From Blue Collar Space, a look at how to encourage compels and prevent some of the defensive reflexes they sometimes bring out.
Categories
Category: FATE Games
Categories
Dresden Files: Baltimore Preview
Dresden Files: Preview of their sample city Baltimore. Lots of statted out NPCs as examples.
Categories
Stalking Diaspora
Doyce has a couple of good posts for Diaspora: Being Immortal and a huge Session One post. Let the stalking begin. 😉
Judd’s game, a thread on ENWorld.
Categories
More on compels
From the mailing list Xarlen asks
The way I conceptualize Compels, it’s really easy to toss in complications in the middle and the end of the various stories. That’s when there’s clear conflict and the player has to make their choices.
But it’s also important to get the PCs some juice before things are ratcheted up to that point. In DF, players WILL start with low refresh.
So, how do you really toss compels and make complications at the beginning? Aside from the old “You have an Arch Nemesis As an Aspect, here’s a fate point for them to pop up later.”
Fred answers,
Compels are a tool for how I add pressure to the early events of the story.
My basic storyline might be “okay, so there’s been a murder, and you’ve got to solve it”, but compels would be how I add, “while trying to keep your marriage from falling apart” and “before the police catch up with you, since you’ve been framed for it”. Pressure becomes the motive that drives things forward.
Jan gives his own example,
“You’re a ‘Hot-Headed Kinetomancer’? Okay. So: You’ve been enjoyed a quiet evening in your local haunt when this group of low-level talents walk in, laughing among themselves about some in-joke. As they sidle up to the bar, you hear one of them crack a joke at the expense of your mentor, and that _really_ gets your bile up. Go ahead.”
In effect, start with the compels on generic things — temper, financial (“In Debt to a Loan Shark”) or social situation (“My GF hates what I do”). FATE is spent, action is had, and all things are good.
Categories
Dresden: Lots of Q&A answered
Fred linked off to a great site, where they are discussing their playtesting experience with the Dresden Files game. It sounds like it’s solid– they had a lot of data and thorough system backing, which makes me think that the GM is going to have lots of guidelines and rules to help out.
An overview of the RPG books is here.
From http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FateRPG/message/16305
Assessments, Declarations, and Maneuvers are all the same action, the way I look at the system. As individual applications, they’re framed differently. Assessments ask the GM to come up with something that in the story-space is already true, just discovered. Declarations empower the player to come up with something that was already true. Maneuvers empower the *character* to assert something new and now true.
Fred
And from Grant: If the GM is amenable, an Assessment may also allow a player character to ‘discover’ an element that the GM hadn´t even thought of previously. In this manner the Assessment works like a Declaration (see below) with the player stating that his character has identified a weakness, Aspect or other feature. The GM sets a Difficulty for the Skill roll to see if the character was correct in his Assessment, or whether he was mistaken. If the roll fails, the GM may wish to impose a temporary Aspect on the assessing character to reflect this, for example ‘Mistakenly believes the security cameras to have a blind spot’.
Categories
FATE one-shot advice
(From the FATE mailing list: this post)
I posted most of this earlier to this list, so look through the archives for that thread, as there were other good hints. But here are my tips for one shot/con games.
Characters –
I would shy away from full chargen at the table. My local group loves to spend a whole evening generating characters, but it’ll take too long in a convention slot.Use partial to full pregen characters. Don’t choose stunts at the table, again it will take too long. Either you pick them before or go stuntless, by choosing good aspects(which is the path I prefer).
At a minimum choose the top skills (the +5, and the 2 +4s for each characters). Let them fill in the rest, but also allow them to put them in in play so you can get going.
Pregenerate several aspects for each character. Make sure you have a list of them and write down possible places in the adventure that you’ll be able to compel them. You won’t be able to track more than one or two aspects per player at a table of 6 for very long. Have some compels up your sleeve and any others are gravy.
Cut their fate points to 5, and compel early and often. Explain self compels, and try to get them to the work for you.
Use the faster damage rules on the wiki if you want to speed up combat.
The Adventure –
In a 4 hours slot with pregens and 5 players I usually get either 3 bigger or 4 smaller encounters. Not much more.
Be sure to design the adventure so that you can drop whatever is needed out to get to the Big Bad at the end. Players are more forgiving of plot problems than not getting to the triumph stage.Start them in the middle of something. Ignore the “meet in the bar/clubhouse/ diner and plan” stage (players will overthink it, and spend too much of the precious game time looking for things that aren’t there.) Get them into the action as soon as possible.
Jeff
Rob Rendell explains the breakthrough that made stunts “click” for him, in response to a general question on the mailing list about Stunts and Aspects.
Since you mention stunts, I assume you’re playing Spirit of the Century?
Aspects are explained extensively in the SotC rules in their own chapter (starting on page 33). I’m pretty sure I can’t do a better job of explaining them than the text of that chapter.
Stunts took me a while to come around to really understanding. Superficially, they grant all sorts of random “always-on” abilities that your character enjoys, and are detailed in their own chapter in the SotC rules starting on page 115.
When I first read SotC, stunts felt at odds to the Fate 2.0 way of doing things to me. Since then, however, various things I’ve read[1] have finally gotten the idea through my thick skull of what Stunts are: they’re cool things that anyone with appropriate aspects could reasonably do by spending a Fate Point, locked down to allow whoever has that stunt to do that cool thing over and over as a shtick *without* having to spend a Fate Point. You’re sacrificing versatility for repeatability.
The example that really drove the point home for me was the racial aspects in Spirit of Swords and Sorcery: the only mechanical effect of being a Dragon is a single racial aspect, “Dragon”. To do dragon-like things, you can spend a Fate Point to invoke the aspect to fly, or breath fire, or shape-shift into human form, or various other dragon-y things. This worked for me as a racial aspect: it was *possible* for you to do these cool things that a regular human character couldn’t, but the requirement to spend a Fate Point each time you wanted to do one of those things meant that it was limited in its frequency.
And then I got to the stunts for Dragons, and there was a stunt that mean that you could fly without spending a FP, one which allowed you to breathe fire without spending a FP, one for shape-shifting with the FP. Suddenly, I grokked what all the stunts in SotC were about: as I said above, cool things that your character probably *could* do by spending a FP, but because you want it to be one of the defining shticks of your character, you spend one of your stunts to be able to do it over and over without the FP.
Hope that helped.
[1] Things that I read which helped me come to my understanding of stunts: discussions on this list, reading Rob Donoghue’s “Going Stuntless” article and the conversion “Spirit of Swords and Sorcery” (both of which are in the Files section of the yahoo group) and discussions of how buying Stunts reduces your refresh (the number of Fate Points you start the session with) in the Dresden Files RPG.
Categories
Recent random links
Scott Metz’s link page, with links for Serenity, D&D, and more.
Serenity themes and premises, an investigation/discussion.
Carefully Prepared Improvisation
Story Now, long Heroquest example
D&D
Blink Dogs in 4e
3.5e Monster Generator and Random dungeons
Giant list of house rule options for 4e
Round Table discussion of PH2 classes
Martin’s detailed look at the PH2
A good quick names trick.
F-sharp, a very rules light FATE derivative
Swashbucklers of the 7 skies sounds cool
Mouse Guard campaigns, characters, etc.
Story Games is still out there.
A Spirit of the Century short campaign from Story Games.
A Memory of Light, the final Wheel of Time book, to be released November 2009.
A cool short story
Gametable goodness; cool to drool over
Monele and Leonard discuss Aspects, Free Tags, and Fiction on the FATE Mailing list. Throughout, Monele is in italics, while Leonard is plaintext.