A GM's Question of Style

[wyvern]

Well, the easy way out for that particular example is to just shift the results of the roll to IC knowledge: "Okay, you've got the door open - but you realize you missed the wires leading to a silent alarm.  The cops'll be here in maybe fifteen to twenty minutes.  What do you do?"

And then, if they turn around and leave, well, the place is going to have a security upgrade if/when they decide to try again; an actual guard on site, etc.

However, there are some rolls where this starts to break down; consider, for example, an alertness roll to notice the guy shadowing you.  About the best that I, as GM, would be willing to offer is "Well, you see x, y, and z, and - if you're willing to spend a fate point on it - may notice some additional detail."  Just make darned sure that any "additional detail" of that sort is actually important.

The other thing I do is, in cases when a PC just doesn't know the difficulty but wants to spend a fate point, I will refund that point if it doesn't accomplish anything.  I actually had two examples of that the other day; the group was fighting some ghouls, and someone got off a really good shot - and then tried to spend a fate point to make it even better.  I told them no, their base roll was enough to take out that ghoul, no fate point needed.  Later on, someone got a really bad roll on an attack (and the ghoul rolled well on defense), and one fate point just wasn't enough to turn the miss into a hit - so I made clear what the margin of failure was, and gave them the choice of either taking back the fate point they'd tried to spend, or putting down a second one to land the hit.

[WillH]

Well, I wouldn't wait a half hour. In fact I can't see myself spending that much time at all on this scene at all, but that's me. Delaying the roll may not be for everyone. If you don't want to delay the roll and the players are uncomfortable entering the warehouse and having their characters act normally when there players have knowledge of the impending complication, just jump right to the complication. "You failed the role and tripped the silent alarm. After you have been poking around for a few minutes the security guards show up."

The system is pass.pass with complication. That's how this game works. There is no point in discussing pass/fail, other than to say don't do that.

Wyvern's way of handling the failed roll is a good way to do things too.

[babel2uk]

Well the half an hour figure was pulled out of the air as an example (and not necessarily tied to the warehouse break in specifically). With a my group it can easily take that long to play through a scene, and that's without undue distractions and tangents.

That aside, I wasn't discussing pass/fail mechanics at all, merely pointing out that it will take time for players and GMs new to the system to get used to the way Fate works, and that until they get their head around it you'll regularly get situations where players fall into old habits from the way they're used to playing. It's the GMs job to steer them away from doing so. I stand by my point that I'd come down heavily on someone who used OOC knowledge to dictate IC actions that made no sense - that's in any game, not just Fate. Thankfully  I have a group that's good at separating OOC and IC knowledge, so that sort of thing rarely arises now.

I'm not sure about Wyvern's solution to the warehouse example. It would depend on whether I wanted to put them on a known time limit, whether any of the characters was likely to know what the alarm system looks like, and a whole host of other subjective factors. The part about spending fate points to get extra information reminds me strongly of the Gumshoe system, where you automatically get the important clues that will allow you to solve the mystery (so long as you have the correct skill), but you can spend points to get extra pieces of information that will be relevant - for example the free clues may allow you to find the big bad guy, but the point spend clues might reveal his weaknesses. Though I realise that's not exactly the way Wyvern's example would play out.

[WillH]

Yeah, Wyvern's solution is just another tool you can have in your bag to use. It's not going to work for every situation.

[Gilesth]

The system assumes a certain degree of transparency to function as written. You don't know if you need to spend fate points unless you know whether you succeeded or not, and they're too precious to throw onto rolls when you don't know whether you need to.

You could work out some system whereby you say something like, "You're not quite making it up the fence..." and let them spend the fate point. But then you're just putting success and failure into code, and you have to rely on them interpreting the code correctly to make their decisions. This is just a layer of obfuscation on top of the system information. And it's not a layer that particularly reduces the game-ness of the game.

There's already the system of adjectives. Fudge was originally designed so that you don't need to speak in terms of the numbers. You can say, "It's fairly difficult to climb that fence," or, "It would require someone with a good degree of skill to pick that lock." Because characters would have a general perception of how hard something seems to be while they're doing it, and that can translate directly to mechanical information without interrupting narrative flow.

But ultimately your group needs to work out what everyone is comfortable with. FATE does make some assumptions about what range you fall into on certain topics, so you might need to nudge it a bit if you find the assumptions don't fit in the comfort range of your group.

Your example is pretty much how I run it.  The players are always aware of what's going on, but to keep thing interesting during a fail, I don't always want them to know that there are potential consequences to their actions.  Besides that, many of my players are old-school gamers who are used to hard-lined rules that either have failure or success, and failures are always a brick wall on that action.