The Fate Core/FAE Megathread: We do our own stunts and fractals

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > The Fate Core/FAE Megathread: We do our own stunts and fractals

TheDemon: Dec 11, 2006; _{...on the plus side I'm feeling much more angry now than I expected so this totally helps me get in character.}

On statting NPCs, the key I think is to play them like they were PCs. That means ~~maneuvers~~ Create An Advantage to put down aspects, use of GM fate points, and whatever else is in the system. I GM FATE Accelerated and a big part of the +2s the system hands out are boosts, one-use free invoke aspects you get for tieing an attack or defense, among other things.

You also have a lot more freedom with stunts when statting up NPCs. I wanted a character to be basically invincible, so I gave him this stunt:
Stunt: Always wins the roll in a contest of strength or power by +1.

My PCs can get around that with fate points, free invocations, the aforementioned boosts, or anything special they might cook up, but basically it let me make a recurring villain that the PCs can definitely take down in a climactic fight, whenever that happens, but makes it less likely in skirmishes. Other stunts I've used are erase one stress box each ~~round~~ exchange (representing a flood of enemies), reduce stress from each hit by X, acts a number of times equal to unfilled stress boxes, etc. It really depends on how well your PCs are using the system; if they make good use of their fate points & free invokes and are discovering or establishing aspects and passing on whatever they make/get to their team, it's pretty easy to blow up an opponent. But if they just spam attack these kind of stunts would romp all over them.

# ¿ Sep 30, 2013 20:42

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# ¿ May 4, 2024 14:52

TheDemon: Dec 11, 2006; _{...on the plus side I'm feeling much more angry now than I expected so this totally helps me get in character.}

I do like the idea, Bee, and will keep it in mind for the future. Keeping track of all the options available to a player or gm in fate is perhaps the thing I struggle with the most.

MadScientistWorking posted:

Honestly, the encounters he run aren't actually hard to win. Its just that usually there are fifteen things going on at once and usually makes it hard to defeat someone who requires a full investment of resources to defeat.

My players are their own worst enemies and fate makes it extremely easy to run that against them. Plus if there's a fight I try to make sure we're fighting over objectives on both sides other than just beat up the other guy. Again, fate makes that easy to set up & execute

# ¿ Oct 1, 2013 19:52

TheDemon: Dec 11, 2006; _{...on the plus side I'm feeling much more angry now than I expected so this totally helps me get in character.}

What gets me is my players have managed to write characters that are hilariously bad at figuring out what other people want. They'd completely stomp if I just ran a series of fights, or if they were on the offensive with a clear objective of their own, but put them up against *other people's goals* and they fall apart completely. It's great and I love them for it.

# ¿ Oct 2, 2013 06:23

TheDemon: Dec 11, 2006; _{...on the plus side I'm feeling much more angry now than I expected so this totally helps me get in character.}

I have a Dresden Files RPG question.

Counterspells. So I roll Lore to figure out how much power, possibly with a difficulty based on an enemy's skill, summon up that power and take stress subject to my Conviction, and then roll Discipline to control that power. Do I also use the Discipline roll as an attack roll when counterspelling, and if so against what? The example in the book does not specify a difficulty for the attack portion of the Discipline roll, but the non-example text says to roll it like I would roll an attack spell, so I am lost as to what I actually do.

# ¿ Oct 7, 2013 04:48

TheDemon: Dec 11, 2006; _{...on the plus side I'm feeling much more angry now than I expected so this totally helps me get in character.}

Also, the Bronze Rule totally lets you model some parts of any particular thing and not model other parts. For Horror, for instance, I might give a horrific entity an attack skill and aspects or stunts but not stress boxes or consequences. It's meant to be an enabling guideline, not one that restricts you.

# ¿ Oct 20, 2013 22:32

TheDemon: Dec 11, 2006; _{...on the plus side I'm feeling much more angry now than I expected so this totally helps me get in character.}

Suppressive Fighting could easily be justified to let you Defend regardless of who an NPC in the zone attacks. And guess what, the section of the blog you refer to, titled "NPCs and Characters can provide active opposition when this is supported by the fiction", tells you to do exactly that. At no point does the blog mention any kind of action advantage.

Attack back to me sounds like Stunt territory, the 1/scene and fate point to do again kind maybe.

If you are looking for FATE system rules to attack back, some systems had rules where if the NPCs choose to ignore (and therefore bypass completely) a Block that would trigger an automatic attack. Some systems that used Blocks had that as part of their Block rule. Nevertheless there's no such rule in FATE core nor is such a thing recommended in the blog you linked.

TheDemon fucked around with this message at 17:33 on Oct 25, 2013

# ¿ Oct 25, 2013 17:28

TheDemon: Dec 11, 2006; _{...on the plus side I'm feeling much more angry now than I expected so this totally helps me get in character.}

Transient People posted:

Read the last quote I posted again. It mentions doing exactly that, with no special stunts. Provide Active Opposition, take action yourself with a skill if the target fails to make the roll.

Which is in a completely separate section about situation aspects that are modelled as characters, not about a situation aspect that enables a PC. "Active Opposition" specifically refers to rolling to oppose an enemy roll in FATE Core, the opposite being setting a difficulty for that roll ("Passive Opposition").

quote:

Situation Aspects may provide Passive or Active Opposition

Situation aspects now fill the role that was previously occupied by barriers, representing obstacles that apply to crossing between zones (e.g. �Sheer Cliff�). Other situation aspects, like �Blacker than Midnight� or �Slippery Floor�, may provide constant passive opposition to certain actions (FC 131). The type (passive or active) and level of opposition is set by the GM. For instance, �Slippery Floor� might provide passive opposition at Fair to any action involving rapid movement while an �Imposing Wall� might provide Great passive opposition to moving between zones. You can also mix in the rule about treating Aspects as characters � for example �Moat of Fire� might provide Good active opposition when you try to cross it and also inflict damage with a �Burning Things� skill if you fail (FC 208).

Lenny says:

�You could have passive opposition by GM fiat, or passive opposition justified precisely from a scene aspect like �Littered With Debris� at the GMs discretion or player insistence or whatever. Group consensus.

�Like, a major, major role of [situation] aspects is to serve as a rubric for the GM to say, �Hey, there should probably be opposition there, because X is true.� So, that debris could still affect someone if no one invoked it � the GM always, always has the power to suggest that opposition exists. If someone did invoke it, it could add to that opposition.�

To me as a GM that means if suppressive fighting acts in that way, then firstly it would be more difficult to place (or actively opposed with a teamwork bonus), and secondly its skill in opposing attacks and the difficulty to overcome it would be equivalent to your shifts. That also means you don't get boosts from its successes nor can you spend FP on its rolls.

It depends of course on what the player is attempting to achieve, but it makes some sense to model the same according to this section of the very same article:

quote:

NPCs and Characters can provide active opposition when this is supported by the fiction

If you can arguably be �in the way� of an action (as is often justified by aspects like Grappled or All Up In His Grill) then you can provide active opposition to it (FC 131). This does not require an action and it does not count as a Defend action.

Example: You have created advantage with your Shoot skill to establish that you�re providing �Covering Fire� in your zone. This means you can provide active opposition to movement or to other actions that would logically be hampered by the flying lead with your Shoot skill.

This does not necessarily require a situation aspect though if in doubt a relevant aspect should always be considered as sufficient justification.

Example: If you�ve mentioned that you are standing next to a door then you can provide active opposition to anyone trying to move through the door by physically getting in their way, even though there isn�t an aspect in play to support this: It just makes sense in the fiction.

Where your active opposition helps to defend another (such as when you have a gunman grappled) then the active opposition and defence rolls do not stack. Either one of them rolls and the target has to live with the result or if the table agrees the the defender or the target (whoever has the highest value) rolls with a +1 teamwork modifier (Per discussion with Lenny).

If you allow the teamwork option bear in mind that a teamwork action means that all participants are subject to the negative consequences in the event of a failure (FC 174). Depending on the exact events unfolding this may or may not be appropriate.

Example: Fred uses his eldritch powers to create a Wall of Fire aspect between him and Lenny and a psychotic gunman. The gunman shoots at Lenny and Fred argues that he can use his wall of fire as justification for providing active opposition. Lenny says he�s also going to try and dodge in case the bullet makes it through the wall of fire. The table agrees that this is an example of teamwork so the one with the highest skill rolls against the gunman with a +1 bonus. If they fail to defend it doesn�t make any sense for the bullet to hit Fred and Lenny, so the table agrees that the worst that can happen is Lenny takes the hit by himself.

That said the important part here is that both the player and GM are on the same page before the dice hit the table, so in this case the system works as intended either way with the aforementioned caveat.

# ¿ Oct 25, 2013 18:24

TheDemon: Dec 11, 2006; _{...on the plus side I'm feeling much more angry now than I expected so this totally helps me get in character.}

Temascos posted:

Just ran a one off Fate Core session with my rpg buddies, learning a few things as we went. Basic premise was Abraham Lincoln, Kirby, William Shatner, Steven Armstrong and Altair are taking down a cocaine baron. It went well and people enjoyed themselves but there were a few things that popped into question.

* Turn order - How to you get players into what order for combat? I must have missed this
* Managing dialogue - now I plan to not use tokens in standard conversation scenes and stuff except in combat to represent the environment, but is there any sort of way to manage the chaos. This could be more my ability to control my players :P
* Skills came into play, but not aspects or stunts. Some players seemed unwilling to spend any points or get into any troubles to get more points.

Anyway, it was great stuff and its defintely coming into play again.

Turn Order is detailed on page 158 of Fate Core, but basically you order according to the appropriate skill of each participant (Notice or Empathy for physical/mental).

Managing dialogue: do you mean things like keeping your players from talking over each other and making sure you catch when you're needed for NPCs or rules stuff, or do you mean things like keeping track of what characters are involved in scenes and where and has done what and are talking to whom?

Getting your players into trouble thanks to aspects is mostly the GM's job. You should have a list of aspects each player character has handy and a good idea or even notes on what each of those mean, so you can offer compels. I try to offer one to three compels on each PC each session, but really just offer as appropriate. Once you've offered a compel the player's only choices are to get into trouble and gain a fate point or to spend a fate point. Once the players realize they can gain fate points for doing the stupid things their characters would do anyway they'll be more free with spending them. I know my group burns through fate points like candy.

Often a player does something in-line with their aspects that causes a complication but doesn't word it as a compel. In those cases, if you like, you can jump in with "I'll give you a fate point if you do that". That's basically a pre-accepted compel. I do this for particularly good roleplaying, usually.

It's important though not to use compels for frivolous reasons though, nor to reward players compelling themselves to no real effect. So for example if a player has an aspect Villainous Laughter and either you or the player wants the PC to laugh inappropriately as a compel, there better be consequences beyond an NPC going "oh weird you laugh funny, oh well let's move on". Not to say that wouldn't be a fine reaction if the complication is farther down the line, like the NPC going and finding a priest because he thinks the laughing character is possessed, but things that have no consequences mean no compels.

As for stunts, those are basically the players' responsibility and they'll get better at using them as they get used to their character sheets. As GM all you can do is put them in situations where their stunts are useful, basically everything on a char sheet is a big list of "things the players want to come up in game".

# ¿ Jan 15, 2014 10:35

TheDemon: Dec 11, 2006; _{...on the plus side I'm feeling much more angry now than I expected so this totally helps me get in character.}

My favorite phrase for players who are talking over someone quiet is "Hold on, I'll get to you in a minute" while I turn back to the quiet one and ask them something or get them to repeat what they started to say.

If you need to prompt someone to participate in FATE a good way is through things on their character sheet. If someone is a Defender of the Meek (as an aspect) you can turn to them when someone aspect-relevant is happening and go "hey ____, as a Defender of the Meek what do you make of this?"

TheDemon fucked around with this message at 08:15 on Jan 19, 2014

# ¿ Jan 19, 2014 07:57

TheDemon: Dec 11, 2006; _{...on the plus side I'm feeling much more angry now than I expected so this totally helps me get in character.}

e: ^^ also good advice

TurninTrix posted:

While we're (sorta) on the subject, what's a good guideline to building encounters? I've run quite a few combat scenes that drag out longer than they should, and a few that ended way too quickly for my tastes. I'm not sure if it's just I put too many mooks in play, or too many stress boxes for each of them, since if I set them either of those too low my players just wipe the opposition off the floor with enough invokes.

My experience GMing is pretty similar. I usually let my players do one or two moves of pre-combat prep (unless they're being surprised) to lay down some aspects on the scene or enemy before starting initiative. In combat, it all boils down to how focused the players are. If they know their goal and act on it specifically, then they can usually blow up their goal in one or two rounds using free invokes and fate points. If they either don't really know their goal, or they fail to act on it and instead start wailing on mooks or something (I have a player who's really bad for this unfortunately), then it'll take them literally forever to get anything done as they end up blowing their free invokes and fp on defending themselves.

I guess what I'm saying is it if you love big combat scenes, you need to have some smaller (as in subset of the scene, not as in less important) goal in them, and you need to make sure both the players and the characters are clear on what exactly they're after in a fight. A massive straight fight never really goes over well, unfortunately. Even in ambush scenes I usually have someone cut in after a round or so to give some direction. "Defend the engines for 2 rounds while we charge the hyperdrive" or "Kill the leader and the bandits will be easy to mop up" kind of thing.

# ¿ Mar 21, 2014 20:15

TheDemon: Dec 11, 2006; _{...on the plus side I'm feeling much more angry now than I expected so this totally helps me get in character.}

InfiniteJesters posted:

Is Nova Praxis any good? I'm happy to see a post-cyberpunk RPG done in Fate, but it seems awfully pricey.

Nova Praxis is a solid if somewhat crunchy system. I especially like their vehicle-building and drone-building subsystems. They have good ego/body rules, and I like the list of stunts quite a lot. FATE works wonders for the rep system.

The ruleset suffers a bit from being married to the awful lore; it uses in-lore terms without explanation constantly, like "apotheosis" for the conversion of mind to electronic form. It's not difficult to understand, just very difficult to read and find the mechanical bits quickly. Additionally, tying mechanics to lore means it's difficult to reskin and run something else. For example, during char creation you pick a faction which gives you rep bonuses, but those factions are all Shadowrun-style megacorporations. Another example, the rep system is "official" (as in officially endorsed by the government) and, mechanically, single-score, while the currency system is "unofficial". Any setting where the rep system in "unofficial" or where you require multiple rep scores would have to make major house rules to deal with this.

This wouldn't be a problem, except the Nova Praxis setting is extremely generic and bland and frankly quite awful. It's like they couldn't decide what themes they wanted from all their favorite RPGs and literature, so they just picked "ALL OF THEM" and then failed to write the result interestingly. There was an Earth-ending apocalypse, but it was because of an out-of-control nanoswarm that turned the world into grey goop rather than anything interesting. The singularity happened, but it didn't cause any problems. We have FTL travel, but no one uses it to explore the stars. I feel like the system works best when your GM writes their own setting.

The rules however work and are a good take on a complicated FATE-based transhumanist game system. That at least I can recommend.

# ¿ Mar 26, 2014 21:13

TheDemon: Dec 11, 2006; _{...on the plus side I'm feeling much more angry now than I expected so this totally helps me get in character.}

Swags posted:

Hi nerds.

I've got this idea for a superhero game and I don't know what system to do it in, but I'm looking at Fate since it seems pretty fun and narrative and my group is on a narrative kick lately. Here's the setup: The players create Justice League/Avengers level superheroes, the true superheroes of the age, with the knowledge that three-to-five sessions in, in a climactic battle with the villains of the world, basically everyone is going to die. Then we discuss what happens over the next two or three years with no League around. Then everyone makes a sidekick level hero based on someone else's original super powered dude. Essentially someone that has taken up the mantle, etc.

Can Fate accurately model this sort of power differential and such? I want to be kind of bleak for the sidekicks at the beginning when they still don't know all the tricks of the trade, when they're not League powerful yet. I know M&M and HERO can do this, since they're more of a point buy sort of thing, but I haven't seen anything about truly epic Fate games with world shaking superheroes/etc anywhere.

Seems pretty simple. Just set the skill pyramid / refresh / number of stunts differently for each era. So for example for the League-level guys they might get a 4/33/222/1111 skill pyramid and 3 refresh and 4 stunts, while the sidekicks might get 3/222/11111, 2 refresh and 3 stunts. Have it be a bigger difference (start the super super guys skills at 5 for example) if you really want it to be comparatively bleak for the sidekicks, when the difference between skills in FATE is like +/-2 that's absolutely massive. If your players are into it, they'll also help you along by having aspects that are at different scales too.

When you try to do this, a lot will depend on building and playing the enemies right.

TheDemon fucked around with this message at 03:51 on Apr 29, 2014

# ¿ Apr 29, 2014 03:49

TheDemon: Dec 11, 2006; _{...on the plus side I'm feeling much more angry now than I expected so this totally helps me get in character.}

It worked once for me, when the other guy by coincidence made a super-butler character who meshed right with my super-rich-girl, but all the other times it's kind of fallen flat. I'm inclined to agree that the guest stories technique doesn't really do much for the gameplay nor for roleplaying. It doesn't harm anything, but mandating a certain number of aspects depending on others ends up being pretty uninteresting most of the time, doubly so if you do the passing cards thing and who you've guest-starred with is random. The idea of making characters with some shared background is good, but it works if and when it's organic, not because the rules require it.

# ¿ May 24, 2014 05:59

TheDemon: Dec 11, 2006; _{...on the plus side I'm feeling much more angry now than I expected so this totally helps me get in character.}

Having played a lot of FATE Accelerated I don't think 3 or 4 aspects was any worse than 5 or 7 or 10 (SotC lol), and in many many many cases was much better in terms of getting gameplay to flow smoothly and players, especially those new to FATE, understanding their own character sheets.

# ¿ May 24, 2014 20:11

TheDemon: Dec 11, 2006; _{...on the plus side I'm feeling much more angry now than I expected so this totally helps me get in character.}

My point is the characters are complete with 3 aspects and the play as complete with only 3 as well. You can have as many as 5, but FAE makes those explicitly optional and neither the characters nor the game suffers for no matter if you have 3 or 4 or 5.

# ¿ May 24, 2014 23:46

TheDemon: Dec 11, 2006; _{...on the plus side I'm feeling much more angry now than I expected so this totally helps me get in character.}

Am I the only one who doesn't really like Modes in the Atomic Robo RPG?

The concept of dividing skills up into groups is good for FATE. Really good. But the implementation is waaaay too granular for a FATE system. Your Modes are all rated different and within each Mode each skill is also +0 +1 or +2. What you end up with a range of skills from +5 to +0 and given that the FATE dice don't really have a big amount of variation on their roll, it ends up being just too big of a potential difference. I mean, yeah, in FATE Core you have a skill pyramid with some granularity to it since you end up with skills that are +0 and a skill that's +4, but honestly I think the large difference is a fairly big problem with FATE Core too, just a little less because you'll only have one skill at the top.

The concept of grouping skills and of basing big stunts on them is good, I just think the Trained/Focused/Specialized bit is too much.

# ¿ May 30, 2014 04:04

TheDemon: Dec 11, 2006; _{...on the plus side I'm feeling much more angry now than I expected so this totally helps me get in character.}

Phrosphor posted:

I am about to start a game of FATE with 5 total roleplaying newbies, they are keen but have no real experience. We played a short Technoir campaign that went down pretty well, and now they want me to run something more open ended and FATE caught their eye for allowing you a lot of freedom with your character etc.

I have run a lot of games in the past, but nothing like FATE. Is there any advice I should take onboard before we have our first planning session next week? Anything to watch out for with newcomers? I know that all of them have at least glanced at the core rules, with a couple having read them in a lot of detail.So they aren't coming into this totally blind.

My plan for the first session was to give a general outline of what I would like to run, before letting them alter it through world/setting/character creation.

When I was a new GM to FATE, I had a lot of difficulty giving my players appropriately difficult challenges. One thing it takes a bit of play to realize is that, kind of like 4E, you have to tax your players' resources in order to ramp up to big dramatic challenge. You especially have to chip away at their fate point stocks, how many fate points the party has available can pretty easily be read as their potential to defeat any particular challenge. Consequences are also a bit of this, and if they do prep for fights free invokes from discovered/created aspects, but mostly it's about the fate point economy. There's pretty much nothing a party with full FP can't handle.

# ¿ May 30, 2014 19:33

TheDemon: Dec 11, 2006; _{...on the plus side I'm feeling much more angry now than I expected so this totally helps me get in character.}

ProfessorProf posted:

Running a FAE campaign right now. One of the players wants to pick up a (still alive) monster and throw it at the encounter boss.

How the hell would you model that?

I would model this as a straight up Create An Advantage.

# ¿ Feb 10, 2015 03:13

TheDemon: Dec 11, 2006; _{...on the plus side I'm feeling much more angry now than I expected so this totally helps me get in character.}

That sounds like something I'd let my players do for a FP anyway... if they had a Grenade Launcher.

# ¿ Aug 17, 2015 17:38

TheDemon: Dec 11, 2006; _{...on the plus side I'm feeling much more angry now than I expected so this totally helps me get in character.}

Comrade Gorbash posted:

Yeah, you're still entirely missing my point. I'll figure it out on my own.

My best experiences with Fate have been when I reduce the resources each side has available. Smaller stress tracks, fewer consequences, fewer Refresh, less aspects, and so on. That puts a higher burden to offer or accept compels and means that needing to spend round upon round stacking up more and more +2 to repeatedly break a bigass stress and consequence track doesn't happen... unless the GM wants it to.

Most of the time we used FAE instead of a full Fate system, mind, but I don't think that's a bad thing and this basic idea can be applied no matter what Fate system you use. It also means fewer things are modeled mechanically. Gear would be the prime example of something that doesn't need to be represented mechanically.

This is just off the top of my head but, using FAE as a base:
Three stress boxes
One single consequence
Three aspects
Divide four between Refresh and Stunts

Something like that.

TheDemon fucked around with this message at 08:35 on Aug 23, 2016

# ¿ Aug 23, 2016 08:31

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# ¿ May 4, 2024 14:52

TheDemon: Dec 11, 2006; _{...on the plus side I'm feeling much more angry now than I expected so this totally helps me get in character.}

Play like the players do. Stack up aspects then slam down large attacks using free invokes, then do it again with your FP. Create an advantage is almost always a better use of supporting NPCs than attacking, since their boss buddies can tag those.

Works best if the players can be lured into an area pre-prepared, which is pretty much always.

# ¿ Jul 4, 2017 03:53

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