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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aldarc" data-source="post: 7903056" data-attributes="member: 5142">Fate is your classic example, but the idea that it is somehow antithetical to roleplaying is not supported by the sheer number of groups and players who successfully roleplay using the Fate system. It's fine to say that you find its rules a hindrance to your roleplaying and that it is not to your taste. But to say that it is inherently antithetical to roleplaying? That's just false. In Fate, the player says that they want to be presented with opportunities to be a kleptomaniac and then GM provides them with such opportunities in a way that creates story complications, drama, and/or gives the narrative momentum. In my years of "in practice" with Fate, I can safely say that power gamers are not the people who most enjoy Fate. It's usually the contrary, namely those who enjoy character-driven narrative, with most of my power gamers preferring games that rewards their system mastery and tactical play better, such as in D&D/Pathfinder. IME running Fate for a number of years, Fate points provide a feedback loop where the game play reinforces the character concept in a manner that makes most players feel that their character concept is being acknowledged and engaged with by the narrative. A player's character concept or backstory can be orthogonal to the play experience of games like D&D, where a player backstory or things they imagine their character doing can be safely ignored by an adventure path, module, or DM with their own homebrew adventure. However, Fate requires the GM to actively engage the character and the player's concept of that character. In my actual practice with game play, both running and playing, I am at a loss about your assessment here as I have never experienced how Fate encourages "bad RPing." Alignment is a meta concept or morality and ethics imposed on the character. A Trouble is a meta-narrative concept that the player selects for their character to face. When we read Spider-Man or watch a Spider-Man movie we expect to see Peter Parker grapple with their decisions balancing the role of Peter Parker and Spider-Man in the narrative because Stan Lee picked "With great power comes great responsibility" as the character's Trouble that complicates their life. The Trouble is the player's self-inflicted lightning rod for story complications. A good Fate player calls on their character traits as often as possible too, but they may decide to only invoke their aspects when they need a mechanical boost at a dramatically appropriate time to warrant it. You are still roleplaying your character and their traits in Fate even if you are not invoking. IME, Fate's primary aesthetic tends to be fiction-first as these "gamist mechanics" require that the players/GM engage the fiction of the narrative and character concept. That may be the case if you approach the game in a "play to win" manner that is often prevalent in tactical skirmish games like D&D, but IME with Fate, it is far more often a source of drama in the narrative. For example, one character that I was GMing in a fantastical pseudo-Renaissance Venetian setting had the High Concept (not Trouble) of "Black Sheep Scion of House Marzini". He was leading his party to find a bronze bell from a destroyed abbey for a ritual. This led him to another abbey on the edge of the city that had it. When the party arrived to the abbey asking to use the bell, I introduced a complication based on the PC's high concept, namely that one of the abbey's monks came from one of the rival houses of House Marzini. I gave the player a list of names for noble houses that I had prepared, though not for this purpose, and I asked him which of the houses was a rival to House Marzini. This complication led to a stand-off in which the PC refused to grovel at the feet of this monk from a rival family, so the PCs had to find another way into the abbey and steal the bell. What this also did was expand the narrative and world of the setting. As a GM, I now had the name of a rival house to the PCs that I could use in the future, and the PCs now had a rival house that expanded their sense of the world and their PCs place in it. Likewise in another game of Fate, a player told me that their character was a veteran of a war, who was left nearly dead on the battlefield. During play, I introduced a complication by having his commanding officer now being a hired-sword for the warehouse thugs they were facing. Instead of immediately escaping the burning building, the PC now wanted to fight the man who left him for dead. I commonly used Troubles in this way to build upon a PC and their backstory. IMHO, a Trouble is not about penalizing a character. I actually see it as the opposite: it's rewarding the player by having the narrative actively engage their desired character concept. IME, and I acknowledge your own experiences will vary, but I have never felt yanked around so overtly by the GM in Fate as I do in D&D. It's difficult for me to feel yanked by the GM when my self-written troubles is fundamentally me telling the GM how I want to be "yanked." So when it happens, it feels incredibly natural and consensual for my character. Players also have the greatest incentive to "bend" how their player would or should act for the sake of "winning" the game, often with a certain degree of self-deception. The psychology of roleplayers is not one-hundred percent devoted to roleplay as some sort of high art or ideal. Even those noble souls who aim towards such lofty goals are not immune to their existence as human players of a game. While players may know best how their character would play, that does not mean that most games necessarily provide incentives to act in-character and that players will roleplay how their character would play. The spirit is willing but the flesh is so weak. IMHO, Fate's mechanics are not about telling you how you should play your character - in fact, it's quite the opposite, as the rules suggest that if there is an issue of confusion about what an Aspect means in play that the players and GM should clarify or rewrite it so that the GM and player are on the same page - instead, Fate's mechanics serve as lightning rods for the narrative created to reinforce the player's ability to play the sort of character they want to play. Does a player "need" mechanical reinforcement for this? No. Have I found it helpful in the context of Fate? Yes. Does it make me or my players bad roleplayers? No, not unless you are advocating that this constitutes "badwrongfun" and we know that you wouldn't dare do anything as egregiously rude as that, would you?</blockquote>

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