Do NPCs Get Personal FATE Points?

[Umbran]

Now, I'm not an expert , but invoking an aspect grants a +2 bonus to various rolls. As GM, you can add +2 to whatever you want...

In an absolute sense, yes, the GM can do anything they wish. But, that's not how the game is designed to work, with a GM arbitrarily assigning bonuses when they feel like it. There's some expectation that the GM is playing by the rules, which means if they want to add a +2, they really ought to have an Aspect somewhere and invoke it with a point.

This is important - in D&D, the entire world is in the GMs hands, and the players have little narrative control - the GM's power is absolute, and they can make up everything. FATE shares the narrative control around more. The NPC Fate Pool is there to help enforce the sharing aspect, by giving the GM a budget for it.

By the way, you are forgetting the "re-roll all dice" function of Fate Points.

You are also forgetting the "add +2 to a source of passive opposition" function.

Accept/refuse a compel: GMs compel, so I would hope you're not compelling yourself.

Note that not all NPCs are opposition to the players. Some are allies. An ally might compel something against an antagonist.

If a PC's action, or fate point, creates something that looks like a compel on an NPC, you'd just be nerfing that PC's fun if you had (and used) an NPC fate point to reject it.

Sometimes, for reasons the players are not yet aware, a proposed compel from a player won't be as cool at they hope. Rejecting the compel, then, still burns through a valuable resource, so the player gets a little something for their effort.

Declaring story details is the GM's job, so you don't need FP for that, either.

If you are declaring a story detail that is very specifically in the NPC's favor, you really should use a fate point. Same for hostile compels - if you, the GM want to compel a thing to make the PC's life difficult, that's a standard compel. If the NPC effectively wants to compel a thing, for their own direct benefit, that should be a hostile compel, and cost the NPC a Fate point.

 

[aramis erak]

Why would NPCs use Fate points?
As GM, you can add +2 to whatever you want, so that benefit is a wash.

you clearly are applying a D&D mentality to a game that was design in rejection of most of D&D's procedural tropes...

The basic concept of Fate is that the GM frames the scene, establishes the NPCs in scene, and then turns them loose and runs the NPCs in scene almost like PCs.

Another concept of import: almost everything is opposed rolls. Set a difficulty is a last resort.

Active or Passive?
If a PC or a named NPC can reasonably interfere with whatever the action is, then you should give them the opportunity to roll active opposition. This does not count as an action for the opposing character; it’s just a basic property of resolving actions.

There is another concept that's not stated this way, but is in mechanics: Scenes are essentially characters, too. They lack skills, usually don't get actions, but usually have aspects.

For the GM to get a +2 for an NPC, some PC gets a fate point, or some NPC spends one from the NPC pool.
From the GM pool: tagging a scene aspect or invoking the NPC's personal aspect.
Pay the PC from the NPC pool: Tagging their aspect on an NPC action.
Pay the PC from the unlimited pool: Compel a PC, extract a concession

 

[GMMichael]

This is important - in D&D, the entire world is in the GMs hands, and the players have little narrative control - the GM's power is absolute, and they can make up everything. FATE shares the narrative control around more. The NPC Fate Pool is there to help enforce the sharing aspect, by giving the GM a budget for it.

Note that not all NPCs are opposition to the players. Some are allies. An ally might compel something against an antagonist.

Sometimes, for reasons the players are not yet aware, a proposed compel from a player won't be as cool at they hope. Rejecting the compel, then, still burns through a valuable resource, so the player gets a little something for their effort.

If you are declaring a story detail that is very specifically in the NPC's favor, you really should use a fate point. Same for hostile compels - if you, the GM want to compel a thing to make the PC's life difficult, that's a standard compel. If the NPC effectively wants to compel a thing, for their own direct benefit, that should be a hostile compel, and cost the NPC a Fate point.

Good points. But...

I'm not hopping in the boat, yet. Fate shares narrative control, but nowhere on a level of PbtA. If NPCs needed FP, the rules would grant them to each NPC. As it stands, a per-PC budget means that the GM gets to ruin a PC's fun once per scene.

Allied NPC FP are completely worthless. There's no reason for them to compel anything against an antagonist, because that's literally the GM having a conversation with herself: "hey, Me, will I accept the story turning against another character I'm running in exchange for a Fate point?" "Well, Me, I don't know. It's not like I'm in control of everything else, anyways..."

I don't see how compels can come from players. That doesn't seem to be one of the uses of a fate point. But, again, not an expert.

If you're declaring story details that are in favor of the NPCs, you don't need a fate point - you need GM practice. Alternatively, you know exactly what you're doing, and it will keep the PCs on the edge of their seats up until the climactic ending of the encounter. Either way, no FP needed. If an NPC wants a compel, you're metagaming that NPC, and should see point 1.

you clearly are applying a D&D mentality to a game that was design in rejection of most of D&D's procedural tropes...

The basic concept of Fate is that the GM frames the scene, establishes the NPCs in scene, and then turns them loose and runs the NPCs in scene almost like PCs.

Another concept of import: almost everything is opposed rolls. Set a difficulty is a last resort.

I'm applying GM, not DM, mentality, which echoes this from the Fate SRD:

You describe the environments and places the PCs go to during the game, and you create the scenarios and situations they interact with. You also act as a final arbiter of the rules, determining the outcome of the PCs’ decisions and how that impacts the story as it unfolds.

I would say that the basic concept of Fate is that the GM frames the scene, the PCs react to it with their characters, and then Fate Points allow PCs to tactically increase the dramatic impact of the whole thing.

I'm not seeing difficulty as a last resort. In fact, the SRD advises that GMs can just use the Ladder for NPCs if they don't want to roll. So let's say it's at least 50/50. The point is that GMs set difficulty, which means that GMs (NPCs) don't need FP.

In another one of the contradictions (ambiguities?) that @Umbran mentions, the SRD points out that GMs are the "chairman, not god" (despite determining the outcome of the PCs' decisions). That disagreements should result in "brief discussions." This is not a D&D procedural trope, true, but if the GM is running everything mechanically, there's no need to bring this up. Unless the GM has the narrative control that I understand him/her to have.

 

[pemerton]

Fate shares narrative control, but nowhere on a level of PbtA.

I'm not really sure what you have in mind here. Apocalypse World doesn't have a player-side "fate poiint" mechanic.

 

[aramis erak]

I'm not really sure what you have in mind here. Apocalypse World doesn't have a player-side "fate poiint" mechanic.

AWE/PBTA does have the same level of player narrative control as Fate Core. It's about the only element I think Mike has gotten correct. The fate point mechanic isn't technically narrative control... it's mechanical leverage.

Fate in the Fate Core flavor grants players a lot more mechanical leverage, however, than AWE/PBTA, and the GM as well...
The fundamental role of the GM in PBTA is to decide when they need to roll, and secondarily, to play NPCs.
The fundamental role of the GM in Fate Core is to frame scenes, compel PCs, and play NPCs; setting difficulties is explicitly after rejection of "say yes" and "opposed by"... and there's no further element in that decision tree. At least not in the released PDF's texts.

 

[Umbran]

As it stands, a per-PC budget means that the GM gets to ruin a PC's fun once per scene.

If you are viewing the GM as an antagonist, well, you're done anyway - you've already effectively argued that the GM has the right to set arbitrarily high bonuses on their own rolls, so you are the one giving them unlimited power to ruin fun.

If you view the GM as a co-conspirator in generating fun, then - the GM is given some design guidelines for the skills and stunts on NPCs, and a budget of Fate points to work with sets a bar. These comprise a limit on GM power, not an extension of it.

"Well, Me, I don't know. It's not like I'm in control of everything else, anyways..."

Again - that's kind of the point here. The system expects the GM to actually be following the guidelines, which recommends limits on skill bonuses for various types of NPCs. Limits + budget = limited GM power. If at any time you assume unlimited GM power, yes, that power is open to abuse. Go figure :/

I don't see how compels can come from players. That doesn't seem to be one of the uses of a fate point. But, again, not an expert.

Okay, so, here's a thought - if your experience with the system is limited, rather than make a whole stack of what you admit may be poorly founded assertions, and then arguing with folks when they suggest they may not be accurate, you might try instead asking questions. The result is apt to be a more constructive discussion.

But, rather dig into this hole, let us make it simple - if you don't want to have the GM paying to resist those... then when you are GMing, don't do that! You'll have the points for other things, then. That's a choice you, as a GM, can make.

I'm not seeing difficulty as a last resort. In fact, the SRD advises that GMs can just use the Ladder for NPCs if they don't want to roll.

Passive defense or opposition is for when the NPC is unimportant (so, really only for Nameless NPCs), or the NPC is legitimately caught unaware or occupied and unable to act or engage. The GM is not supposed to set static difficulties round by round in an extended conflict.

Unless the GM has the narrative control that I understand him/her to have.

The ability to always set whatever desired bonus they want on any roll is not an intended level of GM control in FATE. They are expected to follow guidelines for NPC creation, and use the FATE point pool to interact with character and scene Aspects - this ensures a certain balance/sharing between GM and players, and that the NPC's results are narratively consistent with the scene framing.

All-in-all, your argument seem to end up in the realm of "Well, if I ignore the details of how the rules say I should run the game, I don't need this mechanical element!"

In effect - Yes you can house-rule away the GM Fate Point Pool. Congrats! But you will find that the game then runs almost entirely on GM Fiat, which seems to be a result you want to avoid, since you have stated an aversion to the potential of the GM ruining player fun.

 

[pemerton]

The fundamental role of the GM in PBTA is to decide when they need to roll, and secondarily, to play NPCs.

As someone who is preparing to GM Apocalypse World, that's not quite how I see it. The rest of this post isn't to quibble pointlessly with you - I've gor a reasonable sense from your posting history of the range of RPGs you've played/GMed, and am not meaning to interrogiate or cast doubt on your expertise.; I'm headed somewhere else which is a little bit OT, but seems relavent to the issue raised by @DMMike.

In Apocalypse Word, determining when to roll - under the principles that if you do it, you do it and to do it, do it - seems primarily a table function. Perhaps the GM has a "chair of the committee" sort of responsibility - "there are two ways they sometimes don’t line up, and it’s your job as MC to deal with them" (p 12) - but that seems more like an outcome of the GM's role in managing the fiction.

It's that role of managing the fiction - helping keep everyone on the same page as to what is happening in the ficiton, and introducing new fiction when appropriate - that I would see as fundamental for the AW GM. (And as I read the rules and prepare, in my mind, for running this game it's the number one thing I'm thinking about!)

The prescribed agenda - "Make Apocalypse World seem real; Make the players’ characters’ lives not boring; Play to find out what happens" - is all about the content of the ficiton and the process of establishing it. The instruction to "Always say what the principles demand, what the rules demand, what your prep demands and what honesty demands" is about the establishment of fiction (by saying things). The principles speak to this too.

The two places where I see significant reference to player "narrative control" is in the principles "ask provocative questions and build on the answers" and "sometimes, disclaim decision-making" - one way of doing the latter is to "put it in the players’ hands". But this is all GM-initiated, and to me seems no different from what might be done in most mainstream RPGs. I have used one or both techniques in GMing 4e D&D, Classic Traveller, Cthulhu Dark, Dying Earth, Burning Wheel and Prince Valiant.

The reason I'm going through all this, and honing in on the GM's role in establishing and managing the fiction, is because I want to push back against what, in this thread, I see as an instance of a more general trend on ENWorld. That trend is to characterise any approach to GMing, or to managing and establishing the fiction of a game, that implicitly or overtly eschews railroading, as involving player narrative control. Which then robs us of a useful vocabulary for labelling mechanics that work in (what Edwards/The Forge calls) director stance, whereby players wthout GM mediation can directly establish fiction beyond the remit of their PCs' immediate causal influence.

I've read the rules for Fate Core but never played it and am not currently planning to, and so I haven't given them the same degree of thought as I have Apocalypse World. But looking at them right now, I see (p 80) that a player can spent a fate point to (among other things) declare a story detail based on one of his/her PC's aspect, or to invoke an aspect. Page 68 says that invoking an aspect means getting a benefit for your character (or another's - there's an abmiguity in that respect vis-a-vis the option to "pass a +2 benefit to another character's roll").

It seems to me that this does give a player narrative control in the "director stance" sense. For instance, a player whose character has the aspects Wizard for hire and Rivals in the Collegia Arcana (this is an example from the book) presumably could spend a point to introduce a detail such as that the Conclave of the Collegia is meeting tonight. And if a scene includes a "situation aspect" like Thick mud then presumably a player could spend a fate point to invoke that aspect against an opposed NPC, the logic being that the NPC has become stuck in the mud. As I read the rules, the player wouldn't have to further establish that it is his/her PC who caused the NPC to become stuck in the mud.

Apocalypse World doesn't have these sorts of mechanics. In the "Advanced ****ery" chapter, the following is described as "a pretty interesting custom peripheral move" (p 276)"

When you declare retroactively that you’ve already set something up, roll+sharp. On a 10+, it’s just as you say. On a 7–9, you set it up, yes, but here at the crucial moment the MC can introduce some hitch or delay. On a miss, you set it up, yes, but since then things you don’t know about have seriously changed.​

It goes on to say (p 277) "The subtle effect . . . is to expand the player’s, like, area of involvement: into the past . . . [and] move toward a new game, a game based on, but no longer, Apocalypse World."

The absence of this sort of thing from default AW is why I don't think it's all that accurate to descirbe it as a game involving player narrative control.

 

[pemerton]

@Umbran - all your stuff about limits on GM power etc is crystal clear. (I don't play Fate but I play Cortex+ Heroic, which uses a somewhat similar approach via the Doom Pool.)

But a question about NPC compels. Page 82 says "you can get more [fate points] in theat scen if they [the NPCs in that scene] take a compel, like PCs do". Pagae 71 says "If you're in a situation when haing or being around a certain aspect means your character's life is more dramatic or complicated, someone can compel the aspect" and then says that either the compel is accepted - earning a point - or refused - costing a point. Spending a fate point to refuse a compel is also mentioned on p 80 as one of the ways to spend a fate pont, just as page 81 lists accepting a compel as one way to earn a point.

Page 71 also has the following rule which seems like it should have been on the p 80 list but (presumably due to an editing oversight) is not there - "if a player wants to compel another character, it costs a fate point to propose the complication."

So suppose the GM's antagonist NPC has the aspect Hubristic mastermind, and the PCs have been caught in the NPC's death trap. It seems that the players could suggest that a hubristic mastermind would leave them unguarded, being overwhelmingly confident of the success of his cunning ploy. It seems that a player can pay a fate point to propse that complication, and then either the GM can accept the complication and put a fate point into his/her own pool, or refuse the complication and pay a fate point out of his/her pool. (As I read the rules the player's spend point does not go into anyone's pool but is simply gone.)

To me this seems to be what @DMMike has missed. Have I got it roughly right?

EDIT: Also, and in response to the OP - p 81 lists as a way to earn a fate point having your aspects invoked against you: "If someone pays a fate point to invoke an aspect attached to your character, you gain their fate point at the end of the scene." It seems to me that the GM doesn't get fate points in this way, as the rules on page 82 - which mention in-scene fate points for accepting compels, and mention end-of-scene fate points for comples and conceding - don't say anything about it. Stepping back from the rules text to the system logic, this way of earning fate points looks to me like an aspect of player/GM asymmetry that complements the asymmetry I alread noted in having to spend to provoke a compel. That is, players have to pay to muck around with someone else's stuff, and they get paid when someone else mucks about with their stuff. Which is a clear nod to the traditional distinction between GM and player roles in a RPG.

 

[Umbran]

Page 71 also has the following rule which seems like it should have been on the p 80 list but (presumably due to an editing oversight) is not there - "if a player wants to compel another character, it costs a fate point to propose the complication."

So suppose the GM's antagonist NPC has the aspect Hubristic mastermind, and the PCs have been caught in the NPC's death trap. It seems that the players could suggest that a hubristic mastermind would leave them unguarded, being overwhelmingly confident of the success of his cunning ploy. It seems that a player can pay a fate point to propse that complication, and then either the GM can accept the complication and put a fate point into his/her own pool, or refuse the complication and pay a fate point out of his/her pool. (As I read the rules the player's spend point does not go into anyone's pool but is simply gone.)

To me this seems to be what @DMMike has missed. Have I got it roughly right?

Pretty much. There's some ambiguity in "compel" and "hostile invocation".

EDIT: Also, and in response to the OP - p 81 lists as a way to earn a fate point having your aspects invoked against you: "If someone pays a fate point to invoke an aspect attached to your character, you gain their fate point at the end of the scene." It seems to me that the GM doesn't get fate points in this way, as the rules on page 82 - which mention in-scene fate points for accepting compels, and mention end-of-scene fate points for comples and conceding - don't say anything about it.

I quote a note in the FATE Core SRD: GM Fate Points for Hostile Invokes:

"Lenny has stated that he always intended for hostile invokes on NPCs to grant fate points to the GM for the next scene..."

Where Lenny is Leonard Balsera, lead system developer for the Dresden Files Fate game.

 

[pemerton]

I quote a note in the FATE Core SRD: GM Fate Points for Hostile Invokes:

"Lenny has stated that he always intended for hostile invokes on NPCs to grant fate points to the GM for the next scene..."

Where Lenny is Leonard Balsera, lead system developer for the Dresden Files Fate game.

OK, that contradicts my reasoning above!

The structure of this gives the GM an advantage - gets points for hostile invokes but has no need to pay for compels. How does it work out in play? Does the numerical advantage the players have (ie there are more of them) outweigh the GM's structural advantage?