Give me the low-down on Fate Core

[koz]

By 'Fate Core', I mean this. I need the Den's style of merciless, laser-precision criticism, please - what are the system's failure points? What is it bad at? What (if anything) is it good at? Would you recommend its use?

[erik]

That link is useless. Here's better.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fudge_%28 ... _system%29
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fate_%28r ... _system%29

I don't have laser-precision criticism, but here are some vagaries to get us started.

The system is simple. You roll custom dice that have equal odds of - / + / null
And this modifies a skill which can receive a bonus from various sources.
You roll when trying to resolve something with attack, defend, solve, or buff as your desired outcomes.

The devil is in the details. From what I understand the skill list and the aspects aren't balanced.

The latest edition eschews skills for fluff regarding how you resolve contested rolls.

Every time I try to get interested in a game setting that happens to run on that system, I find out that the details of how the bonuses get distributed or how certain actions are supposed to resolve is fucked and doesn't let you actually emulate the setting as advertised. I've held out hope that there's a worthwhile Fate/FUDGE adaptation out there, but I haven't heard tell of one yet.

[Longes]

I personally like FATE, but most FATE hacks I've seen are fucked in one way or the other. I've played Dresden Files and Mindjammer. In Dresden Files the advancement is glacial, and anyone who didn't make a wizard is irrelevant. In Mindjammer, a Culture-like sci-fi game, anyone who didn't make a core human can't interact with the titular Mindjammer/internet. Anyone who made an uplifted animal has no customisation points for aspects and stuff.

[Prak]

I liked Dresden and managed to be relevant with a custom character (eastern dragon sealed in a person suit). However, mostly I managed to be relevant through creative use of aspects and a bit of disregard for my own safety to protect the group.

I don't remember all my aspects, nor do I care enough to go find my sheet, but I do recall my high concept being something along the lines of "I'm a goddamned dragon" and my trouble concept was "Sometimes the pants don't fit," ie, sometimes the seal slips. This is a trouble aspect in that sometimes I'll be standing in a room full of mundies and suddenly be a dragon and break the rules about hiding the supernatural. Or get people trying to kill me or whatever.

Of course. When the GM targets our group with a rocket launcher... fuck it, I'll compel my own trouble aspect and protect the others with a wall of dragon. And then use one of the four or five fate points I got for it to invoke "I'm a goddamned dragon" on my roll against the damage.

Aspects have defined in game effects (1 FP to get +2 or a reroll when you invoke your own, Gain 1 FP for a bit of a plot screw) but are also a bit MTP-ish, and, like all MTP elements of a game, their power is heavily based on player creativity and GM adjudication. I generally managed to maintain a pool of Fate Points and used them to increase damage on my breath weapon and get free actions and otherwise increase my capabilities, but not everyone had aspects that helped them to that extent.

[OgreBattle]

So which version of FATE is the best, or are there parts of each version of FATE worth pillaging

[mlangsdorf]

FATE is a 300+ page "rule lite" game, and that's exactly what's wrong with it.

[TheFlatline]

I've been looking at the accelerated version to run a zombie apocalypse game. I wanted something light enough to not get in the way and focus more on personality conflicts with the living. FAE seems to work pretty well for that.

I'm pretty sure The End of the World series is more or less a basic hack on FAE. At 50 pages or so it seems to work okay.

Oh also TEOTW: Wrath of the Gods sucked. I might pontificate on it a little more if there's interest, but the short version is that the tone and scope seems really terrible in this version of the book. You don't have the capability to really survive the Gaia's Revenge scenario, the Mayan scenario is kind of racist and actually focuses more on the aftermath (otherwise the apocalypse is literally consisting of earthquakes and shit and how do you make an RPG out of that?), the Ragnarok scenario seems more like high fantasy than survival horror, and I thought putting the Book of Revelations in was kind of tacky. But at least you can play Left Behind now? The Cthulhu Awakens scenario has the most legs IMHO for survival horror.

[Aryxbez]

I've been looking at the accelerated version to run a zombie apocalypse game. I wanted something light enough to not get in the way and focus more on personality conflicts with the living. FAE seems to work pretty well for that.

I'm interested in hearing how that game ends up fairing. On "End of the World" I definitely want the concept of that game rewritten by Frank. I myself am very much interested in finding RPG's that work well for Zombie Apocalypse stuff.

Oh also TEOTW: Wrath of the Gods sucked. I might pontificate on it a little more if there's interest

I'm interested, I think I can enjoy hearing how some rules lite fails to deliver.

[Mask_De_H]

By 'Fate Core', I mean this. I need the Den's style of merciless, laser-precision criticism, please - what are the system's failure points? What is it bad at? What (if anything) is it good at? Would you recommend its use?

Frank's talked about FATE here and there in various threads, but here's the basic shit about FATE Core.

Adjudicating actions is pretty simple, although the game shits itself a little when you are searching for things or uncovering a mystery.

FATE Points are a nice bit of metagame currency. How you get them is low comedy or consistently self-compelling when it's neutral or beneficial for you to do so. You then rain FATE points on whatever the big obstacle is and move on with your life.

Aspects are neat, but they don't have a mechanical benefit or penalty unless invoked. So something being "oh fire" or "pitch black" means "jack shit" unless you pay for it. There also can be a shitload of them, once you focus on boosts (one timers), character aspects, consequences, advantages and situation aspects.

Combat is really swingy Padded Sumo. You don't have a lot of boxes, but they're triangular in damage soakable (but don't stack) and you have Consequences which hold way the fuck mire damage than your stress track. So either you don't take Consequences and get KOed with the quickness or you grind down with consequences. Also, unless the target is two up on you (or vice versa), the average hit is nothing done.

The skill pyramid is ass. Sincee you never use anything lower than X-2, where X is your highest rated stat, you'll have about three to six things you don't suck at, ans only one money skill. Your attack, soak and initiative take up the same space as crap like knowledge and pissing people off.

The rules on creating oposition are crammed into a little footnote: so blocking or making walls and shit is basically not covered.

There's some Bear Worldish stuff on failure and determining what happens to you with success at a cost.

It is good at being something relatively quick to pick up and play, and is simple enough to hack. Aspects and FATE points are so nice games jack them liberally. Designing new content is easy and the basic resolution mechanic is solid. It does pulp games well and give a solid bit of narrative control to the players.

Scenewhores will take over the table, wallflowers will get steamrolled, there's the inherent Mother-May-I in most MTP games and DC adjudication is hazy at best. Also the books are really long and usually have at least one dumb mechanics thing.

EDIT: Here is Frank talking about some of the pros and cons of FATE in general.

[TheFlatline]

I've been looking at the accelerated version to run a zombie apocalypse game. I wanted something light enough to not get in the way and focus more on personality conflicts with the living. FAE seems to work pretty well for that.

I'm interested in hearing how that game ends up fairing. On "End of the World" I definitely want the concept of that game rewritten by Frank. I myself am very much interested in finding RPG's that work well for Zombie Apocalypse stuff.

Yeah that was a good brainstorming thread. There's some stuff I'd like to do there and might hack fate into some of the ideas into that game.

I just have to find a group. That's turning out to be difficult these days. One of our gamer group decided to start trying to bang every other guy's wife and it kind of nuked the group.

[Atmo]

Maybe it can be useful: http://fate-srd.com/

[Dogbert]

Biggest low-down for me?

Evil Hat engages in predatory antitrust practices. One would think that a publisher that's basically an elevated indie would know better than perpetuating the cycle of crap among publishers, and instead of that, as soon as they got power of their own, they started "doing unto others."

That's the reason why I refuse to support them on principle.

[Mask_De_H]

Jesus Lord Hijiri Byakuren your webcomic is bad even by the standards of gaming webcomics, dogbert. Could you provide documentation of these predatory practices in a way that doesn't make me want to gouge my eyes out?

[Almaz]

Dogbert is making the bold 1st Amendment stand for the #Gamergate card game, released by James Desborough. True to a game about ethics in videogame journalism, it was about making fun of brown people, women, and queers, and also not very good as a game. Fred Hicks objected to this thing's existence on the same sales front as his game, and so Drivethru RPG (the host for both) decided to take the #Gamergate game down. I can't tell you whether OneBookShelf (that is, Drivethru RPG's owner) decided it was because something so tasteless they shouldn't carry it on principle, or because of the deutschmarks.

He might also be referring to the instance where Tournament of Rapists, an adventure module supplement to Black Tokyo, was taken down. Interestingly, however, Fred Hicks remained notably more quiet on the matter, and even said something about not wanting to take a huge stand every time something shitty is on the storefront, because DTRPG is the livelihood of him and his company. Was it because he viewed ToR as a lesser issue? Because it was an RPG and not a card game? Because other people were already quite loud about it? Because the game was not propaganda backed by an entire mob of violent supporters? Simply because he was tired that day? Remember that that entire thing happened over like, a weekend. Tournament of Rapists was taken down voluntarily by its owner, in the end, and OBS decided on a policy of more closer curation of their storefront, without changing their "we accept anything" stance, though they have yet to implement the report function that they announced.

[Kaelik]

True to a game about ethics in videogame journalism, it was about making fun of brown people, women, and queers,

...

Because the game was not propaganda backed by an entire mob of violent supporters?

Yes, let's definitely take this completely unrelated issue about what is or isn't acceptable practices for an RPG company dictating policy to a sales front, an issue which is actually interesting, and kind of worth talking about, and instead let us distract from that issue by jumping to your totally irrelevant and baseless accusations that anyone who cares about gaming journalism is part of a vast conspiracy to subjugate people, even when they are members of the groups they are allegedly subjugating. Let's totally have that argument again, it was so much fun last time.

[Almaz]

Eh? If Fred Hicks was using it as part of his rubric for why he should do a thing, I think it's worth talking about, mostly because utilitarian calculus is pretty much all we've got. Was his assessment based on false information? Load the likelihood of it being false into the calculation, because people don't make decisions with perfect information. What else is on the other side of the equation? Are there other factors that so outweigh this one that it makes it pale in comparison? Weigh the scales of Maat. Is Fred Hicks' heart lighter than a feather? Tune in to watch a bunch of nerds argue about it. The loser of the debate gets fed to Ammit!

[psychognome]

The latest edition eschews skills for fluff regarding how you resolve contested rolls.

Not quite.

There are basically two games now that are both Fate. The systems behind them are exactly the same, so you can pretty easily combine parts of them together.

One of them is Fate Accelerated Edition (often shortened as FAE), which, as you said, eschews skills in favor of Approaches, i.e. how you do it counts towards what you roll. So, instead of a big list of skills, your character simply has six Approaches, rated from +3 all the way down to +0 I think, and these act as your skills. The list of actions is the same, so you can do stuff like Attack Forcefully, Defend Flashily, Overcome Sneakily etc.

If Fate Accelerated is the rules-light starter set version of Fate, then Fate Core is the full rule set with lots of switches and options built in to allow for making it into your own game. Most of the supplementary material for Fate is written for Fate Core, but there are some Fate Worlds of Adventure supplements written for FAE as well.

Fate Core does have a skill list, and in vanilla Fate Core each skill has clearly defined applications towards each of the actions, some actions being explicitly gated for certain skills without the application of a certain stunt. For an example, you can't use Lore to Attack unless you buy a Lore stunt that allows for doing that.

Both are good in their own way, but I'd say that neither of them are perfect: Fate Accelerated, with its list of Approaches, can definitely lead into a game where the players beg the GM to be able to always use their best Approach for all actions. It doesn't require a lot of house-ruling to fix (Like, even though it's not explicitly stated in the book, both "Don't demand nonsense" and "No reaching" are basically implicitly stated as rules in the game), but it might still arise as a problem.

As for Fate Core, the game is good, but it's very much a toolbox system. It can actually be pretty bland unless you have a clear theme for your game in mind and apply some alternate rules that reinforce that theme. Thankfully, there's a lot of support for the game, both in the form of the Fate System Toolkit (a great book) and lots of PWYW Worlds of Adventure supplements. The latter basically provide you with a campaign setting and all the necessary hacks to the system needed to run a game in that setting and situation.

[Dogbert]

Let's totally have that argument again, it was so much fun last time.

Meh, it's okay. Didn't you know that accusing someone of being a gamergater is the new black of "trump cards"? All you have to do is using the G-word and an accusing finger, and you magically become the instant winner of any discussion. Because that's how things work in the net, seemingly.

[psychognome]

Returning to Fate, I recently picked up the Atomic Robo RPG (powered by Fate Core) from a Bundle of Holding, and I must say that it's probably the best adaptation of Fate Core I've seen.

The game still uses the exact same rules as Fate Core with a few minor twists, but the presentation is excellent. In my previous post I stated that Fate Core suffers a bit for being a generic toolkit system, since it makes it feel a bit bland. Atomic Robo nails the presentation perfectly: panels from the comic are used to demonstrate mechanics along with running commentary from characters from the comic "playing" the game, which goes a long way. Fate is a very abstract game and it really helps to have a visualization of how the game's mechanics can actually be presented in fiction to make it click.

My favorite example is this one: while fighting giant ants (as one does) Robo decides that they're a bit too tough, so he rolls to Create an Advantage to discover an aspect on the scene that he can use to his advantage. He succeeds and gets to name the Aspect. He chooses "Buicks!"

http://www.atomic-robo.com/atomicrobo/v1ch2-page-14

[Avoraciopoctules]

One of the players in my Fate Core game wanted to play a special snowflake Stormcaller with acid-themed magic. How does this look?

Dissolution

Melding the straightforward destruction of Inferno with the amorphousness of Flood, Dissolution has myriad ways to hurt or weaken. It is entropy made manifest, and those attuned to Dissolution can always find a way to make things worse.

Passive Effect: Caustic or poisonous gas and smoke do not bother the character.
Invoke: Corrode - When acting to ruin or sabotage, Dissolution offers strength.
Compel: Erode - carrying Dissolution with you means that things sometimes fall apart without your notice. Compel for something to be gone / unusable when needed.

Overcome: If you overcome a physical barrier, reduce it by 1.
Create an Advantage: Any barrier created with the Dissolution diminishes by 2 per exchange unless the caller concentrates on it, taking -1 to all subsequent actions so long as the barrier is maintained. Anyone who fails to overcome an acid barrier has the option to force their way through, taking damage equal to the number of additional shifts that a successful roll would have required.
Attack: Damage from your attacks ignores any armor. You may take -1 to the attack and attack all targets in a zone, but it inflicts 1 stress on you.
Defend: Acid hurts whatever it touches, and is at a -1 to all defense actions.

[Mask_De_H]

Maintaining the barrier could also potentially be like taking Full Defense and eat up the character's action. I'm also not sure if the Defend penalty applies to the defender, the attacker, or both.

[Avoraciopoctules]

That's a decent point. The masic system we're cribbing from is here:
https://fate-srd.com/fate-system-toolkit/stormcallers

Is forcing a roll to move between combat zones worth more than one PC turn? I suppose it depends on how often the players run into enemies they want to keep at a distance. If you can block off the opposition until you stack up enough +2s to one-shot them, having one PC take care of that is probably worth a turn every round.

My understanding is that the Defend penalty applies to your roll specifically when you use the Stormcaller skill to take a Defend action.