@BESW @trogdor I'm curious what either of you think of this brief exchange I had yesterday with SSD

welp, so far the first thing you both say echoes something that I have thought of before

Fate is a system that has a good flexibility and strength rooted in narrative, but mechanical parts of it are often not defined enough, at least on the GM's side, to help you "balance encounters"

this doesn't make it bad, but it is a very particular limitation that less narratively focused systems usually don't have (and they in turn have entirely different limitations)

I'm thinking of Fate as "tools for helping you resolve decisions" rather than "tools for helping you figure out what decisions to resolve."

(eg, Fate points as "bribes" to encourage quickly deciding to have dramatic problems happen to your character)

But the flip side of that is, it's gotta get out of the way if you don't want a tool to resolve the decision because you know what outcome you want.

i think all of that is reasonable

@BESW that in particular says something about why those relatively intimate games i had worked well: we had a fairly well shared understanding of what decisions mattered and how we wanted things resolved.

i think we covered it way back when, but i think it's a weakness in the amaterasu story that it was largely based on a hybrid of like 4 or 5 different pieces of media, where those medias each had radically different tones, but several of us had only seen half of them (i think)

iirc... atomic robo, hellboy, avatar, warehouse 13, x-files

Aye.

@BESW Do you think it would be worthwhile revisiting story tone & inspirations if/when we revisit the Amaterasu game?

@doppelgreener I feel like it might need a full overhaul honestly

@trogdor i'd be open to that, what're your thoughts on doing that?

similar to what you have said so far

we may have too many seperate inspirations for it

though I also think I need to work on how I make my characters

I'm not entirely sure exactly what we should do, but I do think our group needs to discuss it at some point if we want to start that campaign back up

i'm interested in starting it back up sometime, but now that you mention it, an overhaul wouldn't go amiss - it would be helpful to revisit our goals for the game and the inspirations fuelling it to see what common ground is available.

yeah

I don't think it was the only reason it fell apart, but one of the reasons, to me, seems to be that we lost touch with where we were going with the story

and the setting itself

i think so, i mean it was a mission-a-week casually available game and medium for various stories

but maybe it would be better off being not that?

I don't know

that is why the top of the list of things I think we need to do is have our group talk it over

so we can gather everyone's thoughts and ideas on it

unfortunately, our group's biggest weakness is not being able to gather our whole force very often

we could have that conversation in a dedicated channel on discord

(i think the dedicated channel would be important for keeping the conversation from being dissolved by the other stuff we talk about when we're active)

like, the skype channel?