Reflecting on our 13th Age game last night, one of the big things which stands out is how my brain had forgotten the tactical patterns of thought which were second nature when I was immersed in the d20 System landscape.
In 13th Age, like other d20 System games, there's a bit more "exactly what to do when" meta-tactics involved: choices made based on the player's understanding of the mechanics which the PC isn't capable of being aware of.
I often wasn't sure which of two options which Fen would be equally likely to take was "better" or "worse" from a mechanical viewpoint--part of that is system mastery, obviously.
But part of it is just having forgotten that that's actually a thing in a lot of games.
This is, I think, why after going along pretty smoothly for most of the session, we suddenly balked at the door to the final boss and spent ten minutes arguing about strategy for entering the room.
Our tactical brains were finally waking up enough to start talking to us, but not yet enough to make much sense.
I used my 1/battle "roll a d20 and force someone else to use it for their attack" feature... the round just BEFORE Brian would have been able to potentially end the fight if I'd used it then.
And my feature didn't do any good because everyone rolled really well that round anyway, so both Brian and I had a limited-use awesome go fizzle because we weren't coordinating tactically.
@trogdor That's a thing we also noticed: in Fate players are happy to see bad/dramatic things happen to their character, and the fate point they get for it is not the actual reason for doing so.
(i.e. they sit outside the lines of other players, or are failures that are so complicated that other players refuse to engage with them)
because those are the failures I'm interested in -- I find that most of the failures that others consider narratively interesting are actually rather boring for me because they don't provide enough technical surface area for me to engage with
the thing is, I do like failure in Fate, but the main reason I do is because it has almost everything to do with the choices I make, and almost nothing to do with making mistakes
@doppelgreener Character aspects, rather than dice randomisation, are the main source of failure in Fate--so yeah, "the choices I make" are kept front and centre.
Your choice rose from your character, and by making character aspects the core mechanic of the game it keeps character-based choices at the core of the story.
Aye. It's possible to run a fully relationship-driven Fate game, just as it's possible to run an adventure Fate game where you jump across chasms, but most of the time you'll be somewhere in the middle.
I think part of it is that we've all played D&D for years, and so we jump at the opportunity to not just describe the way our characters fight.
And yeah, there's plenty of advice in the book on making up aspects that'd play a role in a variety of circumstances.
For each edition I could count the number of sessions I've had on one hand. For a couple of them, one finger!
I've jumped at the opportunity to express how my character fights in the right way, unbarred by "you must be level 7 first, by which time this is useless"
In almost every game I ran after Fate, there was at least one moment where I found myself thinking "and this is where I'd compel them." It's amazing how much smoother things can go with players' cooperation.
@doppelgreener If that's the 13th Age dwarf game and not some extra on-the-side dwarfing you're engaged in, so am I. After the game last night I have a much better idea of how tough 1st level PCs are, and what the plot should be.
@Magician Oh! I am looking forward to the 13th age one as well. But there is also some on-the-side dwarfing which I was referring to: in our regular Atomic Robo game, I am planning on running a session focusing on the invasion of some dwarves.
Mainly I plan for things to fail horribly and unavoidably and be a complete disaster, so that we can feel relaxed and have no obligation to keep things on the straight and narrow. The straight and narrow is no longer available.
So, hey. Minor GURPS 4e question. I'm running a campaign of that, but I'm not too familiar with its balance.
... if you take, like, Magery with the Song restriction for -40%, then the one-college restriction for another -40%, does it really end up being 2 points per point of Magery?
I put on those restrictions for flavor reasons for a test character, then took a step back, and was going, like, "is this really OK?"
I can't easily figure out what sorta damage output I should expect from someone with a gun in normal conditions because of various stuff like RoF and recoil. >.<
Well, I can absolutely see recoil as an aspect on an oversized weapon, but as a permanent rules fixture everyone has to take into account always - ugh.
If you can get pretty specific about what your group needs, a game-recommendation question could be very helpful.
I've never actually played BRP (best known as the percentile system used by call-of-cthulhu) or Unisystem (used by Buffy and all-flesh-must-be-eaten), but they're both generic-but-crunchy engines used by many different settings and genres.
The premise of my campaign is that all the PCs are from different worlds (and, to be honest, GURPS' tech level system makes this harder than it could be), and will be exploring multiple diverse worlds during the course of the campaign. Standard multiverse stuff, but... yeah. Stuff like D&D is not going to work.
For example, all the Doctor Who RPGs have to accommodate going to a totally new and different PLACE each adventure--but they generally expect PCs to have the same "talk first, run second, tinker third, fight fourth" approach to problem-solving regardless of the challenge in front of them.
Crunch's not super-important, but... none of us have any experience with narrative systems, and there's a player or two who I don't think would do well with it. :/
BESW: Hrm... I'll have to think about this carefully.
I know some people like Savage Worlds as a medium-crunch flexible system, and nominally it has all sorts of splatbooks supporting different genres and settings, but I've had bad experiences with it.
honestly, the only thing that I personally miss from anything that is not Fate is the crunch anything else might have
like 4E, there is no way in the 9 hells I think 4E is better than Fate (as a personal opinion), but I do still think it has a better crunch to it as a tactical system
in fact, I took enjoyment just making characters to do specific mechanical things
but I would say I still like Fate better as a system I would actually play
Yes and no. You still very much play your character, but you're more mindful of the larger story.
And you sometimes let bad things to happen to your character, because it makes for a more compelling story, something most other systems teach you to oppose.
We've just had a conversation about this earlier today.
you are definitely playing your character,... you just also happen to be deciding what you want to happen in the story regardless of, or against, the interests of your character
though that also does not preclude going into their interests, it's just that doing so too often is not encouraged
One of my players has a bit of adversarial "beat the campaign" mindset at times, and two others are pretty big on player immersion. Would Fate work well for them too?
@LymiaAluysia I think Fate is great for immersion. It rewards you for following through with your character's personality traits, positive or negative.
I can't speak for your players specifically, but I have played with people who were into D&D about beating the campaign
and even was that way myself to a lesser degree, I think
but playing Fate changed that
mostly because there isn't a GM who's sole purpose, at least as dictated by the system if not by themselves, is to destroy them
the GM's job in Fate is similar in some ways as a GM role in D&D, as GM you still set up the world and act for the NPC's and decide what said NPC's do in most situations
Talking about, and trying systems like that isn't... "normal" in my group, nor is spontaneously starting a game. We hang out together in an IRC chatroom... pretty much all the time, so, it's not like we have defined meeting times.
I've had similar challenges, both with getting group buy-in to try new systems and with getting people to feel comfortable GMing anything at all.
My solution was a long-game process of changing the "landscape" of how people at the table viewed their role in the game. I didn't set out to delibera...
@BESW I don't think this is our problem, exactly. Pretty much every single player we have bar one has GMed full campaigns before, and we do try new systems regularly.
But, well. In each of those campaigns, player agency was limited to character action (which, granted, were generally on the unrestricted side). So... Fate is, like, something new in a way that changing systems isn't.
Or, well. Character action and the backstory you wrote... hrm.
I think my biggest concern with Fate is that generally our campaigns have a big mystery element to them. So, like, a pretty big GM/player information discrepancy, and a big part of our campaigns is investigation, and so forth. How would something like this work out with Fate?
In traditional games such as D&D, the mechanics of the NPCs you face are generally an unknown quantity. The players and the characters only have a rough idea of what an NPC is capable of, based on what they’ve already seen - ultimately, a player does not know much about his or her adversaries. Th...
@LymiaAluysia This is how my group is, except more than one of us works retail or other unpredictable jobs and one person in the group has a chronic condition that is also pretty unpredictable. P:
Important NPCs may have hidden aspects that PCs are supposed to assess somehow before using them: can such a NPC invoke one of his hidden aspects without the GM revealing it to the players?
Example:
Let's say that Lenny is a drug-dealer working for a local crime lord that PCs are trying to take...
@BESW I don't think that's a problem on the low level, at least. At least, personally, I do a sort of mystery where the mystery has more to do with the world, and the overarching plot, and I don't generally try to use anything like "fear of the unknown" much. But when people talk about Fate, I do hear a lot about the players having an deciding role on the plot. And, well, this sorta mystery, I think, intrinsically involves hiding parts of the plot from players.
But yeah, we've just had to start planning around the possibility that he might not be there on any given day and that he might fall asleep mid-game. I also have a condition that means I might fall asleep before or during game time, though it's not as severe.
I'd generally say on voice myself, and it's probably not a common interpretation of the phrase, but it's called a call in Skype so my mind went two places, heh.
We usually use text chat. We did use voice a few times during our last Pathfinder game, but it's not a regular thing.
As for Fate and hidden aspects... keeping certain aspects hidden (though detectable or surmisable) doesn't necessarily seem like it would make for a bad experience. It would, however, be a different experience from the one Fate core's text focuses on. I'd think about it carefully since invokes and compels are an important part of the mechanics.
On the other hand, though you can't exactly compel an aspect you don't know, you can do a lot of invoking and compelling your own aspects simply from basic description. This is my GM's first time running SotC or (I believe) any Fate game, and he hasn't specifically told us any aspects at all. I haven't felt the slightest bit restricted by this.