On Fate and the Future of RPGs

TODO: More images will be added to this post at a future date. The text is final however, so read away for now. But if you would prefer to wait for the final, fully finished product, I expect to have the last few images sorted out soon.

A Question of Beginnings

During the process of writing my On Dungeons and Dragons post (which was a long process given the word count) I have become aware of a question that now burns inside me. It’s a question that, if answered, might hold the key to removing the struggle I have gone through with rpgs for future generations of social gamers. The question is: Why is D&D, almost universally, the very first RPG that people play?

The only real exception to this rule are White Wolf rpgs (and GURPS to a degree, but GURPS doesn’t apply so much to Australians. I have literally never even heard of any Aussies who play it). White Wolf make products like Vampire the Masquerade and Werewolf. The few Aussies I’ve broached this question with have mentioned White Wolf products as possible other first rpgs. And I have to say if you were lucky enough to learn about rpgs from a White Wolf product rather than D&D you are blessed. And you have probably played many rpgs since.

If you are like the rest of us and when you first talked with some of your friends about playing an rpg everyone decided on D&D since it’s so well known; I feel your pain. That is of course, if you feel any pain. Plenty of D&D players have nothing bad to say about it.

Disclaimer: I have yet to play enough 5th edition to really comment on it in terms of this post, so if you feel that any of my complaints have been addressed in 5th, please let me know and I will look at updating this post.

The main division between people who having nothing bad to say about D&D and those who seem to have endless bad things to say about it, in case you were wondering, comes down primarily to what the players want out of the game. People who love D&D are often people who don’t enjoy talking in a funny voice for their character. Or maybe they don’t like spending a whole session just role playing. They almost always love just rolling dice to deal damage to things. And there’s nothing wrong with that at all; rolling dice and killing monsters are both beloved past times for me as well. But rpgs, for me at least, need to be about awesome stories way more than they need to be about dice rolls and hit points.

For people like me, that is, people who like stories and characters and funny voices and epic moments and twists and narrative structure, D&D can be a real drag. It’s not alone in that of course. In fact there are many other systems like it that are just as much of a drag. I’ve explained some of the reasons for this via my own personal history with this issue in my On Dungeons and Dragons post but those stories are just the tip of the iceberg. I think that the fact that D&D is so well known, and beloved by many, leads people toward it as first time players. And I hate that it does. Many people who would probably love rpgs end up playing D&D first, assuming all rpgs are like D&D and never playing one again. And I think that is a tragedy.

It’s a tragedy because there are so many rpgs that are not D&D. D&D is just one game. It’s like if someone who had never played a video game decided to play tetris first since it’s been so popular for so long. And then they hated tetris, got frustrated and confused, and decided all video games must be exactly like tetris and never played another one ever again. Anyone who has even played a few games on their phone these days knows not to judge all the games that have ever been made based on just one bad experience with a game. But people do it with rpgs all the damn time and pisses me off.

In fact what pisses me off even more is when the opposite problem happens. A lot of people play D&D first, love it completely, and decide that they don’t ever need to play any other rpg at all. They are all sorted out for rpgs, no need to try any others. Vanilla is fine, I don’t need to try chocolate or strawberry to see if I like it, I have vanilla. This too, is a tragedy. And to be honest I have a hard time deciding which of these tragedies is worse.

Given these two very common problems, I’m not even sure who I’m writing this post for to be honest. The aims of both this post and my last rpg related post are essentially to convince people that playing rpgs that do not have the words Dungeons and Dragons on the cover is a worthwhile thing to do. And that we, as a role playing culture, shouldn’t feel so damn backed into a corner by the hulking behemoth that is D&D. I hope there exists some percentage of our culture that can understand the things I’m saying without rejecting them out of hand. And I’m willing to guess that if you have read all of the approximately eight thousand words of my last rpg post, then you are probably part of that percentage. And I love you for it.

Since by now, given my last post, I am probably only talking to people who find rpgs interesting. And maybe people who enjoy reading about how games can affect a person’s life. And probably people who like as many flavours of rpgs as they can get. Let me, finally, get to the damn point of all this. My vision for the future. Both for my personal future and, I hope, the future of rpg culture at large.

I want light to be shone onto all the delicious and amazing role playing systems and games that D&D has been casting a shadow over for as long as I have been alive. The next time I get a group together for some sweet adventurous pen and paper action I want to hear people clamouring about all the different systems we could play. And while I am personally open to anything (even D&D again… if I have to…), I am really, strongly, hoping that I can get enough adventurous folks together to play a serious, at least once a week, think about practically nothing else, Fate Core campaign.

Fate Core is a role playing game. And as such, given our culture as it is, I suppose I should compare it to D&D. But, to put it in video game terms, that would be like comparing World of Warcraft to Call of Duty. Or comparing any two games that are just trying to do entirely different things with the same tools. (The tools in the case of video games being mouse and keyboard primarily (in before console players erupt in furious anger)). But still, I shall do my best to explain Fate Core in terms of how it relates to D&D since that is the language that many role playing gamers are fluent in.

The Role of Rolls

The simplest thing to compare for any role playing game would be the tools themselves. In the case of pen and paper rpgs, perhaps not surprisingly, the tools are mostly pens and papers which operate in a very similar manner in Fate Core as they do in D&D and most other rpgs. You have a character sheet and a book of rules. And something to write with. And snacks, never forget snacks.

And dice of course. Dice in fact are what most people think of when you ask them what to bring to a role playing game. In many ways dice are like religious icons for role players. Partly this is because they simply look cool. Really cool. But mostly it’s because, as a roleplayer, dice often hold the keys to your fun. They numerically represent the highs and lows of the dramatic arcs your character is going through. When your character succeeds, it’s because the dice came up in your favor.

Dice are wonderful things. But they can very much be double edged swords. In fact, with most roleplaying gamers you will find that dice are equally beloved and hated. Players will often tell you how much they hate rolling dice, all the while showing you their huge collection of full dice bags while wearing a t-shirt with a d20 icon on it. It’s a huge disconnect, and if you aren’t much into the rpg world it might be confusing. This again I mostly blame on D&D but if I am being fair it’s a problem that most rpg systems suffer from to some degree.

The problem is that, at least in the case of D&D and other traditional rpg systems, the rolling of dice usually violates that one golden rule of rpgs that I mentioned in my last post. “If it’s a choice between something interesting happening, and nothing happening, then the interesting thing should happen.” I’ll try to explain how this violation occurs.

So in most rpgs when you reach for the dice you are doing so because you are trying to accomplish something in the game. Disarming a trap. Hacking a computer. Shooting lightning out of your fingers at your arch nemesis. That kinda stuff. So as an example, if you want to hack a computer and the DM or GM says you have to roll higher than a ten on your twenty sided dice in order to successfully pull off the hack that sounds awesome! At least it sounds awesome until you roll a two. Because then the DM will often say the worst words an rpg player can hear. “Nothing happens.” Nothing happens? Nothing fucking happens? Why the fuck did I even come this silly fucking game! How fucking boring is that? Nothing happens… Pfft.

Of course a normal player, one who isn’t a massive dick, will not scream at their DM just because the dice came up bad for them. It’s impolite for one, and dice are nothing if not fair, so for the player who rolls a two it just seems like a case of bad luck. But bad luck should be just as interesting in a story as good luck. In fact most stories are built on the foundation of things going badly for their main characters. So in reality the bad luck isn’t the dice roll. It’s the fact that in most rpg systems dice rolls represent a random choice between something happening and nothing happening. Which is stupid and not fun.

In Fate Core this problem is largely abated. This is less to do with the tools than the rules in my opinion but there is a lot going on here so let me break it down for you.

The tools are of course dice. Fate Core uses its own special dice called either Fate dice or Fudge dice. But since they are basically just six sided dice you can always substitute Fate dice for good old d6s. In D&D the players can end up using all kinds of different dice. From two sided dice (also known as coins) all the way up to the staple twenty sided ones and sometimes beyond.

For the most part though, in D&D when your character is ‘trying to do something’ you will generally roll a twenty sided dice. Whereas in Fate Core you roll four six sided dice. Fate dice have two plus symbols, two minus symbols and two blank sides and you simply add up the number of plus symbols and then take away the number of minus symbols to get your result. This leaves you with a number from negative four to positive four.

So what does all this mean? Well when you roll a single d20 every number from one to twenty has an equal chance to be rolled, resulting in a complete lack of any kind of probability curve. In fact I think they call this a probability line. With a probability line you find that complete failure, a roll of one, is just as likely as amazing success which is a roll of twenty. And both of those outcomes are, in turn, exactly as likely as the average result of ten or eleven.

In Fate Core, since you are rolling more than one die, all of a sudden the very worst result, negative four, is much less likely to be rolled than your average result, zero. The same is true for your best possible result, positive four. This means that finally you have a curve. Meaning that most of your rolls will come out as average. And every once in awhile you will get a very bad roll or a very good roll.

Already, in my opinion, Fate Core or any other system that rolls multiple dice and thus has a probability curve, is already looking like a winner. But remember that golden rule. Even if we make our great failures and successes less likely to be rolled we are still in danger of the GM being forced to say those nasty old words; Nothing happens. So how the hell do we fix that? I mean at the end of the day, if you are trying to disable an ancient trap, and you fail to do so, then nothing happens right?

Of course that’s not right. In fact, this particular example is so obviously not right that even D&D players should know the answer. The trap goes off! Something happens. In D&D the choice to have something happen is largely left up to the discretion of the DM. And when it’s obvious that something interesting can come out of the players failing their roll like this trap example the DM will usually pick up on that. But what if you are just trying to open a door for example?

This type of thing has come up for me personally in every D&D style game I’ve ever played. Someone wants to do something simple. Something that any normal person in their position should be able to do. There are no bad dudes around and no one is trying to stop them from doing it. For example; opening a door. Even with a locked door, if you are trying to get it open and you have all the time in the world to do so and no one is trying to stop you, then there is no reasonable expectation that you should not be able to open said door. But in this example, for some reason, you are asked to roll the dice. To check whether you have been able to open, unlock or break down the door.

Automatically this is a terrible situation and any experienced roleplayer will see why. But it happens all the time and don’t try to tell me that it doesn’t. The reason this is terrible is that, even if the GM sets the difficulty really low, let’s say you have to roll higher than a three on your twenty sided dice, if chance dictates that you fail, and you roll a two on your dice, then guess what happens? Nothing. The GM says something like “the door doesn’t budge”.

Of course since nothing of any importance is happening in this scene of the story other than you trying to open a door you can just try again right? And maybe this time you roll high enough. Well that’s great now you can enter the room or whatever but why the hell did you waste everyone’s time even rolling? There was no way you weren’t getting into that room at some point. You could have just rolled and rolled and rolled until you got in. So why even reach for the dice in the first place? Usually because the GM told you to roll. And that is why I said the rules are more important that than the tools.

The rules, or in this case rule I suppose, for Fate Core is as follows; Roll the dice when succeeding or failing at the action could each contribute something interesting to the game. This little gem can be found on page 187 of the Fate Core rule book. It is in a chapter called ‘Running the Game’ which should explain why this mistake is primarily one that GMs can make. That said I have seen players ask the GM if they ‘should roll for this’ and essentially put themselves into this situation.

If “nothing happens” then the game grinds to a halt. Any game. D&D. Fate. Anything. Play basically stops in its tracks. Nothing is nothing. It doesn’t give the players or the GM or any bystanders to this mess anything to work with. It makes people feel like they may as well be watching a TV show or reading a book. Because at least something would happen then. So thank god that in Fate at least we have a rule right there in the book that tell us if we face a choice between nothing and something, then we don’t roll our dice at all, we just do the thing that is interesting.

So, the way dice are used is more fun in Fate Core. I think I have established that. If you are the kind of person who hates rpgs because you don’t like the very idea of rolling dice then you would probably still hate Fate dice. In that case Fate Core does offer you the Deck of Fate, which is a deck of cards that mimics the probability curve of Fate dice. So even in that case you should be covered. Fate Core has your back.

So far I have talked mostly about dice. They of course are the main tools of most rpgs. The only thing that comes close to being as iconic as dice in the context of an rpg is the character sheet. And to talk about that, I will really need to get into a few of the rules of Fate Core. They mostly don’t have direct comparisons with D&Ds rules but I’ll try to explain why Fates character sheet is as pretty as it is with all those nice big boxes.

Statistically Speaking

Roleplaying games often have these funny little things that players call statistics, or stats for short. Really they should probably be called metrics but ‘mets’ sounds weird so they aren’t. In practice roleplaying systems call them all sorts of things. Attributes. Points. Skills. Scores. All kinds of stuff. In the end though they are basically all just ways for the rules of the game to describe how competent the characters are at what they do.

Even between D&D systems the names of different stats have changed. For the most part however one thing about stats has generally stayed the same in D&D. They are mostly numbers. Hit points are an obvious example. In D&D your hit points (sometimes referred to as health points) are a measurement of how dead you aren’t. I wish I could say they were a measurement of how healthy or alive you are but that isn’t really how they work in practice.

Regardless of the details of how you gain or lose them, hit points are basically just one number. Even though the name suggests they are a collection of individual items. You can say “I have ten hit points”. But in reality you don’t have ten individual things. You just have a single score that represents your not-dead-ness that is currently set to ten. At this point, if you have only played rpgs that have numerical stats, or if you have played no rpgs at all, you are probably confused as to why I would bring up the fact that hit points are just a number. And to you, I must now explain that it is because they don’t have to be a number.

It might sound too radical. It might blow your mind. Probably not, but who knows. Hit points have been around for a damn long time and are still used in many thousands of current game systems. The idea that maybe they actually suck isn’t a new one but somehow they still keep getting used. And they aren’t the only numerical attribute that most rpgs use. Not by a long shot.

In D&D how strong your character is, how smart they are, what skills they have, and a lot more besides, are all represented by numbers. Now of course not every single thing is a number but most things that aren’t a number at least have a number attached to them. Like a +1 Sword. Sure it’s a sword. Swords aren’t numbers. But plus one? Yeah that’s a number.

To be fair there have even been a few things in D&D that weren’t numbers at all. Especially the further back you go into the older systems. The clearest example I can think of for a D&D stat that isn’t a number is a thing you could have in 3rd edition derivatives called a feat. A feat was a real thing! Like Brew Potion. That feat let you make potions, potions are not numbers! Then however I guess there were also lots of feats like Agile that just gave you a +2 to some other stat. Plus-two’s are in fact numbers.

You are probably wondering what my problem with numbers is. If you are a physicist or a mathematician you would be even more annoyed by my lack of number-love. But I assure you, I love numbers. They are super cool and do funky things. PI might be my favourite one. Or Euler’s constant? Hmmm. Or maybe 496. Regardless of which one is your favourite, numbers are great. But they aren’t very dramatic or relatable. At least not to us meat-bags. So what should rpg systems use instead of numbers? Words. Of course words.

It should be obvious that words are better than numbers in an rpg. But if it isn’t, don’t feel like you are alone. I didn’t get it for a long time either. See numbers make you feel pretty cool. My fireball did ten damage, yay! It makes you feel great saying that. But it doesn’t really describe what your fireball actually did. Did the fireball hit your enemies energy shield, slightly weakening it? Did it hit them right in the face, melting their skin off? These are two dramatically different ideas but both can be expressed by the term ‘ten damage’. Ten damage doesn’t mean anything unless you give it context.

Even D&D knows that numbers are meaningless without context. It tells the DM to interpret the numbers into words. So you said you were going to cast your fireball, it was cast, you rolled dice to see how much damage it would do, the dice came up ten, the DM then says something like “your fireball burned all the other orphans to a crisp”. Ok maybe that last part only happens if you are playing as a fired-up mutant who is flashing through their tragic backstory to reveal their darkest secrets to an intergalactic god; but still. You can probably see the process at work here.

Fate Core doesn’t eliminate this process entirely like some super-word-loving rpg systems do. But it does a lot of cool things with it and with words in general. Stats, as they are known to D&D players, are largely not numbers in Fate. And it’s awesome. Numbers still exist in this system so there is no reason for your more number-loving players to freak out. I wouldn’t expect them to go cold turkey on numbers. But at least this time around the numbers are given good context right off the bat. Context to which the GM can add, but more importantly, to which the players can add. That’s right, in Fate Core, the description and thus the story itself often comes directly from the players.

The first wordy part of Fate Core that I will try to compare to D&D is a concept called Aspects. Aspects in Fate can be compared to D&Ds primary attributes but they also encompass most of the effects of Classes, Races and other such descriptors. There are a number of stats in Fate that are Aspects. The most important ones are the High Concept, Trouble and Consequences. The High Concept and the Trouble stats are essentially two sides of the same coin so I’ll tackle those first.

The Highest of Concepts

The most natural way for me to dive into the rules of Fate Core and compare them practically to D&Ds rules is to run through some examples of play. First off we are going to compare the process of character creation between Fate Core and D&D and afterward I’ll a give a few examples of what you can do with your newly made character and how those early sessions differ between the two systems. So, to jump right in, the first two things any Fate player will be looking at during character creation are their two main Aspects. High Concept and Trouble.

A Fate characters High Concept is essentially their D&D Class and Race combo. It’s the very idea of your character. Who and what they are. If you were playing a fantasy themed Fate game your High Concept might be something like ‘Elven Ranger’ which sounds very D&D like. And even if we just went with that as our High Concept and wrote it down on our sheet, if nothing else, we have saved a damn lot of time as compared to how long getting to this point would take in D&D.

Elven and Ranger are both not numbers, so we are looking great so far. But let’s be honest; ‘Elven Ranger’ is a bit boring. It says we are an elf, and that we do ranger-type things but it doesn’t add much flavour to that idea. It says the what, but not the who. Aspects in Fate should always be cool and interesting phrases that suggest theme and meaning, having positives and negatives. Maybe if ‘Elf who does Ranger-type things’ was our character idea we might make our High Concept ‘Protector of the Forest’ instead.

‘Protector of the Forest’ suggests that we do Ranger type things, but it achieves that effect in a more thematic way. You get a different mental picture if someone says “I am an Elven Ranger” compared to if they say “I am the Protector of the Forest”. The mental picture you get for Elven Ranger is very open, it could go a lot of different ways and everyone at the game table is probably imagining that character a little differently. Protector of the Forest is a bit more specific and suggests what kind of personality our character has. They obviously love the Forest. They will probably try to stop anyone who wants to do harm to the Forest. Moreover they are probably awkward and weird when they aren’t in their Forest. That is great! It gives us a lot of story ideas to work off and really informs how we should portray our character.

Notice now that we aren’t specifying that we are an Elf any more in our High Concept. If this was worrying you at all, then chill brah. This doesn’t matter at all. We can just say we are an Elf. That’s all it takes in Fate. We can write it down in the description part of our character sheet, or if our eflhood is somehow super interesting we can make up an aspect around it and put that down in one our regular Aspect slots underneath our Trouble slot.

Writing these couple of words down on our Fate Core sheet is equal in scope to doing many many things in D&D. In D&D we would have had to look through all the available Races and Classes (and if you look at how many expansion type books exist in most D&D systems that add more of these to the main list you can imagine that this itself might take a good couple of hours). We might even want to weigh up all the various rule changes that each class and race makes to the game before we make our choice which adds even more hours to just looking at what is available.

Then once we have made our choice we have to roll a bunch of dice and make a number of complex choices in regards to our primary stats, like strength and charisma. Then we would roll up how much money we start with and look through a table of gear and choose what pieces we think our character might own at the start of the game. Depending on the exact version of D&D you are playing this process might include even more things to add to this list. In D&D we need to do all of this just to cover the writing down of a few words in Fate Core.

See in Fate, just by writing down Protector of the Forest into our High Concept we now assume that our character has all the cool things that a Protector of the Forest should have. What types of things you ask? Maybe a cool bow and arrows? Fast reflexes and tracking skills? Or even a magical totem that the life-tree at the center of the forest bequeathed unto us after some past epic adventure? All of the above.

Of course we have all that stuff, we are the god damned protector of the god damned forest! We should have all that cool stuff! And it shouldn’t take hours of looking through books and arguing rules with our GM to get there. We just write down our badass idea and boom! We are now the Protector of the Forest! Or a Mutant Cyborg with Time Traveling Powers! Or even The Kitten Holy! Anything! All in one stat. All sorted out within a couple minutes of playing the game.

The Trouble with Troubles

One of the most difficult parts of character create in Fate, (although decidedly simpler than D&D still, and easy to fix later) is assigning your new character an effective Trouble stat. It’s a very powerful stat because with it, we get to double down on what our main character is all about putting a big stamp on their stories to come. In this stat we will put an Aspect that reflects a problem in our character’s life that is wholly unrelated to our High Concept. As I’ve previously mentioned, stories themselves are largely made up of things that are bad for their main characters. Normally in a D&D game all of these problems and issues will be generated by the DM. In Fate you choose your characters own struggle. Which makes sense. Proactive, heroic type characters are often defined more by what bad things happen to them or by who their arch nemeses are far more than by the positive things they have in their lives.

So, we could put ‘At War with the Industrious Goblins’ as our Trouble for our forest-loving character but doing so wouldn’t really add anything to the mix. If we love the forest and the goblins want to burn it down to make their evil devices then of course we will go to war with them. This is implied already by our High Concept. Our Trouble stat should be something all it’s own, usually a personal struggle or a problematic relationship. Maybe we have allowed a single goblin to live inside our forest because we took pity on him? Or perhaps we have family outside of the forest but we never get to see them any more cos the damn forest needs so much protecting all damn the time? Either of these are great Troubles but they are a bit too wordy so let’s make one into an Aspect. Let’s say we add “Gix the Goblin is Still Learning” to our Trouble slot.

If you can think of a part of the character creation process, that is covered in an official D&D book, that is comparable to the Trouble stat I would love to know about it. Personally I can’t think of anything in terms of the official rules. Most DMs will ask you about what story plans you have for your character at some point but that rarely ends up being as powerful as the Trouble stat is. And it should be that powerful. How cool would Batman be without the Joker? Or Frodo without his relationship to Gollum? Or the entire Next Generation crew of the Enterprise without Q? Bad things for characters are good things for stories. And role playing games are basically just a fun way to tell a story, so being able to add your own spin on what haunts your character is about as awesome as it gets.

So, by talking with our game group, or maybe getting inspired by our favorite book or movie, or maybe just having our own awesome idea, and then by writing down less than a sentence worth of words we have just achieved double what a player in a D&D system achieves in their first few hours (sometimes longer). The Trouble stat might not seem all that important but it really does do a lot of work for us in terms of story mileage and portraying our character. On top of that we can actually use it to our benefit via Fate points which I will discuss later.

By this point a D&D player is mostly done with character creation. Having now spent a damn long time sorting out who their character is and what they do; They still have skill points to work out, weapon stats to write down, hit points and armour classes to figure out and probably even more stuff depending on the exact system in play and what their class choice was (like sorting out their spells if they are a wizard). In Fate we have only written down a few words so far. So how close are we to actually playing the game? If we are going with the bare minimum then just one more quick choice and we can get amongst the action.

What One Does Best

The last choice before we start playing is our Peak Skill. The Peak Skill is basically whichever activity we think our character is likely to be best at. Skills in Fate are actually a lot like Skills in D&D. Skills have numbers (though for number-phobes Fate Skills also have words you can use instead). And they work very similarly to D&D skills: You want to steal something from someone? You will probably end up using the Burglary skill. The skill’s name is a bit different but really it’s very much like stealing something from someone in D&D. So what is different here in Fate?

Well, instead of getting heaps of skill points and having to distribute them into just the skills your class choice allows, you just take whatever skills you think work for your character and slot them into a pyramid shape. It sounds weirder than it is. Basically, in Fate you start off with one skill at Great level (which is a +4 for the number-lovers) then two at Good level (+3) then three at Fair level (+2) and four at Average level (+1).

Since you have only just come up with the idea of who your character is, and Fate wants you to get amongst the action as fast as possible, you really only need to choose your Great level skill at this point if you aren’t sure about the rest of them. In the case of a forest protector we could go with Fight, since that might come up a lot when protecting the forest. Or Empathy or Lore or Stealth could all work depending on how we imagine our character.

Whichever one we pick, now that we have our two main Aspect stats and our peak skill we can jump right into Fate and work out the rest of the details later. And it’s only taken us a few minutes to get this far. In a D&D based system there are certainly a few things you could leave out of character creation if you wanted to jump into the action a bit faster, but with a normal number of players you are still looking at a good few hours before ‘you meet in a tavern’. In Fate Core, if you arrive at the table with some idea of what kind of game you all want to play, you can get started in minutes.

The Extra Bits

Now, even though we do have enough of our stats sorted out that we could play the game, there are of course still a number of blank spots on our Fate character sheet at this point. Character creation can function a number of different ways in Fate but if we are going with the traditional method then once we have figured out our character’s Name, High Concept and Trouble we would enter what is called the Phase Trio.

‘Phase Trio’ is a pretty weird name for a really awesome part of Fate. It’s basically a little mini-game in which we come up with our character’s backstory and how it relates to the other characters at the table. The closest thing I can relate this to for D&D would be the first game session itself in terms of the actual rules but many good DMs will have their own version of this process that they run through before the game starts.

So, we start off by writing down a bit of a setup story for our character in phase one. The players then swap the stories around and we write down another scene about how our character is going to affect the backstory setup that is now in our hands. Then we swap stories around again and write a bit of a conclusion that involves our character to the new story we are holding.

This process first of all connects the character’s that we have made. So we already know a lot of information about who is buddies with whom and how we all relate to each other. This is awesome. It lets us all jump right into the action when the main game begins. The other thing it does is that it gives us three cool scenes of stories that involve our character. And from those three scenes we derive our other three main Aspects.

These Aspects can be basically anything that relates to our character or their state of affairs. They can describe relationships we have, our personalities, things from our past that still affect us. Anything. We write them down on our sheet in the same way we do our High Concept and our Trouble. We have an idea, then we turn it into a cool phrase. So if in phase one we decided that we would go with our idea about our forest protector having to battle some industrially minded goblins. We could derive all kinds of Aspects from that one bit of flavour.

If we thought the most important thing about that idea was that our character now hates goblins because of how they treat nature we might make an Aspect called ‘The Forest does not Welcome Greenskins’. If we thought that in fact our character doesn’t really mind goblins, they just wish people cared more for the damn forest and less for their ‘devil machines’ we might decide that ‘Technology Threatens my Safety’ might be more appropriate. Whatever we choose we just need to write down three Aspects onto our sheet, each one inspired by a different story scene that our character was in during the Phase Trio.

I won’t go over Aspects again since the three new Aspect stats we have are functionally just extensions of our existing Aspects. But I will mention that the Phase Trio is awesome and I wish D&D had something like it during character creation. It gets everyone playing the game from moment one. Even during character creation you are making up cool stories where your characters are the stars.

I have had plenty of times playing D&D where, once the group is finally done with rolling characters we are so burned out that we just call an end to the session. And then when we all meet back up for the next session no one fully remembers all the cool story-type thoughts they had for their character so the game starts up really cold and takes a long time to warm up. In Fate, that simply never happens because by the time character creation is done everyone’s characters are already the stars of awesome origin stories so everyone at the table is super excited to get into the action.

Assuming at this point that we have five aspects, including our High Concept and our Trouble, a name, and some skills picked out. The only two things left to do are Stunts and Refresh (depending on your game’s world and theme etc). We do also need to check how many boxes we get for our stress tracks as well, this just depends on how high we set the Skills that correspond with each of these tracks.

Stunts in Fate are very much like Feats in D&D. Most of them just add a bit of a bonus to the chances that the dice will come up in your favor when you perform certain actions. But some of them are a bit special, allowing your character to do some cool extra stuff. The coolest part about Stunts in my opinion is that you can just make them up, much like Aspects. But for those that like choosing things from a list there are a few example Stunts listed with each Skill that are all quite good.

Often, since Fate does not have a thematic bias by default, we just have to adjust the wording of an existing Stunt to fit our games needs. The exact mechanics of how Stunts work, and how to balance Stunts that you are making up yourself are out of the scope of this post, for that information you should consult the Fate Core rulebook and its companion book. The PDFs of which are sold under a pay-what-you-want model, so can be obtained for free if you so choose.

Refresh is the last thing on our sheet that we need to sort out now. It is a number that represents how many Fate points you start each game session with. You start off with a refresh of three and reduce that number by one for each Stunt you take past your third Stunt, down to a minimum of one. In other words; If you chose three or less Stunts for your character, you get three Refresh. If you chose four Stunts, you get two Refresh. Five Stunts, one Refresh. As I said, Refresh gives you Fate points. And Fate points are one of the most fun rpg mechanics I’ve ever played around with.

Fate Points. For fun and profit.

So by now we should be all done with the character creation process. So, the obvious question to ask at this point is, how do we play the game? Well from afar the gameplay resembles D&D a lot. There are a few players and one Game Master. The jobs of each are about the same as they are in D&D as well, players control their characters and the GM controls the world and all the NPCs and describes the environment.

Appearance is about where the similarities stop between D&D and Fate however. And this is a common point at which people who have played D&D before start to get very confused. See in a D&D game, most players are ready and willing to be very creative during their first couple sessions especially when it comes to character creation. Past that however, D&D players have become comfortable with the idea that, during most sessions nothing much will be required of them creatively besides rolling some dice and making a few small choices as to what their character is doing. In Fate however, everyone needs to be adding to the game creatively all the time.

Most of Fates rules work very well if you approach the game like it is essentially a collaborative story telling device, (you know, like all rpgs are). But more and more people approach roleplaying games as if they are video games, where you just sit back and run your character through a nice story where they get to be the hero. Roleplaying games aren’t and shouldn’t be a passive activity.

The most important answer to the question ‘how do we play the game’ is never one about the exact rules of the game. It’s always about in what way should one approach the game. In Fate, you should be actively shaping who and what your character is in every scene. You should be thinking of awesome story ideas; Cool things for your character to do, of course, but also terrible things that might happen to them. Both are important for any awesome story. Roleplaying games are many different things to many different people but at the end of the day they are always the most fun if you approach them like they are half improv session and half writers room session.

Awesomely, Fates rules encourage you to do just that. On the very surface they encourage that by not breaking the golden rule; by specifying that if you say your character is going to do something they just do it. You don’t to roll for things unless they are contested, so you can add all kinds of awesome flavour and style to your character all day long. But another big way in which Fates rules encourage you to be creative is in how you can choose to spend your Fate points.

At the start of each session you will get a number of Fate points equal to your Refresh. These are often represented by poker chips or coins, but choosing something that fits the theme of your game is always the most fun way to do it. There are three main things you can do with Fate points. You can Invoke an Aspect, declare a story detail or activate a powerful stunt if you have one. Invoking Aspects for Fate points is one of the cost common things you will do in a Fate game; it should be happening all the time. Doing so gets you a +2 to a roll that you weren’t happy with or even a reroll if your roll was really bad to start with. Now a +2 is of course a number, and we know that numbers are boring. So why is Invoking Aspects awesome?

It’s awesome because as you Invoke an Aspect you must narrate exactly what you are doing and how you are doing it. To some D&D players this actually sounds like a bad thing, which blows my fucking mind. They seem to think that the player will come up with some kind of total bullshit like “of course my Aspect ‘Hardcore Hacker’ helps my roll to try to impress the baroness with my cooking, I’m totally gonna hack into these ingredients and make them taste better!”

As above, I can actually imagine a game where this sentence would make sense. But in most games it probably wouldn’t, by the normal rules of meat and vegetables, they can’t be hacked into, because they are food, not computers. I suppose if this weird cooking roll were taking place in some kind of cyberspace world rather than the real world it would be fine, but let’s assume it isn’t. Now sure, sometimes someone at the table will narrate something like this after Invoking an Aspect and everyone else at the table will be pretty dubious about it. And that’s ok.

See the thing that D&D players don’t really get here is that in a Fate game everyone at the table actually has a second job. They have their main job, playing their character or GMing the game. But, it’s the second job that really makes the game work. The second job is explained on page four of the rulebook, which should explain just how core of a rule it is to the game of Fate. The secondary job, that everyone at the game table has is: “Make everyone around you look awesome.”

This is critical. See in the previous example about hacking food, that piece of narration is perhaps subpar. But instead of the other players getting angry about how weird it sounds, or instead of the GM shooting it down and making the player who came up with it look dumb, everyone now has the job of making that player look awesome. This could of course happen in a lot of different ways depending on how creative the other people at the table want to get. If nothing else and at the very least, another player could chip in a Fate point and declare the story detail that; Yes, in fact this cooking challenge is taking place in cyberspace since, given the baronesses Aspect ‘Never Consort with Lowlifes’, there is no way she would allow peasant food to actually enter her mouth! And thus the player could in fact hack into food items and make them taste better.

There are plenty of other ways to resolve this of course, they don’t all necessarily cost Fate points either, but you can probably start to see how cool Fate points are here. Without them, nothing in that example would have happened in the game. The GM just would have said something like “The baroness demands that you cook her a feast in order to impress her tender sensibilities”! And the player would have rolled the dice and gone from there. But because we have Fate points we were able to have the players themselves contribute fun and interesting story details to the game while showing how they think their characters would actually approach this rather odd challenge.

The Skills to pay the bills.

Up to here I have been talking about rolling the dice to achieve things in Fate without really explaining how that mechanic works. I did explain that you always roll four Fate dice which ends up giving you a result that lands on a bell curve between -4 and +4. But that isn’t actually all there is to it. Basically every roll of the dice in Fate is a character using a Skill. And there are actually four of different ways each Skill can be used. These are the four Actions. Not every skill is useable with all four Actions (in fact by default only the Fight skill is) but it does make it very simple to remember that there are four Actions you can perform with a dice roll.

The four Actions are Attack, Defend, Overcome and Create an Advantage. Attack and Defend should be pretty self explanatory, they are used primarily during Conflicts. Attack means you are using a particular Skill to hurt someone, Defend means you are using it to stop an incoming attack, or to stop someone Creating an Advantage on you. Create an Advantage is used to get free Invokes from Aspects that could benefit you, (especially useful when you are all out of Fate points) or to create new Aspects on the environment or another character from which you can get a free Invoke as well. Overcome is the action that is most dependant on the skill you are using it with. You could, for example, use the Burglary skill to Overcome a locked door (but see my previous example of door related shenanigans first). Or you could use the Deceive skill to Overcome someone asking who you are and what you are doing in this restricted area. It’s a bit of a catch-all Action.

I could continue on and on, but then I would largely be repeating everything that you can find already for free inside the rule book for Fate Core. And I think by now, if you have read this far, you surely already agree with me on most of my points about D&D (I hope). So think I should wrap this post up since it is just now about to crest the 9000 word mark.

The Fate of Us All

So there you have it. By the end here, I have to admit I feel like this post got away from me a bit and became a bit more of a ‘How to play’ post rather than a ‘Why Fate is better than D&D’ post like I wanted it to be. But ultimately it is the manner in which in the game is played that truly decides that for me personally. As I have mentioned, from a distance the two games look very similar. A group of awesome nerdy friends sit around a table making up fun stories and throwing lightning bolts into NPCs faces. Personally I just feel that people who are into RPGs often focus too much on their to-hit rolls and their damage rolls rather than actually playing a role. Roles are more important than rolls, in other words. I’m certainly not the first person to talk about role-playing vs. roll-playing but it’s my hope that it can be talked about less and less because we can all get into the creative side of RPGs more and more.

I know I’m not alone in this, but a lot of times it feels like I am. If you managed to read this and agreed with some or all of what I have been saying, or more improbably, if you actually want to read more articles like this one in the future, please get in contact with me via the links at the bottom of this page. (Email is my preference since I am from the ancient times but I do have face and said face is in a book someplace. Also I have one of those tweety things but no one tweets me or whatever you do, so I don’t use it. If I start getting people talking to me on that thingy I will actually update it and use it.)