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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Crimson Binome" data-source="post: 6862655" data-attributes="member: 6775031">No, I was able to get through the whole book. It was terrible, but I read it anyway, because I needed to be sure that I was right about how terrible it is. It's hard to argue for or against anything if you haven't read it for yourself.Yeah, I agree. I was as surprised as anyone to find that suggestion in the FATE rulebook. I would have thought that they would make a point of actually sticking to your character, but I was wrong on that account.D&D does no such thing. D&D is an objective resolution engine. It tells you what happens as a result of a given action. If X, then Y. It is a language for translating events within the world into a mechanical system for the purposes of determining an outcome without bias. What you do with that is up to you and your character.The actual incentives to the player for accepting a compel, as described on page 14 of the FATE CORE rulebook, are that it creates drama, and you might need that fate point later. This is problematic on both counts. First of all, the player might want the story to be more dramatic, but any sane character would not. Drama is bad. Real people, when put into dangerous situations, don't want things to be more dramatic. Alcoholics don't want to get drunk and lose control. The alcoholic character knows that getting drunk in the middle of an important mission is a bad thing, and the game is asking the player to make a decision in direct opposition to that knowledge - by exploiting the divide between the player and the character, rather than unifying them.Second, the use of fate points as a meta-game currency means that getting drunk when you shouldn't is probably the smart move. Unlike in any sort of reasonable world - unlike what would happen in any world that isn't powered by narrative-causality, the way Discworld is - doing something that should be bad is actually good. You accept the compel, and some complication happens now, but then you have the fate point later in order to save the day against the Big Bad. If you give in to your flaw now, you save the day later; if you heroically overcome your flaw and do the right thing now, then you lose later because you don't have the fate point. The best soldier is the worst one, because the best soldier doesn't earn any meta-game points.If you need incentive for your characters to sometimes do the wrong thing, because of their flaws, then that was solved long ago in GURPS - the character doesn't want to succumb, and the player doesn't want the character to succumb, so you make a Willpower check and you either overcome the negative impulse or you give in. And if you do give in, then something bad is probably going to happen, and you feel bad about it, and your character feels bad about it, and it doesn't secretly mean that now you're more likely to beat the Big Bad later on.</blockquote>

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