Fate Hacking
I'm working on a game using the Fate 3.0 (SotC) engine. Here are my changes so far:
- Characters have 1 Fate point by default (and refresh to 1). You earn Fate mainly from Compels.
- You don't have to spend a Fate point to avoid a compel. You just miss out on earning a point.
- Fewer Aspects per character. Maybe five.
- Fewer skills per character. Maybe five.
- Apex skill level at Great. Maybe. Want to encourage aspect tagging as the primary means of being Superb/Legendary.
- Zone combat tweaked to play more like Red Box Hack.
- Assess and declare actions simplified/merged/cut. They're really just specialized Maneuvers, anyway.
- Shorter stress track. 3 boxes by default. Consequences need to be more frequent (they're a good source of compels for effect and Fate earning).
- Power Up! When you have taken all three Consequences, you get something cool. 3 Fate, a free aspect placement, +2 to your rolls, or the other PCs each get a Fate, or something. Maybe you get to pick. The key idea is: getting into trouble is good.
- Simplified stunts. Very simplified, taking the "core stunts" of SotC as the base.
- Character change! You can "burn" an aspect for a Fate payoff, which destroys it. You get to replace it with a new aspect based on events from play. There might be a per-session limit on burning.
- Include extended contests from Fate 2.0.
Hacking is fun.
Labels: FATE, hack
13 Comments:
Hacking is as fun as mediocre sex.
Ha!
Love this stuff - I'll be watching. Don't know anything about the red box relative to FATE zones, so I'm especially curious about that.
John, have you seen my Awesome Adventures rules? While you seem to be going in the direction of lower-powered characters, AA is in the direction of simpler rules.
Yeah, I did see Awesome Adventures, and it is indeed awesome. I will probably be stealing from it at some point. :-)
These are some great ideas. I've been trying to find ways to get Aspects to act more like TSoY Keys and the low refresh and burn for a kick look like a real step in that direction.
For "core" stunts from SotC do you mean the basic ideas of: +2 for special action, use one skill in place of another, etc. or do you have another idea.
Yeah, Dave, that's what I'm thinking for stunts. It may turn out that I don't need "stunts" per se... we'll see.
Wow, your ideas for hacking FATE/SOTC almost completely parallel my own. The expedient thing for me to do at this point would be to step back and watch you do all the heavy lifting... ;^)
My feelings are that you can completely do away with stunts. Folks can spend Fate chips to accomplish cool things with their skills.
As far as the skill pyramid, I was thinking giving everyone a baseline of 0 in all skills, then have them select three skills at +1, two at +2, and one at +3.
If folks really wanted to lower a skill below zero, they could get a higher refresh rate to compensate.
I definitely think you can get away without using stunts at all. The stuntless variant rules simply give aspects the potential to do stunt-like things, and that sounds completely great, to me. Aspects are great, and anything that gives them more of the spotlight has got to be worth a try.
Are you doing the 1 Fate Point + "scratch-off Aspect boxes" a la Fate 2.0 (as I think I recall you doing when you ran Danger Patrol at GoPlay NW, or just straight up 1 Fate Point to start and no other resources? Been playing around with the Fate Point economy a lot and I like your direction of starting low - just trying to figure out how low you went. ;)
I recall you had an ablative Skill thing going on too where you could damage (lower) a Skill to get a boost.
Kind of a mish-mash of things, yeah, Matthew.
1 Fate to start, and each of your own aspects gets a free tag (which refresh... sometime. not sure about that yet).
I'm probably not doing the Aspect boxes thing, or the Skill-burning thing. Those worked fine during the other playtests, but I'm trying to fine tune the utility of stuff on the PC sheet vs. stuff in the world (like scene aspects). The GPNW test had it slanted too much towards the stuff on the sheet.
I've got some notes along that line. I'll post something about it soon.
Have you tried starting a game with very low Fate? How did it work for you?
Not with super low FP, no, but they started with 5 Aspects and get FP Refresh = 1/2 Aspects rounded up. After several sessions, some characters have 6 Aspects now, but their Refresh is still 3. This seems to work pretty well. They feel like they're digging into next session's resources anytime they're down to 2 FP and they start getting hungry for Compels even though they're not yet at 0 or 1 FP. I changed to not having to pay off Compels they don't want, and I REALLY prefer it now. I can offer lots of possibilities without worrying that they're going to feel stung if I've guessed wrong at what directions they were looking for with their flags (Aspects).
Starting with super low Fate worries me as sometimes I have a hard time coming up with Compels. I guided them as much as possible, but some of my player's Aspects aren't quite at "BAM!" and I didn't want to keep at them continually to tune them towards that. They'd never played anything but d20 prior to my Fate game.
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