A pressure is an aspect on the situation which demands action. Fate PCs are competent, proactive, and dramatic, which means we need pressures to give them things to be proactive about.
@nitsua60 That's just @eimyr. The group's consensus is however the group wants to do it.
(One thing we totally forgot: in Fate there is no "mystery". All Aspects are available at all times. The players know about them, but the game is about the characters not knowing. Abandoning the metagaming is not a mechanical disadvantage, but a storytelling choice)
@BESW OK. I thought the default mode was that if the dragon has a [Broken Wing], the players know about this, even if the characters don't - just by looking at the dragon crib sheet and it's hard to make it otherwise.
In a full traditional Fate prep session, we'd establish a series of important Places (which can include groups, doesn't have to be physical places), and a Face NPC for each one.
If you've got a bar as an important location, its Face might be the bartender, or a dancer, or the guy who's always playing pool. Whoever's going to be interesting and easy for the PCs to interact with a lot.
@nitsua60 They're replacing skills. I'm using a very simple version Fate, called Fate Accelerated Edition.
In FAE, we use Approaches instead of Skills. They describe how you're doing a thing, rather than what you're doing.
I like to think of it as "TV logic." The muscley guy can intimidate a person OR punch out a wall, the sciencey guy can hack a computer AND match DNA, etc.
Your aspects help inform the extent and limits of what's reasonable to use your approaches to accomplish.
any guidance on secrets? IRL I'm a serious oversharer--which you likely already correctly surmised--and so have a tough time wrapping my head around it
In more complex versions of the system, you'd have multiple stress tracks for Physical and Mental stress and maybe even more (like maybe a Resources track in a high business or political campaign).
I'd like to play as Darryl Murchison, a neurotic precarious Shakespeare scholar with a PhD, whose best job opportunity is to work as a barista at Stormducks, who is flying this plane to meet his online GF for the first time and [nothing will stop him] from reaching the destination at all costs.
Now, stunts. We'll just give you one for now, but you can have up to three for "free." We'll come up with them during play; whenever you come up against something that seems like you'd be really good at it, we can talk about stunts to represent that specialty.
@eimyr [when you phrase is "I'd like..."--should I read that another could veto (or at least suggest a re-work of) some portion of your character? Is that part of the Fate ethos?]
@nitsua60 Kinda, yes. Characters often get talked about and have ideas thrown around. Obviously each player has final say over any element of his PC that doesn't make others actually uncomfortable, but collaboration makes for better characters.
(I once made a voodoo Man in Black so creepy I was asked to never bring him back.)
@nitsua60 Say that your character is a witch. I want to play a witch-hunter. That's a very interesting combination, why would we work together? We can then synergise our characters to create tension or other roleplaying opportunities, but if we are unable to, we probably should frop one of the concepts.
Also, with that reach-the destination I gave my character motivation to act. But maybe it doesn't quite fit the theme of the story? I should listen to what you have to say about this before I commit.
> Because I [describe some way that you are exceptional, have a cool bit of gear, or are otherwise awesome], I get a +2 when I [pick one: Carefully, Cleverly, Flashily, Forcefully, Quickly, Sneakily][pick one: attack, defend, create advantages, overcome] when [describe a circumstance].
@BESW What would the dude in Die Hard have for an Ambition? Something like "Stay healthy"? Something that's not necessarily relevant at the very beginning, but once the terrorists start shooting things up, very relevant.
"Because I access gov't databases all day I get a +2 when I cleverlycreate advantage by using laptop from plane to get into passenger manifest to provide info to Darryl who's freaking out about 'who stole my passport that I'll need to get to Tahiti to see *gamerChickFromTahiti3224!'"
in my too-crazy example I was thinking about your "tv logic" line: in tv-world because I WORK WITH COMPUTERS and work for THE GOVERNMENT, that totally means I can get the passenger manifest, right?
(Probably not, but that's the sort of thing that CAN happen in play-to-discover, where we find out someone's aspect implied things we never suspected.)
> You have {something suspicious} aspect and you and this guy are trying to figure out who stole the necklace, so it makes sense that, unfortunately, he'd decide you did it. Damn your luck.
@eimyr I don't recommend it for starting out though, some of those stunts get a little more complex than I think is really good for our introductory session.
They're for Fate Core, not Accelerated. (They try to be agnostic, but they're designed with Core complexities in mind.)
If that's two players together trying to work it out, you could compel both of them - one a decision based compel to make accusations, one an event based compel to have accusations made. Or compel them both to accuse each other and start arguingg.
@eimyr Yeah, skip that one for now. Stick to the basics.
feels like there's lots of sincere, generous mentorship on this stack
even when I was a complete newbie, blundering around and doing my damndest to (inadvertently) break things it felt like the frustration:"here, let me help you with this" ratio was in the 1:20 neighborhood
I'm not heading to sleep anytime soon, so I'll still be around. I'm not quite on the same page as BESW is with this scenario but we've spent just about our whole time with Fate learning it together so I'm ok with the system.
SevenSidedDie and trogdor are also people who know a lot about it. BESW and I know a bit more than trogdor, I think. SSD knows a whole lot more than BESW or me.
@nitsua60 there is :) BESW learned a lot about Fate from another dude, Kyle Sykes, who was really active around here until a little while back.
@doppelgreener when you say "not on the same page," do you mean you don't think you have the same concept in mind, or you don't run the system the same way, or something different?
I'd had more of a 50's-era travel-as-luxury meet-interesting-people story-on-a-train setting in my head, when I realized that a hundred messages back someone'd said "there's a boring movie on." SCREECH. Guess we're in modern flight-as-cattle-car setting =)
plus, they've got load more space and obstacles than a plane, and there's interesting scenery, and you can climb out the windows or throw people out and get on the roof and everything, and a stray bullet won't make absolutely everything explode horribly and kill everyone. it's great fun.
planes have a lot more constraint, and you gotta be happy and willing to work with that.
right. I threw out the idea of plane-as-setting, almost immediately thought well, that's actually really restrictive, but everyone else was happy to run with it
but I've seen
(whoops--mis-click)
@doppelgreener right--the way we've been talking it seems like it may end up being more of a Twelve Angry Men than an Air Force One.
(would that mashup be All the President's Twelve Angry Men?)
@nitsua60 Hahahaha, yes, I'm aware. BESW recommended it to me once when I was talking about how much I enjoyed films that were undertaken with deliberate unusual constraints, like Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat, which takes place completely on a lifeboat. Hitchcock made himself work hard to keep things interesting.
(When I proposed can I flesh out a scenario, you-all can correct my three-minute-old understanding of a game you love, I didn't necessarily anticipate it'd turn into a full-fledged game. I'm absolutely happy to have it do so, but I feel like I'm blundering around the internet pretty rudely)
It's very Fatey, in my Courtly Intrigue game I think a third of all aspects are made by one player for another's character (with consent and discussion ofc)
Secret: Former professional thief could also be interesting on someone. Useful and problematic.
(but then you have to be careful about how you take advantage of that, because someone might just think you seem to know a lot about robbery and maybe you did it)
if you-all have five more minutes, would you be willing to put "Fate on a Plane" development on hold for a moment and run me through a quick little example-scene?
@nitsua60 I'll put it this way. In our Amaterasu game, we're playing as members of a black-ops militant organisation devoted to keeping Weird Stuff secret and protecting people worldwide. We used to start sessions with a mission briefing with our director, and then pre-mission equipment preparation maybe, and then we arrived on the site where the action was happening.
