Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="innerdude" data-source="post: 7342769" data-attributes="member: 85870">I don't have any experience to compare how Fate runs versus how it "reads," but it does bring up an interesting point---does D&D's popularity remain strong because on the whole, it generally DOES deliver on what it promises between the pages? (i.e., combat action, dungeon-y exploration and mysteries, puzzle solving). I would probably agree that on the whole, D&D generally does deliver what it promises with one massive caveat---you have to restrict your view of the game to levels 1 through 9. Once you get to level 10+, all bets are off.One of my primary disillusionments with D&D, particularly 3.x, is that it doesn't really support intrigue-driven, characters-with-personal-stakes-resolving-those-stakes in actual play. It's nigh impossible to really play a "Game of Thrones" type of campaign with D&D, mostly because everyone---PCs and NPCs alike---have too much "plot protection" through massive hit point numbers, magic items, and spells. One of the things I truly love about Savage Worlds is that it significantly reduces plot protection, for both the PCs and NPCs. No one is safe in Savage Worlds. As a result, combat has consistently higher levels of tension in Savage Worlds than it did in D&D.I also have come to genuinely dislike Vancian magic, and the general omnipresence of magic at large in the kinds of worlds D&D envisions. To me this leads into one of my other major dislikes of D&D, particularly high-level D&D, which is the idea that by level 10 you're "planehopping" to other dimensions because the cares of the prime material plane are now somehow beneath you. I think this is a natural outgrowth of magic's omnipresence, because by level 10, the only way to prevent PCs from pretty much being invincible is to have the enemies possess the same kinds of magic that can negate omnipresent magical plot protection. I actually do own a copy of Legends of Anglerre (which I think is generally considered "Fate 3.0," whereas Fate Core is considered "Fate 4.0", though I might be wrong), but I've never actually played it. I watched some of Wil Wheaton's Geek and Sundry / Tabletop playthroughs of Fate Core, and it generally seemed to play out like I expected it would, with the tagging/aspects coming into play and their use.However, one of things I noticed---and this was also true with my direct play experiences with Dungeon World---was that much of the core conceits of Fate as a rules set could be added to other rules systems through general GM-ing principles. In the 4-5 sessions of Dungeon World I GM'd, I kept feeling like all of the pointers, tips, and ideas in the DW/PbtA rules were more to get the GM thinking a certain way about the game, and if the players happened to enjoy it, that was just a bonus. In watching the Fate playthroughs, I felt much the same way---"These are really great ideas, I love the compel/tag aspects, and the concept of the mutability of the fiction . . . but man, the skill tree and task resolution stuff in Fate really isn't to taste."So here's the question---how does a system bridge the gap between "how it reads" and "how it plays"? Or is this simply too nebulous? For example, I've seen in some forums where some defenders of Savage Worlds try to convince people to play it by saying "it plays much better than it reads." This totally blew my mind, because to me Savage Worlds pretty much played EXACTLY the way I expected when I read it---it was one of the reasons I was willing to give it a shot in the first place.</blockquote>

Verification