Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7449871" data-attributes="member: 82106">My reading of FATE Core is that modifying story details DOES require an Aspect. This can be against your own characters aspects, or against an aspect of another character (NPC or PC) or an aspect of the scene, including one introduced in play. Stunts I'm not so familiar with, but given that the build process heavily restricts their availability I'd consider them to be intermediate between an aspect (a rather narrow one) and something like a 4e power.and my counterpoint is that this would be true only if a player has a very casual interest in that sort of thing and isn't interested in it being an important part of play. I'm not contradicting you, I'm simply pointing out that its a very limited thing and thus it will only satisfy few of the people would would want to play that way, and is a pretty limited/poor introduction to the whole concept for others.As I say, some. A limited amount. I didn't find them very satisfactory in my play of 5e. I had PIBFs on my main character, and a background. I certainly used them as a rough guide to play. We really didn't mess with alignment but it was roughly similar in impact to what alignment would be, but a little more specific. I did hanker for more, and at the same time the lack of attention on that system kind of made it fade from mind and we didn't really engage with Inspiration at all.Well, I am pushing against the point where you made a case for there being a strong similarity, with each game being basically a skill-based system with some story-focused mechanics added on. I know you have backed off a bit from that position. Anyway, I think we're on the same page. OK, you want to use d20 as your comparison? It has nothing in the way of story telling mechanics that I'm aware of (but I'm pretty ignorant of the details of d20). Obviously you can probably find ANYTHING somewhere in d20, but I would point out that such rules are CORE in FATE, so they pretty much always exist in all of FATE, just with variations. And my point stands, what FATE inherits from FUDGE (which includes skills, and stunts) it uses very differently. So really a good comparison would have to be a core system derived FROM d20 which adds in FATE-like mechanics and then uses variations on d20 plus that core for different genres. That also may exist, I don't know....Well, not if they really played a FATE-based game much. They would almost immediately understand how it is the story-telling FATE point economy part of the game which drives things. If you played D&D for 10 years and then read FATE Core you might think of Aspects et al as just some minor subsystem, despite it taking up a good part of the rules, but you'd learn different after 1 day of playing SotC! I would consider it to be similar to the BRP or GURPS core rules. A GM could make a bunch of decisions about which options to use, what elements to exclude, etc. and make a sort of vanilla skill-based game of genre X using BRP (for example). I would not call it a complete game on that basis alone. Its close, and might have the elements you need for a specific one-shot or something, but you WILL need genre-related rules and some thematic elements (think of CoC's sanity rules for example) to make it really work. Likewise with FATE Core. Its a bit looser system, but you will still need to make a bunch of decisions and add some elements to really make a decent game. Would you rather discuss one specific FATE-based system? There are 100's and I'm not sure which ones we would both be familiar with. I merely discussed FATE because it does have highly developed story-based mechanics and it provides at least a general sort of basis of other subsystems a game needs. I don't know what to tell you really. When I've been in some of these games we were constantly playing off of aspects. I mean, skills (etc.) provided a part of the game, but it was the aspects that decided what you WANTED and thus what you would 'go for'. If you weren't engaging some sort of aspect in some fashion, usually one of your own, then all you had was basic checks with fixed skill bonuses. It gives you a 'how did I succeed on this' but not a WHY, or a 'what do I want to do' either. The game is also a scene-framed game in essence, so it can only move forward into engagement with Aspects, high concepts, troubles, etc. Skills come into play, but rarely, if ever IME, outside of the context of an aspect.Could you run a game, in the sense of "I can use the subsystems to adjudicate things which happen", yes. But you lack all but the most rudimentary trappings. Actually I went back through my FATE 2.0 Core book and I have to say, it is a LOT more generic and less "playable off the shelf" than even I remembered. First of all it isn't ANY more specific than FUDGE, and uses basically just about the same mechanics. This means you don't have any definitive list of skills. Instead you have 3 possible types of skill system, broad, general, or specific, which you can flesh out. There are lists of skill names, as examples, for each of these three within categories. Before you could pick skills you would have to decide which of the three systems you were using, and make an actual definitive list of skills. Then you would have to describe them all (because there are no descriptions of what they cover in FATE 2.0). Likewise you have aspects and extras. Aspects are generally assumed to be open-ended, but this is not strictly required. Still, you could assume so and play a game. Extras could be ignored, but otherwise they will have to be devised, and they're often the genre-defining parts of the game. They are not detailed except for a few examples.Other subsystems are mentioned as possibilities, generally in chapter 9 under "magic". This could be reflavored to most anything though (psionics, tech, etc.). However there are simply many options provided, each of which would have to be fleshed out to be playable.Now, maybe later versions of FATE are different. 'FATE 3' IS SotC, which is a complete game, but is a bit different, though it is essentially similar to FATE 2.0 from what I can see, except restricted to the pulp genre. The '4th Edition' Fate Core I haven't read, maybe it is more fleshed out. Looking at the SRD for that I guess it really depends on which things you consider to be part of 'Core', since the SRD encompasses 7 entire RPGs! If FATE 2.0 is marginally playable with some assumptions, then I guess you could say Fate Core plus the toolkits and SRD versions of the various RPGs is a lot more fully playable. Core by itself still seems to require some fleshing out though. I think 5e through it's different combat actions, different effects, more precise movement, various spells class and racial abilities for combat, etc. is by default a more tactical game than FATE where the tactical decisions seem to boil down to create an advantage (which is the same set of possible effects irregardless of what advantage is created), overcome (yes I missed this one last time) attack or defend.</blockquote>[/QUOTE]

Verification