Gamex 2011 Wrap-Up: FATE Edition

(For my non-FATE Gamex experience, see Roll Some Dice.)

First, an overview: This was a good Gamex. From 2:00 on Friday through midnight on Sunday, I ran two games (three if you count the one off-the-books non-convention game I ran that just happened to occur during the weekend) and played in four (five if you count an overlong game of Descent). Every GM was great, and only two or three players were annoying, so that's a pretty good percentage. Of course, part of this is that I hardly ever play or run games for people I don't know -- I've been attending Strategicons long enough that just about everyone I end up sharing my time with in four-hour chunks is someone I've gamed with before. This is theoretically bad in the sense that I'm not meeting new people (and/or they're not meeting me), but practically good in the sense that everyone at my tables bathes regularly.

So! Saturday morning was Morgan's DFRPG game, "Showdown at Camp Kaboom." We played recent Warden-school graduates who'd just gotten their cloaks and swords, and were then [spoiler alert?] framed for an attack on the very training facility (the aforesaid Camp Kaboom) that we'd been attending for God knows how long. It should be said again that I don't really know the Dresdenverse very well, or at all -- apart from stuff I've learned playing in a handful of Dresden Files games, I've had no exposure to it -- but that doesn't stop me from enjoying Morgan's games nonetheless. I played a snooty rich-kid type with the aspect "Born with a Silver Wand in my Hand," which you're not going to beat in an aspect-coming-up-with contest, so don't even try. The early game was marked by a lot of people trying to figure out or even just understand spellcasting in DFRPG. I'll admit, it's crunchier than I'd realized. I've never played a proper wizard before, so in the interest of not slowing things down I stuck with my rotes -- a defensive tornado-type-thing and a full-on Lightning Bolt! -- and kicked a fair amount of ass.

(Morgan, if you're reading this, it's probably not news to you that you seemed a bit flustered or something. That doesn't change the fact that you're still my platonic FATE-mate.)

In the end, we were all screwed not by crafty South American Red Court vampires, but by the hotel's fire alarm, which some jackass pulled in the course of being a jackass. The entire hall's worth of conference rooms cleared out into the lobby -- all except ours, because c'mon, it's obviously not real. This happened at about 12:30, effectively robbing us of the game's perfectly timed climax. Ah well. Morgan described to us what would've happened, and we all agreed that it would've been good. You're running it at GenCon, right?

Sunday morning I finally ran the long thought-about, only-recently-realized Agents of F.A.T.E. game I've been talking about here lately. Despite a full roster of six players and two alternates signed up, we only had five players for the actual game. Fine by me, says I -- I only wanted five PCs anyway. So Lars Thorsson went unplayed. No matter.

I'll split this into what worked and what didn't.

What worked:

• The +XdF Areas of Experience. Change nothing. Predictably, this roll-and-keep dice mechanic worked fine, because I'd already used it for the swashbuckling game, so no surprise there. Denys almost engaged the table in a discussion of its mathematical rigor, but I shut him down, because let's go. 
• Player-contributed locations. Earlier, I'd planned to rip off Morgan's Spirit of the Shattered Earth and have the players come up with a bunch of details for me, including various cities the story would visit, what the badguy was up to, and so forth. In the end, I cut all of that except for the locations. Each player wrote a location down on an index card; these told us the basic geography of the story and where it would go. In our case, we had Hong Kong, Paris, Hoover Dam, Lincoln Memorial, and Volcano. Three of those were explicitly used (as in "Now we're in Paris"), while two of them were only obliquely referenced. Unfortunately, Volcano was in the latter category, but that's down to me (see below). Regardless, it gave things an appropriately globe-trotting feel, I think.  
• Cool Points. Likewise, I've used this mechanic plenty, and it worked fine here, too. No complaints. Morgan pulled out a classic 4d6 roll, spending all his Cool at once to crush the opposition, who was, indeed, duly crushed.
• The Challenge Point thing. The only thing wrong with this was that I didn't have the foresight to assign each scene a Challenge Point rating from the start. This meant that I quickly racked up four Challenge Points in the early game before the players had earned Cool, but had almost none later once they'd gotten some momentum. In future -- because I'll probably use this again somewhere -- I'll keep that in mind. Every scene has a Challenge Rating from one to four. The players totally picked up on the introduction of complications, though; as expected, this took some of the burden off me to come up with stuff on the fly, but it also lulled me into a sense of complacency, such that I was forgetting to introduce scene aspects, or even spend Fate Points for my NPCs. (Running Dungeon Patrol the night before didn't help. That thing runs itself.)
• Gadgets. They didn't get used as much as I'd expected, but that's fine. When they were used, they were used well. Nobody did anything too insane with their gadgets. The craziest thing was probably Laura turning her briefcase into a laptop with wireless access to reroute an important bank transfer without anyone noticing. This wouldn't be so crazy if the game weren't set in, like, 1965. But later seasons of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. were like ten times crazier than that before even getting out of bed in the morning, so I have no objections.
• The players getting the tone of the game. Nailed it. I mean, my Platonic Ideal of it would've been more serious, but I am physically incapable of pulling that off, so it was pretty jokey all around. Again, no objections.

What didn't work:

• My ability to communicate vital information without resorting to heavy-handed OOC exposition. Seriously, I don't know what's wrong with me lately, but at some point, after Morgan fairly begged for something concrete to hang onto, I just had to come out and say, "Look, I don't know how to smoothly couch this in the narrative, but here's what you discover is going on." They'd made plenty of investigation-type rolls and so forth, so they'd earned the details, but it irritates me that I wasn't able to deliver them in a prettier package. On the plus side, we had a lot of cool espionage-type non-combat scenes in which clues were dropped and gathered, and that was great, but it was helping them put everything together that stymied me. Hrm.
• The end. True to form, I wasn't happy with the rather anti-climactic ending I forced on them. I mean, we could've ended up in a volcano; instead, the last scene took place in the basement of a rather non-descript house in Hong Kong. Boo. I even wrote down in advance what that final scene would entail, but almost none of it was there. I incorrectly assumed things would work themselves out and we'd just get there somehow. Let me tell you about things: They often don't work themselves out.

At any rate, it's a pretty good hack, and I may run something with it again. Of course, it didn't hurt that everyone at the table was a FATE veteran, so there was no need to set anything up or explain what aspects were or any of that. We just got into it and went.

So that's another Gamex in the can. And now I take a break from all of this game planning oh no wait GenCon.

[Espionage] Sample Characters

Real quick, because I have to get going to Gamex pretty soon: Here are a few agent dossiers for the Agents of F.A.T.E. game I'm running on Sunday morning. Unfortunately, the Agency has pretty heavily redacted their personal information, but you get the idea. We'll be using whatever's still visible as aspects.

Violette Bonnuit, French ass-kicker in the Emma Peel vein
Connor Pierce, reserved British secret agent
Lars Thorsson, a more psychotic and Swedish Brock Samson

If you're going to be around this weekend, come on by on Sunday morning and check it out!

Challenge Points

The other day, a regular reader (I assume!), in the course of an email exchange about something else other than FATE, mentioned how much he dug this whole Doom Points idea I posted a while back. If you don't feel like reading that old post from 2008, it concerned demons bound into artifacts in a fantasy setting. These demonbound items have one or more demonbound aspects that use Doom Points rather than Fate Points. You can invoke the aspect by accepting a Doom Point from the GM; in turn, if you accept a compel on that aspect, you lose a Doom Point. Accumulating Doom Points is bad -- every now and then, you have to make a Resolve roll against a difficulty equal to your current number of Doom Points, and failure means taking a consequence.

That's the basic idea. It worked well in play, the one time I used it in a one-shot, but I'd never really found another venue for it (although I mention in the comments of that post that it'd be pretty good for the Dark Side in a Star Wars game). Prompted by that email, I had a vague idea of using it to model heat buildup in a mecha FATE game, but I don't know anything about mecha, really, so that's all conjecture.

The pressing thing-that's-still-coming-together, though, is Agents of F.A.T.E., so as I lay in bed last night dealing with the tail end (I hope) of a cold, I passed the time trying to think of a way to apply this to the game I'm running next weekend. I like what I have so far for it, but it does feel to me like it's missing just a little something, and maybe this is it.

Here's the idea. See, in Agents of F.A.T.E., when your roll gets spin, you get a point of Cool, which you can spend later to replace a Fudge die with a d6. That's what players get -- but what of poor little me? Do I want to keep track of Cool Point totals for several NPCs at once? No, I do not. When I roll and get spin, I put a Challenge Point in front of me. All of my NPCs get a bonus to all of their rolls equal to the number of Challenge Points I have.

"Crazy!" you say. But you, the player, can get rid of those Challenge Points anytime by introducing additional challenges, complications, or twists into the story. This could be something like "He has a pool full of sharks" or "When I come back with the martinis, she's pointing a gun at me -- turns out she's working for Prometheus" or "He's accompanied by a mountain of a man with metal teeth" or whatever. As long as it's something that's making things worse for you by introducing a new element, it's worth a Challenge Point (if not more than one).

Of course, I don't have a good sense yet of how this will balance out. If I don't roll enough spin, then the players and their Cool Points are going to walk all over my guys. If they're constantly inserting new twists into the story, that's awesome -- but if they do that, will I end up with just a huge mess of a story and nothing to show for it?

Could be. There are ways to mitigate that, like giving myself a set number of starting Challenge Points each scene, possibly as a replacement for Fate Points, or limiting how many complications can be introduced at once, or on a per-scene basis. These feel a little... arbitrary, to be honest, but there's a solution lurking in there somewhere. Plus, as a GM, you really have to be willing to turn a fair amount of control over to your players for this to work. I mean, if you've planned for the PC to later rescue that scientist he's been canoodling with and then the player tells you that she's with the badguys, that could really throw a monkey wrench into things. (The lesson there, obviously, is simple: If you can at all help it, don't plan.)

Regardless, I'm encouraged by a couple things. One, it's common practice with Morgan and me these days (I've cribbed it from Morgan, in fact) to bump up all of an important NPC's skills by a point or two -- if the PCs' skills top out at Great (+4), the big bad's might go up to Fantastic (+6). This theoretically makes them more powerful, but the PCs often have numbers on their side, so in the end it really just achieves parity without having to spend Fate Points all the time. This Challenge Point idea builds that bit right into itself... if the players aren't regularly introducing complications, of course.

Two, it obviously and strongly encourages players to introduce complications. I think that, as a collective, we could pretty quickly turn an ordinary action scene into a trope-laden super-spy barn-burner, which is good. I love anything that gives the players incentive to add to the narrative like that, and this feels more fun (to me) than just giving the player a Fate Point.

It could conceivably go a little farther than that, even. Could a player invoke an aspect by giving me a Challenge Point? I can see that. It's probably more than I'd want to do at Gamex, but it's worth thinking about later.

Anyway, I'm framing this with espionage in mind, because that's what I'm preparing to run, but this could absolutely apply to any genre.

[Espionage] Agents of F.A.T.E. at Gamex 2011

If you find yourself in the LA area over this Memorial Day Weekend, come check out Agents of F.A.T.E. on Sunday the 29th at Gamex.

The following vague blurb is actually a coded message for your eyes only:

Agents of F.A.T.E.: License to Kill
Sunday, 9:00 am
Diamonds may be forever, but in the Cold War of the 1960s, world peace hangs by a thread - easy pickings for wealthy megalomaniacs, splinter groups, and shady multinational corporations. Who will protect the interests of the West against the forces of economic instability? Enter the F.A.T.E. Agency. Grab your Walther PPK, strap on your laser watch, and shake that martini. Time to be a super-spy.

Four agents have already chosen to accept this mission, but two more volunteers are still needed. Your contact at Gamex will be disguised as a lowly convention staffer working the RPG sign-up table.

This message will self-destruct... um... eventually.

[Espionage] Agency Evaluations

For some reason, as I alluded to in a previous post, I'm reluctant to give these spy characters for Gamex aspects in the conventional manner (i.e., a list of aspects). I'm pretty enamored with the idea of making the character sheets look like agent dossiers -- which, BTW, is a really productive mini-obsession when you know nothing about graphic design and try to do everything with Word -- and a straight-up list of aspects just doesn't mesh with that. It'd wreck it, in other words. I mean, I'm not deluding myself into thinking that nothing on the sheet will break the illusion, but anywhere I can avoid that sort of thing, I will.

To that end, I'm thinking of couching aspects in one or more brief paragraphs of "Agency Evaluation." Actually, it'd be one paragraph for an Agency Evaluation -- relatively objective facts about the agent -- and an Agent Self-Evaluation, which would be more subjective, qualitative statements. And maybe a third for Background/Affiliations.

But as flavorful as that is, it's not really doing the trick, aspect-wise. So to bridge the gap, I'd take a page from HeroQuest and underline, say, five or six phrases. Those are your aspects. Then I'd let the player underline another two phrases during play to add more aspects from the paragraphs provided, as they wish. Or maybe I won't underline anything, and they can underline stuff themselves -- but in that case, the embedded aspects would be pretty obvious, but the players would at least get the joy (joy!) of deciding which ones they'd pick.

Of course, this means that I'd have to write enough excess material in those evaluations to allow for some genuine choice in terms of finding new aspect fodder, but that seems like a small price to pay for something that could be pretty cool for the player. My only real fear is that the aspects will end up serving the needs of the paragraph rather than being bang-zoom aspects in their own right. Y'know?

Lemme see if I can illustrate what I'm talking about here:

Background/Affiliations 

Attained the rank of Major in the British Army Special Air Service, then recruited into MI6 where he quickly advanced to Special Agent status, codename 7777. Oxford-educated with advanced degrees in Political Science, International Studies, and Psychology.

Agency Evaluation 

Agent Pierce possesses an impressive variety of skills, including excellent focus and self-discipline in high-stress environments, mechanical aptitude, and fluency in nine languages. Pierce has a range of combat training, as would be expected: A world-class marksman, he's also studied aikido under Minoru Mochizuki and distinguished himself as a national fencing champion at Oxford. Despite his education and background, in the field Pierce is best used as a blunt object, and consistently favors brute-force solutions over lateral thinking when left to his own devices. Psych profile indicates a degree of disassociation from others that nevertheless lends him a willingness to make tough mission-critical decisions. Recommended assignments: Surveillance, Elimination.

Agent Self-Evaluation 

Let it be said of me that I am at all times a consummate professional. Whether fighting for England as a loyal Briton in the SAS or in British Intelligence or fighting for the world as an agent of F.A.T.E., the mission comes first and foremost. 

Hrm... it's a little clunky, but I'm not sure that means it can't work. I'll continue to massage it. I actually think Agent Connor Pierce here is a rather tricky one to start with; he's all business, and rather devoid of some of the quirks and personality edges that the other PCs have. It might be fun to have each agent do a "Peer Evaluation" of another agent, to get some more out-there aspects in the mix.

UPDATE: Wait! In the shower today I thought of something totally better. (It's where I usually get my totally better ideas.) It'll let me list aspects without wrecking the agent-dossier aesthetic. And it will immediately look cool as soon as the sheets are presented to the players. When I have character sheets together, I'll post them here.

[Espionage] "Now pay attention, Bond..."

Initially, as I've said, an idea for how to do super-spy gadgets was the thing that got me thinking of a FATE espionage hack in the first place, but as it stands now I could leave this part out entirely and still have a version of FATE that looks rather different from most others out there. That's good -- it means that the gadget rules won't feel like an espionage-heartbreaker gimmick, but just another alteration.

So the original idea was this: Before play begins, each player writes down a number of mundane items in their character's possession. Stuff like Belt, Shoes, Tie, Watch, Briefcase, Sportscar -- that kind of thing. They'd then have a pool of points, which we'll call Gadget Points for lack of anything better right now, that they'd spend to "reveal" those items as the super-spy gadgets they really are. First declare a flashback scene wherein some Q equivalent gives your character the gadget and explains how it works, then spend the points to put numbers to that idea. Once the item has been gadgetized, it's that gadget for good -- it can be altered again later.

How each character's number of items, or the Gadget Points required to make use of them, would be determined was a grey area at best. Enter Agents of F.A.T.E.'s skill list, which has two skills that seem ideal for these purposes: Access and Systems. Access is a Resources analogue. It measures rank or status within the organization (in this case, F.A.T.E.), and thus "access" to things it can provide. Systems, on the other hand, is your tech ability, measuring your knowledge of and facility with technological devices. It therefore seems a no-brainer to me that Access controls how many gadgets you have (the higher your standing, the more options are probably available to you) while the complexity of those gadgets is governed by Systems (complicated gadgets are more likely to be reserved for those with the know-how to make the best use of them).

At first, it was going to be as simple as Number of Gadgets = Access Rating, with a Systems roll vs. Mediocre (+0) to determine the number of Gadget Points (and certain other benefits accruing from a Mediocre or worse effort). But now I'm thinking there are other ways to go about it -- like everyone writing down, say, three items on index cards, shuffling those cards, and handing out two cards to each player. Then make a Systems roll to determine the number of Gadget Points you have. What about the excess cards? If you visit a well-equipped safehouse or a foreign office of F.A.T.E., make an Access roll vs. a target of some kind (probably dependent on how remote the safehouse or office is), with success meaning you get to draw an additional card. If you don't have any Gadget Points, also roll Systems, with your margin of success from your Access roll adding to your effort, which would hopefully up your odds of getting at least one Gadget Point. (And if Access happens to be your apex skill and your roll obtains spin, you can declare a free aspect on the scene, like "Well-Equipped Safehouse," then immediately tag it to improve your Systems roll even further. Handy!)

Anyway -- that seems neat to me, because it more closely resembles James Bond's complete lack of agency in determining what gadgets he's given for a particular mission. Heck, MI6 wouldn't even let him keep his Beretta. Plus I think it'd be fun to get handed two items -- "Socks and a Lipstick?" -- and have to figure out how to gadgetize them into something useful. Of course, when even a ballpoint pen can go from writing implement to grenade in three clicks (Goldeneye is never far from my thoughts), that shouldn't be too hard.

The only thing left to determine, then, is what those Gadget Points buy. This is obviously important not just in terms of bang for your buck (often literally), but also hitting that sweet spot between "Enough Options" and "Too Many Options!" for a player to consider. Remember, you're making up what these items do in the moment. We can't stop the action for 10 minutes while you tinker with your laser watch, especially in a convention one-shot.

These gadgets are also essentially taking the place of stunts as they're traditionally used in FATE, so the options have to be robust enough to be useful without overshadowing the agents themselves. Right now I'm thinking something like this:

For 1 Gadget Point, the gadget gets...

• +1 to a non-combat application of a skill.
• Use one skill in place of another under narrow circumstances.
• +2 to non-combat maneuvers with one skill.
• Use a skill in an alternate, non-standard way, such as a mini jetpack that lets you use Conditioning to fly short distances.
• +1 Health stress with one application of the Combat skill (maximum of +3 Health stress).

For 2 Gadget points, the gadget gets...

• +1 to a combat application of a skill.
• +2 to combat-related maneuvers with a skill. 
• Affect all targets in a zone.
• Armor 1 vs. Health stress (maximum of Armor 3).

All of the above are for disposable gadgets. After one use, the gadget can't be used again... unless it makes sense that it could somehow be used again, in which case you can spend a Fate Point to do that later. For example, a pen grenade is disposable because once you use it, it's gone. It done blowed up. But a laser watch could conceivably come back into play. It can still only do what it can do, but maybe it can do it again. Who's the judge of that? The GM, I guess, although I can also see a guideline that says, "If you could've had the same effect by making the gadget blow up and cause an explosion but decided not to do so, then you can't use it again." That may be a little... what's the word... dickish.

To have a reliable gadget -- one that's designed to be used again and again -- double the Gadget Point costs above. So if you want to make your Belt Buckle into a throwing star that gives you +1 Combat and does +2 Health stress, that'll cost 4 Gadget Points. But if you want, say, a hidden extendable rapier in your Belt Buckle that gives you the same benefits ad infinitum, that'll be 8 Gadget Points.

The idea here isn't to screw people over out of some sense of balance or something. I just want to see a variety of gadgets instead of having people use the same one or two the whole time. I also like the idea that the agents' gadgets are useful but ephemeral. That happens with Bond a lot. 

[Espionage] Agents of F.A.T.E.

Greetings programs! It's been a while -- and many thanks to Guy for the continued Greyhawk posts to keep things active around here -- so I'll just get into it already.

There's one genre I've long thought about doing with FATE but haven't gotten around to putting on paper, and that's espionage. Specifically, '60s Bond-style espionage, with super-spy gadgets, suave secret agents, international locations, and all the rest. The tone would be pretty serious, but with about as much humor as a typical Sean Connery Bond film. So plenty of humor, in other words, but without descending into Roger Moore-esque camp -- all apologies to Alan Partridge. (I grew up on Roger Moore as Bond in movies like Octopussy and Moonraker, which were awesome when I was 10 or whenever they finally made it to Z Channel and I could watch them.) The main mechanical idea I'd had for this particular hack involved on-the-fly gadget creation, but other than that I didn't have anything concrete other than a title: Agents of F.A.T.E., which I came up with in a vacuum but have subsequently seen at least once on the Internet, so I'm not the only one to have had that idea.

Anyway, I've decided I'm going to run this for Gamex this year over Memorial Day Weekend.

Since getting the spy itch (see your physician) a while ago, I since stumbled upon Get Smart Now!, an excellent treatment of the old Get Smart TV show using a cleverly stripped-down skill list that boils everything down to just 10 skills. Ten skills plus a standard skill pyramid peaking at Great means that every character can have every skill rated, which makes them all as super-competent as they should be. (Get Smart Now! actually gives characters just five skills, rated from Average to Superb, but I can't ignore how perfectly they all fit into a four-tier pyramid.) So I'm using that as my skill list, more or less (Special Skills doesn't really fit what I'm doing, and I don't like lumping in Alertness, Resolve, and Drive into a single skill, so sorting both of those out still leaves me with 10 skills. Convenient!)

Lately I've become very enamored of games like Lady Blackbird, Danger Patrol, and Old-School Hack, where characters basically have just a few focused special abilities that tend to be variations on a theme, so I'm aping that here. Every Agent of F.A.T.E. has one notable feature -- their F.A.T.E. Training -- that lets them spend a Fate Point to do something remarkable. For the most part, these are taken right from SotC's list of stunts, like Master of Disguise. In addition, each PC has a Specialty in their highest-ranked skill. When the a roll using that skill obtains spin, the player can declare a fragile aspect for free. (I love that mechanic, so why not let everyone do it and see what happens?)

Each of them also has two Areas of Expertise that let them roll extra Fudge Dice when using a particular skill in a particular way, and keep the best four for their result. For example, one of them rolls +2dF when using Combat unarmed, so when she's kicking some jumpsuited minion in the face she gets to roll 6dF and keep the best 4dF. I've used this before in Spirit of the Fist and Spirit of the 17th Century, and it's always worked well. I like how it increases the odds of performing at peak capability without veering into big-number territory.

That's what Cool is for. This is another mechanic I haven't used in a while. When you obtain spin on a roll, you get a point of Cool. Spend a point of Cool before a roll to replace one Fudge Die with a d6. (Yes, this means that with your Specialty you can get a free aspect and a point of Cool all in one roll. I'm fine with that.) This greatly increases your odds of pulling off something truly incredible when you need to the most. Max Cool -- great character name, BTW -- is four, and you start with zero, but I'm thinking about knocking off a point of unused Cool every scene (down to a minimum of one) to discourage hoarding. We'll see where that thought goes.

What I like about this setup is that there are only two passive bonuses for the players to keep track of, and neither of them is just a +1 or +2 to a roll. The characters feel very streamlined to me, but still complete. I get a sense of who they are and what they can do from their skills and those four special features (Specialty, F.A.T.E. Training, and two Areas of Expertise) -- and that's before aspects even enter into the picture. I'm doing a very dossier-like character sheet, as is de rigeur for these sorts of endeavors, and thinking about heavily classifying aspects as things like Notable Affiliations, Special Training, and so on, but I'm afraid that might end up being too constraining.

So I mentioned gadgets, which is what started all of this. These effectively take the place of standard stunts -- little rules-benders -- but are usually one-use things. Plus, since the players make them up on the fly, they're more inclined to focus on them for that one roll or scene without having to keep track of them over time. I'm still working out the details on how this works, but I'll post about it next week. I think it'll be fun. (The gadget-making, not the posting. The posting is obviously sheer drudgery.)

What strikes me about all of this is how I unwittingly ended up changing nearly everything about how characters are put together, from skills to stunts to little abilities with no real precedence in published FATE games (but with plenty of it in other hacks of mine I've fooled around with). I hadn't expected that, but after getting so detail-oriented with FATE Kerberos -- because it demanded it -- it's been a breath of fresh air to just make some stuff up and say "Let's see if this works!" It's like old times, I tell you.