FATE RPG: Impressions, analysis, merits and flaws thereof etc.

[vicky_molokh]

Greetings, all!

It's been almost a month, I think, since my exposure to this system (in theory only). I must say that many of its inner workings seem quite bizarre but interesting to me:
The metagame-speed removal of Consequences after combats/conflicts; the game mechanics of Conceding in a Conflict (where willingly losing a conflict guarantees protection against worst outcomes and gives out Fate Points); the freedom to pick the broadness or narrowness of Aspects; the whole idea of basing mechanics around the Fate Point Economy more than the static values of skills; the right to swap trait levels and names between game sessions (as opposed of one-way improvement during the bigger rewards).

I haven't played it so far, though a GM acquaintance is considering the idea of using it in one of the future campaigns.

I'm curious about what other people say about FATE, possibly in greater detail than it was touched upon recently in the two contemporary threads. So, following whswhs' advice, I'm creating a separate thread that deals with FATE in general, as opposed to comparisons with a specific system or its fitness for a single particular setting.
What are your first impressions? What are the actual-play experiences? What worked out great, what was bad? Did something turn you off the whole system? Did it succeed at something spectacularly well?

Thanks in advance!

[whswhs]

My exposure to FATE comes from seeing Spirit of the Century a while ago. I haven't actually played it; reading Spirit of the Century dissuaded me.

The small reason for this was the dice rolling mechanics. In classic FUDGE, which I like, there is a standard success level, and there are three levels below it, Mediocre, Poor, and Terrible, and three above, which I think are called Good, Great, and Amazing. And there are off-the-scale results in both directions. FATE changed this to have only two levels below, and four above. I disliked the lack of symmetry; I thought the multiple levels of increasingly superior success were hard to interpret narrativistically and had no real function; and worst, I found having only two levels of poor outcomes really crippling as far as being able to discriminate among levels of decreased competence. (I was accustomed to Mediocre = amateur without complete training, Poor = untrained, and Terrible = untrained and untalented.)

The larger reason was the system of aspects, and in particular the imposition of a set narrative framework for acquiring them: So many at this stage of life, so many at this stage, so many at this stage, and so on. I don't create characters that way, and my imagination freezes up when I try. I create characters in medias res: Here the character is at this point, and as I work out the design I'll look backward to points in their lives where they acquired various traits, but I probably never do a complete biography. At best it strikes me as a lot of busywork that will mostly never have any effect on play and that doesn't aid me in the actual creative process in any way.

In contrast, as I said, I've used FUDGE a couple of times and would do so again. My preference seems to be to use it for campaigns based on source material with an aspect of metafiction: a Discworld campaign that included narrative causality, and a campaign inspired by Planetary, which is all about the pulp and fantastic fiction of the early 20th century and what kept it from being true, or from being revealed as true. The whole system works brilliantly for that.

I think it's not a matter of "dislike narrativistic play." It's more a matter of "want narrativistic play in one style and not another." FATE happens to offend my sense of style. Or at least Spirit of the Century does, and I found it so distasteful that it put me off looking at any later version.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by whswhs

The larger reason was the system of aspects, and in particular the imposition of a set narrative framework for acquiring them: So many at this stage of life, so many at this stage, so many at this stage, and so on.

I never interpreted that part as required, just suggested. It's the idea that answering certain questions will flesh out who you are. If you look at the current Fate Core, there's a section with a narrative framework for aspects, and then quick character creation simply says to ignore those rules.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Anthony

I never interpreted that part as required, just suggested. It's the idea that answering certain questions will flesh out who you are. If you look at the current Fate Core, there's a section with a narrative framework for aspects, and then quick character creation simply says to ignore those rules.

Well, that's something of an improvement. But then how is it different from plain FUDGE, except in the asymmetric outcomes distribution?

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by whswhs

But then how is it different from plain FUDGE, except in the asymmetric outcomes distribution?

I'm not even sure what plain FUDGE is, it appears to be 'roll your own system'. In any case, the core of what FATE is is the whole system of creating and invoking aspects. It's got its share of anomalies, particularly with stacking invokes, but there are some interesting core ideas there.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Anthony

I'm not even sure what plain FUDGE is, it appears to be 'roll your own system'.

There seems to be a very definite baseline FUDGE system. It has attributes and skills, each with seven levels with names; it has gifts and faults that don't fit the seven-level scheme; it has what amount to powers that each are comparable to a gift plus an attribute step; it has rules for trading these off in character design; it has FUDGE dice and the standard 4dF roll; it has FUDGE points that can be spent to influence outcomes. And of course it has rules for customizing the rules. But there's a default starting point.

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by Anthony

I'm not even sure what plain FUDGE is, it appears to be 'roll your own system'.

That's my memory of it, albeit from a long time ago. It wasn't a system so much as a meta-system, a checklist saying things like "you should pick some stats that are going to be meaningful in your game, and then you could have skills, and these come in different levels" -- no more a realized RPG system than GURPS Space and Ultratech give you a finished SF campaign setting. None of it bad advice, but still leaving a lot of work for the GM to realize the actual system to be used.

A peeve of mine is that FATE retains the style of substituting words for integers. This is meant to be colorful, but it suffers from a lack of clarity. Is Legendary better than Epic, or is it the other way around? How many steps between Mediocre and Superlative? These questions just don't arise when you're simply comparing 4 to 5, or seeing if your +2 bonus will stretch your result of 0 to a +4. A sequence of discrete ordered steps already has names -- one, two, three... -- and most people are quite familiar with those already. Flavor text is fine, but not when it just makes things obscure. The cost here is far more than the gain. You have to really hate numbers to want to try to hide them behind different names.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

A peeve of mine is that FATE retains the style of substituting words for integers. This is meant to be colorful, but it suffers from a lack of clarity. Is Legendary better than Epic, or is it the other way around? How many steps between Mediocre and Superlative? These questions just don't arise when you're simply comparing 4 to 5, or seeing if your +2 bonus will stretch your result of 0 to a +4. A sequence of discrete ordered steps already has names -- one, two, three... -- and most people are quite familiar with those already. Flavor text is fine, but not when it just makes things obscure. The cost here is far more than the gain. You have to really hate numbers to want to try to hide them behind different names.

I never had a problem with that when using plain FUDGE. There were three levels above average, and three levels below, and the sequence for each was intuitive. Part of what bothered me about FATE was that in going to four levels above it no longer seemed intuitive.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Anthony

I'm not even sure what plain FUDGE is, it appears to be 'roll your own system'. In any case, the core of what FATE is is the whole system of creating and invoking aspects. It's got its share of anomalies, particularly with stacking invokes, but there are some interesting core ideas there.

You mean about multiple Create An Advantage actions followed by one use of them all? Or do you see the ability to make e.g. both 'Social Interface' and 'New-Guinean Diplomat' apply to a social roll to be a bug?

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

You mean about multiple Create An Advantage actions followed by one use of them all? Or do you see the ability to make e.g. both 'Social Interface' and 'New-Guinean Diplomat' apply to a social roll to be a bug?

Mostly the former. It's not per se wrong that multiple aspects can be applied to the same roll, but having full effect for each of them gets silly fast.