Do you like or dislike the fate system and why?

[potestas]

I am begining to think that the game is well liked by those that prefer an open ended affair. Where the GM will say if you spend a fate point the ward will hold and you guys can escape. How strong the ward is or how many shifts you need is pointless since its going to hold, and nothing the enemy or you can do to bring it down because its part of the story. Those who prefere to know how and why something works and how to get around it via rules or power probably do not like the rules, well thats my guess. So whats your opinion. I am not saying its good or bad I am just trying to understand if I've grasped why Fate system is popular here.

[JGray]

I think the answer is: it isn't so much open ended as it is collaborative. It gives players a chance to do a bit of storytelling through the creative use of Fate points. It makes their personalities, their backgrounds MATTER in game mechanics in a way that many other games are lacking.

Imagine if D&D had a system where you could use your alignment in order to influence your actions.

[Taran]

I've actually been toying with the idea of using aspects in D&D.

Most modifiers give a +2/-2. 

Myself and other people who've DM'd have used various Role playing points/Luck Points etc.. to let players save up to buy extra feats or buy skill points.

I think adding the aspect system would enrich the game.

I think of myself as a number-cruncher.  But at certain points in a game you think, "this is taking forever" or "it might be more interesting if..."  If the table is in then why not.

You used my example from the other thread out of context.  I gave you 2 (extreme)ways of using sponsored debt and you used the 'hand-wavey' one as your example in this thread.

how many shifts you need is pointless since its going to hold, and nothing the enemy or you can do to bring it down because its part of the story.

And I take exception to this because it's not what I was saying.  All I'm saying is in a given situation it might not matter.  So why bother rolling?  Instead of taking stress, take debt.  It'll be more interesting later.

It's up to the group to decide.  Judging how any given aspect is going to affect a combat or scene is left completely to the creativity of players/gm.

Is that "slippery with oil" going to add a +2 tag or is it going to end up with the whole building on fire?

Are you going to put the aspect "on fire" on a scene or are you going to have everyone resist environmental damage every turn.  Usually that's up to the vision of the GM and how he wants to run the challenge.

If the GM thinks the Ward isn't going to do the trick, then maybe he runs it as another type of conflict.  "you have 3 rounds before they break through.  You have to get 10 zones away in order to escape"  that set up a new conflict and sets up tension.

Or you could run it round-by-round, having them hammering away at the ward, calculating how much damage they take and do to the ward while the PC's try to escape.

That's what I like about FATE.  So many ways to do the same thing.  You can make it as free-form or as crunchy as you like.

[potestas]

I've actually been toying with the idea of using aspects in D&D.

Most modifiers give a +2/-2. 

Myself and other people who've DM'd have used various Role playing points/Luck Points etc.. to let players save up to buy extra feats or buy skill points.

I think adding the aspect system would enrich the game.

I think of myself as a number-cruncher.  But at certain points in a game you think, "this is taking forever" or "it might be more interesting if..."  If the table is in then why not.

You used my example from the other thread out of context.  I gave you 2 (extreme)ways of using sponsored debt and you used the 'hand-wavey' one as your example in this thread.

And I take exception to this because it's not what I was saying.  All I'm saying is in a given situation it might not matter.  So why bother rolling?  Instead of taking stress, take debt.  It'll be more interesting later.

It's up to the group to decide.  Judging how any given aspect is going to affect a combat or scene is left completely to the creativity of players/gm.

Is that "slippery with oil" going to add a +2 tag or is it going to end up with the whole building on fire?

Are you going to put the aspect "on fire" on a scene or are you going to have everyone resist environmental damage every turn.  Usually that's up to the vision of the GM and how he wants to run the challenge.

If the GM thinks the Ward isn't going to do the trick, then maybe he runs it as another type of conflict.  "you have 3 rounds before they break through.  You have to get 10 zones away in order to escape"  that set up a new conflict and sets up tension.

Or you could run it round-by-round, having them hammering away at the ward, calculating how much damage they take and do to the ward while the PC's try to escape.

That's what I like about FATE.  So many ways to do the same thing.  You can make it as free-form or as crunchy as you like.

i am sorry if you thought it was out of context, but its what made it all click for me, which is what lead to the question. It was a giant ah moment so i wanted to run with it but not in context of the other post sorry for the offense but it did enlighten me a bit. From my perspective it was an awsome revelation

[Baron Hazard]

I absolutely adore fate, for reference of all th systems of played and its been alot in the 20 year or so ive been gaming, Fate is by far my favorite. It would go:
1. Fate
2. Cortex (Firefly/Spn era; i dislike Cortex plus)
3. White Wolf, probably. Though i LOVE the Mouse Guard rpg as well.

Why? I love rules light systems, i love the collaborative story building elements of rpgs, i love not needed to worry about stats and rules and mechanics. You'd prolly have guessed by the list above that i prefer rules light systems, I despise most d20 systems ive run since picking up fate and cortex. 3.5 was atrocious, 4E gets better, but is still pretty mechanical.

In fate you can simulate anything within reason easily and quickly with almost no need to look anything up, a few simple rules and you can run the whole thing and simulate everything in a pretty believable and manageable fashion.

A well-tested group that is intimately familiar with fate can get away with obscurring the system almost entirely to the background and relay most of the important information in an immersive way.

I'm not so good with the words, and im trying to make this quick but, all in all i love Fate for how rules light it is and how many options it provides to both GM and Players.

[blackstaff67]

I'm pretty oaky with it.  I rather like how Zones are elastic so I don't have to pull out templates for spells and the like.  Statting up monsters is relatively simple, combat really doesn't take that long.  I'd spring for a cleaned up edition of the DFRPG but I'm content with it is as is.

[Centarion]

I agree pretty much 100% with Baron Hazard. But I will add that I love fact that FATE is so customizable. As much as a like storytelling and improv, both of which FATE is much better at than any other system I have played, I like designing characters even more.

In D&D 3.5, when you design a character, you are basically checking off a list of boxes with pre-built feats/spells/skills. Most groups would not let you make up your own feats or spells, largely because the balancing of the components on a character were so opaque (the difference between spell levels, especially in the middle, seems completely arbitrary, and feats vary wildly in power). Since there is no real mechanical impact of back-story or personality on the game, hardly anyone takes the time to make them. In the end, character creation is like building a puzzle, you try to fit the pre-existing pieces together so they work (and often there really is only 1 optimal way to do it). This is boring. Further, the combat takes forever and is very mechanical, and this makes it hard to tell the story.

In contrast, DFRPG forces you to create your own spells, encourages you to make your own stunts, and has no problem with creating new powers. Further, aspects for you to at least consider your character's story and personality, and give you a real game play incentive to go much deeper. The only real qualm I have is that some of the skills are much less useful than others, I normally fix this by just combining some of the redundant skills together and reducing the number of skill points (I have never had any of the problems with balance that others seems to complain about). Well, that and how Feeding Dependency or Demonic Co-pilot work.

The game play is also just more fun for me. If you really like mechanical simulations, where every action has a number and associated rule, then FATE isn't for you. But if you just want to tell a story with an element of randomness and suspense thrown in, FATE is your game.   

[Troy]

I like the Fate system because it's a lot like the tagline of the AMC network: Story Matters Here or Characters Matter Here. The game gives you an opportunity to make whatever you can say about your character, a location, or setting, your story -- it gives you the opportunity to make that actually matter when you're playing the game.

The system I am most familiar with is White Wolf's Mage: the Awakening. In that game, only dots on your character sheet make a difference. Dots on your sheet are supposed to reflect your character's experiences, but we all know that a PC is more than dots on a sheet. Dresden Files and Fate offer a way for the most important parts of the PC to matter and shine in the game. The numbers on your sheet are only part of the story.

A Fate game is encouraged to build itself around the characters at your table. The world, thus the story, does not exist independent of the PCs, but rather because of the PCs. I saw a contributor to the Fate G+ community liken it to the television show Fringe. The four principles of that show are the PCs are joined together from the very beginning as part of the world. There is a pattern of strange phenomena afflicting the world and terrorizing people: "I'm an anti-terrorism FBI Agent," "I'm a scientist driven insane by strange phenomena," "I'm the scientist's ne'er-do-well son, they need me to get him out of the mental institution," "Okay -- I'm also an FBI agent and it's my job to make sure the three of you have everything you need." You're encouraged to make a game like that.

Mage: the Awakening has an established setting and you are encouraged to design PCs that fit into this world. Everyone his shoehorned together whether they like it or not. It doesn't have to be this way. It can be be very Fate-like if you want it to be, but the game is not designed to do that from the beginning.

A Fate game is.

That's the main reason I like it.

[solbergb]

Funny you should mention Fringe.  I always thought it was the best Mage: The Awakening campaign ever set to television.  You just have to realize that most of the protagonists are in fact mages, whether or not they realize it.  By the later seasons it's increasingly obvious (eg, the FBI agent's background....).  All sorts of things in that show work pretty much exactly like they would in a Mage game, including different paradigms for different characters and the consensus reality being stressed by "magic" and hitting back.

This attitude might be because the longest running Mage game I played had a bunch of my friends as mid-20-somethings after college graduation literally awakening as mages..and by the time we had any power we had each evolved our own ideas of what magic was, independent of all the established power structures.  I'm not sure I'd have the same impression of Fringe if my Mage game had involved all of us being brought up by, say, the Technocracy or Sons of the Ether.

But yes, Fringe works pretty well in Fate too.  Most forms of public entertainment do, and it isn't an accident.  Fate is written by a bunch of ex-Amber RPG players who were unsatisfied with how that system dealt with conflict.  Amber was designed to simulate a science-fiction/fantasy story arc.  These authors were fans of written stories, TV stories, movies, had been exposed to a lot of RPG and took a lot of good ideas from them.  But it was deliberately based around the idea of the protagonist in a story, and having the game mechanics work the way stuff does in a story.  A protagonist loses so that rising from the ashes is more dramatic.  I can't think of the last story I read or saw where bad things and outright defeats didn't happen to the protagonists.

Stories generally aren't written like a d20 game, where the protagonists go from one encounter to another, of varying degrees of challenge but never really experiencing more than severe resource-depletion and needing to rest from time to time.  D20, and 1st edition D&D before it came out of wargaming roots, where what is going on is the GM is presenting a challenge and the fun is overcoming the challenge, more like a CRPG than a novel.  There are genre conventions (eg, Champions/Hero Games are organized in a similar way, except that the genre allows PCs to lose without getting killed, hence deathtraps and the like) but the basic pattern is similar.  The GM isn't expected to present a challenge that the PC's are likely to lose most of the time.  The roleplaying is both there to make you care more about the challenges and also to provide an extra layer of social complexity to some obstacles.  But mostly it's to make you care.

Stories don't work like that, and it is a hard adjustment to people used to one style switching to the other.

[Sanctaphrax]

Obviously I like DFRPG a lot. I'm somewhat less fond of most other Fate games, though.

Anyway, I like the system for three main reasons.

The first is playability: it just works. Simple enough.

The second is conceptual flexibility: although it's intended as a ruleset for a specific setting, it works for all sorts of games. I've had a lot of luck building non-Dresden characters in DFRPG.

The third is mechanical flexibility: you can do a lot of interesting things with its mechanics. Two characters who are both focused on hurting people and breaking things can operate very differently from one another. And of course there's a lot of room for custom stunts and powers and other such things.

[Troy]

I didn't say this before and I think it's important.

Fate and DFRPG is designed to tell a story using the rules of a game. World of Darkness, on the other hand, gives you a game and asks you to tell a story with it. It's a big difference in approach and how things work out in play. In the former, you are confined to your story, in the latter you are confined to your game.

[g33k]

I am begining to think that the game is well liked by those that prefer an open ended affair. Where the GM will say if you spend a fate point the ward will hold and you guys can escape. How strong the ward is or how many shifts you need is pointless since its going to hold, and nothing the enemy or you can do to bring it down because its part of the story. Those who prefere to know how and why something works and how to get around it via rules or power probably do not like the rules, well thats my guess. So whats your opinion. I am not saying its good or bad I am just trying to understand if I've grasped why Fate system is popular here.

I'd phrase it a bit differently:  the fate system is about the story, the narrative; those are the strong points of the system.  Fate is NOT about the game-world, and being a mechanical simulation-engine for the world -- for ANY game-world -- is NOT a strong suit of the system.

You nailed it when you said, "... because its part of the story" (though IMHO you skipped over the key question, "is escaping-because-the-ward-delays-the-baddies the best story, here?")  If the GM, or even one of the players, thinks more combat here -- or a chase-scene, or even a captured PC -- would Increase the Awesome(tm), then the GM should probably spend a FP to break the ward and bring the Awesome!

You nailed it again, I think, in saying Fate's less-good for "know(ing) how and why something works, and how to get around it via (the) rules" -- at least in the sense of knowing large statblocks, and how to overpower high-power opposition.  Instead, the opposition is overcome via narrative, & issues of what makes for better stories, more-satisfying events in the characters lives (or deaths, maybe...).  If the opposition seems too high-powered to overcome, it's the job of everyone at the table (GM included!) to figure out how to advance the game in exciting, dramatic, & player-satisfying ways... even though it likely means a fair bit of unhappiness for the characters...

[Mr. Death]

I like the Fate system specifically because the rules are loose and there explicitly to facilitate the story. One of the things that's kept me from playing "harder" game systems like DnD are things like how attacks of a given strength will kill you, while Fate gives you options and choice on both sides no matter what the dice say.

[solbergb]

The difference is deliberate.  Without the chance of total failure in the D&D-derived RPGs, a lot of the spice of overcoming the challenges for the players is lost.  Even when it is illusory (old school D&D didn't have namby-pamby challenge ratings and in some areas you didn't give a character anything much beyond a name in backstory until he'd got a few levels...more modern versions give the GM a lot more help for balancing opposition and some encourage secret cheating in player favor).

In any RPG where the fundamental approach is challenge-based satisfaction, you have to have threat of permanent loss, at some level.

The evolution of story-oriented games arrived later, and ironically some of them were seen as very lethal when they first started (Ars Magica is really the story of the Covenant, not its members, and you can have a huge body count without ending the story because of this, and Call of Cthulu assumes the players will eventually fail, but the fun is in watching the characters go through the cycles of discovery, denial, fear and either death or transformation into a monster...).  Most of the difference wasn't mechanical, it was just how the GM was encouraged to set up stories.   It wasn't really until diceless or nearly diceless games started to appear (Amber, Everway, similar) that people started putting in strong mechanics to back up the story itself, to give some narrative control to the player.   Aside from Amber, my first exposure was the Feng Shui game, which was a simulation of Hong Kong action movies (a genre that consumed the American action movie style within a decade, because it was better....).  That game had explicit mechanics for adding scene elements, it had skill trappings like you see in movies (an expert shooter will also be able to build/repair guns and know how to find a gunrunner), Ki points that could be used a lot like Fate Points and enemies that became harder to beat because of their narrative importance (named and mooks.  We later added "nicknames" for opposition that earns a bit of sweat or needs full power effort from the character, but isn't a serious threat).

What makes Fate derived systems unusually robust in the storytelling form of RPG is the aspect invocation mechanic, providing a way to reward players who "take one for the story" and also as a giant signal to the GM on the sort of stories they want told.  I've not done enough with Fate to know all the implications of this, but it does give the player a lot more narrative control over the story than is typical of most games, even those focused on story rather than challenge.

[Ulfgeir]

I like the FATE-system as I like to have systems that don't get in the way of playing. FATE is also very customizable. My two favourite versions are Dresden Files RPG, and Atomic Robo (have only done a charavter in the latter though and not started playing it yet)

Sure, I like BRP for Call of Cthulhu, as it is rules-light enough to not be a burden, also liked Starw Wars Saga edition as it was very flexible in how you levelled up. Then we have some games where the system actually hinders the game. High-level D&D or Shadowrun are good examples of that, or Exalted 2nd ed which is broken even for a system by White Wolf.

One thing I like about most FATE-versions are that the characters already have a connection to each other, but that also makes it difficult to introduce new characters.

/Ulfgeir