@BESW I like it. Seems like a better way to model chase scenes in film. Typically the chase goes on with participants crashing or otherwise dropping out until the fleer gets caught or everyone else fails to catch them.

Yeah, if the chase is going to be big and dramatic and drawn-out, I think this is the way to go.

Although perhaps a compromise is in order, with three wins finishing the conflict, but failures causing stress that can lead to a drop out.

A compromise between the two models.

I'd probably have to run a few scenarios to see if a particular model emerged or if it needed to be customised each time.

Yeah. It’s probably relevant that chase scenes typically have a mixture of direct conflict and environmental obstacles

Even more indirect conflict, where the leader creates an obstacle that wipes out some of the followers

Last week I ran a short chase-as-contest scene in my Doctor Who game.

Basically, a chase scene isn’t the same as a race (which is more clearly a contest)

In it, an insane not-quite-Doctor was trying to lose the PC companions inside the TARDIS.

We ran it using traditional contest rules. I'd describe how he was trying to lose them--by running faster than they could keep up, or going through complex and dangerous rooms he hoped would slow them down. They'd describe how they were going to try closing the distance despite his efforts.

When we got a tie (and we did twice) something dramatic changed: once, the army of Cybermen who were also in the TARDIS showed up, forcing everyone to backpedal; the second time the TARDIS initiated a lockdown sequence, slowly closing blast doors throughout the ship.

It concluded with the not-quite-Doctor getting his third success and slipping under a blast door just before it closed.

Previously in the same session, we had a contest where the PC companions taunted some Cybermen to chase them into a trap.

There, it was a matter of "Will the Cybermen catch up to you before you reach the trap?"

That’s pretty cool.

Chase scenes are one of the things that I’ve never really found to work well in RPGs, although I’ve seen a couple that didn’t suck. One was in Shadowrun.

I've had success with the contest mechanic, but as I'm thinking about more action-only type adventures I'm wondering how to use the "zoom" feature of Fate on chases.

I don’t recall “zoom” off the top of my head! Haven’t had much time to look at Fate stuff lately.

Zooming in on the Action.

It's simply the notion that a single roll can represent any level of complexity.

Ah OK.

The recent game-rec questions have gotten me thinking more about Fate again.

The more dramatic and interesting the thing, the more rolls it should probably take to resolve.

Unfortunately I don’t really have bandwidth or players for it right now.

But answering the questions has gotten me thinking about how I really like FAE.

@BraddSzonye What in particular do you like about FAE? (Especially as opposed to other iterations of Fate?)

@BESW Well it’s the only one I’ve actually gotten to play. But I especially like it because it suits my rules-light tastes very well.

I actually really like winging it in RPGs, but I have trouble doing that in games with a bunch of rules and skills and tables and backgrounds etc etc etc.

Because then my rules-loving side comes out and wants to get everything exactly right.

FAE is so simple, especially in terms of character stats, that it lets my creative side out.

And the way things are broadly described lets me not worry so much about numbers and power levels and balance and such.

In answering the game-rec questions, I’ve been looking at stuff in the Toolkit and Worlds about how to do superpowers and other extras.

And often my reaction is: this is nice, but I’d rather just handle it with FAE and aspects.

Or I think about stuff like power levels – action heroes vs Silver Age superheroes vs mythology and stuff. And I think, I don’t really need to worry about power levels so much with approaches.

I can just let aspects and advantages and freebies and such handle the scale issues.

Because the game balance is based on narrative rather than power level.

There are some really easy, simple layers for that sort of thing which I like, but yeah--it's often easy to ignore.

Unrelated: I’m digging the starred post about discovery in Fate, especially the discussion in the comments to the post.

@BESW I suspect that I might want a little more structure if I did a long-form game rather than the one-shot I did.

Yes. Especially approaches: they work great for short games, but longer games kinda need more complex roll modifier systems.

But overall I really liked how FAE worked for Shadowrun, and that’s a setting within kissing distance of a lot of other genres I like. Like supers.

And high fantasy.

My group goes between super-low crunch (Cthulhu Dark, Roll for Shoes) and moderately high crunch (Fate Core with extra bits).

We have an odd mix of players. Some of them don’t especially like RPGs at all, but play for the social time.

One guy really, really loves tactics. Like, D&D4 is his favorite D&D.

I like having him in the group, and I like that he sometimes DMs when I’m burned out, but I get tired of every encounter being a tactical exercise.

My previous group (we've had better than 50% turnover since then) loved 4e and its tactics and its a la carte chargen options.

We have another guy, not currently playing with us, who is a brilliant strategist and wins all the board games, but in RPGs he always plays goofy, lovable characters who are so not about the stats.

Now, Trogdor still kinda misses the complex mechanical chargen of 4e, but we all really enjoy focusing on the more narrative and lower-crunch systems.

I love finicky chargen systems for their own sake. Building Hero characters is its own reward.

But as a GM, man do I love easy peasy simple vague chargen.

I really like FAE and how you can make something out of a few words and phrases and have it actually mean something solid in the game.

@BraddSzonye Trogdor agrees. He'd have a new 4e character built every week or two, though he stuck with playing just one PC for the vast majority of the year-and-a-half campaign.

@BraddSzonye I'm actually kinda learning to love games where only the PCs have stats.

Like Cthulhu Dark or Great Ork Gods.

Ran across a question today about Tunnels & Trolls. That sounds like an interesting system.

It has elements of that for most/all monsters.

Like, I guess most of them just have a numerical Monster Rating.

Feng Shui is kinda like that too, for mooks.

They have a threat rating and a hit point, if I remember right.

Have you seen Dungeons of Fate?

No. Oo.

I haven't tried it yet, but the core innovation is the monster levelling system.

Nice.

You pick a number, and that's the monster's rating. All its stats are that number.

Looking at that – wow. That’s honestly kind of how I see D&D5.

Which I guess is one of the reasons I’m really digging it so far.

A level 2 goblin attacks at +2, defends at +2, and has 2 stress boxes.

It’s loose enough that I can play it the way I play FAE and other rules-light systems.

A level 5 dragon attacks at +5, defends at +5, and has 5 stress boxes.

Which is why I pushed Brian to revive my game-rec for D&D5 as a good rules-light, records-light RPG.

I dunno whether it’s the game or the way I’m playing it, but this D&D just feels a lot freer than I have playing trad RPGs in a long, long time.

To me the play feel has more in common with Fate than different.

So when that whole discussion was going on, “If Fate and D&D are both good answers, it’s a bad question” – well I couldn’t disagree more.

I mean, I totally see why somebody would say that, but the games have an awful lot more in common than you’d expect.

Well, "D&D" has become such an encompassing concept that it's hard to say anything categorical about it.

However, I get the impression that even 5e is still not narrative-first.

Hm.

Yeah, they’re different that way. I think D&D5 is trying to be neutral.

Because it’s really not game-first anymore.

They’ve backed way, way away from that.

And also away from . . . I’m not sure what to call it.

I’d say sim-first, but nobody really agrees on what that means.

Fiddly-details-first.

To me it feels way more like, tell me what to do, and then roll according to your approach, which is Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, or Charisma.

It's still a la carte, which makes it hard to really put narrative first because a la cart chargen predefines the narrative choices you can make.

That’s what really hit me about the Dungeons of Fate thing.

Now it’s possible that I’m just using D&D rules to play Fate. Heh.

What do you mean by a la carte chargen though?

That’s not an adjective I would think to use with D&D5 characters.

You have a set of premade options to choose from. There's not a lot of "or you could make your own" in terms of classes, feats, spells...

Ah, a la carte makes me think of bits and pieces, which is one thing they seem to have largely done away with.

They run the feat cart past and you pick up the ones you want.

They bring the spell cart over and you choose which spells look tasty.

As an artist/storyteller, I’ve never thought of that sort of thing as being opposed to art/narrative. More orthogonal to it.

Some people like to write free verse, some like sonnets.

Oh, it's not opposed to it.

But it gets in the way of narrative-FIRST play.

D&D’s more on the sonnet end of things. Although much less so than recent editions.

I think Apocalypse World is pretty strong counter-evidence against that claim.

AW is very, very heavily on the sonnet end of things. And it’s totally narrative first.

I have not read AW, but my impression is that its choices are more like Fate's actions: generic descriptions that get applied to narrative.

It has a very, very strict class system. Much stricter than D&D’s.

You don't look at your options and say "I chose fireball, so I'll cast a fireball."

It has a very strict moves system too.

For players and GM.

But you use the classes and moves to implement the narrative, rather than to drive it.

Just like in Fate you choose Overcome vs Attack vs Create Advantage according to the narrative, not to drive it.

Having a short list of very strict mechanics doesn’t really limit your narrative, it just structures the mechanical outcome.

In a way that’s a really old-school idea.

Right.

I hear that’s how Hero System’s designers intended it.

I'm seeing a difference in 5e because the mechanics do seem to drive the narrative. But again, I haven't played either 5e or AW.

I’ve read a lot of hearsay about how Hero’s designers played the game and intended it to be played, but very little of it made it into the rulebooks in an instructive way.

@BraddSzonye This seems sadly common across the years.

I’m not sure whether they were trying not to limit folks’ play styles, or if it was just so second-nature to them that the didn’t realize they needed to teach it.

Yeah, it’s a pretty common weakness of RPGs. Very few of them seem to teach how to actually play the game, or what the focus is, or such.

Fate does pretty well at it. And it’s pretty much the point of Apocalypse World.

I love the Call of Cthulhu sections on those topics.

To tell you how to play, rather than giving you character creation rules.

I like Call of Cthulhu as an idea, but I could never get into the BRP versions of the games because the mechanics just totally left me flat.

Like, I think CoC is kinda barse-ackwards in terms of matching mechanics to playstyle, but they compensate with beautiful discussions about the kind of story they're driving for and the roles they expect each participant to play.

So I dip a lot into Lovecraftian horror in my games. But I’ve never played BRP CoC.

I do highly recommend Cthulhu Dark, if you haven't tried it.

I did play a little d20 CoC, but we didn't get into it far enough to get a feel.

And these days I see d20 System as a totally wrong-headed way to go about RPGs, for my purposes.

@BraddSzonye Agreed.

There’s a whole branch of RPGs that are all about describing characters very precisely with game mechanics. Hero System is one of the earliest.

d20 System is probably the biggest mainstream example.

And in my experience the combination of: illusion of detail and completeness, and reality of abstraction and inaccuracy and incompleteness, leads to a certain kind of everything-is-a-nail play.

Sort of like your experience where, if 25–50% of the rules are about tactical combat, surely this is a tactical RPG, right?

And while logically I think there’s some kind of fallacy in that kind of thinking, realistically players do look at the bulk of the rules and assume they represent the bulk of the gameplay.

So if most of the rules are about your kewl powerz, then the game is all about using kewl powerz.

That’s how folks play Hero System. But it was (so I hear) intended to play stories like you find in comic books.

Which are full of grand ideas and plots and schemes and surprises and mythology and whether you make it on time to your date with Mary Jane.

Depending on genre and publisher of the title.

The rules were only supposed to answer questions like, “Who punches harder, if we need to know that?”

And so I suspect that the original Hero players were a lot like the original D&D players, who knew what kind of stories they wanted and didn’t need any rules to get it, for the most part.

Ah, yes, the old "What's the purpose of the rules" thing.

Most rulebooks are written like reference manuals rather than tutorials.

Or they’ll have tutorial sections, but they come across as an afterthought and are not actually all that helpful.

Oh, man. D&D 3.5 was awful at that.

Yeah.

Or it turns out to be less “how to play” and more “here are some additional details you can throw onto your character”

or RPG theory, like player taxonomies.

I think for a lot of game designers it’s much easier to say “here are some tools” than “here’s how to use them”

Oh, yes, definitely.

Partly because the how-to-use-them part is controversial.

It's something I've been paying a lot more attention to lately.

Yeah, the discussions here have gotten me thinking about them too.

That and the part where I was thinking about how some RPGs get me stuck in a rut and others don’t.

Although it’s not just the RPG either, it’s also the players and force of habit.

Like, when I started with D&D3, I actually ran a bunch of it very narrative-first.

It helped a lot that I was using Dwarven Forge play sets, and some of the players really got into using the props as toys to describe what they wanted to do, instead of using rules to do it.

And with my new D&D5 game, I think it helps a lot that nobody really knows what they’re doing.

So we’re like, here’s what we want to do, now how the hell do we do that?

Hm. That’s an interesting thought, that system mastery gets in the way of narrative-first play, for me.

It may indicate something more about the systems you're using than about you?

Well it’s at least partly about me, because I’m definitely the sort of player who gets enjoyment out of rules constructs and rules lawyering.

I also enjoy narrative play. But I’m a lot better at it in practice with games that are very simple, or that I have little experience with.

What about AW?

Have not had a chance to play.

Typical gamer group where you have to sell them on new stuff.

They’re pretty good sports about it, even though somebody usually ends up not liking the new thing.

Ah.

I'm very lucky in my groups the last three/four years.

Some of them require a sales pitch just to play anything at all, heh.

My college group, though--if it wasn't d20 System, it might as well not exist. They moved from 3.5 to Pathfinder instead of 4e.

My college group was great about trying new things.

We played all sorts of new games. We just came back to D&D after each experiment.

My groups immediately after college stuck mostly with iterations of D&D--3.5 and 4e--but were willing to take short breaks to try Dogs in the Vineyard, Everybody is John, and the like.

My previous group was fairly open to experiments too.

My current group is all "Oooh, Lady Blackbird! But Fate! And Cthulhu Dark! Maybe Roll for Shoes?"

We took detours into Werewolf, Mage, Shadowrun, Champions, d20 CoC, Little Fears.

Paranoia

Probably one or two other things I’ve forgotten.

We've tried Princes' Kingdom, A Penny For My Thoughts, numerous iterations of Fate, and have Great Ork Gods lined up for a slow night.

I guess my current group is technically an evolution of the previous one.

My friend Will/Serena bridged the transition along with me.

Oh and so did my friend Jonathan.

Trogdor's been in all my games since I finished college and came back to Guam.

He's really the lynchpin of the whole operation.

So I started my current group right when D&D3 came out, and I had a falling out with my previous group.

That was me, ex-wife, Dave, Jonathan, and Sean, if I remember right. Not everyone was there for the first session, but I think Jon was.

I first picked up an RPG book almost exactly ten years ago. I took the 3.0 books home for Christmas break to read, and then read the 3.5 books and started my first game in that.

The group swelled to about a dozen briefly, then settled around a core of Me, Jon, Sean, Morgan, and various friends and significant others.

Including me & Jon’s ex-wives.

We continued playing for a while after my ex & I split. That’s when Will joined the group (I met him through a singles’ event)

The various divorces and the D&D 3–4 transition together sorta killed off the group.

Seems reasonable.

But I suggested playing D&D4 to the few remaining players, and Will brought a friend of his who turned out to be the “butterfly” for another big circle of friends and gamers.

That’s my friend Mike.

Jon stuck around for a while, but basically Will & Mike’s friends built the group back up from scratch. And they’re quite a bit different from the other guys.

Although we are again a bunch of friends and wives and girlfriends, so I guess the composition is similar in many ways.

I ran 3.5 throughout college with a moderately variable group of friends, then rebuilt a new 3.5 group around Trogdor and some folks at the local U when I got back home. That group has fallen from attrition at least twice and then rebuilt itself. For about a year it was just Trogdor and I.

I’m really happy that my game has always been female-friendly, often having about 50% female membership.

I had to cajole one of our players to join because she thought her boyfriend playing meant she couldn't.

There have only been a couple of stretches where we’ve had no female players at all.

(Largely this is because my wife and pretty much all of my serious girlfriends have played. But they’re not the only ones.)

So with the resurrected group, we have tried Shadowrun, Champions, Fiasco, and Fate.

Not quite as diverse as the last incarnation.

I suspect that’s partly because Mike really don’t like freewheeling fluffy games, and Tarisa really doesn’t like having to actually learn anything about how to play.

One thing that makes my current group more diverse re: systems is that our attendance is a lot spottier.

Yeah, I know how that goes.

Traditionally I’ve tried new games as “off-week” volunteer things.

We play every other week.

So wacky games get the off-week slot.

With spotty attendance it's hard to maintain a long-form game's continuity, which makes flitting from system to system each week much easier because there's no sense of continuity to disrupt.

Now we've got so many different things we want to try, I'm going to see if we can play two games tonight.

But that probably won’t work going forward, because Tarisa & Danhiel don’t have the off-weeks free, and Fredlet (future wife) doesn’t like me booking up all of our weekends with social stuff.

Nice!

Finish up the Doctor Who game for sure, and if it ends early try Save Game or Great Ork Gods.

Or just do ARRPG prep.

Mike is generally game for trying new things, but Mike is also the most critical of new things.

It occurs to me that it’s rarely that difficult to persuade him to try new RPGs, but he always seems to be a tough sell because he hates everything.

Ply him with chocolates?

Heh.

Another tough thing about AW is that it really only seems suited for long form.

Even though it’s designed to get you up and running in a single session, it’s not intended for one-shot play.

We're talking about trying for some kind of long-form game with conceits to support episodic play.

Instead, the first session is the seed for the campaign. Sort of like city creation for Dresden Files.

(We really like long-form campaigns.)

I’m checking out the Lazy DM Guide from that site you linked. I’ve been there before, I think for HotDQ tips.

I like that guy’s style so far.

So I'm going to wrap an ARRPG plot around Trogdor ('cause he's an every-week kinda guy): he's been made head of a Weird Science project for a UN-sanctioned corporation, and each week he's doing something toward achieving his project's goals. Whoever else shows up is the team he takes along.

@BraddSzonye Yeah, he's not always right in line with my attitudes but he's good at expressing 'em and that's worth a lot more.

I’ve seen references to ARRPG, no clue though whether it’s to my tastes.

I don’t know the source material.

And I’m leery of getting into licensed games where I don’t know the source.

Atomic Robo is kinda "Hellboy but with science instead of magic." You can read the one-shot Free Comic Book Day issues, and some others, here.

But for me, even more than "I like Atomic Robo" (which I do), the ARRPG book is an absolute mine of ideas and mechanics for other Fate games.

It's helped me understand stunt balancing and the nitty-gritty of custom skill design in ways that the Toolkit couldn't teach me.

And it's got some inspired bits like removing Refresh completely.

A lot of the Fate iterations I collect, it's not because I'm going to play them, but because they expand my conception of the engine and how it works.

My Fate games are basically "homebrew Fate starting from X iteration's baseline" and the more iterations I know the more I can turn the dials to fit my game's immediate needs.