Rob Donoghue has some very nice things to say over at his blog, Some Space to Think, about Diaspora. Specifically, right now he’s jazzed about scope, which we introduce in no more than half a page of material on page six. My response to his observations and to those of his commenters is:

You guys are mowing all over my Soft Horizon lawn. :D A lot of this is ground I’ve covered while analyzing scopes but some of it is new as well, which is exciting. An upcoming project, Soft Horizon, uses scopes as a critical component of character generation and it pays in extraordinary ways.

During character creation, when asked to select an aspect, the player may choose either an aspect or a scope. She gets one scope for free — Myself. Every aspect must be under a scope. Refresh is the number of aspects only.

I’m sure you can already see most of the cool trade-offs being performed here. One that’s less obvious, perhaps, is that the player is making decisions about autonomy: when the ref compels an aspect under the scope “The Royal Family”, it’s the character’s obligations that are pushing. Were the aspect under “Myself” it would be a personal decision. The story of accepting or denying the compel must take the scope into account.

Another feature is the empty scope. What does it do? Well, when someone maneuvers to put an aspect on you (friendly most relevantly but also hostile) they must put it under an existing scope. So empty scopes are places where your friends can make you extra awesome by empowering your relationships (your DEMON SWORD or your CREW OF PIRATES).

Scopes rocks.

Scope is a remarkably powerful concept to introduce to Fate because it adds constraints and the one thing that Fate really needs is constraint. These kinds of constraints are the anchor points in the system (any system) that let us find interesting new mechanisms and interactions between mechanisms. Systems with no constraints have nowhere to get a grip and twist. And look how much you can twist this sucker with just this one constraint!

This is space that needs exploring — in any awesome system in which you can do anything, wonder how you can tie it down and make it beg. Once bound, it will be more obvious how to make it something more interesting.

BDSM metaphors are not typical for me, I promise.

–BMurray