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Zerilan posted:This sums up like the only thing I sort of dislike about Fate pretty well, and next time I run something in Fate I might see how merging the tracks works for my group. It's worked pretty well for a game I've been running over IRC so far; we have just one stress track, called 'Stress', and if something inflicts stress on the character, it goes on that track. Getting smacked by a goblin? Stress! Being insulted by a trusted friend? Stress! Psionic mojo aimed at your brains? Stress! It can still be boosted by Physique/Will stunts, but not by the raw skill; in effect, if you want to have a higher Stress Track, you can pay a stunt for it and show how it ties in to your character's specific story, but most of the time there's no need for it. Each character has 3 stress boxes by default, so you can take a hit or two without immediately needing a consequence, but prolonged fights generally get ugly.
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Oct 18, 2013 02:58
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Transient People posted:I can certainly think of one: In the New Orleans Dresden Files game going on in these very forums, the Warden in a child's body had to pull a fast one on a ghost and could tap into no Aspects to make his lie better, even though it could've been important. It's not that none of them lend themselves to lying, they just didn't fit THIS situation. So he had to bite the bullet and suck at lying even though he didn't really want to. Just because it's not the most key roll ever doesn't change the fact your Aspects constrain you on spending FP sometimes. I invoke the ghost's 'Unliving Memory' Aspect. Since it's an unliving echo of the person it once was (as per Dresden Files canon, assuming that's relevant), it doesn't actually have the instincts that would have cued in a living witness to my deception, making my invoke valid. That's one way it could have been done.
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Nov 30, 2013 08:10
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In my FATE Core Exalted game, when we were rolling up characters, I explicitly told my players, "Stunts work in three ways: one is to give you an 'always active benefit', one is to give you an explicit ability that isn't spelled out in an Aspect already, and one is to give you a +2 to a particular kind of action in a certain circumstance." I mostly borrow the wording from the Apocalypse/Dungeon World moves for these: Ancient Voices Remembered "When you attempt to translate an ancient scroll in a language your First Age incarnation could reasonably have known, take a +2 to your Lore roll." I also pointed out that these are probably among the less 'interesting' choices for stunts, but they are an option. The first one is demonstrated best by a Medicine-based Stunt the party Twilight Caste took: Enlightened Physician's Diagnostic Excellence "When you attempt to diagnose an illness, it takes a matter of minutes." This isn't directly tied to an Aspect, or I'd have told her that the Aspect applies anyways; I don't see the need for two bits of the system to both be hitting on the same thing. The second one is best exemplified by a stunt the Dawn Caste took: Cloud-Mounting Leap "When you move across open-roofed zones with an Athletics roll, ignore rough terrain or multiple zone penalties." This one allows him to do what he wants to do; play a highly mobile fighter who can move between areas of the fight, and also incidentally allows the Twilight Caste to use long-range abilities to set up useful situation Aspects for him to exploit.
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May 3, 2014 03:59
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So I've been without internet for a while, so I couldn't really reply sooner than this, but here's something that I felt needs replying to:Evil Mastermind posted:Well, before we even get into the power of the stunt, it does have a very "secret language of character sheets" vibe to it (i.e., the player saying "this is something I want to see happen in the game a lot"). This is basically how I regarded their choice in powers. Evil Mastermind posted:I think it's a legacy problem from the original game though; there are so many Charms that are ridiculously situational that translating them as-is into another system causes issues because at least in Exalted you get bunches of them, but stunts in Fate are a more limited resource. You seem to think I went about this backwards. I didn't start with a list of Exalted charms in front of me and start converting them: I asked my players what kinds of supernaturally potent things they wanted to be able to do. The player of the Twilight Caste specified that she wanted to be able to diagnose diseases quickly. When I asked if she wanted a stunt to help with the actual diagnosis, she pointed out that she had a perfectly good Aspect for that, so we agreed that the speed was what she wanted the stunt to modify. Quadratic_Wizard posted:Neither really seems practical in the actual game. "Mysterious illness" is a plot thing, and it's not something you can run into more than once every few campaigns without it being just House. I think it's okay if you expand the scope a bit. On the contrary, in a campaign focused on (among others) a character with a strong medical focus, I firmly expect to bring up Abyssals and plague-spirits as frequent antagonists - and being able to identify that yes, this is Razor-Fanged Serpent's work at a glance might be very useful. Quadratic_Wizard posted:Enlightened Physician's Diagnostic Excellence A few things with this: One, any stunt that outright bypasses a roll, I usually make cost a Fate Point to activate. It's a good rule of thumb to help keep things balanced. Second, with her Aspects, and her Medicine, any time she REALLY wants to know it, she's rolling at a +6 (and possibly a +8 under some circumstances), making this stunt entirely unnecessary. And lastly, fixing Consequences early is part and parcel of having a high Medicine in a game where the baseline for PCs is being a superhuman paragon of excellence. That being said, in a game where the baseline was 'normal human', this would make an excellent stunt. Quadratic_Wizard posted:Ancient Voices Remembered The problem here is that you assume that there is a 'past life' Aspect. In general, there isn't, since this game is about who the PCs are now - if you want it to be relevant, take an Extra with the Free Aspect you get, or put it in your Concept. And I've got a few more written up; because the players tend to make up their powers as they go, these ones are more for NPCs, and are intended to be evocative when I look over my notes: Great Mother's Grasp You can grab at a target from a distance, provided there is water below or next to the target of your grab. (Grabbing I usually handle as a straightforward Create Advantage/Overcome Obstacle; it lets you place certain Aspects on the target, and the target can try to Overcome your grab to either remove those Aspects, or prevent them from getting placed in the first place). Open the Maiden's Gate You can open a temporary gate from Yu-Shan to the current location of anyone, provided you have at least one of their possessions in your hand when you do so. FrozenGoldfishGod fucked around with this message at 09:36 on May 22, 2014 |
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May 22, 2014 09:19
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mikeycp posted:I would be interested in discussing the specific mechanics, if you are. I can talk here, or I have PMs, or Steam, or something. One thing that occurs to me about how you could handle this is that Aspects are always true, even without an invoke. So one of my Exalted players has the Aspect Master of the Glorious Hero Style - that means that even without an invoke or a compel, he is the undisputed master in the game world of the Glorious Hero martial arts style. His personal story has had this come up once already. I've put in a bonus rule (don't recall seeing it in Core, but it's thematically appropriate) that while you can invoke an Aspect once per scene normally, if I compel on it, you can invoke it again afterwards. In other words, compelling 'resets' an Aspect for invocation, if it's been used. The scene where he first confronted Ligier's Hammer, Chosen of the King of Kings and Master of the Infernal Monster Style, was agreed on by all the players to be one of the best fight scenes by that point in the game (though the more cerebral 'fight' scene between the Twilight Caste and Razor-Fanged Serpent has since usurped the title, according to my players.) So in a Power Rangers game, a 'Morph' aspect would be true whenever you were morphed, as a permutation on this rule - so you wouldn't need to invoke it to be Morphed, but it would only be true (and therefore, only be invokable) when you were Morphed, while a 'Human' aspect would only be true while you were in normal form. FrozenGoldfishGod fucked around with this message at 04:57 on May 23, 2014 |
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May 23, 2014 04:52
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Transient People posted:Super secret ninja technique: Not all Aspects must be double edged swords. If an Aspect Just Fits (TM) but has no downside or upside, then gently caress it, roll with it anyways. It just means you have an ol' reliable for invokes or a license to print FP, and that's fine. I'm not sure I'd use Morph Aspects on the character sheets of the PCs for a Sentai or Power Rangers game though. It almost seems to me like you'd want a World Aspect of It's Morphing Time! instead. This. I'll admit, the last time I saw Power Rangers was when I was, like, 8, so I'm not terribly familiar with it (or with the genre in general, really). If I were going to do something like that (hello, Lunars), I'd compel the Morph aspect in a situation where blowing their secret identity (if they have those) could up the stakes somehow, or when they're trying to do Normal Person stuff in Morph form for some reason, if you were really determined to make it a character thing. And since I'm running Exalted again tomorrow, I'd like to hear the thread's ideas on how to handle Lunars, since they're going to be making their first on-screen appearance in the campaign as (potentially) something other than 'this episode's monster', and I like to actually stat out full-on recurring characters, since that gives me some inspiration on what kinds of approaches they might try. (For one-shot characters that need a stat spread beyond 'basic concept Aspect and a stress track', I just use the FAE approaches plus a couple aspects). My basic idea is that their totem animal/Tell is a part of their Concept aspect, like a Solar's caste. Instead of a Free aspect, they get a Shape aspect. When they're in human form, this Aspect reflects whatever it is they're tied to - if they're running a tribe of barbarians, for instance, they get the Barbarian Warlord Aspect in human form, since it's pretty much irrelevant when they're not in human form. Then when they turn into, say, a Utahraptor, they get the 'Raptor Red' Aspect (or whatever; the point is, the Aspect should reflect the fact that they can jump REALLY well and claw the poo poo out of anything that comes in range). If they adopt the form of another person, they get an Aspect related to why they want that shape to begin with. The shapes they can take are based on the fiction; if a given Lunar is based heavily in the West, it makes sense that they can probably assume most common sea animal forms native to their region, and possibly one or two land/air forms based on island life. Since they're not PCs, I don't need to worry too much about Charms and stunts, beyond (again) what sounds evocative and fits the role I have in mind for them. If anyone's got a better idea for handling it, though, I'd love to hear it (and yes, I own the DFRPG books and have considered the Dresden Files shapeshifting system, though that seems a bit cumbersome for someone who could easily have 10+ forms.)
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May 23, 2014 11:42
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Kai Tave posted:Yeah, this. More than five aspects and I find that A). I never use all of them and B). I struggle to think of enough solid aspect concepts to fill a list longer than five for any given character. Seconding this, especially the bit about five being the sweet spot. With the Guest Starring Aspects, I've found that they tend to work best when used in a game like the Dresden Files RPG. Since the setting for the DFRPG has as a core tenet of it that the supernatural is hidden from normal life, the Guest Starring Aspects and the process you run through to create them provide you with a reason why you're calling that guy when things get weird - and why he won't just write you off as delusional when you call him up, babbling about werewolves. Is that the only way to handle this? No. In fact, just saying, "Okay, you guys all know each other, and you all are at least partially clued-in to the fact that the world has some weird stuff going on that doesn't make the news" can work well. But in a setting where there isn't some vast, setting-wide secret that the PCs are all assumed to be in the know on to one degree or another, then that extra step isn't really necessary.
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May 24, 2014 09:40
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Evil Mastermind posted:Well, in SotC you had to come up with two aspects per phase, so you had to have two for your story and two for each guest spot. That's on top of your two for high concept and...whatever the second phase was. Yeah, I poached some of the ship-building stuff from Bulldogs for a couple Star Wars one-shots I ran, but I deliberately used a different Aspect setup, because man oh man do we not need that many Aspects.
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May 24, 2014 18:40
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So I'm having some trouble conveying to my players in a FATE homebrew game that raw mechanical power just isn't the be-all, end-all of the system. It's a game that switches between two focuses: adventure episodes (lasting about 1-2 sessions, dealing with exotic locales and external problems), and slice-of-life episodes (lasting about as long as the adventure ones, but dealing more with internal problems and character conflicts). Each character gets a 'Adventure Mode' skill setup and a 'Slice of Life' setup, while their Aspects remain constant across both. My problem comes in when one player is trying to stack all their stunts into spellcasting alone. In this particular homebrew's setting, characters with a broad base of several spells to cast are unheard of - you have one, maybe two spells your character can cast, and that's it. Bear in mind that I explained this premise to them before we even started on character creation, and that the rest of the group is more on-board with the fact that slice-of-life stuff is going to be A Thing, and that it won't involve a lot of physical combat. I'm worried because this guy is potentially locking himself out of participation in a lot of the slice-of-life stuff, since his spell is pretty much only useful for fighting - which doesn't come up much in the slice-of-life stuff, ideally. So the way I see it, I have a couple options here: 1.) Make stunt bonuses non-stacking. I'd rather not do this because in this particular homebrew, you grow in power by picking up more stunts. Skill changes are kind of rare. 2.) Let him get hosed over by his over-specialization. I don't want to do this one, because, well, it's not fun for him, it's not fun for me, and it's not fun for the other players.
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Oct 27, 2014 06:14
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Transient People posted:Is the one spell you get going to make him utterly worthless if he isn't picking something with broad utility? If the answer's no, just let him roll with it and allow a Plotty Bullshit Switch down the line if he decides it's too limiting. The spell he created is basically 'Magic Missile, except it only works on living things' - so yes, he will be functionally useless outside of a fight. I've talked to him about it, and we've agreed to run with it, since he likes the character concept and feels that this spell fits it best - but I'll probably let him swap it out for a more general one later if I'm right. The other players are on board with it, too, so we'll see what happens.
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Oct 27, 2014 22:11
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e X posted:For one thing, if combat really is his area of competence, I wouldn't take it away from him. One of the great things about FATE is that even non combat skills can easily be really useful in a fight, so maybe the other characters could take a support role without feeling left out? Oh, I'm not. In adventuring mode, he's the party's go-to "Make it die" character, and we're all fine with that. e X posted:The other thing is, how exactly do his stunts look? If they are just a bunch of '+2 to skill under condition X', I can see the problem, since those are really the worst stunts, but otherwise, if he just managed to come up with a lot of cool stunts that compliment each other, don't just knock him down for that. His stunts are literally all tied in to spellcasting in one way or another. Having spoken with him just now - between the post you quoted and this one - it appears that I was the idiot here. He wants to play a character who is out of his element during the slice-of-life social and worldbuilding stuff, but who still has skills that explain why he's hanging around with everyone else during those parts. So, my mistake on that one.
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Oct 27, 2014 22:28
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petrol blue posted:Huh, that really is limited. I guess 'only works on living things' could be stretched to mean 'goes through walls and/or armour', but I'm struggling to see a non-combat use for it. Umm... pest extermination? He wants to play a 'fish out of water' character type - someone who's not really had friends until he joins up with the other PCs. Considering that he's the kind of person who can walk into a crowd of strangers, and within five minutes have names and stories of most of them, it should be a lot of fun.
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Oct 28, 2014 05:09
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petrol blue posted:I'm lucky enough to have a group that naturally works with their characters' flaws anyway - tonight's 'obsolete hacker' character was happily pointing out the ways he couldn't interface with X, and I tried to reward self-compels, my problem is more that I tend to just roll with whatever they suggest and wherever the story leads, rather than hauling it there with compels. Another possibility is that your players simply aren't thinking about compels; there are a couple of ways to handle that. First, it does sound like you have a LOT of Aspects; I suggest cutting back a bit. I usually have the PC Aspects on a 'cheat sheet', a Campaign/Arc Aspect that describes the overall mood/tenor of the current arc, and maybe an Aspect or two for significant NPCs in the current story arc. Not every NPC needs Aspects; mooks and faceless NPCs don't usually need them, named NPCs (lieutenants of the Big Bad or major allies) need one at most, and the Big Bad is really the only one who needs more than one or two that matter outside of a confrontation. Secondly, feel free to put a wall in front of the PCs that they need to spend Fate Points to get around. Set the difficulty for a challenge at +6 or something like that (obviously one that at least one PC has a +4 in a skill that can help them get around), then put them in a situation where their Aspects apply. Thirdly, and going back to my statement about not thinking about compels: there are two ways to address this. One is to interrupt the players' discussion of what to do to offer a compel. The other, and the one that I've found to be more successful is to simply give them the Fate Point when they use their own Aspects to put an obstacle in their way. For example, one of my players has the Aspect "Strong On Theory, Weak On Practice". They were contemplating a magical murder mystery, and while he gleefully rolled Lore to try and theorize how it might have been done, he flat-out refused to roll for a Will roll to detect how it was actually done, saying that his character, as per the Aspect, would have no idea how to go about doing it. I gave him a Fate Point for that, since it was effectively a self-compel.
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Nov 7, 2014 05:22
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