Fate chat and game room - 2014-09-11

« first day (510 days earlier) ← previous day next day → last day (1940 days later) »

7:20 AM

Thesis: Fate Accelerated approaches are superior to skills in achieving a "cinematic" game experience.

Now for some rambling about how I got to this and why.

The Stargate SG-1 RPG uses d20 Modern rules. It applies the "wounds/vitality" layer to hit points, and implements a kind of story point system, claiming these make it "cinematic."

Now, a story point system does help make things cinematic, although this version was pretty anaemic. Wounds/vitality is stupid and makes things less cinematic.

But setting aside the problems with the specific chosen systems, the idea that hp systems and "important character currency" make a thing cinematic is bald-facedly stupid.

While reflecting on a recent Fate Accelerated game (a Doctor Who adventure), I realised that Accelerated's approaches provide a crucial element to the "tv/movie" feel in a game.

And importantly, it's an element that the SG-1 RPG, because of its d20 system, couldn't possibly have even touched upon.

As we've talked about before, skills define what you're good at doing, while approaches define how you're good at doing things.

And in TV/film logic, "how you do things" is king.

Carter's smart and sciencey, so anything sciency is within her bailiwick whether it be maths or chemistry or genetics or physics.

She's Careful with a Science aspect.

In d20, she'd have to have ranks in a half-dozen different skills just to begin to describe the scope of what the show expects her to be able to do.

Daniel Jackson is the persony culturey guy; he's the diplomat and the linguist and the historian. That's a vast range for skills to cover, and the player can't possibly anticipate all the situations he might be expected to be capable in.

But in FAE, he can be Clever with a side of Careful and with the right aspects he's good to go.

The point is this: TV shows and films paint character competency with extremely wide brushes which most skill systems can't possibly approximate.

Approaches come much closer to imitating the TV-writer approach to character competency.

That seems to assume certain specificity of a skill system. If we go as far as remove skills entirely from D&D, something 5e almost did, we end up with stats as the one and only thing used for anything.

Which then turns into "Am I being wise or intelligent?" debates, which I will be pleased never to endure again.

But, well, removing skills makes it not a skill system.

Ok, what about 4e skills, which I guess, were kind of approaches.

(I'm still dealing with fallout from using "clever" in a character's aspect. Stupid of me.)

@Magician Not really; they were still "I am good at doing this thing" rather than "I am good at doing things this way."

4e History would cover culture-y and probably even diplomat-y bits.

7:34 AM

Even stripping skills away entirely and looking at stat-only rolls vs approaches:

@BESW Sort of? They were very broad and up for interpretation at times. So while they definitely talked about ares of expertise rather than approaches to solving issues, those areas were not restrictive.

If I'm doing something Forcefully, it might be ramming a door open or making someone back own in an argument.

If I'm doing something with Strength... that's not related to how I'm doing something, it's the kind of thing I'm doing.

It's difficult to Charismatically ram open a stuck door, but I could do it Flashily.

2

Stat-based rolls map action to stat in rough one-to-one correspondence with some wiggle room.

Player: "I'm doing X."
GM: "That's a roll of Y stat."

Player: "I'm doing X."
GM: "Tell us how you're doing it, so we know what approach you're rolling."

Right. So skill-based systems care about the actual action undertaken, whereas approach-based systems (so many of those!) care about the manner in which the action is being undertaken.

One other key is that approaches do not tell you what the character can and cannot do.

@doppelgreener Yes, this.

Which is also crucial to the TV/film feel of a game.

The writers feel free to invent new skills and capabilities as the plot demands, why shouldn't we?

At the end of our Doctor Who session, the shoot-first-ask-questions-later career soldier used a technobabble solution to defeat the enemy.

If the player had been looking at a list of skills on his premade sheet, I guarantee I wouldn't have put anything in there which would let the Brigadier reverse the polarity of a radio broadcast.

But it made total sense that he did it!

7:50 AM

What would you say about the 13th Age's approach? In it, a character has a certain number of Background points to spend, up to a limit in a single background. So one PC can be Red Cloaks Founder 5 and Tentacle Dwarf 3, while another can have Moon Childhood 4, Bardic Training 2 and something else 2 (from our actual game). These are added to d20 whenever the experience provided by background would be applicable to the task at hand.

That seems to be neither skills nor approaches

It's still "who PCs are, what do they know" rather than "how they do things".

It does not say what someone can or cannot do. It also does not say how they do it. After all, my Bardic Training could have involved knife fights, sweet singing, Indonesian cuisine preparation, smart aleck comments, and how to promptly see that a door and its frame are separated.

That's more like the aspects only hack from the toolkit.

It sounds more like the justification-based property of aspects, particularly if we take the ---- yes, the aspects-only fate hack. It says "I am this, so that helps me perform this action better."

7:54 AM

@doppelgreener Absolutely. It does force me to explain that when I want to rely on the Bardic Training, which is the main benefit of the approach.

Alternate names could be background-based, being-based, etc

Interesting, so we have "What do I do?" "How do I do it?" and "Who am I?"

I will leave you to it, gents, I need to head home. Tally ho!

ttfn

5 hours later…

1:09 PM

Hi, folks! I'm still thinking about Fate Core skill lists, and how to ask a question about that. How do I best use this fine medium of chat to get either a good idea for myself, or a good question for other people in the future with a similar problem?

[wave] Tell us what's up! What is the challenge you're facing?

← 2 messages moved from RPG General Chat

I'm wondering how to arrive at a good Fate Core skill list for a setting.

In particular, how to deal with social skills.

Cool.

Custom skill sets is something I've thought about, but don't have a lot of experience with yet.

Let me describe my ansatz so far.

- Splitting some skills looks easy. *Driving* needs to be replaced by *Sailing*, and some other skill needs to be used for animal-based transport (Generalise to *Animal Ken*, because there seems to be no skill for dealing with animals at all in the default skill list?). With the mythology-versus-logics theme, *Lore* should be split into one skill for mythological lore (*Doxa*, belief or glory) and one for the logical lore (*Episteme*, knowledge). Reskins and
- Dropping/merging skills looks more intricate. While there surely is burglary and pickpocketing in ancient Athens, we want to concent…

(I'm actually interested in turning the skill dial down, or all the way off, like this hack does.)

1:14 PM

I'm not experienced in Fate at all.

Fair enough.

Okay, so when we hack Fate we have to start at the narrative level: what kind of stories will your group be telling?

From that, we learn what's important to focus on in the game system.

That's what I expect.

If fighting isn't common, it can be relegated to one or two skills while social stuff gets divided into several skills; if fighting is the focus, then lots of skills defining what kind of fighting you're doing is necessary while social skills might be limited to a couple broad options.

(Context: I have read a lot of stuff, and played a few oneshots and currently I'm in a Diaspora campaign, but that's not a lot to have seen the inner gears of Fate turn. My players have not played Fate, AFAIK. I'll GM.)

Sure.

So let me tell what I believe I know.

I'm going to be coming at this from a Fate Core perspective, which is a bit different from Diaspora in some of its details and philosophy.

1:18 PM

That's fine, I do want to play Core. I think I like it better, at least from reading.

Shiny. So, do tell!

Setting: Ancient Greece, mostly Athens, unspecified time during the Classical era. The big theme will be a clash between the old ways of mythology and the new ways of philosophy, with characters siding with the Gods.

This happens before the scenery of Eirene, Goddess of peace, having vanished, so there is a lot of wars with Spartans, Barbarians etc. in the background, and politics in Athens in the foreground.

Oh, right. I remember your question that got closed.

Yep, that's why I'm here.

I think the question “How do I adapt the Fate Core skill list” is still good, just needs to be put in a way to fit this site.

The first way to phrase it was obviously not good.

Well, have you read the Toolkit chapter on skills?

1:24 PM

I think so, let me see how much I can recollect why I did not consider it helpful enough.

Any SE question about this is going to have to establish exactly that: what are you looking for which the Toolkit and Core didn't satisfy?

(And any discussion in chat is going to reference them, too.)

What system background are you and your group coming from? D&D of any particular edition, WoD, free-form, the *World set of systems?

(It's useful to know how much a given Fate dial adjustment is going to give the group culture shock, and whether they're eager for a change or trepidatious.)

Me: Avoid D&D, mostly Indie, lots of AW, some other random bits like Scion or WoD or 40k

One player: AW, and other things

One player: D&D, heavily homebrewed for political play D&D, freeform with tokens for narrative influence

One player: mostly D&D IIRC

(where D&D is nearly exclusively 3.5 or PF, I think.)

The relevant part of the Toolkit is mostly the first subheading (fate-srd.com/fate-system-toolkit/using-skills-written).

It tells me I want to roughly stay in the same order of magnitude of skills, and how to deal with Drive and Lore easily.

Iiinteresting.

So you want to consolidate the fighting skills and expand the social skills. Is that right?

We want to compress the Crime and Investigation sphere, I don't think we want to change much about fighting. That's the easy part.

With social skills, I'm not sure about expanding.

(My personal bias would be to eliminate skills completely and go for approaches or an aspect-only hack, but--at the risk of sounding condescending--that's probably much too shocking for some of your players.)

1:34 PM

I would be willing to try Approaches, I've read FAE and I think it might work with those people.

Approaches are a different way of coming at action modifiers.

Instead of "What do I do?" defining the modifier you add to the roll, the question is "How do I do it?"

Yep, but I'd like to try them out in a single session first before committing to a longer game with approaches.

In some way they are not too far off AW stats, in particular when looking at moves that allow stat substitution.

Aye, it's a good idea for any system to introduce it with a quick game because then the stakes are lower: there's more encouragement to experiment and explore the implications of the system when your long-term gameplay isn't riding on it.

Social skills: It seems like we are interested in a different split of social interactions than the default skill list, and the question is how that influences play and if it's a good idea.

What kind of different split are you looking at?

And what's the goal of it, the purpose?

1:41 PM

It seems that the source material has good and bad orators, sophists, bards, dramatists etc., not people good at annoying people, making people feel good, lying to people etc.

Fate is very resilient in the face of purposeful hacking, but idle dial-fiddling can kill it fast; this is because at its core Fate works when all its mechanics are tools laid over the shared narrative truth of the group's story.

If you know what your story is, then you know why you made a change to the mechanics and when it stops working toward that end you can stop and tinker with it until it does work again.

@Anaphory Okay, so that sounds like you want profession skills.

Hmmm. Interesting. Maybe I am…

If we leave social skills as is, the way I think of implementing a very manipulative character is so give them the right stunt, are there other good ones?

Well, a manipulative character will have high ranks in Deceive, Empathy, and Provoke: he uses well-placed lies to get close to someone, learn their secrets, and then use those secrets to get them to do something unwise.

He can have stunts which give him bonuses in this, or let him declare aspects with free invokes, or the like. He should definitely have aspects which reflect his ability, and perhaps give insight into the specific methods he uses.

But also Rapport with the same justification as Provoke, and probably also Circles to find the right people whose strings to pull.

Aye, it gets convoluted quickly.

If the PCs are working together, they can spread the burden.

1:55 PM

That would already be the top half of the pyramid, but if they use these skills only manipulatively, and not to eg. tell good stories (Rapport) or help people recover from mental consequences (Empathy), that makes me wonder if that's the right way to have a skill list in a game with manipulative characters.

It's a matter of the game's focus; if that's what they spend almost all their time doing... then no, the default skill list doesn't support it.

You could consider custom or free-form skill lists that are unique to each character, so you aren't stuck trying to find the right combination to meet everyone's needs all the time.

Here I was, trying to change the skill list a little but not too much, and now I'm thinking of actually putting all the previously discarded options back on the table…

Anyway. What skills would you give a default Fate Core Socrates?

(I.e. in the setting described above, because I'm sure a character can't stand in the void)

Hmm. It's very late and it's been a long time since I've studied that part of history, but...

Sorry for keeping you up.

Where are you?

Guam.

In no particular order: Provoke, Contacts, Deceive, Empathy, Rapport, Will, Lore, and two bonus ones to be chosen depending on what kind of Socrates you want.

2:06 PM

Hmm. I share as important ones Provoke, Contacts and Empathy with you, so maybe stuff might work.

Professions might be simpler.

I'll think and discuss with players, and then I'll either ask again or not, depending if a reasonable question for SE turns up.

Thank you for clarifying a good number of things!

Perhaps... allow each player to add a "profession" skill of their defining, as a customised alternative to Craft.

My pleasure! Let me know how things work out and yes--making the ultimate decision with your group is The Fate Way.

Sure!

2 hours later…

Joshua Aslan Smith

4:39 PM

;SOCRATES!!!

« first day (510 days earlier) ← previous day next day → last day (1940 days later) »

Transcript for

Sep '1411

Fate chat and game room

Good questions raised here should hit the main site too! Fudge...

atomic-robo dresden-files fate fate-accelerated fate-core play-by-chat

join this room
about this room

00:00

06:00

12:00

18:00

all times are UTC

site design / logo © 2024 Stack Exchange Inc; legal

mobile