All i Really Care About is Interesting Choices

[Aldarc]

With respect, debating rules, mechanics, and principles on the internet is not a good way to decide what the game actually is or does. Internet debate has a great many failings that get in the way of clear assessments.

Fate wound up with a PR problem, in that it is not a game that came out of The Forge community, but folks chose to describe it as if it were. A great many cognitive biases were set by the language used, and the focus given to some aspects of the game, rather than to how it actually plays in practice. Theory-oriented discussion continues that trend, while practice-based assessment can allow you to break free of that.

With respect, this feels like you are blaming the victims of flame arguments against Fate and those who were fans of it.

 

[Reynard]

I think there's some differences between games where you can, at least in theory, play the game without using the metacurrancy (though it'd probably be unpleasantly swingy) and ones where its essentially impossible; at least the incarnations of Fate I'm familiar with landed in the latter because you'd essentially have to completely ignore Aspects.

Not really, because die results produce free Aspects, so it would be IMO about as hobbling as taking bennies out of SW (and by that I mean making it almost unplayable).

 

[Thomas Shey]

Not really, because die results produce free Aspects, so it would be IMO about as hobbling as taking bennies out of SW (and by that I mean making it almost unplayable).

There are extent Aspects that are present in a character you cannot do that with, so no. Its analogous to if Savage Worlds required bennies to operate Edges. How much of this is an issue depends on how necessary for a given use of Fate is, but there are uses where personal Aspects are not, effectively, optional to make the setting/genre work, and vanilla Fate does not have a mechanism for side stepping that there.

Not using bennies in Savage Worlds would probably be unpleasant but doable, as is shown by the fact the amount of them used varies considerably from game to game. You'd just have to be willing to accept the consequences of the open-ended damage rolls, but, you know, people play non-metacurrency games with strong crit options, so its not intrinsically impossible.