Tagging and Compelling Scene Aspects

A great exchange (though long) about how and when you can/should apply location aspects. (From the FATE mailing list.) The following is my nickle summation, though the whole dialogue is an excellent one.

• Compel a scene aspect when: It complicates the narrative in an interesting way.
• Apply difficulties due to the situation when: Players are already invested in the scene, or an obstacle affects all sides equally.
• Ignore mechanical penalties when: Failure doesn’t advance the plot interestingly. Rolling against a boring obstacle doesn’t do much for the story; move on to describing how it slowed/impeded their efforts but get on with the story.

Here’s the thread. Lenny is responding to a general question about scene aspects and difficulties:

As a player or GM, you can tag a scene aspect to give yourself a bonus or to compel for effect. On one level, that’s mainly about simplicity; SotC has a fair amount of crunch to it already if you use every rule in the book. So “penalties” are always positively facing; they’re bonuses for the person who’s going to roll against you or for the obstacle that you face. Ultimately, if there’s no resistance, then failure isn’t particularly interesting, and hence it doesn’t matter.

I hesitate to use the language of failure when it comes to compels for effect. The two major effects in the text are phrased as “limit actions and choice” and “complicate a situation”. I find the distinction to be more than semantical; it forces you to apply the mechanic outside the realm of dice and look at it dramatically. You have to look at the intent of the action to determine if a compel is appropriate. So let’s look at your example and see what we can tease out.

The player says, “Well, I don’t want to fight in this ice rink anymore, so I’m going to Sprint for the door and get outside where I’ll have surer footing!” (I’m skipping the obvious stage of teasing out the real intent; of course, you might have to have some banter where you figure out what the player really wants out of the action.)

You might say, “Well, it’s Slippery in here…” and hold up a fate point. What you’re tacitly suggesting right now is that you want to close off the option of the player getting out of this zone because it’s too slippery. So they have to come up with some other response. Note that at this point I’m not talking about failure; I’m talking about you making a bid for the dramatic appropriateness of the player not just being able to sprint for the door and get off scot-free.

The player might return something like, “Well, what if I dive into the seats instead?” You might say, “Hey, fine with me, those things are crazy hard to navigate, and there’ll be a border of 2 if you want to move fast, and a [Rows of Seats] aspect over there that might screw with you.”

And the player says, “Fine, I’ll deal with that.” And you hand over the fate point, and someone narrates how the character starts to sprint away, realizes it’s too slippery, and careens over the edge of the railing into the seats! The opponent obviously follows, and the conflict moves to a new environment.

In this way, the scene has been made more dynamic. That is the stuff of compels. You can look at it, in a sense, as a formal way of skipping the dice entirely to resolve something by negotiation.

Does that help, or should we go through some more examples?
-L

Sarah responds:

Hi Leonard,

That’s a great example – thanks very much. I completely take the point of the Compel not being an “auto-fail” in a dice-rolling sense – I have to think of it as complicating the *narrative* rather than the *die roll*. That works.

I suppose what I’m a little confused about now is a difference I’m seeing between the mechanistic determination of difficulty for, say, the Climb skill when trying to climb a Slippery surface (SotC p233), where you get a *penalty* by increasing the task difficulty (+1 diff for Slick surface, +2 diff for Completely Smooth, etc), and the allocation of a “Slippery” aspect to a surface which may be climbed.

In the above case, I’m not sure how I’m “supposed” to handle a “Slippery City Wall” (or something!). So, I’ve got this Slippery Wall. According to the rules it’s a +1 or +2 Difficulty to Climb (my choice). I would imagine that the wall would also reasonably have a “Slippery” aspect. In this case, is the Aspect simply there as a narrative device for me (as Story Teller) or the players to restrict the narrative? So, if I (again as Story Teller) am not that bothered about a player attempting to climb said Slippery Wall, he just gets a +2 Difficulty modifier (nothing to do with the Aspect); but, if I want *as a narrative device* to actually dissuade the player from even attempting to climb the wall, I can tag the Slippery aspect to Compel for Effect and “encourage” the player to try something other than climbing (in return for a Fate Point)?

So, in other words, the +1 or +2 difficulty mods are “permanent”, unavoidable penalties to a climb attempt in terms of the game rules mechanic (ie ALL climb attempts will use them), whereas the Aspect is an optional narrative intervention opportunity for me (as Story Teller) or the players, which if we don’t want to bother we can choose to ignore. IE, the Slippery Aspect only comes into play if we want to as a narrative device, but the Slippery climb penalties are always there as a rules mechanic?

This would mean:
i.) For “positive” uses, Aspects have both a narrative function and a skills mechanic function (Tag for Effect, Tag for a Bonus / Reroll). In addition, there is a completely separate skills mechanic bonus occasionally available, depending on skill – maybe a -1 Difficulty for an exceptionally easy climb, that sort of thing.
ii.) For “negative” uses, Aspects have ONLY a narrative function, and no effect on the skills mechanic (Tag to Compel for Effect only). In addition, there is a completely separate skills mechanic penalty occasionally available, depending on skill – such as the +1 Difficulty for slippery climbs.

I suppose what I’m up against now is, for example, how to determine the penalty to a skill roll. In the case of Climb, it’s in the rules. But, for example, if someone is trying to find the secret door in the dark (Scene Aspect: Pitch Black), is it just up to me whether I make the Investigation (or whatever) roll more difficult cos it’s dark, assuming I don’t *want* to stop the attempt from going ahead (in which case I’d Tag “Pitch Black” to Compel for Effect)?

Am I on the right track? 🙂
Cheers,
Sarah

Lenny finishes up with this response, which does a good job of sewing it up.

I don’t think you’re confused. I think you’re perceiving an inherent instance of “multiple personalities” in the system, born out of the desire to be as playstyle-agnostic as possible. The degree to which you use aspects to play out results vs. how often you rely on modifiers and skill rolls says something about what you prioritize in the game. There is no right answer; there are just the functions each tool fulfills.

The issue at stake is really about what kind of role you want a particular obstacle to play in the emerging fiction that you’re creating at the table. Modifiers deal primarily with character effectiveness or player *investment* in a situation, because the player can almost always potentially invoke enough aspects to succeed on the roll.

Aspects deal primarily with *changing the state* of the situation in play, modifying it in some way. With invocations, the effect is a little more subtle – as I said above, the player’s basically saying, “I’m invested enough here, in the following ways, to win this”. With compels, it becomes more obvious.

Keep in mind, though, that the constraints provided by compels are meant to fuel negotiation between player and GM about how to most dramatically resolve the situation. It’s not a railroading tool; it’s not a thing that’s there for you to go, “The story would be better served by you going through the window than climbing the wall.”

Rather, it’s there for you to do something like, “Hey, so, you want to climb the wall to get to the princess’ tower; it’s real Slippery, and the Vizier has flying monkey guards everywhere. Probably, if you’re concentrating on the wall, they’ll scoop you up without much effort.” Then you offer the fate point.

At this point, you’ve offered a constraint, but you haven’t actually pushed the player in any particular direction. They can pay a fate point to refuse the proposed limitation (aka invalidating your statement), they can go along with your statement in exchange for the fate point, or they can counter-propose something else to earn that fate point some other way. The negotiation process is key; it can’t be one-sided or absolute.

So, to address your other example about the secret door, the bottom line is, what narrative opportunities are you trying to provide? What’s happening in the scene? Where’s the drama coming from? If there’s nothing interesting at stake besides “does the PC find the door or not”, then failure is not going to advance the fiction. Why should you care about rolling? Just let them find the door and worry about the interesting challenge/obstacle that’s beyond that.

If there *is* something interesting going on, then you have to ask yourself what the source of that interest is. If it largely regards what might happen if the character fails at what they’re trying to do, probably the skill roll + modifiers is a good bet. If it largely regards how the situation could be influenced by dramatic factors, probably your available bandolier of aspects is a better place to look.

So if it’s all, “If they don’t find the secret door, Dr. Methuselah gets the info he needs from the captive,” use that “Pitch Black” to bump the difficulty up by +2, or assign whatever difficulty modifier you feel is appropriate.

If it’s all, “Because it’s Pitch Black, a bunch of cool stuff could happen here,” then offer a constraint and hold up a fate point, and see who takes the bait. “Oh, you’ll find it, but you’ll stumble in the door head first and awkwardly land in the middle of God knows what.” “Oh, you’ll find what you think is the door… and actually is the pirahna feeding tank!” Etc etc. Players might chime in with aspects of their own, which could give you ideas about how to further complicate stuff, etc etc.

So there is no right answer. Everything depends on what your group wants from the scene.

-L