Sometimes the Wikpedia talk pages are fonts of knowledge that go far beyond what's been vetted into the proper article. And sometimes they're argblebargle.
If RPGSE had a blog I'd think there should be a series entitled "Why do we do this to ourselves?" It'd be a non-tongue-in-cheek series written by GMs on what each enjoys about the role.
(Basically, I'm just loving one of my RL gm gigs right now and would love to share. I think a lot of people are daunted and think it' a lot of hard work, but they don't realize how much fun it is.)
@nitsua60 I am most amused. This would also give some insight into different GMing dynamics in different games and groups. BESW, Trogdor and I share GMing and a fourth member of our group is preparing his own session for the future that he'll GM, all in the same game.
Our group dynamic and our system of choice also makes GMing painless and enjoyable.
(So the "why do you do this to yourself?" comes from a world I'm no longer in.)
Then there's the games we GM where we just pick it up and go. Great Ork Gods and Roll for Shoes for instance.
@doppelgreener The "why do we do this to ourselves" came from a co-worker working up NPCs in his spare time that may never see play. At the time I was crafting architectural drawings of a building that will burn down in-game next week.
Neither of us was saying it in the "woe is me" sense--both of us recognize that, in GMing, we get to play the away-from-table game as much as we like. And we both like. A lot.
Shadowcraft has some ideas about quick flashbacks, too, in the context of a superspy PC revealing that he has exactly the right gadget for the situation.
I like 'em for any time the players start talking tactics (combat, social-interaction, even just setting up camp) OOC. Throws them into a no-pressure IC scene to have exactly the same conversation. (And keeping the RfS interludes really short seems to tamp down some of the silliness that is apparently in the DNA of that system.)
It's not published yet, so reviews are under NDAs and specifics aren't all forthcoming.
But it looks quite complete.
And its setting is a set of four fantasy realms, each reachable from a different exit from a child's room:
The Closet has traditional fairy-tale adventures, the Window has tech-y spaceships-and-racecars adventures, Under the Bed is scarier with goblins and ghosts, and Behind the Bookshelf is pulp adventure with spies and dinosaurs and superheroes.
Disclaimer: I don't care about rep. If community decides that my post is not useful - so be it. And no disrespect or attempt to soil Dale M's name. I'm just little upset with such arguments.
@RollingFeles It seems like a pretty good answer to me, although Dale M is working in your favour there. The only thing I'd point out is that critical success and critical failure are decidedly non-system-agnostic concepts.
@Miniman thank you! I tried to improve wording a bit.
@BESW I though about it, but decided to explain a bit why I call it a "guess" in more details, although, I think answer already covers this, maybe with less details, but idea, as I see it, should be clear. I'm not sure, maybe my wording triggered such reactions.
I started reviewing Standard Fate Core Boring Skill List for my Courtly Intrigue v2 game
and I find myself cringing a lot
but at the same time when I try to crack the skill problem (skills that are almost useless, skills that are vague, actions that don't really fit anywhere) I find myself oblivious of the dangers of frivolous skill splicing
I feel like I am trying to do stuff and not asking whether I should and what are the dangers of doing it wrong
I have a particular gripe with superfluousness of Empathy (as a "listening" skill complementing Rapport and Deceive "speaking" skills) as well as a lack of a neutral-aligned Command or Authority skill designed to tackle conversations where neither threat or friendliness is involved.
@BESW Thanks, I'll see if there's anything he can tell a youngling like me
@trogdor I'm actually trying to rebuild the skills specifically to assign appropriate modes to them, in a fashion that would bring House of Bards to ARRPG level of involvement.
One (of many) problem I've had with Fate-powered Courtly Intrigue was that players didn't know what skills are for and what sort of emphasis they need to put on each. Modes seem like a good idea to tackle that.
Yes, but instead of ranking three modes, and letting that in turn rank the skills within each mode, you just rank each aspect and let it stand at that.
And yes, it's very similar to custom approaches, but your approaches ARE your character aspects.
I prefer it to Refresh for all my Fate games going forward: set a number of "free" stunt slots and a number of fate points the PCs start with, and any more stunts add to the GM pool instead of reducing the PC's points.
Means that PCs can actually have more power, and use it to solve bigger, more awesome problems.
More aspects means more stuff to keep track of, which is good or bad depending on your group.
It also means you can have each aspect be a LOT more specific because it can sit back and chillax until a particular scene when it shines; you've got other aspects to pick up the slack elsewhere.
But when you're in a situation where most of your aspects come into play, you can spend fate points like water because you have enough aspects to invoke.
@Polyducks you've seen my mug. I need to set my standards high, have droopy role models to aspire to.
@BESW That was a problem in the Courtly Intrigue game. One of the characters had trouble using his aspects until physical conflict happened, when he unloaded 4-5 points at once. This skewed the game a lot.
I have a few candidates to be axed, merged, changed or added.
I think my goal is to shift the focus of the game from "adventure", which is based on actions to "strategic", where more scenes are about planning and affecting the world indirectly, rather than dealing with here-and-now situations
Build your skill list by feel because your feel is gonna be pretty good. Consider what it's important to be good at in your game. Recognise that you're actually going to circle back to the original skill list a lot - almost every Fate variant uses it with only small changes, and that's because it's really really solid.
which would be both active and passive, e.g. Empathy is for listening, but Rapport - speaking. It feels like one is needed for the other, so they could be merged.
How you combine and divide skills is going to relate to how much your game focuses on those things, and needs people to divide their resources or be just universally good. Atomic Robo combines Fight and Shoot because in Atomic Robo, there's just combat training and that's it. You're good at both.
(I wanted to deemphasise direct combat this way too - but perhaps have a skill of "tactics" or "military command" that would show how to win skirmishes by directing other people, which was lacking inmy previous Courtly incarnation. +1 Good example, would listen again)
I'm making a Fate variant as a personal project for another fiction. It involves riding animals or driving vehicles, but since that's almost never relevant, I don't have Drive or Ride. Since the players are vagabond adventurers, Resources is going to be set aside as a "Weird" skill (as ARRPG puts it - a skill almost nobody actually has and may never even show up.)
In a game that's all about mental contests of determination, i.e. usually handled by Will, you're going to want to divide that slightly so people can express in what ways they're good at mental contests. Otherwise, Will is just The God Skill.
@eimyr I haven't done much work with modes. You should read the Fate System Toolkit's section on modes if you haven't already, and the author of Atomic Robo wrote a blog post about constructing them: On Modes.
I was trying to use them for a game design where modes turned out to be not the right thing to use.
My gut has had an awful lot to say about how to design the Fate variant I've been writing for my own sake. Any words I've been able to say about it to the people I've been speaking to about it have just been my brain catching up and being able to articulate it.
"This needs to be something like... this... I'm not sure why... oh, that's why"
ARR seems to focus on what characters do, as it's a game of action. Courtly Intrigue might revolve about who the characters are and there is a lot to pick from.
I like seeing modes as sets of skills wrapped as approaches too
Is your project accessible anywhere?
Well, I want to use the modes to NOT bog players down with relative synergies of skills etc. I want to tell them "you want to be X, you pick A, B, C, D"
Fate Hack & Slash is some draft documents here or there as I tried to figure out what I was even trying to do with it. I'm not sure there's all that much to glean from it. The other thing is private for now.
My issue with Fate Hack & Slash was I was trying to represent many kinds of narratives that had similar mechanical natures: Dark Souls, Lord of the Rings, classic fantasy stories, etc. Fate doesn't dance when you're just trying to represent mechanics, it dances when you're using those mechanics to represent a narrative.
@eimyr Character creation points are also used in Game Over, one of the free Worlds of Adventure. Skills don't have applications in that one, they instead just each can be used with two of the four actions, and you buy permission to use them with one or two of the other actions.
@eimyr People will get bogged down in what they want to get bogged down in. I wouldn't even call it getting bogged down. Just interested in. You should ask @BESW about his friend who loves Fate because it lets him make his own level of mechanical crunch. Plus, the default triangle lets you decide "what's important?" and just decide pretty simply by filling out the triangle.
For other characters I've learned that skills aren't a choice between "what is your character good at?" but "what's most important?". Having a decent skill you use regularly at +2 is OK, maybe you'll use more fate points but you get compels to get more as well.
@doppelgreener yeah, my players where coming from D&D background and they seemed to have trouble constructing characters by narrative requirements and not by ability.
That feeling when you ask a question about a game and you get Word of God in an answer.
@Ahriman I thought they can be recorded, even with mirrors.
I recall vaguely that powers like Obfuscate are affecting the perception of the viewer and do not work when watching a recording. I thought Lasombra's lack of reflection is similar to this.
I'm fond of Ultraviolet's implementation: vampires not only have no reflection and can't be seen in cameras or video recorders, they also can't be heard over the phone or even fingerprinted.
They use text-to-voice software to make phone calls.
I was going to ask how the physics on that work, and then I realized the whole mirror thing is already really broken from a physics POV... (it can't just be they reflect light differently because you can see them)
Yeah, a big part of Ultraviolet is the humans being totally baffled by how vampires work. It's explicitly "They follow rules, but we don't know all the rules and what we do know makes no sense."
It seems to be a quasi-quantum "direct observation only" kind of deal.
yeah I didnt know if you subscribed like I did or not and wanted to give you the heads up since youve always been interested in that splat world and I figured you would eventually pick it up and run it for us or your live game group.
@BESW That game ended up using occupations, which is not all that different from custom character-specific approaches/Rated aspects. Rated aspects might have actually been better, because we were thinking of them in terms of aspects some of the time. Rated … what was it … 3 2 2 1 1? 5 4 3 2 1? Can't remember.
