Fred here. The following is an excerpt of a post I made to the FateRPG Yahoo Group, where someone was trying to wrap their head around the whole “On Fire is an Aspect” thing that pretty much comes up every time someone’s talking about aspects with folks who are less familiar with them. High time I get this written down somewhere official, yeah?
Read on.
Fate Core’s full text rough draft is complete.
It enters into editing starting February 1st.
We’ve added a stripped-of-IP version of the Dresden Files’ Character Creation chapter to the body of DF-derived OGL stuff out there. Enjoy!
We’ve made some new additions to our Resources page tonight, featuring some of the material, scrubbed and genericized, from the Dresden Files RPG:
Over the course of the last month, Leonard Balsera has been writing Fate Core.
He’s been doing a bunch of other stuff, too, but still, we’re on track for about 10-15k words this month, and more in the months to come. He’s juggling Fate Core duties together with his other Evil Hat responsibilities (and other life/freelancing concerns), but the progress is steady.
I’m excited.
And I thought you’d like to know. 
In the past week I’ve had two different third-party publishers asking me if I know any freelancers who are available and are wise to the ways of Fate.
But the people who I could list confidently are either already working on stuff for Evil Hat — or they’re already working on their own projects. So “available” not so much.
In light of that, I want to put this call out for people who are available and are confident enough in their knowledge of Fate that they’d be willing to take on some freelancing work!
In the comments below, please introduce yourself, tell us how to contact you, what kind of experience you bring to the table, and where we can find samples of your work. Please include all three, as that’s crucial for any interested publisher I point in this direction. (I may block comments which don’t fit the bill.)
I’d like this post to become a central resource for folks looking to do the work and for folks looking for those folks. Help me out!
This may have been covered already in some prior posts on the site, but I’ve found myself typing something like it in an email again, so I thought I’d put this out there in a post of its own:
That’s the “secret” of assessment, declaration, and maneuvering, in fact — they’re all the same action, in essence, a skill roll that gives rise to an aspect, which offers a free invocation (tag) out of respect to the successfully skill roll. The only difference between them is in terms of how the authority model appears to work.
Assessment is a discovery of something the GM thought of, uncovered by a successful skill roll. Because the aspect is presumed to exist prior to its discovery, you can look at the possibility of “getting it wrong”, as we do with some of the Empathy/Deceit interactions in SOTC and DFRPG, but that’s not a necessary feature.
Declaration is the establishment of a player-invented/introduced fact, backed by a successful skill roll. The fact is presumed to exist prior to its introduction, as far as the characters are concerned. The player’s character, typically, is the smart/alert one who’s on the ball enough to take advantage of the fact first.
A maneuver is a character-imposed change in circumstance, successfully established if the player makes a (often contested) skill roll on his behalf.
But outside of those authority models, it’s the same basic game move.
The idea that Fate’s consequences are a kind of currency isn’t new. Many of you are already familiar with the -2/-4/-6 consequences approach we use and recommend, as seen in the Dresden Files RPG and other places. Along with the stress track, they add a tiny resource-management aspect to Fate, and they tie into the larger Fate point economy by way of being aspects themselves.
That said, they’re also a bit of an oddity. Fate is not a game chock full of subtraction. In general if we want to reflect the effect of a penalty in Fate, we instead try to shift the perspective on it such that something is getting a bonus instead (factors that increase difficulty rather than penalties to your roll, for example). It’s an odd quirk of the design, but it’s couched in the feeling that doing a series of additions feels, well, more positive. It’s an escalation, a case of something pushing to more awesome heights, rather than reaching for those heights but getting yanked back. The math is ultimately the same, but the experience of that math, at least for us, feels better this way.
So why didn’t we do this for consequences? Honestly, I couldn’t tell you for sure. I suspect we came to them thinking strictly in terms of damage mitigation — as assets which would reduce the stress you’re already going to be taking otherwise. Phrasing them instead as “armor bonuses” or something like that would, in this case, feel a bit tortured. There are times when subtraction is the better option because it’s just simpler.
But let’s push at that a little: if we step away from a model of mitigation, and start with the idea that our consequences are +2/+4/+6 (or +1/+2/+4, to take a cue from Diaspora, or whatever other progression suits you), what does that do for us?
For starters, consequences would become boosters to the defense roll that would simply eliminate the idea that you’re otherwise taking the hit at all. I might have rolled a Good (+3) defense against your Great (+4) attack, but if I’m willing to spend my +2 consequence, my defense goes to a Superb (+5) and your attack doesn’t (technically) land. Sure, I had to give myself this nasty limp to get there, but at least I’m not taken out.
It strikes me that this model would support a no-stress-track implementation pretty well, where you’re taken out simply if you fail to defend yourself adequately, but for the benefit of consequences. That could be extended a little further to Fate 2 style exchanges, I imagine, where attack and defense are the same action, and the win goes to the person whose roll comes out on top — but it’s certainly likelier both parties would get there a little bloody due to some back and forth consequence-spending. That’s intriguing for sure. There’s some middle ground there, too, where it might not take a single victory to take someone out, unless that victory was big enough (a margin of 3 or better), with lesser victories giving the victor “the advantage” (a +1 on the next roll, say). Fights would be super quick and, depending on the rules and strictures placed on “taken out”, potentially very lethal.
Outside of the familiar defense scenario, what other implications come from this?
If you’re sticking with +2/+4/+6 as your progression, that ties into the +2 from invocations by way of equivalence (-2/-4/-6 does this too but less obviously). Consequences are a way to save yourself some fate points, then. No need to spend a fate point and invoke that aspect to boost your defense if you’re willing to take a mild consequence for the same +2 boost. Extra useful if you don’t have any fate points to begin with, big spender.
If that (effective) equivalence exists, though, maybe you could let it flow both ways. Don’t have a fate point? Spend a consequence, and get 1, 2, or 3 depending on the magnitude. It’d be like an on-demand micro-refresh of sorts, with a price attached, and I know any number of players who’d cheerfully hose themselves with a consequence in order to grab a few extra fate points in an hour of need.
Those fate points are, in this case, just an exchange medium, though. They’re going to be spent to buy off a compel, invoke an aspect, declare a detail, what-have-you. But it might be simpler instead to bypass the fate point economy and instead let the bonus from a consequence apply to any part of any roll.
You may have caught in my discussion of defense, above, that I was also implying that the attack side of the equation could get the bonus from a consequence, too. And how cool is that — the guy who takes a Moderate “Deep Shoulder Wound” consequence to get a +4 that takes down the bad guy? But there’s no need to stop at combat once you’ve started down that path.
Need to get that crucial piece of research, but your Academics roll is falling short? Pull an all-nighter, and take the mild consequence “Groggy as Hell” for a +2 on that roll.
You absolutely need to get that piece of information out of that mob boss? Get a +4 on your Rapport roll and you will — but it’ll cost you that “Overplayed My Hand” moderate consequence, which is sure to bite you on the ass when the mob boss comes to make you an offer you really can’t refuse.
Positioned this way, consequences can become even more central to your play, and importantly, a tool that’s usable in every circumstance rather than just in conflicts. And by my lights, that’s pretty damn cool.
As is the nature of any open system, Fate has grown a number of branches over the years. Honestly, not even I have managed to keep track of them all. I’d like to change that, at least a little, and make sure we catalog them reasonably well here at the site.
I’m starting with this post, which is an off the top of my head accounting of the Fate variants I’m aware of. I am going to omit at least one, I’m sure, and my advance apologies for that.
What I need from you is to “check my work” on this. Tell me about the variants I’ve missed. Help me understand if I’m describing these variants incorrectly, incompletely, or unfairly (within the limits of trying to write these up as 1 to 3 sentence accounts).
Once I feel like the conversation’s gone far enough to get this post’s info finalized (I’ll try to update it as I get comments), I’ll turn it into a more permanent page on the site.
So:
Core Fate (also called Fate 3) – This is the name I use for the main trunk of Fate, the version(s) produced by Evil Hat. While this doesn’t mean that Core Fate is standing still — our own understanding and expression of it evolves over time — it is what we’ll be presenting on this site, and using at the core of any Fate products we produce. Inasmuch as there is an “official” Fate, this is it. Implementations: Spirit of the Century, the Dresden Files RPG.
VSCA Fate – This is Fate as extended by the VSCA crew to create Diaspora. VSCA Fate lives pretty close to Core Fate, though it adds a number of modules (various modes of conflict resolution for different kinds of conflicts) and some concepts (aspect scopes, etc) that I personally quite enjoy. It’s possible that we’ll borrow some of those concepts and bring them back to Core Fate, but I still think there’ll be enough distinctiveness in VSCA’s work to consider it as a slightly separate thing. Implementations: Diaspora.
Cubicle 7 Fate - Cubicle 7′s Fate implementation started from an almost complete absorption of the Spirit of the Century SRD when they put together Starblazer Adventures. There, they also adapted into Fate 3 some concepts that Evil Hat had been talking about during the Fate 2 years, manifesting as the organizations system and the idea of plot stress. Their focus is more on d6-d6 as the dice method, and they’ve added a number of fiddly bits in the implementation of stunt and powers that resembles some of what Evil Hat has done, while being its own thing. C7 Fate and Core Fate can probably cross-pollenate mostly successfully, though as each implementation grows over time I suspect the two flavors will become more distinct. They each certainly come from a different aesthetic, I think, in terms of their design approaches, though at the moment that’s a little hard to quantify. Implementations: Starblazer Adventures, Legends of Anglerre.
Awesome Fate – Awesome Adventures is Willow Palacek’s effort to pare back Fate to a very lightweight engine, cutting away whole pieces of it, even stuff you might consider essential to the Fate chassis. This is definitely its own beast, but probably a good fit for folks who want to play Fate, but use a version that lives somewhere between Risus and PDQ in terms of simplicity. I’m pleased to see (by looking at the link) that since its original publication it has gotten some improved production values (one of the primary strikes against it when it initially showed up). Implementations: Awesome Adventures.
Strands of Fate – Strands of Fate is an implementation of Fate created by Void Star publishing. Where Awesome Adventures is an effort to pare Fate down to a leaner thing, Strands goes in the other direction, looking to create a “generic” build of the system that speaks to a more traditionally-minded perspective on RPGs. I’ve heard people quip that it’s “Fate+GURPS”, which is a solid enough description if you’re talking at the level mash-up hollywood movie-pitch dialect, but may sell this thing a bit short. I’ve also heard people express confusion about whether or not Strands is “the” Fate 3.0 book they need, and no, it’s not. I’ve talked with the guy who wrote Strands, and we both agree that it is its own branch, distinct and separate, a deliberate effort to take Fate’s concepts and make them more palatable to folks who find Spirit of the Century to be too “out there”. Implementations: Strands of Fate.
Fate Inspired (a.k.a., Not Fate At All) – I’ve seen people characterize both Houses of the Blooded and ICONS as Fate games. They are both certainly, explicitly Fate-inspired, though, borrowing several concepts from Fate and attaching them to their own original systems. This is fantastic (and you should grab yourself copies of both), but I think it really muddies the waters considerably when folks talk about them as Fate implementations. They are not. EDIT: The excellent Chronica Feudalis belongs in this camp as well.
That’s what I’ve got so far, but I’m very sure I’m missing a few (particularly ones that aren’t for sale). So help me out — what’d I miss? And what more should be said about the above?
One of the things that’s interesting as we’ve been getting comments here and elsewhere is the question of whether some of the missing pieces are “merely” homebrews or are bona fide branches in their own right. In this getting-edited-as-comments-are-made section, I’m choosing not to make a distinction between those two things. That said, in my mind, something grows from a “leaf” into a branch through adoption by players and publishers.
So, Evil Hat is limited in what it can do at any one time, but over the years we’ve been gifted with an incredible resource — our fans — who have, time and again, come through for us in terms of getting the word out, providing ad-hoc support of our products, acting as a distributed grass-roots customer service and sales force, and so on. Heck, the reason there’s an SRD of Spirit of the Century that has been acting as our Fate 3 SRD for the past several years is because some fans stepped up and created the document(s) for us.
We couldn’t be more pleased about this, but it’s also humbling to realize there are so many folks out there willing to jump up and help us out whenever we ask for it. It’s that realization that keeps us from making constant requests of our fans. (A good thing, too — if we pushed out too much “signal” through our fans, the general public would tire of it, and eventually our fans would too.)
All the same, we need your help today.
We want to make some parts of the Dresden Files RPG available under the OGL, but we simply have had no time or resources to do the work, there (more on what that work is in a moment). So we thought: why not see if we can “crowdsource” this one? Toward that end, we’re looking for some volunteers to help do that — and as thanks we’ll dole out some free stuff to the people who step up.
That said, there’s definitely some pain-in-the-ass elements to the process. Here’s what would need to be done by a volunteer squad:
We have some specific sections we want to turn into independently available OGL content; we aren’t intending to open up all the content in the game just now, though this is not necessarily where we’ll be stopping, either. Here’s what we’re looking at:
EDIT: YOWZA! Volunteers for everything already!
To be clear, this post doesn’t mean we’re saying that the above stuff as-is is already open content. It’s not, but we’d like to produce a new version of each of them so that it can be.
So here’s what I’d like to see: folks volunteering in the comments, explicitly, so we don’t end up with four folks all doing the same block of work. Please don’t volunteer unless you’re able to take on whatever you’re volunteering for fairly immediately, so we don’t end up with someone proclaiming they’ll work on a section and then nothing coming of it for weeks. It’s absolutely fine for you to split your work up with other volunteers, however (e.g., maybe someone wants to take on the first ten pages of City Creation, if someone else is willing to take on the rest).
So how about it? Are you able and willing to step up? Tell us!
