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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7900369" data-attributes="member: 4937">[USER=6688937]@Ratskinner[/USER]: Your complaint about my complaint has two parts, and I'll deal with the easier one first.Yeah, but it also really has nothing to do with my complaint. As a concept, I don't mind Fate points for example. Nor do I mind the much more interesting mechanically similar concept of Force points in Star Wars D6. It's OK to have a resource that effects the story, and it's even more OK when that resource has an in universe explanation and further is limited enough that the player is motivated to only use it at appropriately dramatic moments.Nor do I mind abstraction for the purpose of achieving certain design goals or speed of play. The problem with Fate points is how they end up influencing how the players play and how the players think about playing, especially as they gain some system mastery.So your comparison to D&D alignment is apt. Essentially you are being asked to construct a mini-set of core beliefs and personality traits that will define your character, and unlike alignment you get to define it. All that is apt, as is you noting that if the DM is heavy handed about how he interprets alignment, and uses it to compel the player with the threat of punishment hanging over there head, that is very much the same sort of problem I'm talking about. Many people have had this bad experience with alignment and so want nothing more to do with it, and I totally get that. But the Aspect system actually sets this up as a core quality of the game, and it's not really the compels that bother me (though those could be heavy handed as well) but the whole system. In other words, it's not even primarily the potential loss of agency here, it's that system encourages bad RPing in my opinion.I think what the designers wanted was to create a system that rewarded the player for playing his character "in character" and in a dramatic fashion.   But what they actually created was a system that rewards playing a character in a simplistic exaggerated fashion.   A good RPer calls on his character traits (even if he gets no reward for doing so) at dramatically appropriate moments.  A good FATE player calls on his character aspects as often as possible and for as flimsy of reasons as possible.  You are always on the lookout for tagging every action because if you can tag an action, that adjusts the math so much in your favor that if you don't you almost certainly will fail.   As such, what you typically see in a game of FATE is frantically leveraging the Aspect system for straight forward gamist reasons with the result that FATE's primary aesthetic of play ends up not being Nar, but gamist.  People compel, call, tag and so forth primarily for "Step on Up" reasons and aesthetics related to Challenge and Self-Affirmation, and not for reasons pertaining to Story.  By turning the character into a mechanic that directly relates to success all the time, it turns all the considerations about playing your character into weighing not the character but the need for mechanical success.   It's actively undermining its own intentions with the design in the same way that social systems that mimic combat systems in order to make social interaction a pillar of the game are inadvertently undermining the RP that they want to encourage.</blockquote>

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