Fate Points in GURPS (and games in general)

[Azinctus]

I don't like Fate points. I've played a bunch of extremely successful Warhammer characters. They always won their fights but they also had huge character swings, avoiding combat and risk when they had no fate points and embracing it when they did.

The worst was a dwarf who shoulder charged a villain over a cliff hit the ground spent his fate point and was fine and dandy for the next adventure. An extreme example but fate points make meta-gaming essential. Luck is a bit more consistent from a role playing point of view.

[Flameman]

You could allow players to use these point to make minor changes to the local room/area. For example: Placing a fireplace in a livingroom. This way they can use them without being gamebreaking.

[gruundehn]

How would Fate Points, Luck Points, or whatever differ from the optional rule of using saved CP to buy success etc?

[kdtipa]

Originally Posted by gruundehn

How would Fate Points, Luck Points, or whatever differ from the optional rule of using saved CP to buy success etc?

in one case you have to spend valuable character points. In the other case... you don't. :)

[Flameman]

You earn Cp by playing and could be rewarded with Fate Points for good roleplaying

[OldSam]

Also I favor giving a 2nd chance (re-roll) over the automatic success of a task. The latter case takes out the suspense and the small possibility that everything still goes wrong, runs in another direction etc.
Buying narrative elements to add something to the game world is a completely other thing which I really like in many campaigns.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by gruundehn

How would Fate Points, Luck Points, or whatever differ from the optional rule of using saved CP to buy success etc?

You buy a trait once, with CP (possibly you can only do this during character creation) and then it pays dividends for the rest of your character's life.

[mook]

After becoming intrigued with Fate Points thanks to a string of very fun Fate con games, I started using Story Points in my monthly GURPS games and one-shots.

Players seem to either like them or at least be indifferent. As a GM I like them because I can really go nuts with the NPC baddies and not have PC blood on my hands if one goes down. Also, they see a lot of use out of combat for things like social engineering, finding useful clues, doing just generally cool stuff, etc.

This is the player handout:

Story Points (SP) are represented by red tokens – you begin every game with 3. You may sometimes earn more as the game progresses, but at the end of each monthly game night the total is "reset" to 3. In a nutshell, Story Points are a measure of how much you can influence the events of the story in favor of your character.

Specifically, you can spend Story Points as follows:

• 1 SP: to add a minor detail to the story that makes sense (you are carrying a needed item, you remembered to do something earlier, the room has a phone in it, etc.)
• 1 SP: after a bad dice roll to completely reroll all dice
• 1 SP: before a dice roll to add +1 to your effective skill (or +2 if you have complementary traits [similar to Fate Aspects])
• 2 SP: after a dice roll to change a critical failure to a failure, a failure to a success, or a success to a critical success
• 2 SP: to reduce the HP or FP of a single loss to 1 (or to 0 if only 1 would have been lost)

[Kage2020]

The campaign that I'm currently planning merits a certain cinematicism, so I'm going to be using "fate points" or something similar. At the moment I'm kind of looking at Buying Success and Scene Editing, hoping to merge them together into a mechanic that draws upon the "elemental magic" that is at the heart of the game (metaphysics, anyway). I realise that this is going to modify the feel of the game somewhat, but in this case I'm really looking forward to see how it does so.

(For example, and with the caveat that this is just a general direction at the moment, characters would have "fate points" that are based upon the domains of the elements. Thus, for example, if you've got some points hanging around in Water you might use them to influence/edit the scene that revolves around emotion/intuition. Similarly, if you're wanting to weasel out of that damage, you would have to expend "Earth" points etc. Might not be everyone's cup of tea, but it seems to evoke the setting/concept that I'm going for.)