The Kickstarter

A Kickstarter for the core rules of FATE recently started, and having read the rules for previous incarnations, such as Dresden Files, Diaspora, and Legends of Anglerre, I was very excited to get my hands on a trimmed down, cleaned up, and setting-free version of the system.

I pitched in my $1.00 to take a look, and see if it was everything I had hoped. Twenty-four hours later I made sure to buy in at the "Fred's Ink" level.

Thoughts on the Book

The book is very well written at the start. Very few noticeable typos, and the system itself was clearly explained. The choice of type, and the clean layout made the PDF version (which was supplied to me immediately upon pledging a dollar) a real pleasure to read.

FATE has, even after reading the three incarnations mentioned above always been illusive, intimidating and exciting to me. The application of the core mechanic, "Aspects" while simple at first, got complicated for me as you began allowing players to add them, tag them, and create them out of thin air. What the FATE Core book did is cleared that up for me. It standardized some terminology and made sure to keep the rules very simple early on in the book and then elaborate as you go.

In the first twenty pages, you get "what you need to know to play." Very loose explanations and simple fast rules. From there they begin to elaborate on creating your own campaign, walking through character creation (the order of these sections is not an accident, and is very intelligent). They then dedicate a full thirty pages to explaining in detail how aspects and fate points work out.

From there, I feel like the book begins to break down a little bit, the cleanliness and conciseness of their explanations begins to fall apart a bit, and typos begin to creep in. I think that perhaps (and understandably so) they dedicated a TON of time making sure the front of this book is clean and POLISHED. From there, it starts reading a bit like the other systems above.

The First Session

After having read most of the book (I'm working through the mid-two-hundreds, out of 300 pages now) I was excited enough to try and pull together a group. I flipped back to the front of the book and re-read some of the parts that were cloudy for me in preparation.

Four players showed up to the session. None of them have any experience with FATE, and I have personally only run two or three sessions of Legends of Anglerre myself.

Once everyone got settled in, we immediately jumped into creating the campaign. I had my heart set on doing a sci-fi campaign as nearly all of my role-playing experience has been in fantasy settings and I've been itching to mix it up. I brought this up to the players and they were all excited about running a sci-fi campaign so that was settled.

Next up was determining the scope of the campaign, this sparked some discussion among the players that took me off guard. Honestly, I was expecting them to sort of sit back and have me drive this broad story-stuff but they jumped right on it. The idea is to get a sense of how grand in scope the campaign should be. Should everything be on a local level? One world? One city in the world? Should it be bigger than that, span governments and star systems?

The players all nodded in agreement and settled on a 'personal' scope game that grows into something big. Not a big surprise here, isn't this how most campaigns go? The players all seemed really pleased already and the interesting stuff had not even begun.

For a little while we got off track discussing technology and settled on having those gates from Eve online, with general tech feeling a bit 'gritty' like from Battlestar Galactica, or Star Wars, rather than Star Trek. We were also in agreement that the science in the game doesn't need a lot of explanation, it's just there to serve the story.

The next part had us going over "trouble". Basically, what issues drive the adventure. I made sure to emphasize to them that the trouble should probably reflect the scope. The players were apparently really feeling a Star Wars vibe and very quickly came to a consensus that having an "Opressive Regime" would be really cool. They also wanted a mysterious vibe, and decided they want a "New Thing" to be discovered. We couldn't settle on the details, but ideas like "Infinite Power Source", "Intergalactic Communication Device", and "Transporter" all came up. I like all these ideas, but what I like most is that it's ambiguous and that they don't care, it's the mystery that excites them.

At this point I was getting goose bumps of excitement. I had hoped that the interactive world creation would go over well, but I could never have imagined it going over this well. Three out of the four players were extremely engaged, but honestly even the guy (Jon) who wasn't doing a lot of talking seemed to be enjoying where everything was going. Maybe I was viewing this through rose-colored glasses but I'm quite sure the vibe in the room was generally really good.

We talked at length about details of the universe. One of the players at this point (Brian) really took the reigns here. I felt kind of bad because he was so excited and enthusiastic that I didn't want to stunt him, but I could also see that the other players were having a hard time getting a word in, so I interrupted him (as politely as I could) and asked some pointed questions of some other players. We settled here on names of a lot of places and organizations (such as The Solar Alliance). We drilled down as the book recommended and detailed some characters as well. This took quite some time and I could see the players begin to get a bit warn down so we moved on.

Character creation was LONG, and DETAILED. That is not to say that the players did not enjoy themselves, I'm quite sure they did. But I could see that their creative gears were grinding away and that's tough on a person! I had a really hard time explaining what makes a good aspect (this is not a fault of the book, there are an unbelievable number of good explanations on this particular topic in the book). 

The High Concept wasn't too bad, as the players sort of stayed in their comfort zone with class archtypes, and then they added a little flavor. I don't have the character sheets on me now, but in a later post I'll add some more details on this.

The trouble is when players began to struggle. I think this is when the mechanics of FATE really begin to blow players minds. Normally, if a game is going to give you a "disadvantage" like this, it's going to pay you up front (more character build points for instance) and it's going to give you a list. In FATE, that is simply not the case. Eventually, it did click for almost all of them, just one player couldn't come up with his right away and so we went ahead and moved on.

The first story I feel flowed pretty well for most players. I think by the time we were done creating the universe and player high concepts they sort of had an idea of where their first adventures were. The same guy that struggled in the first step struggled here too. After some discussion though and help from the group he was able to come up with something he was really happy with (a Bounty-Hunter who sort of fell into the job after being taken up by another Bounty-Hunter who had caught him).

Then... everything fell apart. The players needed to trade stories with one another and write their character into other stories. This blew their minds! I feel like I should have done a better job emphasizing that this was coming up so they could have written more 'open' initial stories, and it seemed to take a lot of creative juice for them to just make up how they showed up in other stories. I think generally when this was done they were pretty happy. They did this twice and the hardest part of character creation (for our group) was done.

Skill choices were easy peasy by this point. It felt like the skills almost chose themselves. I made sure to discuss with them the addition of a couple new skills (piloting, medicine) and they were off to the races. After just a few minutes and a couple of explanations; skills were done.

One player really wanted to have armor similar to Space Marines, and I thought that would be a cool extra. I haven't fleshed out how the extra works but we agreed to use one of his aspects to represent the armor. I'm not sure if I've handled this well, because I need to look through the extras chapter.

Finally, for stunts we went through as a group because we only had one device on hand to view the pdf. I was pleasantly surprised with how interested the players were with the simple example stunts and we even invented a stunt for medicine

Four or five hours of really fun character and campaign creation later, we were finally done. Everyone was pretty exhausted so we decided to hold off some actual PLAY for this coming Friday. I've got another player coming over tonight to work on his character (bringing the number of PCs up to 5).

Later this week, I'll talk about character creation with the fifth player that didn't get to make it to the initial session, the challenges that brings and how he handled it. I'll also go into more detail about the actual characters and the fiction that came out of this session. I'm extremely excited about this Friday's game and look forward to coming back to here to write about it :-).