I'm getting close to launching a Fate (core) campaign! Help? Advice?

The Game Room
1

Okay, so it has been a couple of years since I started this thread.

“Recommend a table-top pencil-and-paper role-playing game”
https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=861080
Social distancing has finally given me time to consider launching a campaign. I had acquired the Fate core rulebook, and some Fate dice and cards. I’ve set up a Discord space for communication, and a Roll20 space for gameplay. I’ve got a couple of people who are game to try it out.

The Fate SRD website (https://fate-srd.com/) seems to suggest Trello as a good tool for keeping track of information

It has been many years since I mastered a game. I have a setting and range of characters in mind, but I was wondering if there was a quick-start scenario/adventure I could easily adapt.

Any advice? Cautions?

I’m very excited about how this system works, but I’m not entirely solid on all the concepts, like “aspect,” which seems to be the most important thing in the game.

I love its flexibility and its focus on roleplay, and the way that the players co-operate with the game master in constructing the world and the events. But I want to be prepared and give my players a cracking good story.

I’ve created a town with certain characters in it. And I’ve made a list of player character archetypes that I’ll give to my players for consideration, like —

— The"Mastermind" “Smart One” or “Brains” Scholar/Librarian/Intellectual/Puzzle Solver/Information Gatherer

— The “Thief” or “Rogue” “Fixer” Spook/Sneakthief/Guy with Shady Connections

— The “Hitter” “Big One” or “Brawn” The Tank/The “Muscle” Brick/The Weapons Expert

— The “Hacker” The Gadget Guru/Electrician/Computer Expert

— The “Grifter” The Charmer/Trickster The “Beauty”

— The Literal Wizard Magician/Spellcaster/Mystic

— The Mechanic/Repairman/Driver/Pilot

— The “Ranger” The “Burglar” Athlete/Acrobat/Naturist

I figure the players can combine these kinds of archetypes to construct a unique character.

The setting will be a roughly contemporary small American town, but I’m open to letting gameplay determine the nature of the world—scifi, magic, Eldritch horror, cloak-and-dagger, whatever—but I want to have some prepared idea of what the obstacles/enemies/challenges/stages will be, even if there ends up being considerable deviation.

Any advice? Encouragement? Experience? Recommendations? Resources?

2

About a week ago, I was thinking about the thread from 2(!) years ago and I wondered which game you might have chosen to play.

I don’t have a lot of advice for you. I’ve only played in FATE, not GM’d and even then I didn’t get to play much.

The Aspects were crucial, though, and my GM didn’t like my construction of Aspects for my character. It was tough to get them made. My character was a pilot in the Atomic Robo world. I remember most of one Aspect; the sentence was something like ‘[character] can fly any aircraft like he was born with wings.’ The sentence wasn’t exactly that, but something to the effect that he could pilot very well. Later, my friends said that the GM must have been a bit inexperienced because my Aspects were fine.

The game didn’t bog down at all in mechanics during play. Very fluid.

I am excited that you are gonna get to play!

3

Cool! Do you recall your aspects?

4

Only the one I alluded to that was about being a great pilot:

‘[character] can fly any aircraft like he was born with wings.’
I remember that I had three Aspects overall; I don’t know if three is standard for Core Fate or if that is what we played.

5

The concept of character Aspects and Compels are absolutely key to running FATE. If you aren’t really “sold”, i.e. excited about the opportunities they provide for collaborative roleplay, this really is not the system for you. FATE is what I would call a character-centric roleplaying system; it focuses on what the characters are or wish to do at the expense of a particularly coherent narrative experience per se (although a good gamemaster who can improvise can weave the threads into a standard three act structure) and it certainly does not reward elaborate plotting and deep preparation on the part of the GM.

There are a lot of generic rules-like systems available like Savage Worlds that are plot-centric but don’t bog down in the mechanics of the system that may be better suited to what you want to do. If you wanted something more simulationist but still easy to pick up I’d suggest Chaosium’s Basic Role Playing (the BRP “Gold Book”) or Mythras Imperative which use a consistent percentile mechanic, but if you just want a loose-running narrative game, I think Savage Worlds will probably work better.

I would also caution on trying to run this kind of collaborative game on an online platform like Roll20.net. These systems work best when players can scrum together and feed off one another, which is tough to do on a videocon system where people talking at once just results in confusion. It’s not impossible but you really need players who know one another and are comfortably in sort of passing the baton back and forth rather than all trying to vie for the microphone.

Something else you may want to rethink is “letting gameplay determine the nature of the world—scifi, magic, Eldritch horror, cloak-and-dagger, whatever”; it is one thing to have some loose plot threads and let the players determine where the actual story goes, which is the entire premise of Fiasco, but you need to pick a genre or mix of genres, and then build out from there. Otherwise you risk ending up with a very discordant tone and story. For example, if the game is going to have “Eldrich horror” elements, you need to sow the seeds for that early on with a foreboding backdrop and clues that the world is not what it seems with deep and ancient pervasive evil. If it is space opera, however, then you probably want to have a more grounded set of physical properties and a world that is more pseudo-realist (even if it does have artificial gravity, humanoid aliens, and FTL travel).

You can mix and match, of course—cloak & dagger with horror and science fantasy elements is the essence of cyberpunk-type stories—but as the gamemaster you need to set the tone for the players even if they are guiding the story with their decisions and character motivations. Even in a collaborative storytelling game, you need to guide the narrative so it isn’t just a bunch of random scenes, unless, of course, you are playing Fiasco (in which the game rules explicitly drive the narrative to a conclusion). Don’t just throw a bunch of ideas out and let the game become a spitballing session, because that is how you get things like Lost and The Rise of Skywalker; you owe your players guidance to make a story of their ideas, rather than just trying to follow those ideas to some kind of hopeful monster of a plot.

Whatever you choose to do, good luck with it, and let us know how it goes.

Stranger

6

My Pathfinder group plays once a month but our last face-to-face was Feb 15th. We skipped March and had a 3.5 hour video session that was mostly planning a raid that our party is going to conduct on a dragon in a clock tower.

We generally seem to want to wait to have that session face-to-face. In the meantime, we are likely to meet on video calls to play other games. The ones we seem to be leaning towards are:
[ul]
[li]Dungeon World - old school style with new school and light mechanics using the Apocalypse Engine[/li][li]Fiasco - I gave a long post about how to play Fiasco in the older thread[/li][li]Purgatory House - a one-off game (or many one-offs) where the party ends up in a haunted house and must get out, given some stipulations. The core mechanic is blackjack. The party has to survive a number of times through the deck and then get out. A second deck determines room contents. The GM/House can win.[/li][li]Microscope - A cooperative activity in world building. At the lower levels of detail, it can have RPG scenes. Many folks use Microscope to build a detail-filled world in which to later set regular RPGs. Microscope would help a GM to tease references to Earendil or the Clone Wars into a fantasy or sci-fi setting during session one because you would have invented Earendil or the Clone Wars already.[/li][/ul]
These all seem to be easy to do on video without even going to Rolld20, Tabletop Simulator, etc. Pittsburgh is no hot spot for Corona but it still looks like video for months for my RPG groups.

7

Ha! Stranger on a Train got in between my two posts because I am slow to compose!

8

Five is standard for Fate Core: a High Concept, a Trouble, and three additional.

Since Ascenray’s original thread, I’ve started running a Star Wars game using Fate. (If the Origins game convention had actually occurred this summer, one could have played it with me as GM there.) Some examples of the aspect arrays from the pregenerated characters I’ve made for that game (set during the Original Trilogy / Rebellion era):

High Concept: Jedi Scholar
Trouble: Wanted by the Imperial Inquisition
Other Aspects: I’ve Lived a Lifetime in the Shadows, I Refuse To Give In To Hatred, Defender of Those Who Cannot Defend Themselves

High Concept: Wookiee Gladiator
Trouble: Hot Tempered, Even By Wookiee Standards
Aspects: The Biggest Guy in the Room, My People Are Oppressed By the Empire, I’m More Than Just a Big Dumb Fighter

High Concept: Catburglar
Trouble: Things Seem to Find a Way Into My Pockets
Aspects: I Relate to Machines Better Than People, Breaking Into Places Is My Favorite Game, Adrenaline Junkie

However, I think that Fate is at its strongest when the players work together to develop their aspects during the first session, as described in the Core rules.

9

Also, a bit of advice for running online. As I noted in another thread here recently about D&D, Roll20 can be, well, finicky. It’s a bandwidth hog (even if you aren’t using it for voice and video), and can have a steep learning curve, especially for those who aren’t particularly computer-savvy. I’d definitely recommend doing a test-run of it with your group to make sure that it’ll work well for everyone.

I run Fate purely using Discord; you can add a dice-rolling bot to your Discord server (I use one called “rollem”), and even the guy in our group who has really bad rural broadband service can play without an issue.

10

I said I’m not solid, not sold. Meaning, I’m not sure I necessarily understand the concept thoroughly enough to be able to write aspects for any and every character, object, or situation. I like what I’ve seen about how it works, but I’m not 100 percent confident that I can invent aspects on the fly.

11

Yeah, I might have been thinking of three additionals, not a complete set.

Try writing some here and see what kenobi 65 says. I am no expert but I liked the ones kenobi 65 wrote here:

12

Sorry, my error.

Writing Aspects is pretty easy. Just think about the essential qualities of the character, object, or location. For instance, Bruce Banner would have Aspects of “I’m always angry”, “You don’t want to make me mad”, “Hulk SMASH!!”, and so forth, while Thor would have aspects like “Bring me more drink!”, “I trust my brother even though he stabs me in the back”, and “I am worthy!” It actually forces you to ponder the essence of the character (or object, or location) so it will actually serve you well even outside of FATE just as a general narrative tool. Making them up on the fly might be a bit harder, but really, you can construct a story with a few key elements and NPCs with their particular Aspects and then let the story develop from there.

The more difficult issue with FATE is letting go of certain elements of narrative, and just rolling with whatever the players come up with, which requires a large degree of improvisation, and also a significant amount of metagaming. In fact, in a sense, FATE is all about metagaming because the players are helping you construct the story rather than just playing characters within it. You have to be really comfortable with sharing that responsibility or the system just doesn’t really work the way it is intended.

There is a Tabletoip episode where Wil Wheaton and Felicia Day play a FATE game run by a professional screenwriter, and is pretty much the exemplar of what a FATE game should be…but of course it is being run by a professional screenwriter and several actor/creator/gamers who have experience in improvisation. If your players are improv enthusiasts or community theater geeks, then it’s perfect; if they are players who wait for a prompt from you and like to hack & slash their way through dungeons, it is unlikely to be satisfying to them.

So, consider your audience and the platform you are running on to see if you think it’ll actually go smoothly. Also, you mention a campaign, and while FATE does have rules for campaign play, I’ve only seen it run as a one-shot (for which the system excels because of how quick vibrant characters can be created and allowed to fill in backstory on the fly) and don’t really see it as suitable for more than just running a story arc. The sandbox nature of play means that you just can’t really build into larger themes and influences you expect in campaign play unless your players are really in sync with what your vision of the world, and even if they are it becomes a lot of metagaming just to create a consistent narrative.

Stranger

13

I absolutely second everything Stranger on a Train wrote.

I’d also suggest that you read the “Book of Hanz” before you begin. It was originally a series of blog posts by a gamer named Rob Hanz, explaining and explicating his take on what Fate is and how it differs from “traditional” RPGs like D&D. It has been pretty much universally applauded by the community of Fate players, and by the creators themselves. It’s part of the Fate SRD and also available as a PDF download from the Evil Hat website.

I’d also recommend the webcomic from Up to Four Players explaining the Fate Core rules. This is a really good resource to share with players before they start playing.

Finally, the one non-free resource I’d strongly recommend is Atomic Robo: The Roleplaying Game. It’s also available in PDF from DriveThruRPG. It is, in my opinion, not just the single best RPG book for teaching you how to play Fate, it’s the single best RPG book for any RPG for teaching you how to play that RPG. It uses re-purposed panels from the Atomic Robo webcomic to literally illustrate how to play and run Fate. It’s simultaneously genuinely fun to read and makes it very clear how Fate actually plays at the table (in my opinion, the single biggest weakness of Fate Core is that it’s often not clear how to actually implement it in actual play at the table).

If you’re not totally committed to Fate Core, by the way, I’d also recommend taking a look at https://www.evilhat.com/home/fate-condensed/. It’s currently only available as a PDF, but it’s Pay-What-You-Want. It’s a slightly stripped down version of Fate Core that also streamlines and clarifies some bits of Fate Core that a lot of players found problematic. Evil Hat is insistent that it’s not Fate Core Revised, but a variant implementation of Fate Core…but it’s pretty much Fate Core Revised.

14

Actually, this part I don’t completely agree with. I think Fate can be used for campaign play, but it may require a different mindset from players used to an F20 zero-to-hero progression. Fate is designed for characters to grow and change narratively over the course of a campaign, but not to grow much mechanically. They can change Aspects and Skills and Stunts frequently to reflect narrative growth and change, but they don’t actually increase the total numbers much. For some players, this is a deal-breaker, especially for a mid-to-long term campaign, but with the right group of players, a campaign is definitely do-able.

Two particular Fate games come immediately to mind. The recent Fate of Cthulhu is very much designed for campaign play. Although, the campaign is definitely self-limiting. The heroes are attempting to stop the Apocalypse, and once they stop it, the campaign is over. So, it’s a sort of mini-series campaign on rails, not an open-ended sandbox.

Dresden Files Accelerates is also very much designed for campaign play - and for open-ended, sandbox campaign play, at that. (BTW, if you have any interest in the Dresdenverse, the earlier Dresden Files RPG from Evil Hat, The Dresden Files Roleplaying Game, is an absolutely gorgeous, extremely well-written RPG adaptation that’s also, unfortunately, nearly unplayable, unless everyone involved is really, really, intuitively, comfortable with the Fate game system).

15

Fair enough. I’ve never played it in campaign form, but I’m sure it can be done at least from the standpoint of growing the characters. I tend to view “campaigns” as being a series of constructed arcs with an overarching narrative path and ultimate resolution that the gamemaster is guiding (e.g. the Titansgrave: The Ashes of Valkana campaign) where I would regard Dresden Files as more of a sandbox with episodic adventures with some loose connective material that could support building to an eventual resolution. It still requires collaboration between the players and the GM so that should be considered; in my experience, players don’t generally want to do that much work, but if you have a special group of creative people it may just be their cup of tea.

Personally, if I were looking for a system that was specifically about developing and maturing the characters from a thematic sense I would probably either go toward Mythras (my default BRP-like system with it’s unique Passions mechanic) or Burning Wheel. However, both of those systems are very rules-heavy and require a lot of engagement by the players to work correctly (I haven’t even fully read through Burning Wheel but with the right group it seems like it would be fantastic), and an overly aggressive player can be killed off or permanently disabled quickly, so they are definitely not lightweight games for introductory players.

For what the o.p. describes doing, I’d really recommend looking at Savage Worlds (free two page PDF of basic rules in comic form) or another genre-independent rules-lite system like Powered by the Apocalypse or Cortex. (FTR, I’ve never played either but they are very popular with the rules-lite crowd.)

Stranger

16

Savage Worlds is absolutely my favorite RPG. It is very flexible, explicitly designed for the GM to tinker with, and hits my sweet spot for the balance between “fluff” and “crunch”. Fast! Fun! Furious! That being said, by modern standards, it is definitely not rules-lite. In some ways, it’s actually crunchier than D&D 5E. But, as I stated, it’s my favorite, so I’d definitely recommend anyone at least take a look at it. And the PDF is only $10.

Powered by the Apocalypse is a sort of open-source RPG game engine that has gotten a lot of different implementations. Ironically, I didn’t really like the original, Apocalypse World, but I think some of the implementations by other authors are downright brilliant. My personal favorites are Dungeon World, Masks: The New Generation, and Monster of the Week. For online gaming, I know Dungeon World has a character sheet on Roll20, and you can of course use D&D Roll20 assets with it. All of that being said, PbtA is actually in some ways even more narratively demanding than Fate. If you’re comfortable with the collaborative story-building nature of Fate, I think a lot of PbtA implementations are more than worth taking a look at. If that’s what you find most difficult about Fate, though, I’m not sure I’d recommend PbtA.

Cortex is…an odd duck. I’ve got a bunch of books for it, but I’ve never actually played it. The older Cortex games (Serenity, Supernatural), are pretty straight-forward, “traditional” RPGs, and that version of the system struck me as similar to Savage Worlds but not quite as flexible or streamlined. I’d also say that’s definitely a YMMV situation, though. The new implementation, which is currently under development as “Cortex Prime” after a Kickstarter and just in the last couple of weeks finally released a more-or-less complete PDF to backers, is…an even odder duck. It struck me as kind of a tweener. The dice mechanics and some other elements are reminiscent of Savage Worlds and its action-forward philosophy, while other elements are much closer to Fate and its narrative-first philosophy. The result, for me, is that I’d rather just play Savage Worlds or Fate, rather than something that doesn’t quite match what either does as well as they do. Again, though, I think this is a YMMV situation, and I know there’s a community of gamers that enjoy it, so it might be worth taking a look at it.

17

So, Acsenray, how is it going?

18

I’m still studying the system. It’s been many decades since I mastered a campaign and I’m a little apprehensive about being a boring DM.

19

Just a suggestion: don’t worry about mastering the system; just learn the basic conflict resolution mechanics (in the case of FATE that is pretty simple because all you can really do is attack, defend, overcome, or create an Advantage) and don’t sweat the details. You can add more rules later, but the purpose of the rules is really to support a narrative in which the players have agency, and anything that doesn’t serve that purpose can be ignored, modified, or replaced as you go along. One of the biggest problems with that really popular fantasy roleplaying system is that with all of its class and race restrictions, it’s abstract combat mechanics, a lack of comprehensive non-combat task resolution, and an alignment system that is basically meaningless (What is ‘true neutral’ anyway? Beige?) is that the multitude of rules ends up creating a bunch of really artificial constraints without giving a real sense on why a character can’t or won’t do a certain thing like wear metal armor. A system like FATE, on the other hand, is pretty much fully open for the characters to do anything that makes sense in the context of the character, including things that may seem contradictory. If your hafling wants to be a great paladin, well, maybe he’s just really ambitious and ‘can do this all day’, and voila, you now have a basic Aspect and a hook for a character arc.

Which, by the way, should really be the point of the game; at the end of the day, as the game master or referee, your job isn’t to feed the characters a narrative line to follow unwaveringly but instead to give them the chance to find their character’s true purpose and go through a transformation. Think of any memorable lead character in any movie and you’ll realize that what makes them memorable isn’t the story they experience but the challenge and transformation they experience. Indiana Jones goes from being a jaded treasure hunter to a true believer in the supernatural. Michael Corleone goes from being a Marine seeking to distance himself from his Mafia family to a reluctant but capable leader of it (even though he loses everything he once treasured in doing so). John McClane goes from being an arrogant ass who can’t just accept his wife’s career to a repentant savior willing to literally throw himself off of buildings and walk over glass to be with her. And so forth. Your players characters should each be the heroes of their own individual stories, and your job as a referee is to weave those together into a collective narrative where they each have a chance to develop, fail, overcome, sacrifice, and ultimately reach some memorable achievement.

Another suggestion; forget about a campaign for the moment and just start with a simple story. A jewel heist, a mysterious and ancient tome of horror, a murder the authorities can’t or don’t care to solve; just give them a reason to be in a room together trying to solve a problem. The campaign will develop later as you see what they like and what they can do. This isn’t to say that you should just string them along with one random challenge after another hoping that a narrative arc will appear, but you don’t need to go in with an entire story line plotted out because I guarantee it will change, and for that matter, so may your players as they decide they don’t like the character they have or they want to play a different type of game. Just give them something to start on and for you all to get familiar with the system and the ways you may want to collectively modify it, and go from there. Once you figure out what the group likes and how they mesh, then a suitable narrative will come to you organically.

Stranger

20

That’s great advice.

By the way I picked up the Atomic Robo book and some other stuff from DriveThru RPG