Fate: BESW's Hack & Slash puzzle brainstorming experiment (2/2: reflection)

BESW

Oct 21, 2014 05:26

And that's the conclusion of the brainstorm! All the established fact and cost aspects go away, but their narrative potency remains.

You've found the solution, and it's now up to the GM to decide if enacting it is interesting enough to call for more rolls (it might be, because booby traps).

Miniman

So at the conclusion of the brainstorm normal play recommences?

BESW

Or if knowing the solution is enough to cut to the next scene.

Right.

In some cases, brainstorming happens at the same time as other things.

Magician

I think in general, finding the solution to a puzzle and solving it is one and the same. But yeah, booby traps.

Well, I think this worked rather well.

Smurfton

Hello, @Emrakul .

BESW

For example, if you'd still been having to fight the enemies in the jungle!

user61230

Oct 21, 2014 05:27

Hello, @Smurfton!

Adeptus

@Magician I was thinking similar but more mundane - use the vines to swing the statues from, like a medieval battering ram

BESW

Then at the start of the brainstorm each PC would have had to choose whether to participate in the conflict, or in the brainstorm.

Magician

@Adeptus So many fate points spent! :D

Smurfton

@Adeptus : same.

BESW

(So some of you fight off the enemies to buy time while the others figure out how to open the door.)

Magician

Oct 21, 2014 05:29

It's curious that the initial high roll hurt us.

BESW

Yeah, that was interesting.

Smurfton

I hereby volunteer to tank the traps if necessary.

Magician

Thanks to fellow party members for participating!

Miniman

Incidentally, @BESW, how similar is this to actual FATE play?

BESW

@Magician I'd probably just make it a teamwork Overcome check, with success at cost if it rolled low, the cost being booby trap complications.

Smurfton

Oct 21, 2014 05:30

You're welcome!

What had been taken from D&D? are those 4e skills?

BESW

@Miniman It was a bit more... stilted... because we were focused on just one kind of mechanic in an unusually structured format.

Magician

@BESW Perhaps, cap the next difficulty at what it would have taken to succeed with style. So +6.

BESW

@Smurfton Just the idea that players will encounter traps and puzzles they have to think their way through, and trying to see if this particular mechanic works for that kind of encounter in Fate.

The skills are also inspired by D&D-style hack and slash games.

Magician

And that idea is not 4e-centric at all, but endemic to D&D in general.

BESW

In most D&D games, a puzzle of this sort would've been designed by the GM to have a set of expected solutions, and a good GM would've also been willing to roll with unexpectedly creative solutions.

But the GM would've been the one in charge of whether the statues moved, and how strong the vines were, and if the door was thin or thick.

Miniman

Oct 21, 2014 05:33

So is it meant to be a competitive process, or is that just a side-effect?

Smurfton

@BESW makes sense. If Fate isn't for that kind of encounter, what is it usually deciding??

BESW

@Miniman It's definitely competitive; brainstorming is designed originally to represent Action Scientists with competing theories about how the Weird Thing works.

trogdor

So I guess we are done then?

BESW

@trogdor Eeyup. Thanks everybody!

trogdor

mk

cool

BESW

Oct 21, 2014 05:35

@Smurfton Fate can accommodate most any setting or genre provided the PCs are competent, dramatic, and proactive, and the group is more interested in story logic than realism.

Miniman

Thanks BESW, was interesting.

trogdor

I think the idea of initial high rolls hurting you might be an unintended side effect of the intended difficulty scaling

BESW

The idea of players establishing truths about the scene is deeply ingrained in the Fate mechanics, but the brainstorm mechanic is an unusually structured form of it.

trogdor

it's supposed to get harder to do

Smurfton

Definitely looking into FATE after this.

Magician

Oct 21, 2014 05:36

@Smurfton One of us. One of us.

BESW

A loving cup!

trogdor

gooble goble gooble goble

XD

Smurfton

Is it all caps, or normal capitalization, then?

BESW

@Smurfton It used to be all caps, now it's normal.

Magician

@trogdor Yeah, but I reckon it should have become +6 after the first success with style, not +9 - that was an increase in difficulty with no benefit.

trogdor

Oct 21, 2014 05:37

you can just normally capitilize it

@Magician yeah

Magician

It's also pay-what-you-want and free online.

BESW

The Fate tag wiki has links and info about the different versions of the system--some of them free--and so forth.

Smurfton

@trogdor That's no fun!

BESW

(And at the bottom is a link to an article about the capitalisation.)

trogdor

@Smurfton you can say FATE if you want

Smurfton

Oct 21, 2014 05:39

Well, I'm off to dinner, then.

Night!

BESW

ttfn

Magician

G'night!

trogdor

night

BESW

I'd just like to mention how awesome it is that Fate can so easily accommodate people with no prior experience in it.

Magician

Yeah, that was very smooth.

BESW

Oct 21, 2014 05:41

I felt no trepidation having half the players be totally new to the system.

trogdor

my character would probably have worked out a little better fighting stuff while everyone else brainstormed

but it was still fun

BESW

Yeah, I did want to see how it would work out with characters not really built for that sort of problem-solving.

On a more brainstorm-specific note, I'm glad to see a new non-conflict multi-roll mechanic that doesn't rely on Overcome.

Something I noticed: Brainstorming is one of the first times in my experience with Fate that uneven skill ranks really made problems.

Magician

@BESW Speaking of those, challenge doesn't work for me.

@BESW Because we were competing with one another, not with arbitrary difficulties set by a sympathetic GM.

BESW

Heh.

Miniman

Also, penalties for over-success was a bit weird.

BESW

Oct 21, 2014 05:47

That was bizarre. I agree that a with-style cap is appropriate.

Magician

It's a curious thing, yeah. We're pursuing meta-actions, only tenuously tied to our skills. Declaring truths relating to something our characters know how to do. But seeing as it's effectively a competition for authorial authority, perhaps looking at the character sheet is not even appropriate.

As in, set the initial difficulty to 0, ignore skills, only use aspects because aspects are interesting.

As long as we're discovering existing aspects.

BESW

That might have to do with the fact we were using a pre-alpha-test set of skills.

But yeah, it had a kind of Penny for My Thoughts vibe to it.

Also! [flash of understanding]

Magician

On the other hand, seeing as this is puzzle solution rather than the original brainstorming, it is perhaps fitting to actively create new aspects-facts

BESW

This is why ARRPG made it impossible to have less than a +3 in Notice, and you have to work hard to get that.

Magician

huh

Yeah, Notice would definitely go well with this.

trogdor

Oct 21, 2014 05:53

@BESW Well, technically you could make weird modes without it

BESW

Hush, Weird Modes make everything uncertain.

(Presumably if you have a Weird Mode without Notice, you have something to make up for it that you can use to contribute in brainstorms.)

Smurfton

For the tie hypothesis, you could have a reroll and only those who tied could win, or each only gets to make half the plan?

BESW

Either of those could work.

A thought: What if Abraxis had declined to compel himself into the brainstorm, and instead used Intimidate to place aspects on the group to motivate them?

Not contributing facts or a hypothosis, but making others better able to do so?

Smurfton

Neat.

Magician

Yeah, that'd work.

trogdor

Oct 21, 2014 05:59

@BESW I sort of felt like that might have been a good idea

Smurfton

As an aside, doesn't intimidate make people dislike you automatically when you next leave the room or on the next day?

In d&d, at least.

BESW

That's a common rule in D&D editions, yes.

In Fate, it'd be based on the narrative.

I think Abraxis uses it more in the "scary captain of the platoon" fashion when he's dealing with his own group.

"I roll Intimidate to place Get with the program on Kove. He can use the free invoke on it if his next roll is in line with the others' actions instead of doing his own thing."

doppelgreener

In Fate, Intimidate is not a skill that has specific mechanical effects like that. Rather, it's: "I am performing an action in the narrative. This action is worth rolling for, because it is sufficiently dramatic / failure will be interesting / the degree of success is important. That action seems like it's best represented by how Intimidating my character can be. So I will use Intimidate for my roll to see how well I did."

(e.g. your character might be good at Lore or Tact but that's not the best skill relevant to the action you're taking in this circumstance)

BESW

That's one reason brainstorm felt weird to us: rolling a skill and then defining its story meaning isn't something Fate usually does.

Smurfton

how does it usually work?

BESW

Oct 21, 2014 06:04

I feel like maybe at an IRL table, defining the skill we roll would more naturally be accompanied by a brief explanation of how it's going to be used.

@Smurfton In Fate, you first describe the action you're going to attempt.

If only success or only failure would be interesting/dramatic, then the interesting/dramatic one happens.

(If failure would stop the story, you shouldn't fail!)

But if both success and failure would be cool to see, then you figure out what mechanic or set of mechanics to use to determine it.

A single roll, or a full-on conflict with attacking and defending and moving and so forth, or anywhere in between.

It's always "narrative first, then apply mechanics when they'd make it more interesting."

The version of Fate with brainstorming, Atomic Robo RPG, is unusually heavy with its mechanics.

doppelgreener

> Me: I'm going to charge that guy over the balcony. That's definitely Forceful. Is that Create an Advantage, or an attack?
GM: I think it might be an Overcome roll, actually, to break through the balcony edge and knock your opponent outside.
Me: Ok, I don't have any stunts for that. So that's Forceful +3... [rolls, gets + + - +] I get 5. What's he get?
GM: He got only a 1 to Quickly defend against that, trying to get out of the way. This isn't going to go well for him.
Me: I'm going to charge that sucker right out of the building, and knock him into the dirt below.

BESW

By contrast, a system like D&D 3.5 expects you to roll dice for most every action you take regardless of whether failure would be interesting; it defines your possible actions by the mechanics available to you rather than defining mechanics available to you by your possible actions; and it usually has only one level of action: turns in a series of rounds of combat.

doppelgreener

(at least I think I remember that action having been an Overcome)

BESW

That was definitely opposed Overcome actions.

Magician

@BESW As I said before, I think in this case you need to have an idea, and roll appropriate skill for it, but maybe not necessarily declare what the idea was. You might even be pushing the same idea each round, until you actually get a chance to make it a fact. Stating it over and over would just make it repetitive.

doppelgreener

Oct 21, 2014 06:11

(or it was a Quick overcome, I can't remember)

BESW

The four basic actions in Fate are Create Advantage (interact with aspects by creating, removing, and manipulating them); Overcome (oppose something that's in the way of doing what you want); Attack (cause harm to someone in order to remove them from a conflict entirely); and Defend (prevent someone from doing harm to you).

@Magician Fair enough.

doppelgreener

> Defend: Use the defend action to avoid an attack or prevent someone from creating an advantage against you.

BESW

@doppelgreener Defend gets... weird... depending on exactly which iteration of Fate you look at.

doppelgreener

people either do not get a leg up on you, or do not hurt you, if you defend well

BESW

In some, there's a fifth poorly defined pseudo-action called "oppose."

I'm not sure why.

doppelgreener

Oct 21, 2014 06:16

@BESW well in others there's the idea that you gotta invoke an aspect for it to be true, so maybe it was just some terrible idea dreampt up by someone who didn't know what they were doing and everyone else just copied it

BESW

Heh.

Maybe that's one of the things I like about ARRPG: it's doing what DFRPG wanted to do, but they had to strip Fate down to its core components and rebuild before they understood the system well enough to make it effectively crunchy without all the unnecessary dangly bits.

Smurfton

Well explained!

doppelgreener

So, one thing I noticed: physical interaction in this puzzle was difficult to work out how to handle on the parts of the participants.

BESW

How to fiddle with the puzzle to learn about it without solving it yet.

That may simply have been my fault for not explaining the narrative restraints of the exercise properly.

Magician

Yeah, it's important to remember it's all about figuring out the solution to the puzzle. So one could, for instance, use Athletics to rock the statues to make sure they're movable.

doppelgreener

Oct 21, 2014 06:23

The factss were created with Tact, Mechanics, Lore and Intimidate. Tact was probably improper because it was Noticing stuff. Intimidate was challenging. But Lore and Mechanics were easy enough.

I can imagine Faith going equally easily, it can probably be used for knowledge.

BESW

@doppelgreener Factsss, my precious!

doppelgreener

I'm gonna leave that typo there now :)

Sssssslip of the tongue

Toughness could have been used to interact with the heavy statues. Melee could have been used to break stuff, cause damage, and so on, and learn from that. Athletics could've been used to go climbing all over the joint.

Faith is a weird skill to me, and in ways I like it and in ways it seems like something about it isn't being handled as well as it could be for some reason.

BESW

Faith could easily be subsumed into trappings of Lore and Will.

Smurfton

did two of us have+6 in mechanics?

When using it with the bonus thing.

BESW

Thrumin and Calariel had easily applicable +6s.

doppelgreener

Oct 21, 2014 06:29

Here's what it looks like to me:
- It's Will.
- It also implies Religious belief, but not so firmly it can't be shrugged off into something more earthly.
- It also represents automatic Rapport with your colleagues, i.e. the fact you have faith in them.
- It's a Magic skill, but by a different name.
- It's a Lore skill, but specialised.

Nevertheless I enjoy the fact there exists a Magic+Lore skill by a different name.

It makes me wonder if you stumbled onto something interesting: a Magic skill can equally be defined as, say, Faith, or Arcana, or Shamanism. This ought to also grant you specialised knowledge over that domain, and key into things you might do: smite zombies, summon firestorms, shapeshift into a dire bear.

This feels right somehow.

BESW

So you're thinking... make Lore into the H&S equivalent of ARRPG's Science?

Magician

That requires well-defined magic "domains" to work.

BESW

A skill group?

doppelgreener

@BESW I need to research this; I can do that in a couple of hours.

Smurfton

Kind of like how in Paranoia, the skills intentionally overlap?

Magician

Oct 21, 2014 06:36

As in, Shamanism deals with spirits, Arcana deals with elements, Faith deals with... souls & healing & stuff because we need it to be different from Arcana somehow but not really.

BESW

I'd probably put Faith as dealing with guidance.

Smurfton

If you can convince the gm that the skill applies here, it does.

doppelgreener

@Magician Yes, like that. The players are given the freedom to come up with their own brands of magic, but it would be a good idea to supply a few.

BESW

Faith is the "I just know what to do" skill in my head.

doppelgreener

@BESW Yeah, Faith is also about divine inspiration.

And they can overlap: you can light zombies on fire with the might of the sun god, or enthusiastic pyromancy. You can have visions through divination, or through contact with a higher power.

STT LCU

Oct 21, 2014 06:39

good morning

doppelgreener

@STTLCU Morning

Smurfton

paranoia had the rule book specifically say the whole overlapping thing, though.

Morning.

Magician

And now I have to run. Have a good night!

doppelgreener

@BESW And it might be that Lore simply gets shoved out of the domains of magic the players have created. Lore implies studying history and worldly knowledge, and not necessarily the mystical arts.

BESW

This has a lot to do with how sharply we want to define magic.

Is it the result of applied knowledge? Or can it also be unconscious, instinctive, untrained, unknown?

Remember Cat's PC in the Enchanted Forest game, who didn't really have control over her shadow magic.

doppelgreener

Oct 21, 2014 06:42

@BESW Yeah, it can and should be those things sometimes.

I guess in that case, Shadow Magic doesn't imply any knowledge due to the narrative. But that knowledge might develop, due to the unique perspective that person has.

Likewise there can be brands of magic from even the well-educated that don't imply knowing anything: necromancy might mean you know a lot about the undead, or you might not have any idea about anatomy but you know how to make it move.

@BESW This is beginning to make me think that Magic ought to be the equivalent of Science, a create-your-own of what your magic means to you.

BESW

"I don't do bodies, man, I just cram the souls back into 'em."

doppelgreener

If that comes with Knowledge, your Magic mode comes with Lore. If that comes with brute force (think druid), Melee and Toughness are in there.

@BESW Haha yes.

And your Magic mode comes with a skill defining the name, brand, or nature of your magic. Faith, Arcana, Cryomancy, Shadowdancing, Necromancy, and so on all work.

Some modes, like Devout or Caster, are pre-prepped Magic modes.

(I need to read about Science later to make sure I understand it correctly, but at the moment as I understand it, it's a mode you pick to fill in with other junk, including something describing a field of study you're an expert in.)

Fate: BESW's Hack & Slash puzzle brainstorming experiment (2/2: reflection)

Fate chat and game room

Participants