Fate: Best Practices

 

In a fit of nostalgia this week, I appeared on a podcast (Mastering Dungeons; long-time listener, first-time guest) talking about Fate, of all things. I was ostensibly there to talk about campaign creation, but I was, uh, all over the place. It brought up a lot of thoughts about Fate in general, some of which made it into the conversation, but many of which stayed on my page of notes (I had notes). And I thought, hey, if I were still blogging regularly, this could make a plausible blog post. So that's what it is now.

These are just things that, IMO, make Fate really shine.

Play honestly. I talked about this a little on the podcast, but Fate is not a game that's overly concerned with things like balance and action-economy. If you go into it looking for ways to exploit the system, you will find them, and you will make the game less-fun for you and everyone at the table. Play the character your aspects say you are; conversely, give your character aspects that make them a fun, integral part of the story rather than an efficiency-machine. Given Fate's roots in the Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game and the goals of its creators, it should come as no surprise -- if I had a nickel for every time I've heard Lenny Balsera say "F#ck balance," I'd have about 35 cents. Let us also heed Ryan Macklin's famous warning that "The math will f#ck you." I may have those attributions reversed, or maybe they've both said them, possibly simultaneously at the Big Bar on 2 at Origins. Regardless, nothing but respect for these two foul-mouthed kings and their massive contributions to our beloved Fate.

Rename skills and approaches. This really only applies if you're making your own campaign, but for a Fate game set in a very particular time and place, I think one of the best things you can do to set the tone is to tailor your game's skills and/or approaches (or whatever your equivalent) to match. Fisticuffs instead of Fight. Skullduggery instead of Deceive. That kind of thing. Til Dawn's approaches -- Chill, Dark, Fabulous, Fierce, Shady, and Technical -- are a great example of this. They don't correspond to FAE's usual Careful, Flashy, et al., but they indelibly lay out what your mindset should be as a player or as a GM. This is a game about futuristic, gender-bending mecha-DJs getting in and out of drama while musically battling it out with other futuristic, gender-bending mecha-DJs on stage. Imagine how much less evocative that'd all be if its approaches weren't so distinctive.

Go hard against the PCs. Don't hold back, GM. If it gets too hot for the player, they can always concede. In fact, make getting them to concede a primary goal, when the story warrants it. To do this, start with overpowering your major NPCs. The PCs have a top skill of Superb (+5)? Cool, this guy has Legendary (+7) Skull-Cracking. The players will frequently have a fate-point advantage over you, and an easy way to compensate for that is by just upping the skills/approaches of your important NPCs. Just keep the focus on offense. A superhuman ability to avoid damage will make for a superhumanly boring badguy. Overpowered antagonists virtually force the PCs to work together, creating advantages for each other and coming up with creative solutions beyond "I guess I hit him again." That dynamic is one of Fate's key strengths, IMO, so lean into it.

"Save your fate points for being awesome." You can't really talk about how to run a great Fate game without invoking (no pun intended) Morgan Ellis, whom I associate closely with these wise words. Setting aside the profound life-lesson this phrase represents to me, the idea here is to value what your character can do by spending your fate points on exciting action rather than avoiding the repercussions of someone else's action. Not to say that you should let yourself get taken out of a conflict, but don't pillow-fort and fritter away your precious narrative currency on playing it safe. Take some stress. Take consequences. Hell, take all the consequences, then concede and get more fate points to spend on being awesome later. The one tiny bit of Fate that I think everyone can agree isn't the greatest (how's that for diplomatic?) is that a successful defense doesn't explicitly force the fiction to change. Success with style gets you a boost, and a tie gets the attacker a boost, but there's that little two-shift range in there where kinda nothing happens. We don't like that. So really, there's no reason to not just take a point or two of stress instead. And then you can spend the fate point you saved on being awesome later on.

But do spend your fate points. Sort of a corollary to the above. The worst way to end a session of Fate is with a pile of fate points in front of you. What a waste! You probably earned those fate points with compels and GM-manipulation, so spend them already. One way you can at least limit the hoarder's tendency to hoard is by making the players "discard" fate points down to their refresh at the end of each scene. Or if you want to be more severe, refresh could double as your fate point maximum as well (although that could cause problems of its own, but that'd be a whole other blog post). Point is (again with the unintended puns!), spend 'em if you got 'em. They're not doing anyone any good otherwise. Spend fate points, be awesome.

I think that's it, and honestly this went way beyond my notes, so it ended up being more thorough than I'd expected. But now I want to hear from you, as seemingly every YouTuber says at the end of a video. What's your advice for getting the most out of Fate? And thanks again to Shawn and Teos of Mastering Dungeons for having me on.

[Atomic Robo] Tentative Table of Contents

Hey, Happy New Year! I know I'm more than two weeks late on that, but the baby was two weeks early, so it all balances out.

(BTW, have you checked out the Fate Core Kickstarter lately? It's doing all right.)

The usual thing I say in answer to the question "How's Atomic Robo coming?" is "Work continues apace," which is wholly accurate. But for all that, it's not a very interesting answer. So I figured I'd give a little progress update here in the form of a tentative table of contents -- or at least the names of the chapters as they stand now, not in any particular order other than the one that makes sense to me right now off the top of my head. The bolded stuff is already done and ready for editing, barring a few examples or something. The italicized stuff is at least partially done.

• Robo's World (Note: This is Brian's stuff on the setting; I think it's done.)
• Timeline
• The Basics
• Outcomes and Actions
• Aspects and Fate Points
• Modes, Skills, and Stunts
• Making Characters
• Challenges, Contests, and Conflicts
• Let's Do Some Science
• Factions
• The March of Progress
• Running the Game
• Telling Stories the Atomic Robo Way
• Playing in Multiple Eras
• Character Write-Ups
• Intro Scenario

So, as you can see, it's mostly good to go (to editing). The current wordcount (not counting "Robo's World") is about 70,000 words, which is trending on-target.

A few details on the in-progress chapters:

• "Factions" talks about factions (like Tesladyne) as characters, and the role they play in the game. This is mostly a revision of a chapter from the playtest material, with some new bits added.
• "Playing in Multiple Eras" is about era-hopping campaigns. This is something we talked a lot about in the early going as a mode of play the game heartily supports. That's still true. Right now this chapter is an extensive outline and lots of notes, but could arguably be reduced down to a call-out box in another chapter rather than claiming an entire chapter of its own. As much as we all (that includes you and me) like the idea of era-hopping, it really only shows up in two volumes -- 1 and 3 -- and the first volume of Real Science Adventures. Does a chapter on this subject have a place in the book? I dunno. How about I write it and we find out?
• The character write-ups -- there are around 30 of them -- are the biggest time-sink I still face. Several are already done, having been written for playtest purposes (Jenkins, Jack Tarot, Helen, two different versions of Robo, Otto Skorzeny, and a few others), but some of the remaining ones require a little more research. This has taken the form of me twisting Brian's arm to write me some short bios. "Ow! Ow!" he says. "No, don't make me talk more about Atomic Robo!" It's hard to listen to sometimes. But really, at this point, I don't know how much I could differentiate, mechanically speaking, between, say, just about any two She-Devils. Or Benjamin and Koa. Or Mac and Slim. I have a feeling some of these may end up looking a bit like the proto-PCs I made for playtests: modes, a few skill improvements, one or two aspects, and a stunt, with the rest to be filled in by the player during play. But I guarantee the really iconic characters, like Helsingard and Dr. Dinosaur, will definitely get the full treatment. Anything less would be -- say it with me -- mammalian treachery.
• The intro scenario is the one from the playtest. It's revised, done, and ready to go, but it should probably be reformatted for ease of editing. Because I'm a nice guy.

So there we are! Pretty close.

Oh, and obviously, revisions to Fate Core prompted by Kickstarter backer/playtester feedback will have an effect on ARRPG, but right now it's tough to anticipate how much of one, so I'll deal with that as it comes.

[Atomic Robo] Let's Play It Your Way

Did everyone have a good Christmas or whatever? Ours was... a little more complicated than we'd expected. And I'm pretty much run off my feet as a consequence. But in celebration of the Fate Core Kickstarter campaign hitting 5,000 backers yesterday, here's a tiny little preview of Atomic Robo: The Roleplaying Game. Specifically, it's an example of how we're using Atomic Robo itself to illustrate some game concepts.

In this case, it's conceding a conflict.

(But first, have you read Atomic Robo and the Flying She-Devils of the South Pacific yet? You really should. I don't want to spoil anything for you, but it's been out for a while now, so... that's on you.)

On with the example!

Robo tries to intimidate Takeshi with an Intimidation total of +4. Takeshi defends with Will and gets a +7—success with style. He gets a boost of Numbers On My Side.

Robo changes tack and decides to use Physics to try creating an advantage instead, based on the idea that using ion guns in an enclosed metal environment is an inherently bad idea. The GM decides that this will be an unopposed roll, and it succeeds. Robo creates the aspect Science On My Side.

Undeterred, Takeshi goes on the offensive. He rolls Intimidation and gets a +5, and invokes Numbers On My Side to make it +7. He also spends a fate point to invoke his aspect Only Victory and Defeat to bump that up by +2 more, for a +9. Then, in a gutsy move, he spends another fate point to invoke Science On My Side for another +2. Takeshi and his men don't care about their own safety. That makes his total +11.

Robo doesn't think he can beat that, nor does he want to end up with a consequence from this, so he decides to concede. He loses the conflict, but on his own terms: Takeshi will keep him alive for now, but incapacitated. Robo gets a fate point for the concession.

Now, a couple points:

One, this is only one possible interpretation of this conversation -- you could call Takeshi's first line in that first panel as an Intimidation attempt, for example, as well as Robo's rather threatening "It'd kill you too."   Or maybe Takeshi's first line is him creating an advantage. They're all valid, and any of them is totally plausible in play. But this is the one I'm going with. For me, up until the point when Robo literally threatens physical violence, they're just talking, sans dice. But when Takeshi casually insults Robo's piloting skills, Robo's player decides, "All right, it's on."

Two, normally in the book, I don't use characters as players, such as "Robo gets a fate point," but in this case I'm prioritizing brevity. These are captions; I don't want them getting too long.

I plan to use this technique as often as is feasible in ARRPG. The actual panels from the comic are an amazing resource, and we'd be crazy not to take advantage of them.

[Fate Core] It's Skill Pyramids All the Way Down

WIZARD!

I had a thought over on RPG.net today on sub-pyramids of skills, so I figured I'd expand on it here.

Then I had further thought on the same thing, and suddenly it was skill pyramids all the way down. But we'll get to that soon enough.

First, let's say you have a skill that's important enough to your game that you really want to drill down into what it can do. Piloting, fencing, and magic are the first things that spring to mind for me. I'll go with magic, because the first two will entail a lot more thought and crunchiness. So we have a skill called Magic. It's about magic stuff.

Come up with a number of distinct things -- around 10 -- that the skill can do. "Distinct things" will vary depending on personal preference, game world, and campaign. For magic, I'd go with schools, and for the sake of convenience and my familiarity with the subject, let's say they're the nine schools of 2nd edition AD&D: Abjuration, Conjuration, Divination, Evocation, etc. (They used these in 3.X too, right? Anyway. That's neither here nor there.) I'm calling these specialties for now.

You also have these specialties in a pyramid, with an apex equal to your Magic skill. So if you have Fair (+2) Magic, your Magic pyramid might look like this:

Fair (+2): Evocation 

Average (+1): Invocation, Transmutation

Three slots in your pyramid, three schools of magic.

If you have Great (+4) Magic, you have skill in all schools of magic -- a wizard's wizard, who puts the study of the magical arts above all else. That might look like this:

Great (+4): Evocation

Good (+3): Invocation, Transmutation 

Fair (+2): Enchantment, Divination, Abjuration

Average (+1): Conjuration, Necromancy, Illusion

When you cast a spell, you don't roll your Magic skill -- you roll your specialty skill. So if you're casting a fireball, you'd roll your Great (+4) Evocation. If you're casting phantasmal killer, you'd roll your Average (+1) Illusion. Etc. Probably the only time you'd roll Magic is to know stuff in general about magic.

What do these specialties do? Give 'em some Fate Core actions, as appropriate. No need to define them more than that. Evocation overcomes by blowing stuff up, creates advantages by blowing stuff up, and attacks by blowing stuff up.

This is the part that goes rather completely crazy, in my opinion. Once you have this secondary pyramid, you make a tertiary pyramid for each of these schools of magic. What's in these skill pyramids? Not skills -- spells. Since this is already so AD&D-heavy anyway, open up your PHB and take your spells right from there.

So for Evocation, this wizard's wizard above would have 10 Evocation spells, rated from +1 to +4. For Divination, they'd have three spells. And so on.

Yeah! You're right! That is a lot of spells to keep track of. An ungainly number. It's ridiculous! See, I told you it was crazy. It's more a thought exercise than anything else.

There are a couple more reasonable approaches to this. One is to make the schools individual skills (instead of specialties), and then make spells the specialties. E.g., you have Good (+3) Evocation, which means you can have a Good (+3) Fireball, Fair (+2) Burning Hands and Melf's Acid Arrow, etc.

Another way is to ditch the whole "school" thing and instead go with types of magic, like Fire, Water, Air, Earth, and Death or something. Each of those is a skill, and spells are specialties -- but probably not cribbed from AD&D. I'd make them player-defined, then build the spells as custom skills in the style of Atomic Robo. Maybe you have n points to spend on making those spells, where n is determined by your skill rating.

(BTW, if you're an ARRPG playtester and any of the above reminds you of modes, it's sheer coincidence.)

This has nothing to do with skill sub-pyramids, but: Another way to go would be to have spells as stunts, possibly as stunts you could swap out via some sort of spellbook mechanism. So whether have you have schools of magic as skills or specialties, you can roll Evocation, Abjuration, and Divination all day long to do whatever it is you do with those schools (according to their actions), but then you might also have stunts that stretch those boundaries a bit. For example:

Fireball: When attacking with Evocation, spend a fate point to affect everyone in the targeted zone.

Shield: +2 to Abjuration when defending against physical attacks.

Discern Location: Spend a fate point and specify one creature you've seen or object you've touched. You know the location of that creature or object unerringly and in exacting detail, even if it's on another continent, planet, or plane of existence.

 Anyway. Back to Robo.

[Fate Core] Rules vs. Settings

This is a warning.

So! That Fate Core Kickstarter's been pretty crazy, am I right? It's great to see so many people excited enough about it to back the campaign -- exactly 3,600 people, as I type -- and also to see how many of them are new to Fate with this edition. That's awesome.

Not surprisingly, there's a lot of discussion about Fate Core in various places around the Internet, and a lot of it's revolving around what it can do. Most of the time, inquiries about this kind of thing look something like this:

Really enjoyed the Terra Nova TV series when it was on and was wondering if it would be possible to make that kind of setup using the FATE system?

(That's James Cartwright, commenting on the Kickstarter page.)

Or this:

I would love to see a strong example of a heavily race based system. Ideally in my mind an anthropomorphic animal game in the vane of Redwall, Mouse Guard, or Ironclaw.

(That's Jonathan Dietrich, also on the Kickstarter page.)

These both sound like great games to run with Fate Core. Terra Nova may have let me down as a show, but the premise was cool -- sci-fi tech and dinosaurs! As for the anthropomorphic animal thing, well, I own Mouse Guard and backed Cairn, so I'm in.

My reaction to this kind of thing is always the same: Yeah, of course Fate can do that. What does it really involve, anyway? Knowing the source material? Fate Core gives you everything you need to sort out the rest.

This is a pretty unfair attitude, I know. I'm so used to hacking Fate and talking about hacking Fate and seeing Fate hacks that at this point it's kinda That System Everyone Hacks to me. You want to do something with Fate? Great! Go do it. What are you waiting for? Again, unfair.

However, there's an actual point to be made here as well. As I also said on Twitter, there's a real difference in Fate Core between saying "I want rules for..." and saying "I want a setting that's like...." 98% of emulating a genre using Fate Core is knowing the genre well in the first place.

Do you need special rules for shooting a dinosaur -- rules that aren't already in Fate Core? I don't think so. I mean, sure, you'll want to stat up some dinosaurs, but that's definitely within the scope of the rules as written. Do you need special rules for playing a sword-wielding mouse (as opposed to a sword-wielding human)? If everyone's playing an animal, make sure everyone has at least one aspect describing what kind of animal they are. (And then, y'know, stat out some cats and weasels.) Hashtag done!

Let's take Fate Core assistant developer Brian Engard's Wild Blue setting as an example. Wild Blue is part Western, part fantasy-magic stuff, and part supers. It has new rules for the magic-and-supers stuff (in the form of gifts), because Brian had a specific vision for how those work in the setting that he needed to convey. It has a couple new skills that suit the setting. And... that's it for new rules. Because Fate Core does everything else.

But Jonathan Dietrich came back with this:

Which is a great question! I tried to answer it on Twitter, but Twitter's not the best medium for that sort of thing, so let's see if it I can do it justice here.

What we're really talking here when we talk about sci-fi dinosaurs or heroic rodents isn't rules, but setting. Most of what'd be in a good Terra Nova RPG built on Fate Core would be descriptions and stats for things from the show -- an implementation of the system, sure, but off the top of my head I can't think of anything especially new it needs in terms of rules or mechanics. (Of course, I'm no Terra Nova scholar or anything, so maybe I'm misremembering.)

Anthropomorphic animals? As a complete game, I'd want lots of descriptions of animals and examples of aspects and stunts for each. But what I can't imagine is that any of that would deviate from the tools that Fate Core gives you. Maybe -- maybe -- you'd want size and scale rules, but extras can do that as-is. (The Extras Toolbox will probably have those size and scale rules, but still.)

The thing is, the protagonists in these stories do things that "baseline" human protagonists do in Fate Core anyway. (Well, apart from, like, gathering nuts for the winter, I guess.) They don't shoot laser beams from their palms or have super-strength or bend the laws of reality or anything. Even if they're mice or voles or whatever, they do what mice or voles or whatever in the setting do -- which makes mice or voles or whatever the new baseline, which means you don't need special rules for them. If you know your source material and follow the directions in Fate Core, you'll get the game you want.

With all that established: What makes Atomic Robo so special that it need its own book?

This is a fair and complex question.

One, Brian Clevinger and Scott Wegener want to do it. I want to do it. Evil Hat wants to do it. Lots of Robo fans really want us to do it. So... we're doing it.

Two, ARRPG may be an implementation of Fate Core, but it has several significant divergences meant to engender the kind of play we want to see out of an Atomic Robo game. Modes simplify character creation and skills to get players playing ASAP. We expect some people who buy the book will be Robo fans first and RPG fans second, or totally inexperienced with RPGs, so right from the start "quickplay" was the default. (Fate Core's easy for first-timers to pick up too, of course; a lot of these core concepts of ARRPG were established long before I even set eyes on Fate Core.)

Y'know how I said I'm not a Terra Nova scholar? Over the past year, I have arguably become an Atomic Robo scholar. Eating, breathing, and sleeping Atomic Robo has had a huge effect on the game in a hundred little ways. Atomic Robo doesn't tell stories the usual Fate Core way, so ARRPG structures stories the Atomic Robo way. The game has mechanics that emulate some specific stuff from the source material, like a group of Action Scientists working together to apply science to a mystery, a quick method for handling the in-game invention of new technology, and the capacity of characters (like Robo himself) to greatly exceed normal human limits.

What else? Aspects are categorized differently. There are no phases. There's no refresh (another very early decision). PCs start with more stunts. There's a subsystem for building customized skills outside of the extras framework. ARRPG has the great GM advice from Fate Core, but with an eye toward telling Atomic Robo stories, and new tools to help you do it. And because I wrote it, it has a random table. Maybe two. Maybe a random number of random tables. We'll see.

(Incidentally, some of the above will probably make it into the Extras Toolbox in some form or other.)

On top of all that, it's a thorough sourcebook for Atomic Robo -- more information on the Robo-verse than you'll find in any other book, plus a bunch of great art from Scott, both from the comic and new stuff. As a fan of Robo, this might be my favorite part of it.

Anyway. What was I talking about? Something to do with rules vs. settings in Fate Core?

[Fate Core] Surprise!

Surprise!

The Fate Core Kickstarter campaign has kicked off a little earlier than anticipated, thanks to editor Jeremy Keller and all-around provocateur Fred Hicks.

You've probably already checked it out. If you haven't yet, it's, uh, doing pretty well. Funded in under 15 minutes, hit the first two stretch goals shortly thereafter.

And in case you weren't already aware of this particular tidbit: If you back at any level -- including the $1 Access level -- you get immediate access to the draft copy of Fate Core.

Not bad, right?

This is all kind of novel for me. It's the first project I've worked on that's gotten the Kickstarter treatment. I had nothing to do with setting up the Kickstarter itself, nor am I currently on the hook to produce any new material as part of a stretch goal. So really, in a sense, I kinda don't really have much of a stake in this beyond wanting people to like and play a game I've worked on. (As I've said before, I've been extremely lucky so far in my RPG freelancing career to have worked on pretty much only fairly high-profile, well-received projects.)

But I'm going to be watching this Kickstarter with as much attention and enthusiasm as, I dunno, this, or this -- because it's always fun to see a highly anticipated campaign for a cool project go from "funded" to "ridiculous runaway success." Join me, won't you?

Join me.

[Atomic Robo] Covers and Progress

Scott's been noodling around with cover ideas for ARRPG. Thoughts? Other than my first thought, which was "Those robot fists are awesome!"?

("Of course they are," says Scott. "They're based on a real thing.")

Related: Several chapters of ARRPG have been submitted. By this I mean that they've been put in a place online where an Evil Hat editor can eventually get to them. More chapters are being revised and written as I type this. Well, not exactly as I type, because I'm typing this, and I can only type one thing at a time. I guess I could alternate characters between this blog post and the chapter, but -- look, I feel like we're getting off-course here.

Also, Action Scientists, aka playtesters! Thanks for your work on the secret mission you've been assigned! Good stuff. Keep 'em coming.

[Fate Core] Coming Soon

So everyone knows about this by now, right?

No?

If you don't, you really should check it out.

[Atomic Robo] Playtest Closed

That's it!

Round 3 of playtesting for Atomic Robo: The Roleplaying Game is now closed, which means no new playtesters will be... what's the word... accepted? Required? You get what I'm saying. We have a lot of playtesters, but I don't anticipate any further significant changes -- changes large enough to warrant more full-scale playtesting -- to the rules as they currently exist.

So... if you were like "I'm gonna get in on that Atomic Robo thing on Tuesday!" then allow me to offer my sincere apologies. Missed it by that much.

If you're already a playtester, your feedback's still welcome, but now is the time to move into the next phase of things. That means turning what we have into something that looks like an actual manuscript, adding/adapting some more content from Fate Core, and generally getting everything in a state won't make the editor mad at me.

In the absence of constantly updating you on playtest-type stuff, I plan to offer some genuine preview-type stuff along the lines of the character sheets I posted yesterday. Stay tuned!

[Atomic Robo] Invaders from Mars Characters

I had fun making these characters for the one-shot tomorrow, so I figured I'd share 'em with you all. Apart from a rare couple of exceptions, I haven't been making full-on pre-gens for these playtests, because I've wanted to see how players handled the E-Z No-Math Character Creation that's the default in Atomic Robo: The Roleplaying Game. But I think I've seen plenty of that thus far, and besides, I have to write up a number of characters from Robo canon anyway.

And you know what? It was a lot of fun. '30s Robo, Jack Tarot, and Helen in particular, because it gave me an excuse to pore over The Deadly Art of Science. Of the other two characters, one's based on Welles'  character in his War of the Worlds radio drama, and the other's wholly invented but a plausible participant in the events of the scenario. (I also enjoyed finding character portraits, which is something I rarely do.) Regardless, they all look fun to play. Here's hoping I'm right about that, eh? Guess we'll find out tomorrow at Dice House Games!

So here they are. If you're in the playtest, check it out! More characters ready-made for you! If you're not, then check it out! Here's what characters look like!

[Atomic Robo] and the Invaders from Mars

Full Disclosure: Image has been altered using MS Paint.

This Sunday I'm running an Atomic Robo playtest at Dice House Games in Fullerton. I was debating whether the scenario should be themed after Halloween or the election, since it's proximal to both. In the end, I decided that Halloween scared me less, so Atomic Robo and the Invaders from Mars it is!

1938. Grover's Mill. Robo. Jack Tarot and Helen. Tripods. Heat rays. You get the idea.

It's not really a big public event, but I figured I'd mention it to the big public nonetheless. If you're around and want in on that, let me know in the comments. I plan to start at 2:00, and I'll take up to five players. Plus, it's a Game Day at Dice House, so stick around after and play some other games.

[Strange Fate] The SRD Has Landed

Hey, so this is very cool: RPG.net user thecosmicgoose has extracted the OGL bits from The Kerberos Club (FATE Edition) and made a system-reference document out of it. Now, admittedly, it's basically two chapters from the book with all the non-OGL stuff excised, so it's not exactly pretty, but hey, what do you want? No doubt the it'll be subject to some prettification later, and by someone other than me, because man, I do not know what I'm doing on that front.

Anyway, the SRD is here. Check it out and have at it!

[Atomic Robo] Playtest Round 3 Is Now

At last, the time is upon us, as foretold in the scriptures. By "scriptures," I mean "this blog, a few days ago."

Last night I sent out an email to the Round 3 playtesters. If you should've gotten it (because you sent in your signed Disclosure Pledge) but didn't, contact me and/or leave a comment here.

For pre-existing playtesters, this revision contains some pretty significant changes -- all improvements, from where I'm sitting. Weird skill construction has been spelled out more clearly. Ditto brainstorms, plus a minor change to how they work. One of the modes lost a skill. (Guess which one!) (It's Action.) All of the sample characters have been revised. A bunch of little typos have been fixed. Terminology has been updated. A chapter on the basics of Fate Core has been included. (About time, right?) Challenges have changed a lot. E-Z No-Math Character Creation has been simplified even further. Etc.

So yeah, it's been a pretty thorough revision. Every document got some attention to one degree or another, although the big winners were Modes, Skills, and Stunts and Challenges, Contests, and Conflicts (previously known as Contests, Challenges, and Conflicts). Part of this is because Fate Core is in an advanced stage of editing, which means I have a more definitive set of rules to draw from for ARRPG, and part of it's because we've gotten some great playtester feedback to incorporate. By "great," I mean consistent -- the commentary has been pretty uniform overall, which makes it easy to know what needs work.

In other words, thanks to all you playtesters who've gotten back to me with comments! Even though I haven't replied to all of you, because I'm just one put-upon man and you are legion, rest assured I read your emails and appreciate you taking the time to send them. Keep it up!

UPDATE: If you're not part of the playtest yet, it's not necessarily too late. Download this and follow the instructions.

Speaking of playtesting: Morgan Ellis, friend of the blog, ARRPG collaborator, and my platonic Fate-mate (starting to rethink that phrase now), is still looking for a couple of players for an ongoing ARRPG playtest campaign in the Los Angeles area. If you want in on that and you're cool -- what am I saying! Of course you're cool. You're reading this, aren't you? Anyway, get in touch with him if that's you.

[Atomic Robo] Playtest Round 3 Postponed!

Heya, folks. Sorry to disappoint, but seeing as how it's Saturday night, I think I can safely say that I'm going to have to postpone the next round of playtesting to next week.

The past few weeks have been... profoundly unproductive, for a number of reasons -- not the least of which was the lymphadenitis that laid my son low this past week. It sounds worse than it is, but you know what? It's still pretty bad! He's okay now, though, and just in time for his birthday party tomorrow.

Anyway -- the Round 3 revision is pretty significant, so the additional few days' wait will definitely be worth it. E-Z No-Math Character Creation has been simplified even further, and I've cleared up how modes, skills, and actions are presented, which has important ramifications for other chapters as well (even if only in terms of consistency). There'll also be a chapter on "The Basics" of Fate Core, because it's kinda shocking there hasn't been one until now. And also other stuff. I'd rather own up to missing a self-imposed deadline than rush it.

So stick with me, Action Scientists. Better news to come next week.

[Atomic Robo] Son of Playtest Updates

Good news first: Everything's comin' right along. I just finished updating the intro scenario to the most current version of the rules and will be uploading it for all you currently active playtesters out there (as opposed to the inactive ones -- maybe I should call you "Action Playtesters" and "Resident Playtesters" instead) sometime on Wednesday. Which is today, from where I'm sitting.

Feedback has been very useful, so thanks for that. Most of it's along the lines of "There's a misspelled word on page four!" but hey, that stuff's important too, so it's all good. More of that and everything else, please. Keep it coming. You're helping make a better game.

Requests for a better character sheet have been heard. Unfortunately, they've been heard by me, but still I think what I have here is a definite improvement. I'm not saying it's the end-all-be-all or anything -- just that I like it more than the last one. I'll be uploading it (with a side of PCs) shortly after the intro scenario. If you have an Atomic Robo character sheet you've made for your playtesting group, or just because you like making character sheets, send it my way. (Unless you've already done that, in which case thanks for having done that.)

The bad news isn't really all that bad, but: I'm pushing Round 3 back by a couple weeks. Initially, I'd expected to time it with Big Bad Con, but owing to a few factors, including a totally unproductive first experience at SoCal Smackdown (...), I'm going to hold off. For one, I'd like to be able to incorporate a bit more playtester feedback, from home playtest groups and the Big Bad Con playtests. From my perspective, there's no rush to fix some desperately broken rule, so better to take more time on Round 3 and put out a more complete playtest packet rather than make you pick out subtle differences between the two versions like some overly wordy activity out of Highlights for Children.

Now, if you're in Round 3, which is a lot of you, but I guess you don't know it yet because I haven't told you, you're probably like, "Aw shucks." But don't be like that, because when you do get called up, you'll have a tighter, more complete game to play around with. I dunno. Sounds pretty good to me. Expect to see an announcement for that in mid-October.

And if you're reading this going, "What the what?" don't just go like that -- get in on the next round of the playtest. I expect it'll run through the end of October, so there's still time to sign up. Science needs you!

[Atomic Robo] Playtesting at SoCal Smackdown

So hey! This weekend I'll be running Atomic Robo at SoCal Smackdown at the Anaheim Convention Center in beautiful-ish Anaheim, California. You may recognize Anaheim as the home of Disneyland, California Adventure, and fleeing suspects being shot in the back by local PD. Yes, you read that right! Disneyland!

I'll be there Friday and Sunday nights at 7:00 pm, so come on out. If you played ARRPG at Gateway or GenCon or wherever, this will be an entirely different scenario. Not only will we be playtesting the most current iteration of the rules, but I'm also taking the weird character and extras rules out for a spin.

In addition to a few proto-PCs -- they have just info provided in to start playing, but plenty of blanks for you to make them your own during play -- there'll also be a couple weird characters up for grabs:

• Henry, a rogue Helsingard warbot fighting its inherited impulses who's joined Tesladyne to atone for its creator's/clones' sins, and
• Jenkins. Jenkins.

Either or both should make for an especially interesting playtest -- especially if we have both of them in play. If you've read the Extras chapter in the playtest docs, that would make things... well, I'm just going to say "interesting" again.

[Atomic Robo] Round 2 -- Play!

Hey, so last night, as recklessly promised, the next round of Atomic Robo playtesting begun. If you got an email about it, that's you. Get to work!

Round 1-types, I'll send you an email today as part of our weekly check-in, but the revised playtest docs are up now if you want to download 'em. Everything labeled "Sept v2" is new or has been changed; everything else -- a ground total of one document -- is the same.

I'll go into the revisions in more detail in the email, but for those of you watching from the sidelines or still sitting on the bench waiting to get into the game (soon, I promise!), here's a short list of what's changed/new:

• Aspects chapter
• Extras chapter
• Challenges in general
• Hypothesis Challenges in particular -- they're not even called that anymore!
• Stress
• Skill terminology
• GM's fate point budget
• And much, much more!

I'm excited about the changes and new stuff, myself -- I think it's already a much-improved game, thanks to playtester input, and it'll only get better from here.

And if you want to get in on the playtest, it's not too late! Click here! Follow instructions! Remain calm! Trust in Science!

[Atomic Robo] Playtest Updates

Lots of times, I like to make this joke I stole from Peter Schickele where I say "A number of people have asked me about [something-or-other], and both of them wanted to know..." etc. See, the joke is that it's not many people doing the asking, even though it doesn't sound that way at first.

I cannot make this joke with Atomic Robo.

Interest has been... high. Very high. A side benefit of this has been that I've really gotten familiar with contacts and mailing lists in Gmail. Just never needed to use 'em before! But now I really do, because as I type this -- and I'd have to check on this to make certain -- I'm pretty sure Round 3 of the playtest is full. Round 3. In case you're just joining this whole Robo discussion, I haven't even announced Round 2 yet.

Now, that said: Do not despair. If you're interested in playtesting, please please download the Disclosure Pledge and follow the instructions thereupon. These playtest rounds are like unto waves on the beach, one after another. I will get you in there somewhere.

So if you've done that already and you're not in Round 1, you're probably wondering, "Well, when do I get to get in on this?" Here's the scoop on that.

• I'm in the middle of a revision right now. The game has already gotten better, thanks in part to the feedback of the Round 1 playtesters, which has been invaluable. I'm especially excited about this revision, partially due to the Extras chapter, which I think is pretty cool.
• I expect to update the playtest docs this weekend. (An email will go out to the Round 1-types when I do.)
• Shortly after I do that, I'll also email the Round 2-types. So: to more definitively answer your question, this weekend. That's the Mike Olson Guarantee.
• Round 3, whoever you are (and there are a lot of you), I will get you guys up and running within two or three weeks. Thanks to Morgan and Chris, we've got a couple ARRPG playtests happening at Big Bad Con the first weekend of October, and I want to make sure that everyone involved gets to experience the best version of the rules I can make available. As it happens, the timing's perfect for Round 3.
• Assuming there is a Round 4, and I see no reason to believe there won't be, it'll probably begin around the middle of October. It'll also probably be our last round of playtesting, because we need to wrap this thing up by November at the very latest. (Originally, it was October, but the parallel development of Fate Core, and the resulting revisions and rethinking of ARRPG, kinda messed with that a bit. Fate Core's awesome, by the way.)

For the record, even though I said I'd only be taking 20 groups in Round 1, I took... more. And even though one could reasonably assume I'd only earmark another 20 groups for Round 2, I've earmarked... more. Because I'm a big softie and have a hard time saying no to Atomic Robo fans.

[Atomic Robo] Public Playtest, Round 1

Okay, here we go.

Behold, an ordinary playtest!

If you want to be a part of the Atomic Robo: The Roleplaying Game playtest -- and I think I know you enough to say that yeah, you do -- simply follow these steps:

1. Ask yourself, "Am I going to have a chance to actually experience this with a group of players in the next few weeks and provide feedback?" If your answer is "Yes," proceed.
2. Download a copy of the disclosure pledge.
3. Read and sign it (typing your name on the signature line is enough to acknowledge you've read the pledge and agree to abide by it; no need to put your actual John Hancock on this thing).
4. Email your signed pledge to the email address indicated on the pledge. The subject line should say "ARRPG Pledge."
5. Remain calm and trust in Science.
6. Once we have your signed pledge, you'll be sent a link where you can download the current playtest documents.

The playtest will take place in multiple rounds, and is expected to run through October. This first round of the playtest will include only 20 groups. If you don't make it in, don't sweat it -- the next round will start within a few weeks. We fully intend to include everyone who's able to make a serious commitment to playtesting.

And remember, if you're going to be at Gateway or Dragon*Con this weekend, you'll have a chance to playtest there as well.

On a personal note, I hope you're all as excited as I am about all of this. I mean, I kinda already know you're not, but if you're even approaching my level of excitement, this is going to be a fun time. The playtests at GenCon were really solid, and the rules have only gotten better and tighter since then. It's only going to improve going forward, and that's largely going to be because of playtesters like you. So thanks, and let's do this!

UPDATE: The interest level has been... well, I don't want to say "overwhelming," but it's right up there. As of 8/31, I have all the Round 1 playtesters I need. But! Round 2 still has plenty of room. Please keep 'em coming! Science needs you!

[Atomic Robo] GenCon Playtesters

Hey everybody. I'm just putting this post up here so when I tell the ARRPG playtesters at GenCon to come by the blog and leave a comment, they'll land here and feel special.

Playtester-types: I welcome your comments. You'll have talked to me or your duly appointed ARRPG GM about your feelings on the game, but if you want to say anything else, good or bad, this is a place to do so.

Everyone else: You can just read this and, I dunno, be jealous, I guess.