What is the FATE system?

This is getting asked all over the place, though most vocally over at RPG.net and on the FATE mailing list. It’s interesting because the current incarnation of FATE is basically a list of exemplar works that declare themselves to be FATE. This is not actually all that helpful because each tries to bring some new ideas to bear (it’s not fun just applying paint to an old game and calling it new — you want to improve it) and file off stuff from other exemplars that doesn’t work for you. And so the resulting definition of FATE is the intersection of all these exemplars and the intersection is both small and shrinking.

So my declaration is this (and it’s typical B.Murray vaguery): until there’s an official document declaring what FATE v3 is, no one knows what FATE v3 is.

Okay, so now I can tell you what I think it is.

First, FATE v3 is a core resolution mechanism that is not unique to it: fixed measure of competence + fortune + narrative benefit versus target value or opposed roll. The common expression of this, or rather the canonical one as in Spirit of the Century, is Skill + Fudge dice + Aspect invoke/tag. I think it’s fair to say that a game that doesn’t do some variation of this is probably not FATE v3. But lots of games do pretty much this and are certainly not FATE games.

So FATE v3 is also characters with Aspects. And so we need to define Aspects. Characters have Aspects if they have one or more descriptive phrases that can confer mechanical benefit (see “narrative benefit” above) at the cost of a narrative currency: the fate point. And so here I will say that the fate point and therefore the existence of a fate point economy (which at a minimum is used for mechanical benefit) is a FATE v3 requirement. I think that we also need to include the Compel as essential: there has to be a way to get as well as spend fate points.

I think that’s it. Everything else can come and go. Consequences are special Aspects. Stress tracks are completely detachable. Stunts are wildly malleable (as we’ve seen) and don’t need to exist at all. But a game where you roll dice and add skills, then narrate in your features and pay for the result is FATE. A game where you are shilling around for more of these points is also FATE.

Well that means that a good canonical statement of what is necessary to be FATE v3 shouldn’t take more than a half-dozen pages or so. And then six hundred pages of stuff you can glue onto it.

The end result of this is that I don’t know if any of the upcoming VSCA games are going to be FATE games now. Let’s look.

Hollowpoint. Dice pools that owe more to ORE than anything else and no points economy at all. Aspects are their own economy, burned when used. Certainly not FATE.

Soft Horizon. Tricky one because we’re just now thinking hard about changes. Certainly it’s FATE-like — the resolution is skill + dice + aspects, but the dice are in flux (could be |d6 – d6| — see the skunkworks). So far it retains a fate point economy as well, so I’ll call this one FATE on my own terms, but it could be debated.

Soulscape. I don’t know. We need to revisit this design before we know what it is. It is imagined as a pretty straightforward FATE v3 game but that was a long time ago and I think it could benefit from something more deliberately addressing its premises.

Chimaera. This game is, unsurprisingly, the most chimaeric. It uses a cool dice pool mechanism that’s distinctly unFATElike, and uses an Aspects-as-economy system not unlike Hollowpoint rather than a strict fate point economy. It also has some very cool dice-as-record-keeping tools that are fun to manipulate and also very much not FATE. I think we’ll call this “partially inspired by” but to be honest it’s more inspired by the play we got from FATE games than by the games themselves.

I guess that as players and designers we are continuously evolving our games and we don’t feel any particular attachment to whatever the core of FATE is, partially because it hasn’t been clearly stated. And I think that, even if it was, now we’d be as happy to say “it’s not FATE really” as “it’s another FATE game!” I mean, I get that there is a kind of built-in audience for FATE games just as with any other generic identity because there’s a community associated with it even though the definition is nebulous.

Maybe that’s at the heart of it — I would like for FATE to remain poorly defined exactly so that the community remains diverse and open to experiments and hacks. Hacking on it is what got me into design in the first place. It made the VSCA exist. I’d hate to lose that spirit in that community and a rich and rigid definition would risk killing it.

So here’s to FATE: skill + dice + aspects to resolve, and a fate point economy in action all through play. Hah, six pages indeed.

–BMurray

When people talk about physics, astronomy, and that sort of thing they get to fairly handily dismiss the most useless of all facts: the opinion. That’s hard to do when talking about games because so much of the discussion, however well-defined the terminology, is still essentially anecdotal. Indeed, the best practices I’ve seen so far for thinking about design require anecdotes in order to function. This is good. Even essential. I think we are nowhere close, and probably never will be anywhere close, to useful quantification of elements that have yet to even be adequately listed. There is no science here.

Opinion, however, has deep flaws that need to be addressed in order to communicate effectively. First, they tell us very little. They are only data points and they can only be coarsely quantified. Hell, they can only be coarsely counted. Worse, however, is that the vast majority of them are lies. Unless we believe that people don’t generally overstate their case (like I just did there) for effect when talking on the internet, we have to understand that when people tell us what they think, they are mostly full of shit. Myself included. There are no “people like us” in this argument.

So basically all you have for data is horseshit, and no really good way to organize it. I’m going to suggest a couple of axes on which to line this shit up, mostly so I can throw some out. A hidden (well, not now) objective is to talk about an excellent process for dealing with all internet discussion on anything.

Authority. Real or fabricated, some people speak to you with authority. Whether or not they speak to other people with authority is irrelevant for this purpose. Whether or not the authority is fabricated (as with a blog, where I can delete all dissent, creating a tendency away from dissent even if I don’t actually use the power) is not relevant. Your first useful attribute of any opinion is its authority.

Positivity. This is actually the meat of this post. I’m not talking about cheerleading here, but whether the opinion in question can be boiled down to a statement of preference. If it can, I propose that you absolutely ignore all opinions of the form “I don’t like it”.

I don’t care if you don’t like something. It actually contains zero information for me in any of my roles on the internet. Sure, if you’re at my table or eating my cooking or helping me write, I care about what you dislike. But in the distant anonymity of the internet discussion, talking about things that happen to people I will never meet and whose veracity I cannot measure, there is no way I can afford to care if you dislike something.

I want to be clear, though, that I care what you think. There’s just a specific and extremely common formulation of your thought that I don’t care about. “I don’t like Fudge dice,” for example. I don’t care if you don’t like a particular kind of randomizer. Whether you do or don’t doesn’t impact my designs at all. If you do like them, that’s a data point I can use — I can count raised hands and extract useful information. But counting negatives gets me nowhere because I don’t know the size of the population, and when I’m asking I’m really trying to get a feel for audience. An unknown number minus seven is still unknown. An unknown (positive) number plus seven is at least seven. “Aye” contains information. “Nay” not so much.

The reason this is important is because I want to assure myself that I’m not missing anything useful when I omit attention to negatives. Because I’m probably going to anyway because they create an environment that is immediately antagonistic.

We all know that when you say, “I dislike chocolate” that you are not trying to start a fight. But absent a reason for saying it (like, say, I am asking you specifically if you would like some chocolate cake tomorrow when you come over), maybe even that’s horseshit. If you don’t have an earnest objective to inform me, personally, for some actual reason, then you probably are just stirring shit up. You probably don’t see it that way. I usually don’t. Doesn’t mean it’s not true — every time someone does it, the conversation goes a certain ugly way, and we’ve all seen it, so we have a reasonable expectation it will happen again. Isn’t that sufficient to call “intent”? Doing something you know will have certain ramifications can surely be said to intend those ramifications, yeah?

Everyone is invested in the preferences. So when you say publicly and relatively anonymously that you despise 12-sided dice, those invested in their love of the dodecohedron will necessarily see their investment attacked. Now there’s no real way in which they believe that this statement will ultimately result in the loss of the 12-sided die throughout all of gaming, after objective analysis. But the visceral reaction to an attack on an investment is exactly that. It’s reflexive. Most people do it and therefore most people know it happens and therefore, again, I can only conclude that that is the intent behind the negative statement.

So there’s rule one for dealing with internet forum discussions, where people are mostly people you will never meet and don’t genuinely care about a whole lot. Ignore all negative statements of preference. People announcing that they dislike something (in this context) are giving you nothing but potential grief. And that filter will cut your reading at least in half. Depending one where you hang out, probably closer to 90% will be filtered away.

It might change your posting, too. It changed mine. A bit.

–BMurray

So I am apparently Geek of the Week over at RPG Geek this week. That’s going to keep me pretty busy as it entails answering every question they can throw at me, so there might not be much here at blue collar space while this goes on. It is so worth it though — RPG Geek is one of the greatest RPG communities yet invented in terms of both people and technology. It has a diversity of usership completely unmatched by any other site and seems to utterly lack any pre-disposed membership in gaming ideology cliques.

Because it rewards participation, however, it does have a lot more small publisher representation than Big Guys.

–BMurray