That’s true within the rules, but it’s pretty easy to go fast and loose with it. When I run–not often enough–I’m very open to minor setting/character improv. If you’re fighting goblins in the forest, you don’t need to ask if there’s a rock to jump onto, just declare, “There’s a fallen log right here, right? and it’s leaning against a boulder? So I’m going to run up the log onto the boulder and then shoot an arrow at the goblin in front.” If you’re investigating a crime in a marketplace, you can tell me, “I look around until I see an urchin hiding in an alley; I motion him over.” It’s reasonably common in the game I play in for the DM to say, “This next scene is happening in a big cavern. Here’s a marker, draw the cavern out.”
That’s not nearly as much as in FATE or other systems, I believe, but it can make for a fun game.
Yeah, my current D&D character hails from the island nation of Ilben, ruled by the Empress Ilara, a wizard (they’ve recently won a war against orcs from the Far Reaches, ending with the chiefs swearing fealty to Ilara, which is why she’s an Empress instead of just a Queen). And none of that was in the game until I made it up, and some of it hasn’t even come out yet. I created an entire nation, a war, and a powerful NPC, with no problems and without having to spend any resources to do so. If it ever becomes relevant precisely where Ilben or the Far Reaches are, or exactly what the Empress’s stats are, then the DM (or me, if he doesn’t feel like it) will come up with something.
Now, if I wanted to say that the Ilbish military was coming to reinforce us against some threat, I couldn’t just do that… unless we had actually decided to travel to Ilben, talk to appropriately important people there, come up with some way to convince them to help, and made arrangements, in which case we could (if all of that worked, which it might or might not).
D&D 5th Edition has a starter set that includes a stripped down version of the rules, pre-generated characters, and an adventure/mini-campaign. It’s been very well-received, and seems to be widely regarded as a modern classic. It’s relatively cheap. As well, the D&D Basic Rules are available as a free PDF.
For a more narrative game, as others have mentioned, Fate is a really cool system. For someone not familiar with Fate, and especially for someone trying to get back into TTRPGs after a couple of decades away, I’d personally recommend the Atomic Robo RPG. For my money, it’s probably the single best instructional RPG ever. It’s based on a long-running webcomic, and makes great use of the source material. The rules are explained and examples given with excerpts from the comic, usually with the dialogue and editorial comments re-written to explain what’s going on in game terms.
Also, for Fate, I’d recommend Dresden Files Accelerated, based on the Jim Butcher novel series. One issue that some players have with Fate is that character creation is very free-form, which can be overwhelming. DFAE uses “Mantles” - character classes, essentially, that give you a strong base for a character that can be customized with Aspects, Stunts, and Approaches. It’s not quite as beginner-friendly as Atomic Robo, but it’s very well-written, well laid out, and has the advantage of the Mantles.
Another more narrative system is Powered by the Apocalypse. The system was created for a gritty, post-apocalyptic drama/adventure/personal horror game called Apocalypse World, which I personally don’t like (the setting and themes just really turn me off), but the underlying system is a very interesting narrative game that’s been repurposed for some very different kinds of RPGs. My two personal favorites are Dungeon World and Masks: The New Generation.
Dungeon World is, basically, the classic AD&D/BECMI D&D game with all of its tropes, but in a highly narrative game system. It is, for my money, the single best distillation of “dungeon fantasy” ever. It’s honestly a bit too narrative and not quite crunchy enough for me personally, but it is a classic of RPG writing that I’ve read and re-read just for pleasure, and it has a lot of concepts and approaches that have shaped how I run other games, including actual D&D.
Masks: The New Generation is a teen supers game. Again, a little too narrative for me personally, but if you like a more narrative approach, it’s more than a teen supers game. It is the teen supers game. I’ve never seen any other RPG or sourcebook that even comes close to capturing the feel of teen supers comics and animated series like Gen 13, Gen X, Young Justice, Avengers Academy, and so on. If you like role-playing more than combat, it’s a great game - while you can fight villains, the game mechanics are all about the emotional impacts of conflicts rather than the physical impacts.
One other not about PbtA games: they use something called “playbooks”. These are, basically, character frames. More than classes, they are (if you print them out), literally little booklets that contain all of the information you need to create and play your character. If you like more open-ended, free-form design, they may seem constraining, but in the best PbtA games, the playbooks are really brilliant in giving you a basic framework for your character and conveying the feel of the game world. If I ever run or play in another teen supers game (I’ve run and played in several in the past), I’m definitely going to draw heavily on the themes and approaches of the Masks: The New Generation playbooks, regardless of the system.
Also, on PbtA, honorable mentions to the Fellowship RPG, an epic quest fantasy RPG where the players and GM collaborate to build the world and the quest, and Monster of the Week, an action-horror RPG of hunting monsters, based on, like it says, “monster of the week” shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Supernatural, and The X-Files.
FATE is somewhat different in that players can do far more than just contribute to the narration; in a looser game, they can fundamentally add to or change the narrative of the story. In some “settings” using FATE such as Diaspora, characters actually contribute to the world-building and construction of the conflicts that feed into particular stories, and it is actually encouraged to have different players be responsible for certain worlds such that everybody gets a chance to be a GM; it makes the sessions more like a writers’ room than a campfire story. This doesn’t work for everyone; if you have a group of people where one likes to be the storyteller and the others like to just play to the narrative, then a more conventional RPG like Dungeons & Dragons or Traveller (or frankly the vast majority of RPGs) is a better fit. But if you have a group of people who like the idea of collaboratively creating a story it can work very well and produce a narrative that is more clever than any one person would create on their own. It can also go sideways if someone doesn’t want to play into the collective narrative, or is just generally a wrecker, but that can be true in a conventional RPG as well if the GM doesn’t control or eject a misbehaving player.
It is true that there isn’t material with expansive, heavily detailed settings like Glorantha or The Third Imperium for FATE (although you could easily adapt the system to work in those settings or others) but that is by design; FATE is specifically designed to allow the group to create the setting with enough detail to make it unique. This can create a kind of insular game if not set in a milieu that everyone is familiar with; for instance, if you set a game on an 18th Century British frigate, and the players are not familiar with the canon of C.S. Forrester and Patrick O’Brien, or otherwise not knowledgable about British naval traditions and the 18th European power conflicts, the whole world is going to seem like just a boat and a few ports of call. There is some material out there for worldbuilding to create a larger milieu and history in which to set a game, but that does take a lot of collaboration between players that is probably beyond what many people want to do. But it is also easy to play a quick pickup game in a setting familiar to the players, like the spy genre or horror, with just a few plot hooks and a villain or conflict to play against with minimal preparation.
So I watched the Table Top video about Fate and I now get the fluidity of the game. It seems that the GM can put a lot of the choices in the hands of the players and much of the adventure can be made up on the fly.
I’m still not really solid on the game mechanics. From watching the video, it seems that “Aspects” are perhaps the most important concept and I don’t really know what it is. It seems any kind of clever phrase can become an aspect but the relationship between that clever phrase and how it affects play often looks pretty arcane.
There are also Stunts and Extras and I’m not exactly sure what the difference is among all these.
I assume Consequences are like hindrances or limitations.
I also don’t have a good grasp of the dice rolls and the pluses and minuses, but I’m sure the book will be a good explanation.
I’ve also gone up with half a dozen basic genre descriptions for settings that interest me, such as Space Opera, Siperhero, Eldritch Horror, and Sword and Sorcery Fantasy. Are there any particular technical details I must determine for each setting or just set it up and run with it?
And does anyone have a recommendation for a similar video for the classic Traveller game?
QAGS (Quick Ass Gaming System) is a fun system. It’s low on mechanics and high on player controlling the story through “Yum-Yums”. Yum-yums are candy pieces or such given by the GM in which players can spend them to influence the story diretly. (Similar to FATE.) Or they can eat them. Because they’re yummy. So do you want to influence the world, or eat candy. It’s your choie.
The Cortex system is also another example of a system that allows players to directly take control of the story by spending a resource.
FATE came first (and FATE itself was just a derivation of Fudge that allowed for more player control of the narrative) AFAIK of the systems that allow players to take control of the narrative, but a lot of systems have run with it as a good way to give more power to the players in controlling the story.
Fiasco is probably the culmination of this in that there really isn’t even a GM. Everyone works together to creat the story. However, it works better when you have players who are creative and good at extemporaneous storytelling.
Aspects are basically special traits or unique belongings that define the character. They are stated in a descriptive fashion so they can be integrated into the narrative in a variety of ways that lend them to creative storytelling. Basically, the player has to give a suitable justification for applying the aspect, and the GM (and other players) weigh in to agree or disagree. Tony Stark as the Aspect of “Build anything out of a box of junk in a cave”.
Stunts are kind of like skills that allow you to do something outside of the normal. What qualifies as a Stunt really depends on the type of game, but it is going to be something that modifies an ability or allows you to use a skill in a special way. If you have a Pilot (Biplane) skill, the Stunt might be than you are “World Famous Barnburner”, making you an experienced acrobatic flyer with amazing instincts. For the Wolverine, for instance, his Retractile Claws could be a Stunt.
Stress and Consequences are just a way of handling damage; Stress is used for “superficial” wounds or other damage; Consequences are used if the damage would exceed the Stress track. So a Consequence is basically a major injury that results in a new (detrimental) Aspect. Darth Vader, for instance, would have an Aspect like “Limbs severed and left for dead by mentor.” This would give him a new motivation; obviously, he will need to seek some kind of treatment and augmentation, and if he meets his mentor, he’s going to be pretty motivated to have a conversation with him about “that time we were in a lava cave…” So Consequences allow you to actually tie injuries into the narrative in a way that builds the story, rather than just being a hinderance you have to rest to heal.
The dice mechanic is actually really simple. You roll four dice and add up the pluses and minuses to get a total, added to skill and other modifiers; if you fail the role and have an applicable Aspect, you can burn a FATE point to invoke it to get a +2 or reroll. If you do an opposed roll then you subtract the opposition. There isn’t any elaborate resolution tables or anything to deal with. It is pretty much the opposite of “crunchy”, which can be offputting for players who like flipping through the rule book to find obscure modifiers but really it is just designed to give some organized randomness to the narrative without bogging it down in details; it is expected that the GM and players add in the descriptive details instead of calculating damage points and rolling for hit locations. So, if you character gets grazed by a deflected plasma blast (a result of one of your party members inadvisibly firing a PGMP on a group of xenomorphs in a confined space), instead of rolling a bunch of die to calculate damage and figuring penetration against armor or whatnot, depending on how many shifts you’d basically have the Consequence that you’ve been blinded and had your face and all exposed skin burned off. (That’ll teach you to never trust a second lieutenant who has only had simulated combat drops.). It would probably be a good time to invoke the Aspect of “Wears asbestos underwear” and burn a FATE point claiming that you rolled up into a protective foetal ball to get some relief on that damage. (Who knew that was going to come in handy?)
Every setting can have different rules or types of Stunts and Aspects that are appropriate; in a superhero milieu, powers are obviously going to be a thing, while in a space opera you are going to have space ships, special weapons, and whatnot. I’ve never played a Paranoia type game with it, but it would be ideal for that since the mechanics are absolutely not the point in that game (and anyway player knowledge of game mechanics is treason, Citizen). But really, you should think of the mechanics as being guidelines for telling a story rather than hard and fast rules for playing the game. The intent is just to have a continuous narrative flow with a high degree of player interaction without spending time referring to rulebooks.
And who love Coen Brothers movies, because every Fiasco game I’ve ever seen has basically turned into some kind of (usually amusing) clusterfuck of greed, vengeance, and nihilism. Really, it’s kind of designed to do that, hence why it is promoted as the game of “characters with powerful ambition and poor impulse control,” (and generally not intended for any kind of campaign-type play). It does take a special kind of group to play that game which is why I’ve never actually played it myself, but it’s still fun to watch.
Building a bit on Stranger’s excellent explanations:
When you create a Fate character, you work with the GM (and possibly the other players) to create five aspects for your character:
High Concept (a short phrase that captures the essence of the character concept)
Trouble (the character’s Achilles heel, something they can’t resist, or a complication in their life. When the GM uses one of the character’s aspects as a Compel, they often use the Trouble aspect)
Three additional descriptive aspects that provide additional RP hooks and flavor for the character. These should generally be broad enough that they can apply in a range of situations
When I was first explaining Fate to the players in one of my groups, I gave the example of what Han Solo’s aspects might look like:
High Concept: Hotshot Corellian Smuggler
Trouble: Price On My Head
Aspects: Never Tell Me The Odds, Charming Scoundrel, I Shoot First
A good way to think about Stunts is that they’re kind of like Feats in 3E and 4E D&D. The rulebook gives a few examples of related Stunts under each of the Skill descriptions. I found a much more robust list of example Stunts (including from other official Fate source, as well as player-written, I think) on the Evil Hat Wiki.
Stress goes away at the end of a scene / fight. Consequences linger for longer (the higher the Consequence, the longer it lasts). As Stranger notes, if you suffer a Consequence, it becomes an named Aspect (e.g., Missing Limb, Sprained Ankle, Nauseated, etc.), until it’s healed.
The game book gives some examples of Consequences (the ones I list below are on page 163 of the Fate Core book). Since characters have both Physical and Mental Stress boxes, consequences can be of both sorts, as well.
An “Aspect” is a statement about your character. In Fate Core, all PCs have a High Concept (a simple statement that describes the core of the character), a Trouble (a statement about, basically, what the biggest trouble in your character’s life is), and three other Aspects, of your choice but usually directly related to events in your character’s back story.
Aspects are true - if you have the High Concept, “Hawkman Gunner”, then you are a hawkman, which presumably means you can fly, and you’ve got a gun that you know how to use. Fate is supposed to be highly collaborative, so there aren’t really any rules for what’s acceptable as an Aspect as what isn’t - it depends on your table, and the kind of campaign your playing. If you’re playing Fate Flash Gordon, a Hawkman Gunner is a perfectly good High Concept. If you’re Fate Historical Crusades, it doesn’t fit.
Aspects can be Invoked. If you spend a Fate Point (a meta-game resource - you usually start each session with 3, and can earn more in play), you get a +2 to any roll, or you can re-roll the dice. Again, this is collaborative, and is always a bit of a judgement call. You could certainly Invoke “Hawkman Gunner” for a bonus to a Shooting roll with your hawkman gun. You couldn’t Invoke it for a Stealth roll to sneak past a guard, since being a Hawkman Gunner is pretty much the antithesis of stealth and sneakiness.
Aspects can also be Compelled. The GM (or another player) can offer you a Fate point to Compel you into action.
GM: “Since you’re a Hawkman Gunner, why would you even consider sneaking past one of Ming’s guards? Don’t you think you’d brashly challenge him? Or just dive at him?” [holds out Fate point]
As a player, you can either accept the Compel and get a Fate point (the main way to earn them during play), or pay a Fate point to ignore the Compel. Obviously, this requires a lot of trust and rapport between the GM and player.
Aspects are really key to Fate. It’s not just characters that have Aspects. Literally anything can have Aspects - items, places, the campaign as a whole. A warehouse, for example, might have the “Crowded With Stacked Crates” Aspect. You could Invoke it to gain a bonus to sneaking around, or dodging fire, but so can NPCs - anyone in the location has access to its Aspects.
Stunts are special traits your character has that allow you bend the rules. They have three main forms. A stunt can give you a +2 bonus to a roll in a specific situation (our Hawkman Gunner might have the “Dive!” Stunt that gives him a +2 bonus to Shooting rolls when diving at his target). A Stunt can also allow a skill to do something that it normally doesn’t. For example, in Fate Core, Shooting can be used to Attack, but not Defend. You might make a stunt like “Grammaton Cleric” that allows you to use your knowledge of ballistic trajectories to use Shooting to Defend against Shooting. Finally, a Stunt can let you do something that you normally couldn’t. For example, our Hawkman Gunner could have a “Blunderbuss” Stunt that allows him to attack multiple targets with a single Shooting roll.
Extras are sort of like super-Stunts. Not all settings will use them. Settings that use magic usually make spells and magic items into Extras. The work similarly to Stunts, and there sometimes isn’t any real difference. They can be more powerful than Stunts, though, albeit at a cost.
Not quite. In Fate, if you take “damage”, you mark off Stress. “Damage” in this case can be physical hits, like hit point damage in D&D, or mental stress, or horror, or anything else that might, well, stress your character. You can only take so much Stress before you’re Taken Out. If you don’t want to take Stress, or more likely, don’t have enough Stress left to absorb an “attack”, then you can instead take a “Consequence.”
In Fate Core, you can take a -2 Consequence (negates 2 points of incoming Stress). a -4 Consequence (negates 4 points of Stress), and a -6 Consequence (negates 6 points of Stress). You, with the input of the GM and the table, create effectively a temporary Aspect describing a Consequence of the “attack”. For example, you might have “Shoulder Wound” as a -2 Consequence of a physical attack, or “Tattered Reputation” as a result of taking Stress in a social conflict.
The Consequence gives one free Invoke your foe can use against you (“Since you have a Shoulder Wound, you can’t aim as well, and I get a +2 to defend against your attack”). Consequences can also be Invoked or Compelled, like any other Aspect, with Fate Points. Although they are almost always going to be Invoked against you, in theory you might be able to Invoke them yourself (“Since I have a Tattered Reputation, I get a +2 to my Rapport roll with these lower-class ne’er-do-wells”).
Fate uses special dice (originally created for the freeware FUDGE RPG, upon which Fate is based). They are six-sided dice, with two “+” faces, two blank faces, and two “-” faces. You roll 4dF (four Fate dice). “+” and “-” cancel out, and you count the remaining total, resulting in a roll of -4 to +4. You add your Skill to this roll to determine your result. You can also add special bonuses, such as those from Stunts and Invokes, as described above. You want to beat the difficulty of the task.
EDIT: Ninja’d by Stranger on a Train and kenobi 65.
I’m running a fantasy game using Fate – I use the Aether Sea setting (which feels a lot like the old D&D Spelljammer setting) as a base for it. Aether Sea is actually written using the Fate Accelerated rules, so I wound up pretty much ignoring any of the (limited) crunch in the setting book, and just wrote things from scratch in Fate Core.
Anyway, the big bit of technical detail you’ll need to figure out for a fantasy game is how to handle magic. The Fate System Toolkit book has several examples of magic systems, but they all felt rather specialized to me; my players were coming from D&D, and I knew that they would be most comfortable with something that at least felt like it could be D&D. I wound up creating a new skill, Arcana, which is used for anything related to casting a spell, or understanding a magical effect. I’ve given my spellcasting players fairly loose rein on how they use that Arcana skill (rather than the prescribed spells from D&D), though I also gave them each a couple of stunts which describe specific spell effects (like a Fireball-style attack, or a healing spell). So far (we’ve played a half-dozen sessions), it’s worked pretty well.
Most of the games I’m about to mention have had at least one of two editions since last I played them, but they used to be solid staples back when I had the time to really work on my DMing : 7th Sea : “Modern Europe as seen through the lens of American movies and pop culture” (so you’ve got Not Napoleon invading Not Russia while Not Louis XIV reigns ; all the while Not Elizabeth I’s sea dogs keep Not Holland’s Vikings at bay… it’s weird and retarded in the best of ways) with a couple twists : 1) there’s magic and 2) the game’s rules and spirit are very heavily tuned to allow the players to act as if they were starring in the campiest of swashbuckling novels/movies. You’ll swing on chandeliers and through windows as a matter of course, have sword duels on tightropes, fight 1-on-12 and win effortlessly because they’re just The Cardinal’s Men (but beware the One-Eyed Man with the Swirly Moustache though, he’s the real deal), be boarded by pirates in the middle of hurricanes, etc… Legend of the 5 Rings : imagine Feudal Japan, only set on a continent the size of China. Again, as seen by ignorant Americans (so daimyos deep inland still have fresh sushi dinners, bushido is Very Serious Business). Less camp, more dramatic (in the classical, honour & duty vs. happiness and personal desires sense of the word) and quite a bit more deadly (as in, 4 samurai PCs vs. 6 peasants with pitchforks will likely die or at least be heavily wounded) but with very, very in-depth world building. Also there’s magic and hell is real.
Shadowrun : Ur-cyberpunk dystopia (corporations are more important than governments and rule everything, the internet is a neon VR world where hackers reign supreme etc…), but with orcs and elves and trolls and magic. Once again, retarded in the best of ways, and top-notch world building.
*Deadlands *: Lovecraft meets Sergio Leone meets Jules Verne. Gritty gunfighters (who may or may not be undead) having duels at high noon against crazed cultists (who may or may not be masters of poker magic)
*Feng Shui *: have you ever seen a John Woo movie ? How about a Wuxia flick ? This game is that. You’ll rack shotguns while diving across doves in hong kong, evil martial arts masters will tip-toe across your shotty pellets to kick you in the face, and you’ll hit them with the old exploding heart technique. Hilarious to play and heavily rewards descriptive roleplay. Ars Magica : a lot more involved than the others, but probably the best campaign RPG ever. Set in the historical middle ages (except magic is real, except most people don’t know that), players play multiple characters (i.e. one wizard and his retinue of helpers, bodyguards and servants each) and decide how their magic lodge deals with shit, what their goals are etc… all the while trying to stay under the radar of the mundanes.
oh, I forgot : Ars Mag features the most robust magic system in any RPG I’ve ever read. There are no spell lists. Basically if you can come up with an effect, describe what it does and determine how it involves the various “schools” of magic & elements of the game, you can try to do it. No restrictions whatsoever outside of one’s skill in the various techniques and elements. E.g. a novice wizard might be able to light a candle by saying “Creo Ignem” (“I create fire”) while a more adept practitioner of those two schools might be able to throw fireballs with those same words ; and a big, week-long Creo Ignem ritual might be able to set an entire town on fire.
Actually, you can consider locations, objects, and even events as being a type of character. From the Fate System Toolkit: In Fate, you can treat pretty much anything as if it were a character. Your gun? Sure. The storm outside? Absolutely. The scene itself? Why not? You can give anything aspects, skills, stunts, and stress boxes, and here’s the thing that makes this technique really cool—they don’t have to be the same ones the PCs get. It doesn’t make sense for the storm outside to have Fight and Physique, but what about Cold and Sleet? Your gun doesn’t need a physical or mental stress track, but what about an ammo stress track? And scenes already have aspects all over the place!
FATE really lends itself to hacking the rules to fit a certain type of genre or game, but using the “Bronze Rule” approach you can actually deal with a lot of nuances of a setting without creating special rules. It doesn’t work with everything; for instance, while you could make a volcano a ‘character’ it doesn’t make much sense to do so because the interaction between it and the players is one sided insofar as their is nothing they can do to affect it. But you treat something like a car a character in that the players can interact with it, it can have Aspects, suffer Stress and Consequences, et cetera.
I’ll throw my hat in for Savage Worlds, another simple game engine that is supported by multiple Backgrounds. It has “Fate Points Lite” in the form of bennies that you spent for bonuses and get for roleplaying your disadvantages. I like it because it is a bit less free form than Fate, which means I can fit in my Rollplayers with my Roleplayers
It is also the current engine for the aforementioned Deadlands, but also has a lot of Fantasy, Horror and superhero Backgrounds to choose from. “Necessary Evil” is a classic, where you play the Supervillains that are left after an Alien Invasion killed all the Heroes. As it is very open for licensing, there are tons of free adaptions of classic Backgrounds like Earthdown, Cyberpunk and similar Genres.
Are there official/legitimate PDFs for other D&D books? I poked around wizards.com and couldn’t find them. It seems strange they wouldn’t sell soft copies. I rarely buy paper books anymore, they’re too inconvenient.
Ars Magica really does magic well. My old group ended up bolting its magic system onto other rules sets.
The way it handles multiple characters per player, and a rotating game mastership, works really great with an experienced group. Everyone gets a turn at taking the lead role (the wizard is literally the boss), everyone gets a turn at being the effective henchman (wizards have magic, but we all know who actually gets stuff done), everyone gets a turn at being the storyteller (collaborative worlds when done well feel very real because no one knows everything going on).
IIRC, WotC has never been a big proponent of PDFs, undoubtedly due to concerns about filesharing. Paizo, on the other hand, does sell PDF versions of pretty much all of their Pathfinder books; as Paizo (unlike WotC) has their own online store, that probably makes it much easier for them to sell and control PDFs.
