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

bewilderment: Nov 22, 2007; man what

Apologies if it's been mentioned earlier, it's a big thread - but could someone suggest interesting things to use the mental stress track for? The 'normal' way it's hit, going by Fate Core, is to absorb hits from a Provoke attack, but that's pretty limited, compared to the numerous ways characters can get physically harmed.

Obviously the answers depend on the setting, although general answers useful too. My current game is literally the DnD Eberron setting done in Fate, so defending against psychic attacks and mind control is possible, but as it is, even in a high-fantasy game the average adventurer is probably going to run into bandits with sharp knives more often than psychic monsters.

# ¿ Jul 16, 2014 04:38

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# ¿ May 6, 2024 01:19

bewilderment: Nov 22, 2007; man what

Covok posted:

I wonder what's everyone thoughts on No-Skill Fate. I don't know if it appears in any other works, but it can be found in the PWYW The Three Rocketeers supplement. The gist of the system differences go like this:

While technically FATE Core, there are no skills.

Players make five aspects as usual, but they are categorized. The core concept one is the most important, as you will see later.

At any time a player has agency, they can make one of the four actions.

When they do, for every aspect that applies, they get a +1 Bonus. If their core aspect applies, they get a +2 bonus from it instead of a +1 bonus.

This is not an invoke and does not cost Fate points. Any aspect can be invoked as normal even if they applied a bonus to the roll in the prior step.

As a result, stunts are more about getting +2-+1 bonuses about one action with a narrative hook.

While I don't know if this is The Three Rocketeers or No-Skill Fate, you get only one normal Stunt and one specialized stunt to the setting. In TTR's case, fencing stunts.

You can buy additional normal stunts with Refresh as normal.

For NPCs, they are made just like they are in FAE.

Mooks just get a straight rating, 2-3 things they're skilled at, 2 things they're bad at, an aspect or two, and some stress boxes. Their rating goes up one when their skill applies and down one when it doesn't. Mooks can gang up.

My main point of issue is that it can exacerbate a problem I ran into with FAE. That problem being that people will always try to get their best approaches to apply. In this case, unless you have players fully buying into fair play, players may attempt to always try to force as many aspects as possible as a bonus to a roll. I can see this turning into a bit of arguing too, if an insufficient level of trust and fair play exists between the GM and the player.

A part of me likes the idea of it and I find it kind of smooth, but that issue nags at me. What does everyone else think?

What's the purpose of using this instead of using the 'Aspects Are Skills' variant where you just rate your Aspects with your High Concept at +4, two more at +3 and two more at +2?

# ¿ Dec 10, 2015 00:15

bewilderment: Nov 22, 2007; man what

DarkAvenger211 posted:

Is FATE Accelerated just a simplified ruleset for the game? How do people find using it over base FATE?

This blog post covers the differences.

Skills vs Approaches is the biggest 'visible' difference.

My personal view is that Approaches make sense when either:
- in a traditional skill system, everyone would have almost identical skills; your style of doing things is much more important than the specific thing you're doing
- your characters are so wildly divergent that a regular skill system simply wouldn't make sense. e.g. "we're playing spooky Halloween monsters, who cares wtf my Drive skill is"

# ¿ Feb 15, 2023 03:43

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