flaw where the character has to make a roll versus their entity when they get hurt at low health. If the entity rolls higher, it takes over until the PC is knocked out or succeeds on subsequent rolls to take their body back. So it wasn't an every time thing but happened at unpredictable times. Now, in this case, the player interpreted it as the vampire PC's instincts warring with her. When she lost against her instincts, she would become all hammy and stereotypical evil vampire. And her instinct is less to kill people than to turn them into living blood dolls subservient to her. Previously in the game, she encountered another vampire who was using her hypnotism powers to brainwash people on a whim and acquire her preferred feeding targets (girls she views as cute). The first time the vampire PC didn't tell the other PCs and let it slide, because she found the NPC's talk of sharing a harem appealing and overall said PC had very mixed feelings. However, those feelings solidified after the PCs confronted a monster that had taken on the form of a messianic figure and was using its powers to brainwash people into worshipping it. Seeing this firsthand, the PC decided that she wasn't going to be that kind of person. As a result, she went back to the other vampire, bringing her team, and tried to talk her out of abusing her powers. Things got violent, but after getting beaten up the vampire NPC agreed to stop doing that kind of thing. Soon after, she was picked up by the school's faculty and forced to attend while taking remedial ethics classes. But both the vampires share one thing: they lost their instinctual sense of right and wrong when they became vampires. So for them it's a constant effort to figure out the moral thing to do and to resist their more base vampire instincts. To give an idea, here is one of the vampire's Aspects, described in the player's words: quote:Vampiric Compulsions: And while I'm doing it, her other Aspects: quote:Teenage Vampiress Fistfighter:
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Jul 16, 2018 22:46
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Yeah, sounds like you could just Signature Aspect that, with a general understanding that one of the things your compulsion can drive you to do is go hunting when you're wounded.
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Jul 16, 2018 23:06
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Hi, Fate thread. I don't have a lot of experience with Fate (although I played in a Dresden Files game once, briefly), so I was hoping for some advice. I've been mucking around with ideas for a fantasy game about airship pirates, somewhat in the vein of Skies of Arcadia. I was thinking it wouldn't be too hard to adjust the ship combat rules from Aether Sea or Sails Full of Stars for ship combat (although if there are any better options, by all means let me know), but I've been trying to find some ideas for a magic system. I'm not particularly keen on directly imitating the magic system from SoA, but I do like the idea of magic being useful in ship-to-ship battles as well as normal combat (which is the only really interesting thing about the magic in SoA anyway). I was looking over the Stormcallers and Storm Summoners rules in the Fate System Toolkit; I'm amused thinking about the idea of someone firing his earth elementals out of a cannon/catapult to land them on an enemy ship or something. However, I'm thinking I'd prefer to find some kind of magic rules with a little more versatility than throwing elements around (however classic that may be). Are there any interesting magic concepts out there? I've been poking through various Fate settings for ideas to cannibalize, but there are a lot and I'm not sure where I should be looking. ...On a semi-related note, has anyone tried the magic system from Fate Freeport? It certainly has some appeal (which might just be because I'm accustomed to D&D), but I was under the impression that healing magic (the kind that works mid-combat, anyway) wasn't supposed to be a thing in Fate. Does allowing people to clear their physical stress and consequences so easily unbalance the game?
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Jul 22, 2018 05:30
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Jefepato posted:Hi, Fate thread. I don't have a lot of experience with Fate (although I played in a Dresden Files game once, briefly), so I was hoping for some advice. The "pure" way to do ship to ship combat in FATE, without bolting on additional systems, would be to use what they call the FATE Fractal, in which any device, location, or phenomenon can be represented as its own FATE statblock, with skills, stress, consequences, and aspects. The ship itself has its own character sheet, and gets the standard one movement + one action per round, and characters on board the ship can either take their own turns on their own scale, or assist the ship's actions by operating some station. The ships probably follow the rules for scale from the FATE Toolkit, where they're one or two steps above "a person", giving them inherently +2 or +4 on rolls against individual characters. So, ships firing on each other with their own weapons would play out as normal, and characters taking potshots at each other on the decks of ships would play out as normal, but character vs. ship or ship vs. character would be biased toward the ship without having advantages set up for the characters. Generally characters would have like "above decks" and "below decks" zones, maybe also "up on the masts", and ships would have more conceptual zones like "inside cloud bank" or "within boarding range". Healing magic really isn't supposed to be a thing, outside of narrative permission to use some magic skill to heal various non-consequence ailment aspects using spells. A GM might let you get away with like a once per session non-severe consequence heal on a somewhat difficult roll (healing with cost or major cost can be interesting), but generally damage is supposed to be narratively significant, because physical conflict is what happens when all involved parties are able and willing to kill each other if necessary. If one side isn't interested in fighting, and there's a viable escape route, then it becomes a skill contest, instead. There's some precedent to being able to recover from mild consequences with abilities, since they fade quickly anyway; FATE Toolkit has an example stunt of being able to recover a mild consequence instead of receiving a FATE Token when a particular aspect is compelled. This general philosophy also ties into why it's less controversial to have a scary damage-inflicting stunt, like "Perfect Strike: Once per scene, when attacking with a rapier, spend a FATE token to force your target to take a mild consequence instead of filling a level 2 stress box". deadly_pudding fucked around with this message at 13:59 on Jul 23, 2018 |
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Jul 23, 2018 13:57
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Atomic Robo has a 'fast healing' stunt that lets you spend a fate point to reduce an injury consequence by one degree once per scene- it's an example stunt for the mutant weird mode.
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Jul 23, 2018 14:17
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Speaking of healing, thoughts on a Stunt? Band Aid First Aid. Can roll First Aid against Fair (+2) difficulty once during a combat exchange to heal stress, one for each shift on the roll. Just a previous GM give a similar medic character a Stunt that only gets rid of 1 stress once per combat exchange and I don't want to be as mean but still, messing with the stress track is scary.
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Jul 29, 2018 17:54
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I don't know that it's overpowered or anything, but healing Stress seems wrong given just how abstracted it is. Stress is more about pain, shock and exhaustion (which is why it goes away completely at the end of the scene), than any sort of injury that could be treated in a few seconds with a first aid roll. In some game styles it could work (especially with magic as a justification), but it doesn't seem right as a first aid thing. But that's more a gut issue than a mechanical one. I'd also mention that FATE PCs tend to be pretty darn durable, so something like this which mainly serves to extend a combat scene seems like it might be off. Mechanically, I'd suggest against making stunts triggered by a skill roll. Spending an action and/or a Fate Point should be more than sufficient, making it something you've got to roll for seems too demanding. Also makes it easier to balance when the results are more consistent rather than determined by a skill roll.
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Jul 29, 2018 21:19
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On the contrary, I find FATE PCs to be made out of tissue. And the way the dice math works out for the character, it's spend an action to heal one physical stress (shoulda elaborated) and maybe more sometimes.
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Jul 30, 2018 11:02
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So, I'm running a FATE ACCELERATED game for the first time tonight with a bunch of friends who haven't played either. It's going to be Call of Cthulhu themed, though I'm pretty sure it'll devolve into slapstick pretty quickly. I've got a rudimentary story, some basic NPCs, a pretty decent understanding of the rules, and a near-certainty that things will deviate from my story almost immediately and I'll need to improvise. What I'm wondering is if there are any pitfalls I should avoid as a first time Fate GM. Specifically for Fate Accelerated. Any input would be much appreciated!
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Aug 9, 2018 17:03
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Do not let players who have, for examples, Flashy as their best stat to solve everything with it. Flashy is for when you act in an outrageous manner, the kind that people would talk about for a week after the fact if they see you do it. By all means if the character keeps acting like a swashbuckler or a superstar let them roll with it, but keep in mind that there is a tendency towards players to use one approach for everything, and that is boring.
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Aug 9, 2018 17:40
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paradoxGentleman posted:Do not let players who have, for examples, Flashy as their best stat to solve everything with it. Flashy is for when you act in an outrageous manner, the kind that people would talk about for a week after the fact if they see you do it. Thanks, that sounds like pretty sound advice from what I understand of the system. The only actual plays I've seen of the game had everyone on the same page about not being "That Guy" so hopefully none of my players will try it. I'm setting out some guidelines at the start: "Yes And", don't spend too much time thinking about options, don't be afraid to fail, use the approach that makes the most sense, be descriptive, and add to the narrative.
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Aug 9, 2018 18:28
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Shadow of the Century text-only copy is out and I hadn't realised they were advancing the setting quite so much: I guess it makes sense in that Spirit was about playing 20s/30s pop culture heroes in the 20s/30s, and this is about playing 80s pop culture heroes in the 80s, but I'm not sure I like the shift. Also, this reuses Modes (called Roles in this) with 6 pre-made stunts per, which is really nice for players new to Fate, although I question whether some of these stunts really needed to be stunts at all:  
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Sep 19, 2018 22:55
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Lemon-Lime posted:Also, this reuses Modes (called Roles in this) with 6 pre-made stunts per, which is really nice for players new to Fate, although I question whether some of these stunts really needed to be stunts at all: ...yes? You can "attack to inflict stress" without actually shooting, target the mental track if it's a separate thing, and dump psychological consequences instead of injuries.
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Sep 20, 2018 21:47
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Glazius posted:...yes? You can "attack to inflict stress" without actually shooting, target the mental track if it's a separate thing, and dump psychological consequences instead of injuries. Good job missing the joke.
Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 00:55 on Sep 21, 2018 |
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Sep 20, 2018 23:36
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Lemon-Lime posted:Good job missing the joke. What was the joke? I think that should be a stunt. You can't just point a gun and use Shoot to scare someone fresh out of chargen, that's what Provoke is for. If you want to attack with Shoot you have to pull the trigger and activate the small explosive charge, sending a lead slug into somebody's body. I mean, I'm assuming physical and mental stress are still separate tracks. If they're not, or if "initimidate" is a rules name for a specific Provoke trapping to create advantage or overcome, it's fairly weak in utility compared to other stunts, though it will still be going up against a different defense.
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Sep 21, 2018 04:22
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cops shoot people when it is not strictly necessary for them to do so this has happened almost constantly in recent memory that's the reference that's the joke
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Sep 21, 2018 13:08
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How recommended (or not recommended) is it to modify and add things to standard FATE rules? I've had a hankering to set up a Persona-type game thing but am running into the perennial problem of "What to do about Social Links" "What to do abour Personas" and so on.
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Dec 14, 2018 20:24
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OscarDiggs posted:How recommended (or not recommended) is it to modify and add things to standard FATE rules? I've had a hankering to set up a Persona-type game thing but am running into the perennial problem of "What to do about Social Links" "What to do abour Personas" and so on.
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Dec 14, 2018 20:34
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Evil Mastermind posted:It's not only recommended, it's expected. The whole thing with Fate is that it's a framework to build stuff off of. Ah, grand. I've got both of the World books and the System Toolkit, so I have ideas to test out. But if FATE is ameniable to changing stuff from this side, all the better.
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Dec 14, 2018 20:56
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Fate is explicitly a core resolution mechanic and a common framework for statting things up, and not much else, with the express intention that you should be designing your own subsystems to give mechanical focus to anything that matters to your game. Also, if you manage to actually put together satisfying Persona-ish Fate mechanics, you'll definitely have an audience to sell it as a standalone game to.
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Dec 14, 2018 21:25
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Lemon-Lime posted:Fate is explicitly a core resolution mechanic and a common framework for statting things up, and not much else, with the express intention that you should be designing your own subsystems to give mechanical focus to anything that matters to your game. No one has succeeded yet (that I know of) so I doubt I'll be the one to re-invent the wheel. But if it plays well that'll be good enough.
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Dec 14, 2018 21:33
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OscarDiggs posted:No one has succeeded yet (that I know of) so I doubt I'll be the one to re-invent the wheel. But if it plays well that'll be good enough. I feel like I did it okay a couple years ago? You had like 3 regular aspects, a Persona Aspect, and a Shadow Aspect, and you used those to give yourself permission for thematic stunts with a high power ceiling. A lot of the trash enemies inflicted mostly mental stress. Social Links were kind of floating setting aspects. I didn't worry too much about arcana or fusion. I think I was planning to eventually introduce a Wild Card User as an antagonist? It's been a few years and the thing fell apart because GMing for my (then) girlfriend was the worst. The overall theme of the setting was that something was terribly wrong Underground, in the subway tunnels and basements and such, and it was possible to go underground, especially if you were chasing some kind of shadow, and come back up in the crumbling alternate reality born of man's decay under capitalism or whatever.
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Dec 14, 2018 23:53
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Hmm. Some of that is close to my thinking, so I'll take that as being not to far off the mark.
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Dec 15, 2018 01:06
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Hey, I’m completely new to Fate but I was interested in running a GURPS infinite worlds type game and I was wondering if Fate Core or Accelerated would work better? Is it possible to get robots, superheroes and wizards to play nicely together?
Apocron fucked around with this message at 10:09 on Mar 24, 2019 |
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Mar 24, 2019 09:39
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Apocron posted:Hey, I’m completely new to Fate but I was interested in running a GURPS infinite worlds type game and I was wondering if Fate Core or Accelerated would work better? Is it possible to get robots, superheroes and wizards to play nicely together? Fate is very suited to that type of game, if you're looking for a loose, cinematic style (particularly compared to GURPS). Fate Core and Accelerated are both very similar at base, but Accelerated is the "lite" version, though both can be expanded in very similar ways. What are some examples of things you'd like to see happen in your game, and ways you'd like to differentiate characters and challenges?
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Mar 24, 2019 10:52
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Recently I’ve mostly worked with Powered by the Apocalypse systems and while I love the narrative focus each game is really bound to the genre it’s attempting to honor. I wanted to find something narratively focused but with a bit more flexibility to work amongst genres and enough crunch to differentiate the different characters so that characters are not different in flavor but mechanically the same.
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Mar 24, 2019 13:16
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Apocron posted:enough crunch to differentiate the different characters so that characters are not different in flavor but mechanically the same. This is the exact thing that has tended to turn me off about Fate - character differentiation is mainly flavor rather than mechanics. There's probably ways to do something about that that experienced Fatehands would know about but on the surface level I've dealt with, Fate may not be the system you're looking for.
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Mar 24, 2019 17:10
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I'm a little out of the FATE loop, but it used to be that the Atomic Robo version was unilaterally and universally endorsed as the mechanical sweet spot for somewhat crunch interested FATE. It can handle mixing all the genres, although you will have to do some home brew for non-science stuff. FATE Core can absolutely do it, but it sounds like you might want a bit more crunch, and Robo adds just enough to give you mechanics to engage with, and doesn't complete miss the point of FATE.
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Mar 24, 2019 17:12
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malkav11 posted:This is the exact thing that has tended to turn me off about Fate - character differentiation is mainly flavor rather than mechanics. There's probably ways to do something about that that experienced Fatehands would know about but on the surface level I've dealt with, Fate may not be the system you're looking for. This might be applicable to Fate Accelerated but doesn't apply to all to general Fate.
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Mar 24, 2019 17:25
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Piell posted:This might be applicable to Fate Accelerated but doesn't apply to all to general Fate. It's been my experience every time I've played general Fate. I've never touched Accelerated. I don't mean to suggest that it's impossible to achieve interesting and meaningful mechanical differentiation between characters in Fate, because that experience has been very limited and I wouldn't be at all surprised if there are addon mechanics or nuances that were missed in our play, but it's literally the reason I haven't wanted to play more.
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Mar 24, 2019 18:36
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So since the game is a few years old now is there a supplement with a better iteration of the originals rules? I see people talking about Atomic Robo like it’s an improvement on Fate Core and then I saw someone say Shadow of the Century is the new Atomic Robo. And that Freeport Companion is the best for fantasy settings.
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Mar 28, 2019 12:25
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The big change in Shadow of the Century is that it comes with a sizeable number of skill/stunt packages it has you pick from, instead of asking you to do the standard skill pyramid and make your stunts up from scratch based on a tiny number of examples (Atomic Robo had skill packages but they didn't come with a list of stunts, and it only had four packages, with a "if you want to play anything that isn't a human, here are instructions on how to invent new packages" section). This makes character generation a lot easier, especially for people who aren't used to Fate mechanics or just aren't good at making up stunts on the spot. Other than that, there isn't really a "better iteration" of the rules because the core mechanics haven't changed, and the main problem (people treating Fate Core like it's a game in and of itself, instead of a toolkit for making games that you need to use to develop subsystems that drive the theme of your game by making mechanics for specific things more detailed and involved) hasn't gone anywhere. For the record, giving the earliest Fate Core game I'm aware of that had stunt packages is from 2013 (Tianxia), so really, Shadow of the Century just slammed ideas from Tianxia and Atomic Robo together. e; Shadow of the Century does feel like Fate Core 1.5 though, just because its setting (1980s action movie vigilante heroes) is pretty much a 1:1 overlap with Fate Core's implied one (which is modern day OTT action heroics with dramatic plot twists). Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 12:51 on Mar 28, 2019 |
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Mar 28, 2019 12:47
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Lemon-Lime posted:Other than that, there isn't really a "better iteration" of the rules because the core mechanics haven't changed, and the main problem (people treating Fate Core like it's a game in and of itself, instead of a toolkit for making games that you need to use to develop subsystems that drive the theme of your game by making mechanics for specific things more detailed and involved) hasn't gone anywhere. I think this might be a mistake I'm making. I'm running my third game tonight set in the Final Fantasy 14 universe and the setting just feels kind of window dressing currently as opposed to really reinforced thematically. Do you have any recommendations on reading to help me get better at setting up Fate games? I currently own Fate Core, Atomic Robo and the Atomic Robo expansion...Majestic 13 I think?
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Mar 29, 2019 01:03
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