I'll agree that this particular use of personality traits is limited in depth insofar as it's effects mechanically on the game go (and I think this would be a positive in the situation I presented where it is a single player in a group who enjoys this type of experience vs. the entire group)... but 5e gives other options that tie a character's personality traits as well as their ideal/flaw and bonds into the game with more mechanical heft. If a player and DM are looking for more heft then I would point them to the Personality Trait Proficiency optional rules which ties there proficiency bonus to their personality traits & their ideals, bonds and flaws. This would be more in line with a group whose main focus is on this type of game.
But if you wanted more why didn't you engage with it more? Did you need the game to force you to engage with something you were looking for? OAN I would suggest you try out the optional rules above, they may give you more focus and mechanical heft when it comes to these.
Well I actually think it's possible to get a close and similar experience with just the rules in the DMG... but I'm also getting the feel that if something is optional in 5e (though we are discussing numerous FATE options) it's auto-discarded by some of the posters in this discussion... irregardless of it's actual merits because... well... optional...
I think, for me at least, when I play a game I want a game that puts the elements I'm interested in front-and-center. 5e has a subsystem that lets you do a sort of narrativist 'coupon' and its tied weakly to character traits. I think if I had a 1-10 scale, I'd put it at 3. The fact that it is optional isn't important to me in the sense that I 'forget about' optional things, it is important in the sense that it tells me the game was designed without that in mind and it is thus not central to how the game plays. FATE, on the same scale is a 9, and Aspects/FATE points are TOTALLY at the center of the game. You will engage this mechanic, all the time, in play. It creates a very different overall dynamic.
Obviously it is true that for some sensibilities there's likely something that is 'too much' and something else that is 'just enough', and 5e's PIBFs/Inspiration undoubtedly falls in that range for some set of people. I'm not really criticizing 5e at all, or minimizing this feature. It is what it is and that's fine. Tastes just vary, obviously. As long as its understood that FATE and 5e are on different parts of a continuum and serve somewhat different needs, that's cool.
But I posted a game run by the co creator of the game... I wouldn't say this is an apt description of how that game went. Do you believe he was running FATE incorrectly? Me personally I'm not so sure. I ran FATE Kerberos club and it was pretty similar to how his game played out. Yes we used Aspects but we used our skills, stunts and superpowers more.
Well the video I posted was run using just FATE core...
So we have an actual play... run by one of the designers which leans heavily on skills and less often on aspects... My takeaway from that is it shows that Aspects don't have to be as integral (though I do agree they are important) to the play of the game as they might seem to some...
My other takeaway is that a particular group can choose to make Aspects the focal point of play in the same way that a group playing 5e could make personality traits, ideals/flaws/bonds the focus of play.
I don't know what to say. I'd have to study it and figure out exactly what they're doing and which rules it engages. My experience/reading of FATE is that stunts which allow spending FATE points are very rare (there are none actually shown as examples in FATE Core itself) though it is stated this is a possibility. Failing that, then Aspects must be being engaged in order to spend FATE points. So, is it possible everyone could simply ignore the FATE point mechanics and just play FUDGE? Yeah, I guess.... I don't understand what the point of that would be!
IME the whole dynamic of FATE is the players are constantly looking for Aspects to Tag so they can get free invokes, which is a major incentive to pull in aspects. The GM is pushing you constantly into conflicts, which means leveraging your aspects, and almost certainly compelling them, which forces the players to spend FATE points, and then drives them to accept their own compels in order to acquire more. When things really get critical they will absolutely pull out all the stops and toss their points in to create new aspects to use for advantage (often by tagging them) and/or invoking aspects themselves.
One interesting variation we created was one where the FATE points are a closed system. Each time the GM or a player spends one, it goes into the pool of whomever the compel/invoke was aimed at (or to the GM in some cases, there's possible edge cases to deal with). That creates an even more dynamic type of setup and makes it so points can't really 'run down', which could happen in the classic version (though usually that just means the PCs suddenly get in hot water and then they're stocked up again!).
I'm still failing to see how FATE doesn't provide you with a complete game. Yes you have to make decisions around the rules and game setting...the same way a GM has to decide if Feats are available, multiclassing is allowed and if you're playing in the Forgotten Realms or somewhere else in D&D.
It depends on if you count core, or also the attached System Toolkit, Adversary Toolkit, and the games Atomic Robo, Frontier Spirit, Gods and Monsters, Sails Full of Stars, Three Rocketeers, Venture City, and War of Ashes. These are all now attached to the FATE Core SRD.
