The FATE system is a highly successful one in a relatively wide range of genres (basically anything where the characters are expected to be very competent — not necessarily superheroes or even heroes, but competent). It seems unwise to dick with something that works, but part of its success is its malleability — it’s not just resistant to dickery, but rather it thrives on it. When you get your teeth into it the temptation to bend it to your will is substantial.

Partly you bend it to your will in play. That is, it can be played extremely well by using the rules as written to produce unexpected effects. Weak players will succeed less often than strong players. A group with one strong player can dominate, tactically, a group with no such person. It’s a tactical system and it rewards mastery.

But that’s not what this is about because when we play we’re usually also designing and so we are bending it to a different will: the will to make a new game that uses (in the dirtiest senses) FATE to accomplish our own ends. I think that one of the deepest savageries performed on the system was our own game, Diaspora, in which our objective was to play the desperate, broke, beleaguered competence heroes of the Traveller universe using a game intended to deliver pulp superheroes.

Now with our new games we’re pushing even harder — hard enough that it’s probably not reasonable to call them FATE games. Certainly they owe some debt to FATE (some more than others) and certainly at least one will use FUDGE dice, but they aren’t really reasonably FATE games any more. But let’s look at FATE because the game that uses the most of FATE, Soft Horizon, is on my radar at the moment.

Much as we are often loathe to admit it, role-playing game systems are basically fluff surrounding a resolution system. You invariably make characters who are described by the elements that interact with the mechanisms of the game to say yes or no to, “Can I do …” questions. One or more mechanisms exist to answer the question. They bring character description metrics to bear on a randomizer (or not — the randomizer is part of the gears not part of the definition) to find an answer. Here’s FATE’s central machine:

My character is this awesome (SKILL) + this consistent (FUDGE dice) + because of these things (ASPECTS).

Yes I am ignoring Stunts. Stunts are interesting because they aren’t here. I may talk about them later. I may not. I have a love-hate relationship with Stunts. They are a kludge that works really well, and so I despise them aesthetically but I need them. I am convinced there is a better way but currently they are inadequately defined and so it’s hard to get a grip on improving them. I think I have a path. But later. Patience.

So the SKILL rank is how awesome you are. As a designer ¹ this informs us about the skill structure. Armed with this knowledge, we can make sense of skill pyramids versus skill columns versus unstructured point buy versus whatever other variation is out there.

The skill pyramid, for example, is several declarations. In the 5-cap we use in Diaspora (and I will maintain it is optimal and am talking here about why) it represents 15 skills which is almost half of the total set of skills. So, the bottom five are things you can do. You know about them. They aren’t your focus. Because there is a disparity of four points between top and bottom which is a BIG DEAL in FATE, you are going to try to avoid using them. This creates an interesting dynamic at the table — with Computer 1 I am not awesome at computers. Consequently, even though I can make sense of them, I am going to find a way to solve problems that doesn’t involve computers. If I have Stealth 5, I am going to break in myself rather than hack. That’s a no-brainer. So we discover that the lower ranks of skills are not so much opportunities for different kinds of action but rather reinforcement of the awesomeness of the pinnacle skills.

The mid-range is where a lot of incidental action occurs where we are not super interested in success. This is where we go when we are partially invested in success and think failure might even be cool. Or sometimes it’s where we have to go when we can’t find a story in the apex. Ranks two and three are interesting spaces. They often represent desperate, fish-out-of-water scenes. These are the places where the character has to act even though she is not competent.

The peak is where the play mostly resides. This is where a good player is always going to steer the action. A choice of Stealth as an apex for the pyramid is shouting at the referee, “I am a spy! I sneak! I will solve un-sneaky problems with sneaking whenever I can! Make me sneak.” It is a character class. These three skills (the rank 4 and rank 5 ones) are the core competencies of the character and therefore the key definition of the character. ²

These things are not core features of FATE. They are core features of the pyramid. If you don’t want this to happen, then you choose a different shape. If you do want these things to happen, this is the shape. So that’s SKILL. That’s what the character is good at and what she is going to use as tools when in trouble.

Now the dice. The choice of FUDGE dice, a range from -4 to +4 with a strong peak at the zero, is a declaration of consistency: characters usually get the results they expect. Sometimes there are crazy outliers, but for the most part you are going to get a level of success roughly commensurate with the skill you choose. Those of you out there who are still awake will note how this feeds into the behavioural stuff I just talked about with respect to skills.

So here’s another place to dick around that has profound effects: by changing the probability curve you change the reasonable expectations of the player and you therefore change the tactical value of skill selection. With a wider range of randomness it will be less relevant which skill you choose (if you have a range of +/- 100, to be absurd, it doesn’t matter what skill you use at all really unless there’s a crazy powerful peak at zero). With a narrower range (or no dice at all — try that some time if you’re the exploratory type) skill selection is critical. The FUDGE range creates some very desirable effects that are thrown out of whack with even minor changes. We experimented with all kinds of d6 variations but ultimately none of them rewarded good skill selection as well as the FUDGE dice while retaining enough uncertainty to be exciting ³. So FATE system gives us a certain quality of consistency with the FUDGE dice that has certain effects. In some games they are desirable. In some games not. This is a place to tweak carefully.

Finally, the most interesting narrative component of the resolution, which answers the question, “How come I am so awesome?” Aspects are tiny little stories about the character that the player can leverage for advantage (at a price) during conflict. Varying how many and how much they cost is a knob you can turn pretty eagerly without breaking the game and the effects are not all that powerful. You can yank this knob (LOL) all over the place and maintain a high quality game without even affecting the capacity of the system to deliver its intent. This is the least interesting place to dick around, in my opinion. But there are undesirable behaviours that you can add mechanism to avoid.

First, it kind of sucks when a player leans on  all of her aspects at once because she has the fate points to do it and the narrative is strained, but she did do the tactical work to flex the economy so that she had the power to leverage. It’s a tough balance, honestly, and it’s one that we chose to handle mechanically rather than leave in the hands of the referee: we introduced the concept of “scope”. Basically, any Aspect has a scope — a context in which it exists. So characters have ten Aspects and they are all in the same scope: the character. A scene might have an Aspect. An enemy might have one. A zone might have one. Each of these are scopes. Now you can say things like, “you may only tag one Aspect from each scope.” Now the player must search the environment for advantage. This in turn rewards the group for placing aspects on the environment. This rewards teamwork with success. In some games this is highly desirable.

In some games it is not. This is really important. Diaspora is not all games. It’s not the only game anyone should ever play. It’s a game in which it is rarely the case that each character has the opportunity to deliver a “killing blow” ⁴ absent the assistance of others. This undermines the “I hit with my sword” litany that some combat systems devolve into because the chance of success is actually very low if everyone acts alone hitting with their sword. Instead, characters play supporting roles, planting aspects in new scopes, so that one person can grab the spotlight (and not just the “I am narrating” spotlight that we usually mean, but rather the “I am the center of attention, the source of awesome, the leading role” spotlight) and deliver an awesome success to resolve the conflict.

That’s not always the story you want to tell.

So the way you handle aspects changes the tone of the game substantially.

Okay so there is a lot more to FATE, right? I mean there must be. Most FATE games run hundreds of pages. Well here’s the thing — we have no idea what FATE actually is. Right now, FATE is a series of divergent examples. So up there is what FATE is to me. It doesn’t need anything else to be FATE. How awesome + how consistent + how come so awesome. Now, it’s fair to say that practically every game everywhere uses some clear variation on the first two thirds of that. So aspects are what make FATE novel. That’s it. There are fiddly coolnesses out there like the Time Track and stress and consequences and all that, but they are mostly derivative ideas (derivative of aspects I mean) and decorations on the core. You want a FATE v3 SRD? Skill + Dice + Aspects.

Now I know I’m leaving out the fate point economy. A year ago I wouldn’t have but since we started doing the dice for AP promo I’ve read a lot of actual play and here’s a dirty secret that doesn’t get spoken a lot: the fate point economy is far more dependent on style of play than on mechanism. The same rules generate vastly different fate point behaviour at different tables. That suggests that it isn’t as important as we sometimes think, because it seems to be subservient to play rather than driving play. That’s cool — even awesome — but not what we thought was true at one time. And so I’m not going to draw out compels and fate point bidding and refresh and all that. It’s important, but it doesn’t drive play as much as we hope. It gets reliable results at a table you know, but at a new table under a new referee, different things happen. With this five guys, ten fate points never get used up. With this other five guys using identical rules, players are begging compels by the second hour. With another five guys (who shall not be named) there’s a subtle player vs. player action happening with players trying to manipulate each other using fate points as a social currency. The fate point economy is important, even essential, but its effects have too much variation to talk about with any authority. This is the knob you hand to the consumer of the game: twist this wherever suits you.

Okay, so Soft Horizon. Soft Horizon is the only game in the upcoming list that is certainly a FATE derivative, but I don’t think it’s FATE in the sense expected by the OGL for FATE. It will still use the OGL, but I don’t think we owe it to FATE. It’s still Skill + FUDGE dice + Aspects, though, so it’s that much FATE. Essential FATE.

More later: this is plenty long.

–BMurray