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Message: <blockquote data-quote="resistor" data-source="post: 4809235" data-attributes="member: 9142">I don't consider myself an expert on either, but I'll try to give an overview.Amber is a system that literally uses no random elements.  No dice, no cards, no whatevers.  The basic idea (it's more complicated in the real game) is that each player has a pot of chips.  Players narrate essentially freeform.  When two players disagree on what should happen, they have a bidding war with chips, and the winner decides what happens.  Add in some mechanism for refreshing the pots of chips, and you've got a basic, deterministic, highly-narrative storytelling game.Spirit of the Century, based on FATE 3e (I'm more familiar with FATE 2e, so my explanation may reflect that) is a strongly narrative game that still remains within the traditional confines of being a roleplaying game.Tasks are resolved with dice rolls, like usual, but it uses Fudge dice mechanics, which is to say that the range of the dice is -3 to +3, on a bell curve, added to you base skill.  So even with just the rolling mechanic, the success/failure of an action is strongly predictable.However, FATE also has a system called Aspects and Fate Points.  Aspects are freeform tag phrases you choose for you character, reflecting background, personality, achievements, or even signature items:  "Born in the saddle," "World's Greatest Ping-Pong Player,"  "Whip & Fedora."  Each Aspect has a weight based on how important it is to you.After making a roll, you can invoke an Aspect to aid you (if the rest of the group agrees that the Aspect could plausibly aid you in the task) to spend Fate Points to modify the roll up to the weight of the Aspect.  Conversely, for Aspects with downsides, the GM can "compel" an Aspect.  This means that, in a situation where the Aspect would influence your behavior (imagine someone with a "Dangerously Curious" Aspect), you can either go with your nature to gain Fate Points, or resist it by spending Fate Points.In FATE 3e there's also some means of scenes having Aspects that are accessible to both the GM and players, but I'm not clear on it.Basically, it's a low-variance task resolution system tied together with action points on steroids.  While some things really are determined randomly, those are mostly the ones that were on the cusp of achievable anyways.  And tasks that matter from a narrative perspective are almost always decided by the player (or GM) through Fate Points, rather than by the dice.</blockquote>

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