Today I’m going to dig deeper into the notion of stress and consequences in Fate, and talk about how the principle of the Fate Fractal can be applied to complicate the model (in a good way). A Few Words About Stress When it comes down to it, consequences are the real meat of the system, […]
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The Fiction of 4e
An interesting discussion the other day got me thinking about the fiction of 4e. Not in terms of novels and the like (though I’m sure those would be an interesting subject) but rather in the fiction implicit in the game. This is not, to my mind, about the little map in the back of the […]
The Core of Fate Core, Part II
So, Fred’s post talks a lot about what Fate Core has been. My main interest is in where it’s going. That’s what this post is about, as a supplement to Fred’s post. In that sense, the title might be misleading – I’m thinking out loud a lot throughout, more interested in asking questions and exploring […]
The Core of Fate Core
I’ve seen folks describe Fate in a variety of ways. Collect them all together and it becomes a big jumble of paradoxes. It’s rules light and it’s heavy, etc. And it’s true, we’ve certainly “overwritten” our Fate 3 based games out of a great love for explanation, examples, guidance, and advice. But at the end […]
Building a Challenge
Ok, let’s do this thing: Climbing the MountainOk, the mountain. It’s big, it’s windy, it’s snowy, there are bad things living there that want to eat your face. You guys need to get to the top, probably because there’s some ancient city or something up there. I dunno. Make something up. For reference, let’s say […]
What Doesn’t Work
I put out a call for challenge requests and got some interesting ones, but what struck me that that many of them were most interesting for why they don’t work, so I’m going to be doing counter-examples today. These are all things you might want to do in a game, but they’re not necessarily good […]
Mapping the Challenge
Not every challenge needs a map (or equivalent) to work well. Often the challenge revolves around something large and amorphous which can be engaged by any character at any time. However, maps make challenges more interesting. It’s possible that’s backwards. It may be more accurate to say that challenges with different fronts, which allow different […]
How Challenges Hurt
It’s pretty easy to model a damage-dealing challenge. On some level, that’s what almost any trap is. Consider the classic “Hallway full of darts” – it makes an attack against each player after they act for some amount of damage and players try to dodge through, spot pressure plates or disarm the mechanism. Right off […]
The Challenge Strikes Back
If you spend time designing monster for 4e you will quickly discover that while some parts of the design are pretty standardized, like hit points and defenses, others are much more art than science. Specifically, monster abilities follow few hard and fast guidelines, and are instead something you come up with by mixing your ideas […]
This Is Not A Science
First, 2 Realizations:1) SP is also used for currency, but to heck with it, I’ll keep using it for the time being. This whole thing is going to need a big language cleanup by the time it’s done.2) Rather than 1d6/1d8/1d0 damage progression, it probably makes more sense to use the light, medium and heavy […]