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I’ve been seeing some discussion, off and on, about Fate Core System and Fate Accelerated Edition. I’ll call them Core and FAE in this post, because it’s Sunday and I am lazy. I figured I’d chime in on the discussion, because I’m discovering that I have some opinions about it.

Also, this is just one guy’s opinion. There are a lot of people out there better equipped than I am to do this kind of analysis.[1]

I don’t really think of FAE as a separate entity from Core. It’s a build of Core, as Fred Hicks says, and I agree with him. FAE is what happens when you open the big Core toolbox and pull together the socket wrench set, the allen keys, and the WD-40, and toss in an old voltmeter you found in the back closet. It even still has both lead cables, so we’re in business.

But FAE does behave a bit differently than Core as expressed in the game’s example settings. Why is that? Yes, stunt templates and single stress track, but really it comes down to the difference between FAE’s approaches and Core’s skills. This might seem like arbitrary jargon, but it’s not—it points to a very real difference in what they represent.

The major difference is that skills describe what problems you can solve, while approaches describe how you solve problems.

The standard approaches in FAE (Forceful, Quick, Careful, Clever, Sneaky, and Flashy) are things everyone can do. They don’t tell you anything all that unusual about your character in terms of your competence – your capabilities tend to be assumed based on genre and setting conventions. Characters in a Star Wars campaign can drive speeders and operate computers and shoot blasters. You don’t need an aspect to justify it, it’s just part of the setting. This means you need to make sure everyone is on the same page regarding these assumptions, especially if some players are less familiar with the setting.

If you have a capability outside the norm for your setting, take an aspect to reflect it. You probably need a Force-related aspect to be a Jedi in a Star Wars game, for example, because not all the characters in Star Wars have access to using the Force. All this adds up to FAE having a tighter focus on aspects than Core tends to have.

Another consequence of aspect + setting-driven competence in FAE is that gradations of competence aren’t important. If you’re a hacker, you’re a hacker; you won’t find out who the better hacker is by looking at the character sheet.[2]

Approaches, while they don’t say much about how good you are with a longbow or how much you know about the lore of faerie, pretty obviously tell you something about your character’s personality. Of course you’ll look for ways to use your character’s highly rated approaches—that Flashy +3 or Forceful +2, over your Sneaky +0. And that’s OK—real people do that, don’t they? They’re almost aspects in themselves—invokable and compellable with a fate point. Hm.[3]

That said, something I wish I’d stated more strongly in the FAE text is that sometimes the GM has to push a bit to make sure that the approach the player is choosing to use not only matches the fiction they describe, but is effective at all. Sometimes, circumstances demand that you be sneaky; nothing else will do.

Which brings up the issue of short skill lists vs. approaches.

Approaches aren’t just a short skill list—remember, approaches tell you how you do things, not what you can do. Short skill lists are a fascinating topic for another post [4], but for now, just keep in mind that not every Fate game with a short skill list is trying to be an implementation of FAE. If you specifically want to use approaches for your game, and you want a list that’s different than the FAE default list, make sure you stick with descriptions of manner—i.e., how you do things—not things like D&D stats (as in Fate Freeport Companion) or roles (such as D&D classes or Leverage Hitter-Hacker-Thief-etc. roles). While those may be distinct from skills as well, they’ll play differently than approaches.

I guess I don’t really have a conclusion here, so I’m going to sum up what I see as the big differences between FAE and Core:

• FAE approaches tell you how, Core skills tell you what.
• FAE requires a firm shared understanding of genre assumptions.
• FAE emphasizes aspects to a larger degree than Core.
• FAE doesn’t model fine degrees of difference in competence.
• Approaches can reveal aspects of personality.
• All approaches are useable by everyone, which feels different than the Core skill list.

[Editor: For further reading on this topic, check out Christopher Ruthenbeck’s take on the differences.]

[1] Seriously, if you’re a gamer and not reading Rob Donoghue at http://walkingmind.evilhat.com/, well, I suppose you probably have a reason for that. I hope it’s a good one. (back)

[2] Stunts can further refine competence, but they work in largely the same way for FAE as for Core. Also, I’m least interested in stunts of all Fate mechanical bits, so I’ll ignore them here. (back)

[3] Hack point here! (back)

[4] I’m totally going to write that post too, but not today. (back)

The licensing options for Fate—AND the system reference documents for Fate Core and Fate Accelerated—are live!

You can find our home for Fate Core derived licensing here: http://www.faterpg.com/licensing/

We’re offering the text of Fate Core and Fate Accelerated under two different open licensing schemes: the tried-and-true Open Game License (OGL), and a Creative Commons Attribution Unported license (CC-BY). This was made possible by the generous funding of backers through the Fate Core kickstarter campaign, and our efforts in developing Fate Core as a written-from-the-ground-up, entirely-our-own-text version of Fate.

Visit the licensing page to get started. There, you’ll find a quick overview of each license, our new Powered by Fate logo for use by third party publishers, and the Fate Core Glyphs font for those of you who want to use the “four actions” icons developed for Fate Core.

Drill down into the individual licensing pages for specific details on how to make use of each license. You’ll also find the license-specific system reference documents on those drill-down pages.

We’re pleased as ever to continue our commitment to keeping Fate’s text free for use by third party publishers for both personal and commercial use, and we can’t wait to see what folks have in store for this new era of the Fate system. Bring it on, folks—and thank you!

Over on Google+, Christopher Ruthenbeck asked a question about handling absolutes in Fate Core. Read the thread for full context. Here’s an edited/expanded/altered excerpt of my response to it.

Absolutes are tricky. They’re the least gameable thing we might adopt from our inspirations in fiction. And they’re often something that can’t really be trusted. “This here’s absolutely true,” our television or book series tells us in one episode. Then a few episodes pass, and suddenly we find out there’s an “except…” The cloaking field is absolute, except when a particularly clever opponent figures out a way to look at secondary signs of the presence of a cloaked vehicle. Etc.

But let’s proceed with the notion that an absolute is desirable in our game.

What is an absolute? It’s an unavoidable outcome, something that in a success vs. failure scenario either eliminates the possibility of success, or eliminates the possibility of failure. Ah, yes. And there’s the crux of it, that “vs”.

Absolutes for me typically reduce into the same ur-example: the fall to the death. The players must make their climbing roll successfully, or they fall to their death. Except that sucks and is anticlimactic and as such should actually never be on the table in the first place. There is no success vs. failure there. This is an absolute for our purposes: crossing the chasm must be a success, full stop.

Fate Core already gives us a tool for handling this situation: success vs. success at a cost. If you don’t succeed, you still succeed, but you pay a price to do so: You make it across the chasm, but you’ve lost valuable time, your important widget fell into the lightless depths below, whatever.

So for our “100% no-fail cloaking device” absolute, how do we apply that tool? We apply it to the attempt to hide: successful hiding vs successful hiding at a cost. Essentially, working like this: if the enemy WOULD detect you — thereby implying failure of your attempt to hide — you can instead treat your failed attempt as success at a cost.

Working out what the “at a cost” is is the real sticky wicket. Failure’s off the table, so don’t let it distract you at all.

When an absolute is considered palatable for your game — it won’t be for everyone — this suggests a class of “absolute-validating stunt” that you can work into your extras or power set or what have you. Like this:

Absolute Cloaking Field: You can’t fail at attempts to hide. If the rolls indicate you would have failed, you may instead choose to succeed at a cost. Costs could include: draining all power from the ship’s systems; losing valuable time that you can’t afford to lose; etc.

Depending on your taste, this sort of stunt could be completely off the table; on the table as a standard option; on the table but only for certain kinds of skills; on the table but at a higher than one refresh cost; etc. I leave the pricing as an exercise for a specific table and its tastes.

What other absolutes could we apply this to? An invulnerable foe who always succeeds at defense rolls, only the cost of that success is sometimes quite nasty? Perhaps. It’s probably best applied to circumstances that would normally be a succeed/fail Overcome Obstacle roll, but depending on how far you’re willing to push the system it could potentially work its way into the other of the four actions too.

What absolutes do you want to put in your Fate game? And how would you build them, given this?