What Makes a Skill

Yesterday, I stole one idea form Bulldogs! and today I'm going to steal another.

Back in the day, Feng Shui presented a very interesting way to handle skills that worked very well for it's wide, loose model. In short, a skill represented three things. The first, Physical Ability, was the traditional meaning of a skill - actually doing the thing the skills described. If the skill was guns, it means shooting people. If it was Thief, it meant breaking picking locks and such. All standard enough.

The second thing, Knowledge, measured how knowledgeable you were about the skill in question. Thus, if you had a high guns skill, it also meant you had an encyclopedic knowledge of guns. This worked very well for the action-movie focus of the game, since that tends to be how action heroes operate. The thief may not be "The Smart Guy", but he can rattle off the details about a specific type of bank vault with nothing more than a glance.

The last thing, Contacts, measured the character's connection to the community surrounding the skill. This meant you knew who the other big players were in your space ("He was killed with a golden bullet through the left temple, the signature of Midas Mayhem!") but also the broader network around it, including gun dealers, collectors, specialists and so on. Among other things, this meant that a thief could find a fence or a gun-bunny could get his hands on a bagfull of guns without much real hassle.

Now, I don't know if Laws took this from another game, but for me it was a total eye-opener. By establishing these Skill Components, he'd neatly solved a ton of problems from more detailed systems that emerged from a disconnect between the character as envisioned and the character as supported by the rules. That is, even if you bought up your core skill, you would usually need to also buy up the far less rewarding Knowledge and Contact skills to avoid looking like a chump (or, as was more often the case, ignore them and hope the GM did the same).

I internalized this approach in my own play, to great satisfaction. In time, I added my own spin in the form of a fourth Skill Component for Perception (So gun guy could spot a sniper or a concealed carry without being Sherlock Holmes) and happily meandered onward.

But for all that, there was a bit of a downside to this, since it did not map to all sill lists, especially if you want to go to a finer grain. As an example, Feng Shui had the Intrusion skill, which covered a wide range of thiefly pursuits, and that worked. But if you ever needed to split it up (into, say, Burglar and Stealth) then you ran into weird questions, like what exactly Stealth Contacting meant. Is there a big Stealth community out there? Do they have a very sneaky newsletter?

Bulldogs! strikes at the root of that problem by taking a similar (but more detailed) breakdown and building _up_ from it to construct skills. The basic idea is that a skill can be used to do the following things: overcome an obstacles, make an assessment, make a declaration, place a maneuver, attack, defend or block.

Now, what exactly those mean has some system-specific weight, so if you're not clear on what "make an assessment" means, then don't sweat it (or go read SOTC) but what's important is that those are, effectively, the seven mechanical things that a character can _do_ in the system, so using them as the baseline to define the skills makes for super tight engineering.

The idea is not portable in and of itself - those 7 things are fate specific - but the idea is a fascinating lens to take to another game and ask what characters can actually _do_. Curiously, you can end up coming around to a similar space as Apocalyse World's moves this way, albeit from a somewhat different direction. In both cases the bones of system are laid bare, and the construction on top of them is made apparent to the reader.

So, yeah. It's a good trick.

Space Race

Before I start, let me give a quick plug for a young gaming blog, charactergen.net. The authors are a pair of talented and inspired writers who are already off to an excellent start, and promise many cool things yet to come.

Anyway, it should be obvious that I'm a big fan of Bulldogs!, and if it's not obvious, I suggest taking a look at the lower left hand corner of the back cover, which should answer any questions about where I stand. It's a fun game standing firmly on a well-loved piece of sci-fi real estate and, notably, just launched its own foray into fiction with Redwing's Gambit, by the ever talented Monica Valentinelli, if that's your bag.

For all its explosive, sci fi fun, I want to really call out two pieces of gaming technology that any designer might want to take into account. Neither is FATE specific (though one leans that way) and both could be powerful seeds for other games.

Today I'll talk about the first, the handling of race. Race is a tricky thing - in fiction as in life - but it's also an essential part of this sort of sci-fi. Alien races need some manner of hook to make them something other than different colored rubber suits, but at the same time it gets very dull when every member of the race is incredibly similar. The classic racial template model tends to stray a bit too close to the latter problem - it works very well when you have one alien of a particular type on the crew, but as soon as you introduce a second one, it gets weird. Think of any six episodes of Star Trek and you can probably see the problem.

However, if you stop and think about any six episodes (well, any six *good* episodes) of Deep Space 9, you can get a sense of what you want to see. Since DS9 had so many recurring alien characters, it was no longer sufficient for "Ferengi" or the like to be a sufficiently distinguishing feature to leave it at that. Instead, it was a starting point to build a character on. Bulldogs! has found a way to build that into chargen, and quite cleverly.

See, it starts with a list of 10 aspects for every race. They're good, colorful aspects and they paint a nice and complete picture of each race. Presenting them this way spared the author the need to write up long descriptive blurbs for each race that restates the content of those aspects. The aspect tell us plenty about the race and about how others might feel or react to them. That's all implicit in the aspect list itself. It's a dirty trick, and a super clever one.

If you stop there, this is basically just a clever presentation of the classic racial template - good, but dull. The twist comes in application. A character is only expected to take two of those aspects.

It's a simple thing, but the impact is profound for a couple of reasons. First, it creates a range for a lot of different aliens of the same species, but it does so in a way that doesn't abandon the complete picture - the fact that your character doesn't use 8 of the aspects doesn't mean those don't exist, it just means they're less important to you. The full list provides a context that the narrowed selection takes advantage of. To put it in concrete terms, it means Klingon poets might be a rarity, but they're not impossible to make (or even penalized) - just pick the aspects that dovetail with your concept.

And as a bonus, it makes the GM's job MUCH easier for creating NPCs. The simple act of choosing _not_ to use some baseline aspects can tell you plenty about a character. Plus, if you're feeling lazy, you can just use more than two of them if you need to quickly stat someone up.

It's also worth nothing that the game gracefully avoids the "Humans are the baseline" problem which often accompanies these systems. The human-equivalents are handled in exactly the same way as everyone else in this regard.

For interested GMs, it's super portable to any system that uses descriptors of any sort (whether they're feats, distinctions or anything else) to construct groups. Races are the most obvious application, but it's easy to see how this could be used for organizations in the vein of White Wolf's old splats. Hell, it could be narrowed in scope and be used to create fencing schools. Anything where you need things to share a common root but have different expressions could be well served by borrowing this idea.

Reading Fudge Dice

It should come as no surprise that I'm quite fond of fudge dice, and I've put a lot of thought into the different things that can be done with their three outcomes. I've shifted things on several different axes, and I've failed as often as I've succeeded, but it's a fun area to play in.

One idea that I'm quite fond of is less about altering the dice or how they're rolled and more about what that mean. Specifically, you can get a lot of mileage out of separating the dice from the outcome.

To illustrate what that means, consider that on a normal df roll, you are judging an outcome, generally based on die roll plus whatever skill is in use as well as any other bonuses or penalties. The final outcome is expressed as a number or an adjective (or both) and that's what's used as a basis for narration.

Now, as gamers we have always implicitly understood that there can be some separation between the dice and the outcome, specifically in situations where the dice roll badly but the roll is a success or vice versa. What I propose here is to make the distinction a little bit more explicit, and make the roll itself as important to the narration as the outcome.

To do this requires a little thought about what the die roll means. Most often, we think of it as representing the role of luck in an activity, but that doesn't hold up under any real scrutiny. Luck maybe part of our lives, but it's usually something we consider as part of what happens to us, less about what we do. If we miss a target, it's because we need to get _better_, not luckier.

So instead, consider the dice to represent all the other factors that the system hasn't already accounted for. Distractions, coincidences, a good nights sleep and anything else. Think of all the reasons you succeed and fail and - unless you're a terrible egoist - those external factors will become obvious.

With that in mind, the dice represent the "swing" of the world at large. For narrow results (-1 to +1) nothing of any real note happened. You tried, you succeeded or failed, that's just the way things go.

For slightly broader results (-2 or +2) something went right or wrong. Someone gave you directions. The wind was at your back. The wind _wasn't_ at your back. The lighting was off. THere's something you can point to and say "That helped" or "Man, that got in my way".

Rarer results (-3 or +3) represent rare strokes of luck or bad luck. Coincidence falls for or against you. The librarian just happens to be and expert on the topic in question. The supplies you need were destroyed in a freak fire. Your opponent slipped on a patch of oil. You take a nail in one of your tires.

By this thinking, critical results (-4 or +4) are just a logical extension of this model. They're the truly preposterous strokes of luck, good and bad, that turn a situation around.

With this in mind, you can combine this information with the outcome (which won't be changed) to be able to describe action in terms of "success because" or even "success in spite of" to get a better picture of how a given even transpired.

This combines interestingly with aspects. If you do a dice-flipping bonus (that is, invoke to turn a die to a +) then you need to describe how the aspect is changing the situation, maybe turning a drawback into an advantage. That's very colorful, but also makes using aspects more work.

If you just go with the +2 bonus, this has the nice effect of making your efforts look more heroic. When you spend to get a +7, it's awesome, but bland. It's cooler to my mind if you also take into account that you had to do it while the floor is shaking (rolled a -2).

Either way, if you use an invocation for a reroll, this makes the story of the reroll much clearer, since it has now translated into a problem which has been overcome or worked around.

This also has some interesting interaction with bonuses, penalties and uncertainty. In this model, you can legitimately have someone roll fewer dice to simulate "lab conditions". In fact, if you think of that as pre-setting those dice to zero, then you could actually just fold penalties right into the dice.

Now, be aware this only really works if you take a light hand with bonuses and penalties, but doing so makes them much more concrete and makes them feel more toothy while actually making them a bit more normalizing. Consider - if you're rolling with a -2 penalty, you could generate anything from -6 to +2. If two of the dice a pre-flipped to -2, then the roll will be somewhere from -4 to 0. Now, some people might miss the more extreme outcomes, but I'd wager that the latter case will _feel_ more like the penalty mattered - both narratively as well as mechanically.

(as a bonus, you might allow aspect rerolls to "clear" a penalty, if you can come up with a justification for it, since a reroll represents a change of situation)

What Else Compels are Good For

One of the curious issues I have with Aspects these days is that I almost never compel them. Not because I don't bring their negative implications into play, but because my players are sufficiently enthusiastic about playing up the negative side themselves that I don't even need to bother.

It's a good problem to have. I can easily swap to a pile of fate points in the middle of the table for them to draw out of as appropriate, but I tend not to do so because those few occasions where I offer a classic compel tend to be fun and memorable, and I don't want to lose that.

The problem, of course, is that this experience is not universal. A lot of people have encountered a lot of different problems with compels, and these problems are wide ranging enough that there's no one solution. They are either too much power for the GM or too much power for the players, depending who you ask. They're too restrictive, or too open ended, also depending who you ask. This has always made them a bit rough to write about because if you speak to one set of concerns, you inflame another. This is why I've steadily fallen into the pattern of talking about what I consider good or rewarding practices rather than seeking to solve specific problems.

So with that in mind, there are two things that go on around compels that I'm not sure get enough airtime, and which offer a slightly different perspective on things.

The first is something my players make clear to me on a regular basis, and that is that a compel is really the GM offering you an opportunity that isn't immediately visible to you. That is to say, the GM has a slightly different perspective on what's going on - maybe she has more information a broader perspective or whatever - and that means she will occasionally look at a situation or choice and go "Wow, that speaks _directly_ to this thing my player finds cool" and calls the player's attention to it with a compel. The assumption is that if the player had seen this opportunity, they would have already taken it (and that assumes a certain type of player-GM relationship). If the player has seen it and declines, then all is well and good, but the GM's done her job.

Obviously, this is harder to do if you're doing all hard compels all the time, and I tend to treat these compels as soft (that is to say, can be declined freely).

The second is that a compel can zoom the camera in on a moment, ideally a moment of choice. If the player is faced with a choice, the compel flags it as something significant, that it's a choice that means something for the character. Not every choice is necessarily this important, and some might merit hard compels and others soft, but the bottom line is that the compel is a spotlight, and it's worth using to shine on things worth seeing.

Reverse Anchors

I've mentioned a few times how much I like the idea of anchors as a way to concretely draw aspects into play. The idea is simple: after a player picks an aspect, they name some element of the setting (a person, place or thing) that is tied into that aspect in some way. It provides the player easy ties into the setting and it gives the GM convenient handles with which she can grip onto character's aspects. Win-win all around.

The other night I was talking with my friend Morgan about some ideas that we'd kicked around for Dresden but which has never really materialized. One of them revolved around thematic categories for aspects to fall under, and we were kicking around ways to capture that, and it occurred to me that you could really make this work by turning anchors on their head.

That is to say, you could begin a game with a limited set of anchors, and say have aspects tie into those. Exactly what those anchors would be depends entirely on the game and the genre. Amber, arguably, provides a great example of this in the form of the cast of characters (the royal family) plus a few key locations. The same thing could easily be done with the little town outside the dungeon or a city in a Dresden or cyberpunk game.

Now, there are some obvious benefits to this approach - a fixed list of anchors and an open list of aspects means you have a pre-built set of tools for building adventures, but this also taps into the same mojo as The Trick. The fixed set of anchors provide linking points for the characters through the anchor rather than directly.

One important qualifier is that the list of anchors is a snapshot, not a fixed list. The initial list should allow for some room to grow as players come up with ideas. After chargen, the list may change (slowly or quickly) over the course of the game. How it changes depends on the game - the game might be complex and call for only occasional changes or it might start with only a few anchors and expand over time.

Obviously, this calls for a little thought before character creation, but it's actually pretty light duty stuff, and it has the advantage of helping prune the field of unwelcome elements. Any potential elements that don't interest players enough to tie to their aspects probably deserve to be shuffled off to the sidelines. But with that small amount of work, you have created an easy way to keep a game's central elements in the middle of play without breaking a sweat.

Faces and Places

Edit: Seems I screwed up my scheduling, so there's a double post today - this one and the one below. Enjoy the fruits of my inability to read dates!

Dresden Files’ city generation is one of my favorite parts of the game, but it can occasionally create problems for groups that are trying it for the first time, especially if they’re using the Vancouver method of sing a generic city as a backdrop. The problem tends to be the points of inspiration - the usual model is to outline places, the come up with the faces associated with them, but that can be rough when you have no starting point.

So this came up in discussion the other night with Chad “Robot from the future powered by beer” Underkoffler, and his solution is probably the most straightforward - if you don’t have places, then start with the people and then figure out where they are. That works pretty well, but I know that some people like a little more inspiration, so I got thinking about how to do that for a city.

The trick is that you’d basically be generating “A [QUALIFIER] [PLACE] with [SITUATION]” and that’s easy enough to turn into a set of tables, so I sat down and started doing so. Simple enough, at lest for qualifier and place, but situation is a bit trickier. Yes, sure, it’s totally possible to come up with a random list of situations, but I think that would ultimately be counterproductive. Generic situations are all well and good, but the point of doing collective city creation is to come up with things that are relevant to the players. Now, I am sure your players are creative, and they would tie themselves into the events that rolled up with no problem, but that feels enough like cheating that I’m leaving that out. Instead, here’s a simple table of qualifiers and places. My suggestion is that before you roll on one of these, pick an aspect, and let that be the inspiration for the situation in the place.

3d6 and Bonus Dice

Gonna be a nerdy one today, with more noodling on the FATE Spies 3d6 mechanic (which I may need to start calling something else soon).

EDIT: I just noticed I didn't upload the key. Basically, the black line is a flat, familiar 3d6. Red line is 3d6 with 1 bonus die, blue is 2 bonus dice and green is 3 bonus dice. Click the image to see it in better detail.


Yeah, I was feeling a little crazy last night and wanted to see just how big an impact bonus dice had on a regular 3d6 distribution (the black line). But even so, I admit that's kind of crazy to see.

Bonus and penalty dice, for the unfamiliar, are a fairly simple mechanic I first encountered in Over the Edge. They work quite simply - when rolling a set of dice, say, 3d6, if you have a bonus die, you roll 4d6, and tally up the best three of them. If you have a penalty die, you roll 4d6 and tally up the worst 3 of them. The math is pretty easy, and so long as you're dealing with tallies that people can handle comfortable then I find it's a useful mechanic because it has a few curious attributes.

Most importantly, it doesn't change the range of outcomes, it just changes the likelihood of where a result will fall. This is a fantastic way to keep the numerical representation of the world consistent yet bounded, because the best result that can ever possibly be rolled is a known value, and you can reasonably set difficulties based on that.

This model works exceptionally well when the dice themselves represent values, as in Over the Edge (where your attributes were rated at 3d6 or 4d6) or in the newer versions of Cortex (where everything is described with a die value EDIT: as illustrated in the Leverage RPG which is out today!).[1] It is a little odd to be using it with a bonus system, as I am with the Fate Spies game, but it's proving a surprisingly good match for the relatively short skill ladder (only 4 steps, though I have a hunch 5 might be better) because the range of bonus seems large enough to tilt a roll, but not large enough to overwhelm it.

Consider, in contrast, if your roll a d20 and have a +2 bonus. Your bonus isn't going to make too much of a difference in the total value of your roll. It weights it a little, sure, but the range of outcomes is broad enough to overwhelm it. In contrast, if you have a +32 bonus, the bonus is much more telling. (Yes, this is partly math, but there are some caveats to that. But it's also about perception).

Compared to that, a +0/+2/+4/+6 set feels pretty good, especially on a 3d6 curved outcome. +2 is still enough to pretty impressively improve your odds (increases your chance of hitting a 10 by almost 25%) but is more likely to drop you in the 10-14 range (complicated success), which seems exactly right. Once you start adding bonus dice and penalty dice into this, it feels like a very potent range of options in a fairly tight package.

As a bonus, setting a hard limit on potential outcomes makes it easier to handle superhuman ones if and when they come up. If the best guy in the world's best shot is a 25 (18 + 6 + 1 point misc bonus) then I know that superhuman starts at 26 and can build from there.

Even more, it makes the game nicely compact in terms of materials. D6's are easy to come by and it's easy to get sets by color. If I'm feeling saucy, it's entirely possibly to hand out fate points[2] as differently colored d6's. Combined with the fairly minimal skill list, and the whole game kit could probably fit in an index card box. I love the physical elements of games, but I lean towards minimalism in my tastes, so I'm always thinking about what's involved in building a kit, and this may end up shaping into a true kit game.


1 - There's some similarity to Roll & Keep systems, such as L5R, but those have different benefits.

2 - Aspects in this system either grant a reroll or add a bonus die. I had worried that wasn't quite potent enough, but looking at the math, it pretty much is, but it offers no incentive for spending them before the roll. I need to decide if that's a bug or a feature. If it's a feature, ti means I'll assume it will _always_ be after the roll, and make specific narrative demands to that end.

More Spy Results

Another session of the spies game last night. The mechanics are still present, just because they're primarily in my head (or on the blog), so I'm trying to keep them transparent, but I think they're holding up. Specifically, We're been playing the 3d6 variant and it's proving fairly robust.

Last night was the kind of session where things took a much more wiggly path than I anticipated, but I made a lot of unexpected discoveries. The sole downside is that the tempo system feels a little stretched in a close quarters gunfight - one that feels like it should be more dangerous than normal. While it's easy to give one side or another an advantage, there's no dial for making a specific fight nastier. I could probably tweak the margin of success in the background, but that seems a little ham-handed. Something to think about, but I don't think it detracted from the game.

On the upside, I think I finally internalized the need for penalty dice as a difficulty gauge. As it's a fixed-outcome roll (influenced by Apocalypse World, but it is definitely not an AW hack) the game has the frustrating habit of distributing outcomes independent of the fiction of the world. Tossing in a penalty die to say "This is harder than just doing the same thing in different circumstances" feels very natural, and since the impact of the penalty die is immediate and palpable, I get a lot of mileage out of just using a few. One means this is hard, two means this is really hard, and three means you're really pushing it. Keeping it down to 3 possibilities keeps it easy to grasp.

I also made a realization which Fred verbalized. As in AW, there is a "Success with complications" outcome that is the most likely of outcomes, but unlike AW, the complication is not automatic - in this, the complication is at the GM's option, and if he adds it, the player gets a fate point. This worked out very well in play, and added a few surprises to the game, but the real payoff was on the meta-level. As a GM, it allowed me to back off from a roll I shouldn't have called for or which I was just using to test the breeze. For the players, Fred pointed out that it removed a lot of the hesitation of using lower skills, since those were the ones most likely to hit these results. That last in particular pleases me.

Didn't get to test combat too much - two fights, the first one ending in rapid withdrawal (that was the close quarters gunfight), and the second ending under the weight of such an overwhelming opening roll that it couldn't really be categorized as a fight.

As a GM, I was reminded that I have a weakness for NPCs who manage to pull off an escape in the face of overwhelming PC firepower, and I had to let myself get comfortable with letting the dice shape the follow up. I've also made a note to myself to see how the tempo rules fare in a chase.

Anyway, all in all a good game, and this may yet shape up into a full system.

Glass Bead Fate

Ok, so before I start, I have to ask: did you learn how to play the game? You should have, and if you didn’t then this isn’t going to make a lot of sense.

The reason you want to learn the game is simple: the skills that make you good at playing the game will help make you better at designing adventures for FATE games, including the Dresden Files. The method is simple - once you start getting used to drawing connections between seemingly unrelated items, you can start applying those same skills to finding connections between aspects.

This is one of those ideas that is simple and powerful, so much so that there’s a temptation to just stop there and say “That. Do that.” because if you actually do it, odds are good its benefits will be sufficiently self evident that any explanation will seem like overkill. Still, assuming you don’t have the time to walk through it right now, let me break out an example. This is a variant on the default Glass Bead Game board:


Now, let’s combine this with some aspects from the sample Baltimore characters in the DFRPG.

Evan: Young White Council Wizards, In Over My Head, Heir to Montrose, Precision is Everything, Here’s the Plan, Hail Hail the Gang’s All Here, I’d Rather Not be a Warden, Thanks.
Biff: Trust Fund Jock, “Sorry Mouse”, Dumb Luck, Krav Maga, Mortimer Lewis Abernathy III, Hail Hail the Gang’s All here, Plays the Dumb Jock

I’ve randomly distributed these on the grid. How is not terribly important, you can do whatever you like to spread it out.

One curiosity of this particular map is it’s asymmetry - the item in the middle right is disproportionally connected to the grid, which has interesting implications when applied to adventure design - it suggests that aspect is going to be a crux of things. Something to think about when you fill in the grid for your game.

Next, let’s grab two of these and pluck the string between them to see what it makes. There are a few gimmes - Heir to Montrose and Mortimer Lewis Abernathy III are an easy pair since they suggest a range of issues about society and family and so on. To easy to even consider using as an example.

Let’s consider something a bit more challenging, like, say, Dumb Luck and Young White Council Wizard. White Council drips with hooks, but Dumb Luck’s a tricky starting point because, while it’s easy to bring up during play, it doesn’t have a lot of setting hooks, but the upside is that it’s a wildcard. If these two aspects were on the same character, it would be easy to put these two in conflict with some bit of mundane luck (like winning a lottery) drawing too much attention to his Council role, but it’s a little trickier to tie in both characters. The best bet would be to draw on Dumb Luck as an initiator - the lucky find or discovery of come sort, one that might be of interest to the council. Something that the council values or wants. If you want to introduce some tension, then you give Biff something cool that the council demands Evan take away. If you want to tie them together, then have Biff stumble upon one of the White Council’s secret’s (perhaps a way map, or something personal about a senior council member) that is personally useful, but which Evan either needs to keep concealed from the council, or Evan gets some pressure from the council to “do something” about.

Whew. Ok, that one took some work. ( This is, by the way, one more reason I like anchors - having concrete things to plug into the grid is much, much easier.) But whatever the case, it's doable, and something similar could be done with almost any pair on the grid, and I encourage you to try. But despite my saying so, you may not believe it.

It is easy to say "see the connections between these things and find potential points of intersection" but as advice goes that's only marginally more useful than "be creative." No matter how much you intellectually understand that's what you want to do, it still can seem impossibly hard.

And that, right there, is why you need to try the glass bead game. Yes, it's fun and interesting and that's great, but it's also a drill, a drill that makes you get better at seeing connections between things. Like any skill, it gets better with useful practice, but like many soft skills, practice is not easy to come by. That is, unless you can find something like the glass bead game. It's not something I can demand you do, but if seeing connections is something you want to get better at, whether to make for better games or for some other personal purpose, why wouldn't you give it a try?

Fate Inspiration

Not everyone is comfortable with Fate, and with aspects in particular. This is natural enough - no game is going to be to everyone's tastes, but in the case of Fate, there's a specific hangup that I think merits a little bit of attention, if only because it's easily addressed.

Aspects (and the use of fate points) serve a number of purposes in play, which means they cover a lot of different ground. A fair portion of that ground involves things that are normally considered within the GM's purview, like dictating the occurrence of coincidences, the arrival of connections and the convenience of gear.[1] For many players, this kind of flexibility is liberating, but for some it breaks their suspension of disbelief. They are comfortable with clearer lines of division that put the GM in control of the world and the player in charge of his character. For that kind of arrangement, giving the player authority beyond his bounds is as disruptive as giving the GM authority over the character.[2]

If so, that's fine - you can actually drop a lot of that material without disrupting the game in any real way. The simplest way to do this is to limit aspects to being literal and descriptive rather than abstract. The first step to support this is to replace Fate Points with "inspiration". Rather than representing the player's role in the game and their ability to help steer the narrative, inspiration is a combination of willpower, drive and sheer dumb luck. It's that reserve of capability that a hero can draw upon in the worst of situations. As a result, the things it can be spent on reflect tapping into that reserve to try a little harder or push a little further.

To support this, aspects should reflect training, background, something intrinsic (like a stat) or things that the character is inspired (for good or bad) by. Mechanically, nothing changes: Spend inspiration along with an aspect to get a bonus or reroll, or gain some inspiration when the aspect makes trouble for you. Under this model, compels are all about character behavior - accepting a compel means accepting a limitation (like being too tired to go on) or yielding to a temptation rather than making the "optimal" choice.[3] More abstract compels don't have a place under Inspiration rules.

This same thinking applies to other aspects in the game. They should be limited to purely to descriptive things like "Dark" or "Dazed." When they are tagged or compelled, the effects should have a clear cause and effect.[4]

Now, there are still plenty of borderline issues, but that's more or less the point. The inspiration model works because it's a discrete subset of the Fate system. Everything done with Inspiration could be done in generic Fate, but the reverse is not true. So while a generic Fate character might have a hard time in an Inspirations game, an inspirations character can play in any Fate game without missing a beat. Compatibility is king!

1 - This also shows up in certain skill uses, like using knowledge skills to make declarations
2 - If this doesn't apply to you, then don't sweat it.
3 - The thinking here is similar to some modern understanding about willpower as a limited reserve. Effort spent resisting one temptation makes it harder to resist another. What this means is that yielding to temptation can help make you more able to face a later challenge, must the same way that doing something unwelcome but which you know is the right thing can make you feel better about yourself.
4 - For example, if an enemy has the "Off Balance" aspect on him, a player can't compel to have him slip at a convenient moment, but he could compel it after a successful attack, describing the attack as successfully knocking him down. While the result may be the same, the former example depends on the player narratign events his player cannot control, which is exactly what we're avoiding here.

Crunchy Aspects

Ok, here's the thing - Aspects make for a great shorthand because most of the "rules" that surround them are actually based around our shared understanding of a word or words. If I say a guy is STRONG, there's not a lot of confusion regarding what that means, nor is there much confusion regarding when that might be helpful. Lifting furniture? Check. Smashing stuff? Check. Reciting Poetry? Not so much.

Even more, the reality is that for 90-odd percent of aspects, that works just fine. That's enough that it's entirely possible to play and enjoy the game without worrying about the edge cases. At the very worst, it might be necessary to make the occasionally impromptu ruling, but that's just not terribly onerous.

However...

I am entirely aware that there are players who like the open ended nature of aspects, but at the same time desire a little more structure to them. These players may not have thought of it, but they would enjoy the benefits of a common pool of aspects which they can draw from and establish a shared understanding. Such explicit aspects would serve several purposes, not least of which would be tying mechanics to specific aspects, possibly even doing away with stunts entirely in favor of what I will call "Rich Aspects".

In the land of rich aspects, most aspects would remain unchanged, but the manner they're presented would be expanded, using write-ups in a manner that might be more in keeping with the way that powers get written up in some other games.[1] A Rich aspect will be composed of five parts: a description, bonuses, benefits, penalties and complications. Bonuses and Benefits are things the player can invoke the aspect for, either for a bonus (for bonuses, natch) or a narrative element for benefits. Penalties and complications are situations where the aspect might be compelled, either when acting (penalties) or as plot seeds or events (complications).

For Example:[2]

Soldier of the Empire
Service in the imperial legions gives a man the opportunity to see the world at only moderate risk of life and limb. The imperial infantry is well respected for its discipline and prowess, and a man who returns from his five years with all his parts can expect easy employment with the guard of any of the great houses.
Bonuses: Fight with sword or spear, set up or break down camp, march, walk sentry duty
Benefits: Collect a small pension. Find a war buddy. Immaculately maintain your gear.
Penalties: Pass as something other than a military man, disobey a rightful order.
Complications: Be recognized by an old friend (or enemy). Get called back up.

There are two benefits to this approach. First, for players, this has one of the benefits that keys offer - explicit clarity. For game designers, it makes it possible to make aspects a more mechanically central part of the game, creating aspect lifepaths or making specific aspects into necessary gateways to other aspects, powers or skills.

Now, me, I'm sufficiently lazy that they only reason I'd really delve into this is as a proof of concept, but I admit it tickles some crunch-happy part of my brain, even as it otherwise makes me flinch.


1 - Look, if this sounds absolutely heretical then just keep moving along. I am aware this is a drastic departure from the normal way of doing Fate, but that's rather the point.

2 - Curiously, I did write all this in advance of Wednesday's discussion. That said, that discussion makes me more inclined to explore this idea a little further later, just because it, and examples like Houses of the Blooded, suggest it may have more legs than I originally thought.

The Role of Spending

There are a few games out there (FUDGE was one of them) where game currency (fate points, bennies, actions points, drama dice, whatever) are also experience points. I do not like this model at _all_ because it presents players with a decision that has such a profound opportunity cost as to be no fun at all. If you spend the point on a roll, you've "wasted" it, but if you don't use it on the roll, you might get hosed. This sort of model seems to have its roots in the days when a character could die from a single bad roll, so the calculation was more "If I don't spend this now, I may never get to spend it at all." I don't play games like that anymore, and I'm happy to not have to think that way.

The biggest culprit in this for me was 7th Sea, a game I have a profound love-hate relationship with. Stylistically, it was exactly the sort of game where you would expect the currency (drama dice) to be spent hand over fist in feats of derring-do, but the incentive was to hoard them as aggressively as possible. I ended up inverting the system and saying that *spent* drama dice turned into XP, and that got the spigots flowing again.

As I was thinking about TSOY's keys, I realized this model could work very nicely for Fate as well, if you were to run an XP heavy game. You can treat Fate points as XP by keeping a bowl in the middle of the table. Every time a player spends a FP, it goes into the bowl. The GM might also randomly toss into the bowl when he wants to reward general awesomeness. At night's end, the points in the bowl are converted to XP and divided among the players.[1]

This is a bit of sleight of hand, but it speaks to the kinds of behaviors one wants to encourage in a game. If the currency of the game is something you want to see used, then set up the rules to encourage it. If you worry that currency will be unfunny or game breaking there's an instinct to impose artificial limitations. Don't. Instead, ask if it's what you really want.

4e's action points raise this question quite effectively. They're very limited because their function (allowing an extra action) is crazily unbalancing if it's allowed to stack. Because of that limitation, the flow of a potential non-XP reward is strongly curtailed. In contrasts, consider AP's as presented in Eberron (3e) , simply granting one or more D6's of bonus to a roll. It's useful, and can even help land some big hits, but stockpiling and multiples are much easier to handle.With these, DMs could hand them out for good roleplaying or bringing snacks or for engaging aspect or belief type mechanics.

While I'm specifically talking about XP, currency and rewards what I'm really asking is whether a mechanic is going to get used in a way that makes the game more fun, or if it creates an unnecessary barrier to play.

1 - Give any extra to whoever the table considers the night's spotlight player, or just let it ride til next time.

Keys and Explicit Compels

The Shadow of Yesterday has a fantastic mechanic (one of many) called "keys" that allow the player to determine in which circumstances they gain XP. It's easier to show than explain so consider this:

Key of Conscience
Your character has a soft spot for those weaker than their opponents. Gain 1 XP every time your character helps someone who cannot help themselves. Gain 2 XP every time your character defends someone with might who is in danger and cannot save themselves. Gain 5 XP every time your character takes someone in an unfortunate situation and changes their life to where they can help themselves. Buyoff: Ignore a request for help.[1]

XP is pretty easy to come by in TSOY, so much so that many GMs just let players track it themselves. It's so easy that the first time you play it seems like cheating, but really, that's the way it's supposed to work.

Now, there are a lot of interesting similarities between Keys and Aspects, and at some point I want to discuss in game currency vs. XP as a reward, but before I do that, I want to highlight one incredibly important difference - Keys are almost entirely player triggered. That is to say, the GM might set up situations where the key might or might not come up, but it's the player's decision that drives the reward.

Even more importantly, the player explicitly knows what will trigger a key. There might be a little wiggle room, but it's much more transparent than something entirely dependent on GM interpretation.

If this idea appeals, there's nothing that says it can't get applied to Aspects equally easily - the only thing it requires is explicitly writing down what circumstances might trigger an aspect for good or ill. For example, if I have the Aspect "Soft Hearted" I could add a note that says "Gain a Fate Point whenever the character makes trouble for himself by helping someone in trouble."

In doing this I am, effectively, writing my own compels. What's more, I am also communicating very clearly to the GM the kinds of situations where I expect to see this aspect come up. In doing so I'm making it easier for him to do so.

Explicit compels are far from the only technique that supports this. Aside from just talking to the GM, things like anchors[2] are designed to serve a similar purpose. But for players who are not entirely comfortable with the "fuzzy" nature of aspects, this sort of explicit detail may help them get a grasp on things.

1 - Buyoff is basically how you get the key off your sheet. It pays off big time, with 10 XP, more than enough to buy a new Key, but you can't re-buy the key you've bought off.

2 - Explicit setting elements (people & places) tied to each aspect.

Fate Spies

This is the ruleset I'm using for my current Cold War espionage game. There's a mild supers element to the game I'm running, but I've compartmentalized that and taken it out of this writeup. I may write it up as a standalone at some point, but honestly, the supers part is the most hand-wavey part of the game.

Character Creation
Like most Fate games, character generation is something performed with the players sitting down together and figuring out some elements of their shared history. The assumption is that when play begins the players are an established unit or cell, and that inter-player trust can be a solid commodity. A game looking to introduce a little more conflict within the party might mix it up a little.

Aspects
Characters have five aspects. The first three relate to the character's history and background, while the last two relate to missions the character has previously been on with the team.

Background Aspects
The first aspect picked should be the primary aspect for the agent. This is a descriptor which, if you only had to describe the character in one way, it would be this. I might be a role like Assassin or Mechanic, or it might be something that speaks to their story like Sole Survivor. There's nothing that mechanically distinguishes this aspect from other aspects as an aspect, but it is going to say a lot about the agent's role in the game, so it maybe important to consider how it's phrased.

The other two aspects should catch the character coming and going. The first reflects where the character comes from (their background, family, education or the like) and the third reflects how they got into the agency or their time in the agency (or some other service) before joining the team.

Flashpoint Aspects
The last two aspects will be flashpoints - missions that they team took together. The details of these jobs should be worked out between the players and the GM.

Anchors
After all aspects have been chosen, each player needs to come up with an anchor for each of his aspect. An anchor is a person, place or thing that is representative of that aspect to the player. The GM is expected to bring anchors up in play with some frequency as a guarantee that even fairly abstract aspects get hit often enough.


Roles
There are eight broad roles which cover the breadth of agent activities, and they are:
Athlete
Diplomat
Observer
Politician
Scholar
Soldier
Technician
Thief

They will be ranked at one of 4 levels
World Class (+6)
Elite (+4)
Trained (+2)
Untrained (+0)

Agents are exceptionally skilled, and as such have one world class role, two elite, four trained and one untrained skill.

Skill Breakdown
Athlete covers most physical activities like running, jumping and climbing. Hopefully it's pretty straightforward. If no other physical role is appropriate to a task, use athlete.

An Elite Athlete may choose one of the following benefits:
Mobility - The character can do crazy parkour/Jackie Chan type stuff, allowing them to move full tilt in environments a normal person would have to slow down for.
Brute - The character is strong as hell and can perform a burst of strength to do thing silk break ropes or bust down a door.

A World Class Athlete receives both Elite benefits.

Diplomat covers most social interaction, from making friends to lying to impressing the opposite sex. It does NOT cover the perception of the same (that's under this auspices of Observer).

An Elite diplomat may choose one of the following benefits:
Subtle Inquiry - You can tell the GM you want the answer to a specific question before you enter conversation with an NPC. Provided you converse with them for a reasonable time, you subtly steer the conversation in such a way that you get the answer you'd have gotten if you'd asked.
Plant Seed - After a few minutes of conversation, you can plant an idea in someone through subtle language and cues. This isn't mind control or hypnotism, it just plants an idea the way that a song gets stuck in your head. It's not a big thing, but it can be a good way to help someone have a brilliant idea.
Gambler - In any game of chance where there are other players, the character may roll Diplomat rather than luck (which is a 0).
Dangerous Grace - In any social situation where there are rules of behavior, you can force someone into a Faux Pas, or prevent such a faux pas from someone (including yourself).

A World Class Diplomat may choose two Elite benefits.

Observers keep track of what's going on. They rely on keen eyes, keen ears and the sharp intellect to separate the wheat from the chafe.

An Elite Observer may choose one of the following benefits:
Cold Read - Upon entering a scene, the observer may ask one of the following questions and get a good faith answer:
Who is the most dangerous person in the room?
Who is the most important person in the room?
Who is watching me?
Where is the fastest exit?
Faces Are an Open Book - Any time they make a roll against another person regarding deception (such as whether or not someone is lying) the player will be told what the opposition rolled after the fact.
Elementary - When the character finds a piece of information, he may ask for one additional piece of information he can extrapolate from it (such as the weight of the person who left footprints) over and above what his roll may merit.

A World Class Observer may choose two elite benefits, or he may choose a single benefit (Cold Read or Elementary) and ask two questions.

Politician covers all the interactions with people that do not depend on them liking you. A good politicians understands how power structures work, can give good orders and find loopholes in those he receives. He understands the law and perhaps most important to an agent, he understands paperwork. Outside of the uses on a mission, politician is the skill required to requisition resources for a mission or to effectively call in support.

An elite politicians can choose one of the following benefits:
A Little Bit of Law - The politician is actually a lawyer, and has the education and paperwork to prove it, and is familiar enough with international law to fake it in any country where he can speak the language. The exact benefits of this vary from country to country, but even in those with few protections for lawyers, knowledge of the law can be handy.
SOP - The politician knows the rules and regulations of any organization large enough to have rules. That means he can identify them on sight and make declarations regarding how they are supposed to respond in specific situations. For example "Ok, those are Hercule Security guards - that means 4 man teams, 1/2 hour patrol intervals and a mandatory lunch break of not less than 45 minutes"
The Man - The politician is a person of importance, if not prominence. He might own a large share of a major corporation or be royalty from someplace where that matters, but whatever the case, he moves in the circles with the movers and shakers.

A World Class politician may have two of these benefits, or he may choose to focus on The Man, in which case he is one of the dozen or so secret figures who pull the strings behind the scenes. Whether or not this is apt for a player is a decision for the table.

Scholars know things. Simple as that. While there are many situations where the application of this trait is obvious, this also has the advantage of being the fallback trait to roll when no other trait seems appropriate. Scholar can be used to make declarations as appropriate, or to allow the agent to get answers without research.

An elite scholar can choose one of the following benefits:
Linguist - The agent is the master of a number of different (and unspecified languages). In practice it means that the character can speak any language that comes up in play.
Great Mind - The scholar can choose some academic field. Within that field he is a published, respected figure, the sort that gives speeches and writes book. He can use one of his aspects for free when rolling scholar within that sphere, and when dealing with other scholars within the same circle he can use the Scholar in lieu of Diplomat.
Pattern Recognition - Given time to study the paperwork around a situation (which is to say, the kind of situation that would have paperwork to research) the character can extract one aspect associated with the situation.

A world Class scholar may choose any two of these benefits, or may take an improved version of Great Mind, in which case he is the greatest authority on the world on the topic.

Soldier covers violence of any stripe - guns, fists, sharp sticks and so on. It's pretty simple

An elite soldier can choose one of the following benefits.
Heavy Weapons - The agent can use larger weapons, from rocket launchers to tanks. Technological complexity is no barrier to them.
Martial Arts - The character's skill with unarmed combat is such that they do not grant superiority (see the notes on combat, below) when fighting hand to hand, no matter what the opponent is armed with, and they gain superiority against other unarmed opponents who are not similarly trained.
Tactician - The agent can use soldier in lieu of Observer when in a fight.

A World Class Soldier may take two of these benefits.

Technician covers the ability to fix, understand and operate machinery (including driving cars).

An elite technician can choose one of the following benefits.
Pilot - The agent can drive anything, including planes, helicopters and boats.
Hacker - Computers behave for the agent like they do in the movies (well, specifically, movies from the early 80's, so it's still all green screens and squealing modems) rather than the way they act in real life.
Gadgeteer - The agent doesn't need to spend fate points to have reasonable tools and gadgets on hand, and anything you can't carry you can probably build it out of parts on hand.

A World Class Technician can take two benefits.

Thief covers activities of stealth, deception and (of course) theft.

An Elite thief can take one of the following benefits.
Fast Hands - The agent can perform feats of legerdemain while in the middle of the most distracting of circumstances, such as in the middle of a fight or chase.
Face in a Crowd - The agent can sneak in plain sight provided there are people for him to mingle among.
Magician - The agent is an accomplished stage magician, capable of displays both flashy and subtle.

A World Class Thief can take two benefits.

Special Rules

Aspect Invocation
Characters may only invoke a single aspect of their own per roll, for either a +2 bonus or a reroll. Similarly, they may only tag one aspect on the scene.

Aspect Exploitation
Characters may exploit any number of aspects of their opposition in a scene on a given roll. That means that if you want to spend a bunch of fate points for a big bonus, you need to know your enemy well.

Descriptive bonuses
Good plans, good tools and other things that might help a roll can grant a +1 bonus to any roll. Such bonuses do not stack. Superiority (see below) is an application of this rule.

Combat and Conflict[1]
In any situation where an agent is throwing down with opposition (whether in a fight, a chase or the like) things get resolved pretty quickly. It's all about advantage. Both parties roll appropriate skills and the outcome depends on the margin.

At any point in the fight, things will be in one of the following states:
Bother side are on equal footing
One side has an edge
One side holds an advantage
One side holds a decisive advantage

Tempo
The meaning of margin of success depends a lot on the starting point in the conflict. Once one side wins they are considered to control the tempo of the fight, and this is mechanically reflected by them holding an edge, advantage or decisive advantage. The side which controls tempo has more options than the other side, depending on their status.

Starting from even footing (and some fights may start with one side or the other having an edge) the outcomes are as follows:

Win by 0-1 - status does not change
Win by 2-3 - winner gains the edge
Win by 4-6 - winner gains the advantage
Win by 7+ - winner gains a decisive advantage

Edge
If you hold the edge, the outcome chart changes as follows:
Win by 0-3 - keep the edge (unless he gives it up, see below)
Win by 4-6 - gain the advantage
Win by 7+ - gain a decisive advantage[2]

The side with the edge gets to narrate the direction of the fight - not outcomes per se, but the general direction of things. As part of his description, the agent can give up the edge (restoring tempo to a neutral state) and add an aspect to the scene as part of the description.

Advantage
If you hold the advantage, the outcome chart changes as follows:
Win by 0-4 - keep the advanatage (unless he gives it up, see above)
Win by 5+ - gain a decisive advantage

The side with advantage can describe things in such a way as to harm or inconvenience the other side. You can sacrifice advantage to reflect that inconvenience or damage as a consequence.

Decisive Advantage
Once you hold decisive advantage, you can sacrifice it for victory on your terms. That said, it's not carte blanche - you can achieve one end with a decisive victory, and if there are more things you need to accomplish, you may need to reach it more than once.


Superiority
Weapons and tools impact the roll in terms of the relative advantage they offer. Any weapon is a help against an unarmed opponent, but certain weapons will be more useful in certain situations, such as a knife in close quarters. Advantage is usually worth a +1 bump, but may be as high as +3 if it's extreme. In very extreme situations (like a fight at range where only one person has a ranged weapon), not only does that grant superiority, but the defender can't ever get better than edge, no matter how well he rolls.

Non-Fudge Alternative
If played without Fudge Dice, this is the alternate system.

The base roll is 3d6, with the outcome modified the role value[3] making use of bonus and penalty dice to reflect a lot of things. When a roll has one or more bonus dice, they're extra d6's rolled along with the usual 3d6, and the player counts the 3 highest dice showing. If the roll has penalty dice, then they're extra d6s as too, except the player counts the three lowest dice.

On a normal roll, the outcomes break down as follows:
Less than Five - Unmitigated failure, described by the GM with an eye on making trouble.
5-9 - Failure, described by the player, who may mitigate the consequences of the failure, but not cancel it out. Best phrased as "Tell me how you fail."
10-14 - Qualified success - This is a reasonable success, but the door is open to complications. The GM may, at his option, introduce a complication to the success, or a choice that must be made in order to succeed. When the GM does this, the player gets a fate point.
15-19 - Unqualified success, narrated by the GM
20+ - Dramatic success - as with an unqualified success, but the player has the option to ask for a little extra spin.

Conflict works roughly the same way, but table changes a little
Base or with Edge
1-4 - Edge
5-8 - Advantage
9+ - Decisive Advantage

With Advantage
0-4 - Maintain
5+ Decisive Advantage

Superiority is still reflected as a straight bonus to the roll.

Aspects
Aspects in the 3d6 game can be used for rerolls or bonus dice.



1 - Informally, I'm calling this the Tempo System, because edge used to be called tempo, and I still think of it as that in my head.

2 - Notice there's not really any difference between the normal and the edge table, I just separate them for clarity. The big change comes once you have Advantage. It all looks very fiddly, but the reality is much simpler: The threshold for taking someone out drops by two so long as you hold the advantage.

3 - Designer hat here. Some part of me suspects the 3d6 model would work better with an additional tier, so roles would be untrained (0), trained (+2), experienced (+4), elite (+6) and world class(+8), suggesting a distribution of 1 world class, 2 elite, 2 experienced, 2 trained, 1 untrained.

Hard and Soft Tags

Lots of good feedback about hard and soft compels last week, but also some interesting discussions. See, this also revealed a few things that speak to the guts of Fate design.

So, playtesting is a wonderful thing, and one of the joys of having an open system is that a lot of people try a lot of different things, often things you would never even consider as a designer. By and large that's fantastic, but it does mean that a designer may end up facing the challenge of trying to solve problems that he's never encountered. This happens to me a lot. As a specific example, a lot of the problems people encounter with compels simply never come up at our table. I can count on one hand the number of times I've had players reject a compel. That may sound strange (especially given the number of games I've run) but we've got a culture of enthusiastically rushing towards badness which I love, but which is not universal.

All this leads to something that is rather the inverse of hard and soft compels, and that is the whole matter of tagging, compelling and invoking aspects external to the character, such as those on the scene or on other characters. Again, this is something I don't really encounter problems with locally, but I try to listen to people's experiences and this is why we end up with sometimes confusing ideas like free tags or fragile aspects. Just saying "use your best judgement" is half-assed game design, so things like that are come up with as explicit rules to try to capture a certain feel or style.

Now, this is mostly an issue in the context of fights, so I'll use that as a basis. Fights in FATE are absolutely designed to model the way they work in fiction that we enjoy, which is to say that it's all about tempo and momentary advantages. If the hero manages to throw sand in the bad guys eyes, that rarely wins the fight, but it creates an opening that he can exploit. The free tag is designed to fulfill much that same purpose[1] - a player pulls off something interesting and creates an opportunity that he takes advantage of, but it is then lost in the bustle of subsequent action. On a more meta level, it rewards players for creating new situations and playing with new approaches rather than just using the same exploit over and over again.

It is not, however, realistic. Or at least it's not realistic in the sense we tend to mean it in gaming, which is a whole other discussion of its own. The objection, you see, is not to the free tags per se, but rather that players need to pay fate points to tag these things in the first place. That is to say, if the black knight has a CHINK IN HIS ARMOR, then why do they need to spend a fate point every time they aim for that chink? After all, it's *there* - it doesn't magically go away if they don't aim for it - shouldn't it just be baked in? (The same logic applies as you get into more game-y aspects that might be reflected as statuses in other games, things like PRONE or STUNNED.)

Now, I have an answer to this, one I feel is pretty persuasive, but I'm not going to delve into it at the moment[2]. It is not my intent to argue against this position because it's not a matter of the right way to play things. Rather, today I want to talk about how to better support it if it's your bag. There are a few ways to make aspect use a little more "realistic" depending on what exactly you're trying to accomplish.

For purposes of terminology, I will be referring to all use of external aspects as tagging, and I am dividing these into two categories, hard and soft tags (yes, I'm stealing my own naming). A soft tag is the normal kind, one you would spend a fate point to perform. A hard tag is one which your internal logic says should not require spending a fate point to receive the benefit from.[3]

Additionally, if you go with a strict model of hard tags, you may wish to consider removing the rules for free tags. I won't say you have to, but stop and consider what it means and how well free tags fit your vision of play. I'm not going to refer to them in the models below with the assumption that they're not hard to plug in or remove.

Hard Tag Approaches

Free Hard
This is the obvious one, and I just put it here so I can refer to it: You can tag hard aspects for free. There might be some limitations, like "only one free hard tag per roll" or limiting them to certain scopes[4] but the heart of this is "If it's hard, it should be free[5]"

Half Hard[6]
This is probably the easiest implementation with the least drift from normal play. A hard tag grants a +1 bonus if you don't spend a Fate point, +2 if you do. That reinforces that fate points are used for dramatic, heroic efforts, but still acknowledges that some opportunities should grant advantage. This approach still encourages the creation of interesting aspects, even soft ones, because the extra bonus is always welcome, and soft tags make for a more cost effective application of fate points.

You do want to decide how to handle this in conjunction with consequences. I would suggest that minor (and perhaps moderate) consequences be treated as soft, but how you set the slider on that will determine the potency of injury. If all consequences are hard then injury is quite scary indeed.

Triggers
This is not an approach in its own right so much as a supplement to another approach. The idea is that even if tagging aspects grants free numerical bonuses, there may be some special effects which are triggered only by spending a fate point (and possibly by the success of the roll). To use the example above, when fighting an opponent with a CHINK IN HIS ARMOR, that aspect might or might not provide a passive bonus, but if you spend a fate point then the attack will also ignore his armor. If an ancient mummy is FLAMMABLE then fire attacks might get a bonus, but spending a fate point means it will actually catch on fire.

Statuses
This model proposes a limited set of aspects with fixed mechanical effects that include free tags but may also have other mechanical hooks. This set of aspects will roughly equate to the statuses (like stunned or asleep) you might find in other RPGs, notably in the 4essentials version of D&D. For example, the PRONE aspect might grant a hard tag to attackers within reach, but grants the PRONE character a hard tag on his defense against long range attacks. A character who is OFF BALANCE and has that tagged as part of an attack may end up PRONE.

This model, especially combined with triggers, allows you to get pretty fiddly with powers and stunts, since it gives you an array of custom effects to differentiate things with. That's pretty cool if you're going for the crunch, but if you're not then there's a danger of it getting overwhelming. Ideally, you want to find a set of statuses that is comprehensive enough to cover a decent range of options but is not so broad that it creates a bookkeeping challenge.


A Few More Notes
With those suggestions out of the way, just two more notes to add:

Hard Tags and Hard Compels
If you're using hard tags then give some thought to how the inverse works. If players are getting bonuses for free then they probably should not be getting fate points when they are impeded by a hard aspect. This sounds harsh on paper, but in reality most such situations are either obvious in their resolution ("No, you can't run on on a broken leg") or just quietly give the opposition a bonus.

Notation
Few things are more useful than writing down the aspects in play. We're fond of putting them on index cards and tossing them down on the able, but other methods work to. This becomes doubly important if you have hard and soft tags in play because you'll want to note the aspects differently, such as using different color pens or underlining the names of aspects you feel invite hard tags. This won't be 100% - plenty of aspects are only hard if approached in a particular way - but for common situations this can save a lot of headaches.



1 - it was a bit of serendipity that it also resulted in the "Everyone contributes in some way then one character launches the big attack, using all the free tags for a big, massive hit" model which, while not ideal for every fight, has made for many satisfying SOTC finales.

2 - I will, however, say that hints of the difficulty of this can be found in the SOTC text. Look at the rules for Stealth and concealment sometime and consider how at odds they are with everything else. That's because the idea of making the character pay for the dark was a bit too jarring.

3 - Internal logic is squirrelly business, and that's the real reason I'm using categories. I am so very much not going to do the work of telling you what should be hard and what should be soft. if you're looking to use these rules, it's because you have already made that decision yourself.

4 - From Diaspora. Scopes are the arenas aspects fall into like personal, equipment, environment and so on.

5 - This is going to be a very dirty-sounding post, isn't it?

6 - Yup.

Cool Stuff on Monday

Trying to get back into using Monday's to point to things I'm excited about and remind me why I like the internet. And we'll start with Strands of Fate, a new Fate based game that has just been released after a pretty robust beta. You can read more about it here, but the quick pitch is that it looks like a well-engineered version of Fate that makes a few different choices of emphasis (like removing the adjective ladder) and goes a little more crunchy. Someone describe it as a love child between GURPS and Fate 3.0 (and I think they meant that in a good way) but I'm not sure I'd even go that far. I think it's still close to Fate at heart, keeping a lot of the fast and loose, but nailing down a few more quantitative things like equipment. I'm still reading my pdf, but it's pretty cool so far.

I have been reading the hell out of Gray, Brown & Macunfo's Gamestorming, and enjoying it enough that I've been taking my time going through it (and taking notes! Voluntarily!). I'd been following the blog and I enjoyed Gray's previous writings on visualizing information (I have the initial copy of the unbook Marks & Meaning), so I was already ready for this to rock. See, Gamestorming is about games you can play in a business context to get things done in meetings, such as brainstorming, team building, problem solving and so on. There's some fantastic analysis of games and creativity, but the bulk of the book is dedicated to the actual games themselves. In a weird bit of nerd recursion, I've been looking at a lot of these games he's adapted to business and been thinking about them in terms of adapting them back into games, and it's been quite useful. It especially offers some useful insight on shared creation, as in games like the DFRPG. Sometime after I finish, this one will probably merit a full review, but for now suffice it to say I'm very much enjoying it.

On the fiction end, Harry Connolly's Game of Cages is out. I mentioned this when it was released, but having finished it I need to mention it again because it rocks hard. As with its predecessor, it's much more on the action-horror end of the Urban Fantasy spectrum, full of dark, painful stuff. But it rockets forward, once again underscoring how scary you can make something without ichor by illustrating it's impact more than the thing itself. This is shaping up to be a great series, and since there are only two books, this is a great time to get on board. However, I would definitely remind any prospective reader that I do not lightly describe this as dark. Very bad things happen to people, and the usual protections of fiction are no place to be seen. I find it a breath of fresh air, but I also have warned my wife off the series.

I have to recommend reading What Batman Taught Me About Being A Good Dad. As a newish father, it kind of doubly struck home and got me thinking about what I will be watching with my son as he gets older.

These are too pretty to go without comment: Typographic Maps.

Linnaeus (Who has been doing some FANTASTIC daily game analysis) has offered a summary of why Race for the Galaxy works so well for him that I am in strong agreement with. Race is one of my absolute favorite games, but one I only get to play every so often because it's got a bit of a learning curve.

Alex Epstein, one of my favorite writers about writing, breaks down the 6th element of story. John August, who is also in that category, provides the short answer for how to write a romance.

Gamefiend has started a kickstarter to fund his 4e villain book, Worldbreakers. If you haven't seen the stuff he's done so far, you should. With the Worldbreaker's he's basially creating boss fights where ther transitions, environment and flow of the fight are all baked into the monster. This is good stuff, and more it's exactly the sort of stuff that D&D 4essentials could use more of. The fact that Gamefiend is probably one of the most insightful guys writing about D&D these days is just a bonus (and if At-Will isn't on your 4essentials radar, it should be)

That should do for now. I already feel reminded that the Internet is full of awesome.

Aspect Technology

I've been kind of randomly designing Fate widgets for a variety of purposes and thinking about some fiddly bits, and I figured I'd share a couple of them.

Hard and Soft Compels
So, one of the most contentious rules issues in Fate revolves around the handling of compels. The question is this: when the GM puts forward a compel, should the player be able to defer (at no cost) or should the player have to pay a fate point to put off the compel.

There are good arguments on both sides that more or less boil down to this: On one hand paying to resist a compel is pretty expensive and not necessarily fun because that fate point could be better spent doing something interesting. On the other hand, paying to resist is the only way to give aspects teeth, and without the requirement to pay, aspects which should have a concrete effect, like injuries or scene aspects like "Out of Air" don't actually have any teeth.[1]

There are other issues too, though less central ones. For example, not-paying is arguably more newbie-friendly (which is why my earlier Magic Words implementation was a no-pay one). You can pick any number of issues, but as long as you can grasp the main conflict, it should be pretty clear.

In an ideal world there should be some way to distinguish between aspects that you opt to take versus those which you must take. There's a temptation to split the terminology here into offers (optional) and compels (Pay or play) but just for consistency I'll refer to them as soft and hard compels.

There are a couple of ways to handle this, so here are two that are on my mind[2]:

1. Straight Signaling
No mechanical change here except that when the GM puts forward a fate point as part of a compel, there are two ways to do it, depending on how the GM intends the compel. On a soft compel, which the player is free to refuse, the GM offers the fate point held upright in his fingers, or in his palm, facing up. On a hard compel, which the player would need to buy off, the GM sets the fate point down on the table (ideally with a forcible *click*) and withdraws his hand.

The one thing this demands are fate points that are clearly visible and easily manipulated. Poker chips are my usual favorite and they work very well for this approach, especially for getting that *click*.

2. Adjusted Cost
One other easy way to do it is to up the effective "value" of a hard compel over a soft one. Doing this effectively reduces the cost of refusing a compel by one fate point, which is to say, when the GM puts forward one fate point, the player is free to refuse. If the GM puts forward _two_ fate points, the player needs to put forward one to counter it. The GM can then put forward a third, the player a second and so forth. This has the advantage of being pretty clear with any kind of fate point, and it implicitly acknowledges that some compels are nastier than others.

Decoupled Refresh
So, a fixed refresh pool is an important thing when it's a part of the rest of the system, as it is in the case of Dresden Files, but that's not a necessity in every game. Similarly, Spirit of the Century has an implicit refresh (it's not called that) equal to the number of aspects, but there's no need why that must be so. Setting a much lower or higher refresh value can tweak a game. Admittedly, setting it higher can get silly, but setting it low, sometimes quite low, can be very powerful. The trick that I am currently very fond of is this: Assume a default refresh of zero, and increase it by one for every aspect on the character's sheet that you've used to plan the current session.

This is a nicely double-edged trick. To players it communicates who is going to be in the spotlight in a given episode. As a GM, it tells you how well you've engaged each player. If you find yourself giving someone no fate points, you've probably done something wrong. I'm doing this in my Cold War game, and, I try to gun for at least two per player as a baseline, with more of them for the character drawing my attention.

Fast Aspects
I love a good phased chargen for building connections between players and characters, but you simply don't always have time to do all that, so here's a quick and dirty way to generate a list of aspects that defines the character and ties everyone together.

First, generate your three key aspects. The first is your High Concept. As in the DFRPG, this is the single aspect most reflective of what your character is, If you were to describe him in a single turn of a phrase, it would be this. The second should be your Trouble, the aspect that lies at the heart of most of the problems you encounter. This is the big obstacle you struggle with. Third is your ace in the hole, your little something extra that makes you a little bit more than yout high concept and trouble might suggest. Maybe it's a secret, maybe it's a different problem entirely, maybe it's some unexpected past experience you can call on. Whatever it is, it's the twist that rounds out your core description.

You will get an additional number of aspects equal to the number of players (including yourself, but not the GM). The first of them is what your character thinks (or perhaps hopes) people think of you. This is your Facade. At this point take a quick pause - everyone should share their High Concept, Trouble and Facade and, optionally, their Ace in the Hole.[3]

The others are each something your character thinks is true about each other character. It's helpful for these to be strong opinions, and it's important to embrace the idea that these (as well as the facade) are not simply _possibly_ wrong, they are almost _certainly_ wrong. That's as it should be. It creates a mild friction that provides a basis for interaction that might otherwise be purely limited to the necessities of play.

Feel free to openly discuss these aspects as you pick them, and players should reveal them all at the end of chargen before play begins.

As a GM, give the players opportunities to change the aspects if they have particularly good player-player interactions that would seem to change the relationship. Make sure that the new aspect is clearly stated. See, no one is one thing all the time, so creating a new expectation is just as much of a play driver as a misapprehension.[4]

1 - The iconic bad example of this is a character with a "Broken Leg" refusing a compel on an athletics roll to keep the from sprinting around.

2 - This pair of options (and others like it) are the kind of rules options I'm very fond of because you can drop them into any FATE variant and they hold up.

3 - Yes, you can keep your Ace in the Hole secret, and while this would seem at odds with my usual problem with secrets, note that with the limited set of aspects, there's going to be a strong incentive to _use_ that aspect. Which is to say, if it's a secret, it's a secret that wants to come out in play, and that's as it should be.

4 - Kudos to the fantastic Smallvile RPG, which inspired this idea.

Magic Words

Aspects in Fate (and by extension Spirit of the Century and The Dresden Files RPG) are an incredibly powerful tool, but like most tools they can be hard to use without a little familiarity. Obviously, if you're already very comfortable with their use then advice in applying them is of only limited use, but maybe you'll find this interesting anyway.

Players tend to be very enthusiastic about using aspects once they feel they can, but there's often an initial period of hesitation, where the player is mostly asking the GM whether or not he can use an aspect. It may be a step on the learning process, but playing mother-may-I with the GM is rarely something that gives players an excited first impression.

More problematic is the GMs end. The process of compelling aspects is one of those things that is harder to explain than do, and the process of explaining it can often end up seeming needlessly arcane. The fact that it works well at some tables does not erase the fact that it's overly tricky on others.

So with that in mind I'm going to propose a model of aspect use which will hopefully solve both problems. This is of especial use for new players and new games since it will have an impact on the type of aspects that people choose (or more specifically, how they phrase those aspects).

In this approach, we no longer explicitly refer to compelling, tagging or invoking aspects, and in fact there are no such actions. Instead, we simply treat aspects as magic words.

For a player this simply means any time he actually uses the aspect as part of his description, as part of what his character says or generally as part of play, he can spend a fate point for appropriate bonuses.

I come at him fast and furious.
"Jet's in trouble!"
I look over the scene cautiously.[1]

When spending for effect, which is to say, spending a fate point for something other than a bonus, simply make it part of the phrase.

I'm pretty well prepared, so I'm sure I've got some spare batteries here somewhere.
I've got a girl in every port and this one's name is Trixie
I've been up for two hours already. I'm a light sleeper.

And that's all the player needs to know. Say the word and slide the fate point forward. No need to ask the GM or check if it's ok. Just go forward. Now, yes, a GM may raise an eyebrow if something is totally out of line, like using well-prepared to justify having a rocket launcher in a boy scout pack, but things like that don't actually happen unless someone is being a tool, so don't sweat it.

On the GM side, the same logic applies. These are magic words, and every now and again you will start a sentence with one while sliding forward a fate point. If the player takes it, that's their cue to pick up the thread. If they don't then close it off. For example:

This guy has been riding you for the whole trip, trying to get under your skin. It would be easy to get angry...
At this point the GM slides forward the chip, if the player takes it, then the player proceeds.
Yeah, he gets me so pissed off that I pop him one in the dinner car over breakfast.
If the player declines, the GM proceeds, taking back the chip.
...but you manage to keep a cool head.

Yes, for the GM's part there's a bit more non-verbal communication, but not enough to break the flow.

Long time Fate players will also notice that in this case, the player was given leeway to make trouble for himself with the aspect. This is not mandatory - the GM can frame the aspect in much more detail - but unless the player is in a position where it might be hard to come up with a way the aspect might complicate things, it's often worth leaving such trouble in the hands of your players.

This model is fairly flexible in terms of what aspects it supports - people, places and things can all be named dropped ("If there's one thing Master Po taught me it's...") but it will get a bit gummy with more poetic aspects. The harder it is to work the aspect into a sentence, the harder its going to be for it to come up in play. Players looking to use this approach in existing games may need to consider rephrasing some of their aspects so they flow more naturally.


1 - Yes, adverbing it up or making other reasonable transformations are entirely valid.