There was also a confusion on that. I prepared Core, the guy who wanted to try GMing prepared Accelerated. I didn't think it would be a big issue, I'd use Core knowledge as a backup for him if he'd get stuck.
Though I did start out with reading about Fate through Accelerated, but stopped halfway through because of a couple of references to Core and I though, oh what the heck let's read that.
So we've got W and G, then from my original group we have T and K, and story-teller dude will be S.
So there we are, quite a big group. We have dinner first, and as dessert we start talking about a setting. We go around the table to see where people's interests lie.
Since it's just a "lets get a feeling for Fate" kind of session, we didn't want to put too much effort into the setting, but we still talked about it for a good hour or so...
We settled on Harry Potter meets Lost.
We'd be shipwrecked and on the run for 'Voldemort', a cultist organisation trying to resurrect him and we'd have to stop the ritual.
But our immediate issue was, "survive on this island".
Then we get to character creation, and it starts going a little bit downhill.
For some reason, G really loves playing level 0 characters.
She loves the mundane and incompetence, but I tried to explain to her that Fate is about competence and drama.
She insisted that she'd be useful in social conflicts, and the group was alright with that.
Then there was W, playing an agent from the Ministry of Magic (or whatever it's called in English Harry Potter, we play in Dutch). So that's quite a competent character there.
T played an archaeologist with butter fingers (think like a slapstick Indiana Jones).
I played a character as well, since S read the rules and he wanted to give storytelling / GMing a go. So I was playing a tomb raider, and I thought it would be nice to connect my background to the archaeologist.
Then K walked in, after being delayed in traffic for an hour. She sat at the table, got like a 2 minute summary of everything we talked about so far, and she made a character: a 14 year old Syrian boat fugitive who barely speaks English but knows a bit of magic.
Then we get to the Phase Trio part of character creation, but since another hour or so passed, a few were getting slightly impatient. So they suggested that we skip the backstory part, just so we can 'play a bit of Fate' and see what's it all about.
At this point, I didn't even get to explain anything about the 4 actions, 4 outcomes, the dice or even Aspects...
So, to not be the stick in the mud, looking at the clock, I decided to roll with that too... I would introduce the rules as they'd come up. BUT, I wasn't the GM....
So, there I was, interrupting the story teller at various points in the story to explain to the group, "this is where you break out the dice, because there is an interesting outcome to either succeeding or failing", or, "you don't have to attack this bear, you could try to change up the situation to create an advantage for you or the group".
Most often, I'd do this through my character, so when we were fighting a bear, I'd show that instead of attacking it, I'd kick sand in its eyes to create Sand In Eyes, write it on a piece of paper and put it on the table.
But the way we were introduced to the rules was very messy and stop-n-go. It made for a very confusing session, for them.
I think "going back" on resolving things differently confused the group to the point where one of them even said outright "I think I'd enjoy it more if we just sat on the couch and told a story together". I responded that that'd be okay, and it'd be completely free-form, but then we're not playing Fate.
Because we started out completely free-form, and when I felt that the storyteller wasn't applying the rules (in situations where he could have, and he knows because he read the FAE rules), I'd explain to the group that if we'd encounter a similar situation, we'd resolve it differently.
And that'd be okay too, but I didn't want the night to continue like this, and then at the end we could pretend we had played Fate while in fact it was just rules-less freeform...
If we play a session to get to know a system, I said we should at least try to follow the systems rules to discover if it's a good system for us...
So by the end of that, we decided to do a do-over soon, I'd take the GM role, and I'd go over the system rules first, before even touching anything like the setting or characters. We might even use the already-established setting and characters to speed things up.
I just felt that it'd be nice to establish the setting and characters first, and then questions like "how do you do stuff" would come up naturally...
So yeah, I think it was a disaster, and they are going to enter the next session not with a clear head, but a sour taste in their mouth... so I wonder if Fate will ever take off in my group.
