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Message: <blockquote data-quote="prabe" data-source="post: 7977619" data-attributes="member: 7016699">So, spells or other things that briefly control the characters are more along the lines of things in the world attacking them. I can make up a monster that's built around scaring people, and things like the Fear spell make that work as a challenge for the PCs. I'm pretty sure you know this, and that you already see this difference yourself, I'm just putting that out here.Also, using a Compel on a PC in Fate is (at least sometimes, I think--I'm not pulling any books out, here) specifically called out as possibly being a character behavior thing, especially if it's a Trouble Aspect. There's similar language in Blades in the Dark about the characters not always acting in their own best interests. I'm fine if a player wants to play a character that way--I have at least one player who's leaning into his character's low-ish INT and naivete--but using those mechanics feels to me like telling the player how to play their character in the moment. Yes, in the case of Compels based on character Aspects, they've said they want those things to come up, but that's arguably less the case if it's a scene Aspect.There are other (better, IMO) ways to engage the players' desires for what they want to see in the story. I don't need an Aspect on a character sheet to set up a situation that engages that character's personality and tendencies. If I have a character based on a turn-of-the-20th-century unionist (and I do), I can set up a workers' strike in the city they're going to and see what happens (and I did, and the other players bought in). I have no idea how that player would have written that Aspect on her character sheet, if at all (the character's personality has emerged some in play) but it doesn't seem as though it would have been any more organic than what happened, and she would have been expecting it in ways she probably wasn't.In many of the examples in the Fate books I have, it feels exactly like forcing a line of action. To use the example that was floating around in another thread, if you have an Aspect that implies that you're a kleptomaniac, the GM might Compel that Aspect to insist that your character pocket something from their boss's office. Depending on where things are in the adventure, you might not have a Fate Point to resist the Compel, which means you have no choice but to try to argue with your GM about that course of action. Looks like GM meddling with the character, quacks like it, too.Given that in BitD the characters get "full success"--succeed without consequence--about a third as often as they screw up at least a little, incompetence seems like something of the draw, or else the putatively interesting parts of the game wouldn't engage. I've been poking around in the SRD and I'm glad I read that before spending any money on it.Other than the fact that the characters in BitD are broken scrabblers who are probably going to die horribly in the pursuit of petty venal wealth, there's nothing in what you've mentioned that's not possible in D&D 5E. If a character wants to do something, you can let them narrate the success, or the failure.</blockquote>

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