[DFAE] Ace Squadron's Aces

The ships of Ace Squadron, which consists of "aces," all have the word "Ace" in their names. I'm not sure if this is confusing or just appropriate, but it does make for some easy color-coding. 

I mean, Hype is a green Rodian, and his ship is green, and it's called Green Ace. Griff wears all black, and his ship is black, and it's called Black Ace. Et cetera.

Making these ships was fun not only because it's fun to make things (it's true!) but because it was also a test of the ship-construction rules I wrote for Tachyon Squadron. If you were a Kickstarter backer, you'll be getting that probably sometime this summer. (I'm guessing late summer; it's supposed to be in editing through June, and then there's layout and a couple rounds of last looks, so July or August?)

Two things must ye know about these ship-construction rules: 

One, balance was not a guiding principle. There's no tradeoff for having a low-quality ship vs. a high-quality ship. This was a mandate from Tachyon Squadron creator Clark Valentine, and I stand behind it. 

Two, every effort -- well, nearly every effort -- wait, let me back that up again -- efforts were made to avoid turning it into a point-buy thing. The guidance in the core book was the primary touchstone, and where more detailed design was needed, more detailed design was produced, but the rules in this supplement don't vary too wildly from what's in the core book to begin with.

On a very basic level, every ship consists of two factors, scale and quality. The higher the scale, the bigger the ship; the bigger the ship, the more it can hold (as in modular equipment bays) and the harder it is to handle. The higher the quality, the more upgrades it gets. 

There's no change to equipment bays, other than an expansion of what can be put in them -- there's a bunch of new modular equipment from Draconis, the Dominion, and the, uh, less-savory elements of the setting -- so I'm not going to into any detail on that. Upgrades more or less follow the guidelines for designing new ships on page 138, with a couple notable exceptions, such as adding an extra damage-instance box to a damage track or eliminating the implication that equipment bays go hand-in-hand with higher-quality ships (they can't, because that's a function of scale now, not quality).

All of the Aces -- Green, Red, Blue, Black, and Yellow -- are scale 1 ships of Good (+3) quality. They are significantly better than the standard Average (+1)-quality ship of their scale. If this were a Tachyon Squadron game, it'd be ridiculous how good these ships are. But it's not, and hey, these are the Aces, man! They all have supremely tricked-out ships. That's their whole deal.

Speaking of which, here are their character sheets. You'll note that their design is considerably different from the character sheets I posted before. I want to make sure there's no confusion regarding which sheet to use under which circumstances. As a player, I don't think you could reasonably mistake your ship's sheet for your character sheet. I'm constantly worrying about things like this when I make character sheets -- ease of use.

I think the sheets are pretty self-explanatory, but I'm gonna explain more anyway. Specifically, the character-specific reasons their ships have been designed and statted-out the way they are. The source material doesn't provide a ton of information about these ships, so I've had to make do.

Green Ace's big distinctive feature is those movable wings that can "shift angles for maximum maneuverability while speeding through turns." Given that, it seemed like the most suitable way to represent that was by making the ship especially good at getting on someone's tail or shaking a tail, so that's what we have there. Mechanically, I've treated this is as a piece of modular equipment, but narratively it's obviously not. Ultra-Maneuverable isn't a great aspect, but I'm hoping to think of a better one before Gamex. It'll do.

Red Ace's description is all about the practicalities of its design, which is great for me. "Technologically powerful," "built for precision performance," "delicate balance of speed, acceleration, and power" -- these are all very useful phrases. In contrast to Green Ace, I'm really into Red Ace's aspect (Power. Precision. Performance.) because it sounds like a commercial for a German car. The modular equipment here is straight out of the book, but I think they suit Freya very well. She's more cautious than the rest and more concerned about tactical advantage. She spends most of her time in Red Ace racing, but she's studied for a fight and built a ship to match.

The thing to remember about Blue Ace is that Torra Doza's over-protective father paid for it, so of course it's the sturdiest ship of the squadron. It has a shield generator booster, three shields, and an Armor rating. It's a Volvo. Captain Doza just wants to keep his little girl safe, but not so much so that she doesn't get to fly combat missions. Complicated relationship, there.

Black Ace is the opposite. Not only does it only have two shields, but Griff has rigged it so he can redirect power from his shield generator to his propulsion and weapons systems. He's still used to flying a TIE with zero shields; it's a point of pride with him. If you're a good enough pilot, you don't need those shields. Shields are for rookies! He's put all his upgrades into a high Weapon rating and a good targeting computer. The best defense, etc. 

Black Ace is objectively the coolest-looking ship of the five. Nothing game-related; it just needs to be acknowledged.

Yellow Ace is the weird one, as expected with a ship that can shift its four wings into different configurations. This is reflected mechanically in the ability to swap the ratings of the ship's starfighter skills. At the start of his turn, Bo can pick two skills from Pilot, Gunnery, and Tactics (but not Technology, which is always going to be +3) and swap their ratings. I hope this is interesting in play. I've tried to make it a meaningful choice by limiting the ratings in question to +4, +2, and +1, so you can never have, say, +4 Gunnery and +3 Pilot. That gap from +4 to +2 means that compromises will have to be made. As for the rest of the ship, apparently Bo pushes the envelope so much that he tends to crash Yellow Ace a lot, so he has a couple extra damage instances to help deal with that. Bo's ship is also be difficult to pilot for anyone who isn't used to it (i.e., anyone but Bo), so I threw in a little sorta-stunt to reflect that: anyone else who flies it minimizes a die on all rolls. It doesn't really fit in mechanically as an actual rules component, but it feels right thematically, and ultimately that's why we're here.

(Bo is my favorite.)

You may have noticed that I've basically separated the pilots' spacefaring skills from the actual pilots, and then renamed them to "starfighter skills." Again, that's me being concerned about players having to look back and forth between two pieces of paper, and I figure if I put all the skills they need for space engagements on the ship sheet, there'll be a lot less of that. 

Also, they all have Pilot at +4. They're five of the best pilots around, and they routinely race each other in their downtime, so it didn't feel right for one of them to be objectively better than the others at this stuff. Using the ship-construction rules, I could have bumped that +4 up to a +5, but I didn't want to do that for two reasons: one, +4's already literally Great, and two, they're obviously going to face some pilots who are better than they are (on paper) and I don't want the skill-ratings arms-race to get too ridiculous.

[DFAE] Ace Squadron Mantles

Oops, I know I said I was going to offer a sneak preview of Tachyon Squadron's ship-construction rules, but there's something else I want to talk about first: mantles.

In case you're not familiar with Dresden Accelerated, mantles are the game's primary way of communicating a character's archetype and their general "place" in the setting. Some are pretty broad, like Reporter or Magical Practitioner. Some are much more specific, like Knight of the Cross or Valkyrie. (At least, those latter two seem more specific to me.) Every PC has one -- sometimes they might have mostly one and a bit of another.

Mantles give you some unique conditions and a couple of core stunts. There are also optional stunts you can buy with refresh, like in most Fate games, but everyone with a given mantle will have its unique conditions and core stunts. And the unique conditions frequently don't work like other conditions, where you check a box to avoid being taken out. Lots of them are a much more proactive resource.

(Standard conditions are a resource too -- they're things you expend to avoid being taken out -- but we don't tend to think of them that way because you're normally spending them reactively, not proactively. Same with stress. This is one of my needlessly pedantic distinctions. Let's continue.)

For example, the Reporter's unique conditions are Press Credentials and Off the Air, and its core stunts are Journalist Favors, Word on the Street, and Media Frenzy. Everyone with the Reporter mantle has those conditions and stunts. I think I've made my point about a game that's been out for a long while now that you probably already know about because it's very good.

Sometimes a mantle will have a unique condition with five boxes, and you can check a box to make a thing happen, and sometimes there'll be an accompanying unique condition with only one box that makes you check all the boxes on that other unique condition when you use it. Some examples of these multi-box, proactive conditions are the One-Percenter's Wealthy condition and the Changeling's Called condition.

And oh man, do I love those. I think you can tell just from looking at these character sheets.

Why do I love these so much? We already have stunts and aspects for making characters distinctive, but mantles offer a third way through strong worldbuilding. They're like a higher high concept. And the conditions in question are a mechanical widget that ties directly into that. If your archetype is this thing, you have this resource available to you. There's usually also some interesting way of recovering those marked conditions, which is more or less another way of letting the player how to behave in character. Not always; sometimes it's just a matter of waiting, like how the One-Percenter recovers one Wealth box at the beginning of a session, but usually it requires purposeful action. This is also a big deal to me.

Strong bonds between mechanics and setting -- that's like... like you know how people who are sensitive to ASMR find flipping pages and sussurus and whatever else weirdly pleasing and/or gratifying? That's me with a good fusion of mechanics and setting.

Now, with Ace Squadron, I have the luxury of being able to just come up with a mantle that fits each character without worrying about what those say about the world at large, but I honestly think you could take those mantles, apply to them to Star Wars, and have them fit right in. That wasn't a key concern for me (or any concern, really), but, y'know, it's nice!

And because I specifically like those five-box conditions, well, every one of the mantles I made for these PCs has one of those. What's funny is I didn't even list the names of their mantles on their character sheets, because this is for a one-shot and I don't want to give the players extraneous information that may confuse things. But for the record, they're these:

• Hype Fazon: The Leader
• Freya Fenris: The Scholar
• Torra Doza: The Heart
• Griff Halloran: Ex-Imperial Veteran
• Bo Keevil: The Daredevil

Now, you can see that I went off-script a little there for Griff, but for concepting purposes I really wanted to hit the ex-Imperial thing hard and I couldn't think of a more elegant way to do it. The guy has the symbol of the Galactic Empire tattooed on each bicep; you gotta give it to him. Plus everyone else's mantle sort of pays lip service to the five-man band concept, but Griff sets himself apart from them in some ways, so if you squint just right it makes sense that his mantle would diverge from that pattern.

What was fun after that was coming up with a good name for each mantle's primary unique condition, and then figuring out what it should do. Would it maybe have been wiser to consider that this one-size-fits-all approach might not work for every mantle? I dunno, maybe, but I think it worked out, and besides, trying to distill what each mantle brings to the table in a single word was very informative. Everything else about the mantle had to connect in some way to the name of that condition track. 

I mean, yes, it derives from the name of the mantle too, but the condition names feel more important, because that's what the players will actually interface with -- not the mantle name, which is much more ornamental in this case and doesn't even appear on the sheet.

You can see for yourself what each mantle's unique conditions are, but I have a whole blog here so I thought I'd talk a little about my reasoning for each of them, because I found the process fun and enlightening.

The Leader's main unique condition is Command. I wasn't sure about this one at first, but there's a Star Wars Resistance short in which Hype totally comes up with a plan and tells everyone how to execute it, so whaddya know, he's a leader after all. Hype can mark Command boxes to help ensure that his squadmates successfully execute a plan. This mantle also has a secondary unique condition, Focus Fire, that lets him mark all his remaining Command boxes to give the squad a big advantage against a single target. Hype recovers a Command box when he makes a new plan, which could conceivably be every scene, but I'd rather trust my players to act in good faith and just let that go. Plus this is a one-shot, so everything's a little truncated.

Oh, that's another thing about these unique conditions: How easily or quickly do they recover? Can't be so easy that marking boxes is meaningless, but -- especially in a one-shot -- it can't be so difficult that the player balks at marking them at all. This was another big source of lonely fun for me making these characters.

Anyway -- moving on.

The Scholar's unique condition is Study. Pretty straightforward. Freya recovers a Study box at the end of a scene in which she absorbs new information or reviews her past performance. I gave it two triggers so the player can be proactive about it. If it was just the thing about absorbing new information, I'd be concerned that the player would twist themselves in knots trying to find some sweet, sweet new information and it'd come off as contrived. Freya's a studious, driven pilot; I can totally buy her reviewing her gun-cam footage to improve her performance.

Oh! And what does Study do for her? Checking a box gets her a big bonus to overcome or create an advantage when she can bring her erudition to bear, and also she has another stunt called Corrective Pedantry that lets her alter and improve a situation aspect created by a squadmate. I hope that's as funny in play as it is in my head.

The Heart's unique condition is Teamwork. Torra Doza's voice actor said in an interview that Torra's all about her friends and family and love and etc. She's less jaded than the other Aces, being the youngest by far at 15, and I like the idea that she's sorta the squadron's resident optimist, always believing in the team to pull through in the end. She's the kind of character who'd probably refer to the Aces as a family at some point, and then Griff or someone would reluctantly grunt agreement. So she's all about that Teamwork, and can check a box to help an Ace who can see or hear her. She recovers a Teamwork box at the end of a scene in which an Ace helps her (mechanically speaking) or in which she spends a fate point (important distinction) to invoke a situation aspect created by another Ace. I.e., her belief in the team (and her special mechanical ability to help them) is stoked by her teammates actually giving back.

The Ex-Imperial Veteran's unique condition is Experience. This was probably the first one of these that came to mind -- that or Torra's Teamwork condition -- because it's just so... appropriate. It's 34 ABY and this guy used to fly a TIE fighter for the Empire. He's been around, and that should be his big strength. He can check those boxes not for a straight-up bonus, but to improve the reliability of his performance by maximizing dice. His secondary condition is I'm On the Leader, a blatant homage to another famous Imperial TIE pilot (Darth Vader -- I'm talking about Darth Vader), that makes use of his unmarked boxes against a single enemy. So there's some tension there for Griff's player: check Experience boxes for better results in a variety of situations, or leave them blank to really stick it to one foe later? I look forward to seeing what the player does. 

Oh, and Griff recovers an Experience box at the end of a scene in which his player voluntarily fails a roll. I don't call for extraneous dice rolls when I run Fate, so this should be significant, but if it's not I'll adjust!

Finally, the Daredevil's unique condition is Risk. I was going to call this one Stunt, but I figured that could get confusing, and Risk works. I really enjoyed just loading Bo Keevil up with mechanical bits that strongly encourage his player to put him in constant peril. Bo can check a Risk box to get a bonus to overcome or create an advantage in dangerous conditions. More importantly, he recovers a Risk box when he takes damage or chooses to succeed at a cost. Generally speaking, overcome and create an advantage don't intersect with avoiding damage, so taking damage to recover Risk is always an option for his player in combat. I hope that there's sometimes a real choice between marking a box to succeed on an overcome action and not doing that so the player can succeed at a cost to recover a box. 

On a related note, Bo Keevil also has a couple other stunts that encourage foolhardiness: Thrillseeker and Danger Zone. The former gives him access to a new approach, Reckless, at +5 when he's marked a 4-shift damage condition, and the latter lets him mark a Risk box to attempt an action so desperately dangerous as to be virtually impossible otherwise. Will that work in play? Like, shouldn't a good GM just let players try stuff regardless? I see that perspective, but I'm hoping the mere presence of that stunt on Bo's character sheet encourages the player to do some real stupid stuff.

If you're going to be in the Los Angeles area over Memorial Day Weekend and want to see any of this in action, come to Gamex and get in on it! I'm running this game Saturday and Sunday at 2pm, and while pre-reg is full for both, that just means two out of five seats are taken.

Next time: The ships, I promise!

[DFAE] Star Wars Resistance

So... it's been more than three years now since I've posted to the ol' blog. Let's just acknowledge that up front and move on with this new entry.

(Why's it been so long? I kinda haven't had a whole lot to write about, to be honest! A lot of my work in the past few years has been with Evil Hat's Fate Worlds line, mostly as a system developer. Sure, I contributed to Tachyon Squadron -- about which more later -- and Shadow of the Century, but I don't know that I had a lot to say about those games in terms of Fate-hacking, which is ostensibly the topic of this blog. Okay, explanation delivered!)

I'm running a Star Wars Resistance game called "Ace Squadron" at Gamex in a couple weeks, in which the players will portray the criminally underused pilots of said squadron. For most of the season I was pretty lukewarm on Resistance -- it's had its ups and downs -- but one consistent flaw of the show, in my eyes, has been that it's almost completely ignored its potentially most-interesting characters: the Aces, pictured above.

Who are the Aces of Ace Squadron? What's their deal? They're the first line of defense for the Colossus, the big floating fueling platform that serves as the setting for the series. It's sort of a hive of scum and villainy writ large, a place where pilots and associated tradespersons from all over the galaxy either gather or end up -- it's not entirely clear why most of them are there. It's like a Happy Bottom Riding Club for the Star Wars universe. For whatever reason, this is where anyone who wants to fly faster than anyone else comes to prove themselves. The Aces are the best of these pilots, practically treated as royalty both in recognition of their skill and as compensation for the services they provide.

HOW IS THE SHOW NOT ABOUT THESE PEOPLE? Anyway.

Only one-and-a-half of them really get any screentime (Torra Doza's the one, Hype Fazon's the half), but the other three, probably the most interesting of them all, are virtual ciphers. You've got an ex-Imperial pilot in a heavily modified old TIE fighter, a Kel-Dor stunt pilot, and... a pale woman with an accent?

Yeah, the show doesn't do much with them, and you wouldn't even know anything at all about Bo Keevil, the Kel-Dor, from the episodes themselves. You'd have to have watched this not-quite five-minute behind-the-scenes video with the production staff and the Aces' voice cast (most of them, at any rate) to even know that much about Keevil. He doesn't have more than, like, two lines in the entire series thus far!

And Freya Fenris, the Pale Lady, doesn't fare much better, but at least they invited her voice actor into the studio to get her perspective on the character she plays. If nothing else, it's good to see that the actors have some insight into these characters.

Anyway again. I'm a sucker for spaceship dogfights and test pilots and everything in that general milieu, partially due to watching The Right Stuff a lot as a kid, and reading Chuck Yeager's autobiography in high school. So naturally I'm drawn to these Aces.

AND THAT BRINGS US TO THIS BLOG POST. As I mentioned before, I'm running a Fate game about these five pilots at Gamex. At first I was going to back to my version of Faith Corps I'd tweaked for previous Star Wars games, then it hit me like a ton of bricks. Dresden Accelerated!

I've yet to play DFAE or use it for anything, and this seemed the perfect opportunity. Boy, am I glad I made that choice, because making these characters has reminded me how brilliant this book is. Man. So good. Mantles feel like a puzzle piece that fit into a gap in my brain that I didn't even know was there. Hats off to the whole team on that one.

Between reading DFAE, making these characters, and zhuzhing their character sheets to within an inch of their lives, I've spent a lot of time in the past week or so on this game. Reminded me of old times! So here I am to post their character sheets. Get them here! Click here!

Next time: The Aces' ships, and a sneak peak at Tachyon Squadron's starship construction rules! Yes, there'll be a next time!

[Faith Corps] Star Wars: Maintaining Tone

Hera looking irritated. Or maybe under pressure.

After playtesting that Star Wars Rebels scenario I'm running at the end of the month at Gamex, I've decided to make some minor changes.

The playtest was fun, and the characters felt right, but I like it when a game's (or, in this case, hack's) mechanics support the tone of the thing we're trying to emulate. Obviously all of us human beings involved in the game are largely responsible for that, but when the game constrains our choices in certain areas such that we have no choice but to maintain tone... I like that. (I tried to take that to a bit of an extreme with the long-languishing Sparks Nevada RPG by mechanically incentivizing not just roleplaying, but saying certain things associated with the canon characters.)

One of these changes is deviating from a recommendation in Demon Hunters: A Comedy of Terrors RPG (for such is our source of Faith Corps mechanics, in much the same way that, for years, Spirit of the Century was our source of Fate -- or, back then, FATE) in a small but important way.

The Demon Hunters way of handling a mob of minions is to give them a die code for "Mob of X" -- which works great -- plus a few other dice, and then a number of mild conditions. For a small mob, the recommendation is five or six mild conditions. As you might expect, that makes for some super-resilient mooks, way more resilient than I expect the default minions of a Rebels game -- stormtroopers -- to be.

In play, even three mild conditions was too much, in fact. They just stuck around too long, especially for the in-medias-res intro scene in which I used them. Thus, I'm dropping them down to one or two. Typically in Rebels, stormtroopers are more pressure than major enemy. They're usually used as either an excuse for a relatively brief fight scene, or as a reason to run/give up when they show up in overwhelming numbers. The former case is a 10-minute fight, the latter is a compel. Er, endure. (Endurance, maybe? What's the noun form of "endure" that's equivalent to "compel" used as a noun? We haven't gotten there yet.)

The other change is more of a thing, and it's this: pre-defining conditions for the PCs. In the heat of the playtest moment, I found myself tossing out really lazy conditions, like "Blasted" and "Oh My, More Blasting." Now, should I be a better GM? Absolutely. Boldface, italics, underline, of course I should.

But later I realized that the reason I was going for those goofy conditions was that I didn't want to stop and think of a good condition in the middle of the action. Plus, the easy, go-to conditions (like "Blasted") aren't really appropriate for Rebels. You don't see the crew of the Ghost getting actually shot a whole lot.

So! Pre-defined conditions -- more like conditions as presented in the Fate System Toolkit -- help with that. But defining them on a per-character basis means that you can force every character to react to stress differently, which means the players' choices all fall into the category of "Things That Reinforce Tone."

The companion alteration to this is to say that mild conditions clear at the end of the scene, a la stress in Fate Core. What that means is that mild conditions become new aspects with a lifespan of one scene, so you can use them to further characterize a PC without using up character resources like approach/discipline dice, aspects, or stunts to do so. Moderate and severe conditions stick around for longer, so you can use those to show how the events of an episode change the character for the length of that episode (in the case of moderate conditions) or an entire story arc (for severe conditions).

Every PC can take as many as three mild conditions, like before, but they have five conditions to choose from, so they're not locked into being the same way all the time. And none of these mild conditions involve actual injury (well, except for Zeb) -- they're more about the mental toll the events of the scene are taking.

For example, Hera Syndulla's five mild-condition choices are:

• Under Pressure
• Nervous
• Irritated
• Flustered
• Protective of ______________

As the scene goes on, and Hera fails to defend against all those aforesaid stormtroopers' various hails of blaster-fire, the effect might be that she thinks, "I've gotta think of a way out of this -- fast!" Or maybe "How are we going to get out of this?" Or "This is the last thing I needed today!" Or "If I could just have two seconds of peace I could think of a way out of this!" Or "Hey, Kanan's in trouble!"

These don't account for every single reaction Hera might have to failing to defend against blaster-fire, but it's a good variety, and they all feel in-character to me. And they reinforce this important but oft-overlooked maxim: Failing to defend against an attack doesn't necessarily mean being physically injured by that attack.

Here are Ezra Bridger's:

• Overconfident
• Mouthy
• Impatient
• Stubborn
• Protective of ______________

Quite a bit different. If Ezra fails to defend against that same blaster-fire, he's more like to think "These guys are chumps!" or quip "Is that the best you bucket-heads can do?" He's liable to worry about his shipmates in the moment too, from time to time, but the big ones to me are Stubborn and Impatient (and, to a lesser degree, Overconfident), because it ties into his emerging Dark Side tendencies. He doesn't walk around with yellow eyes and a black cloak when things are good, but when pressured, he can definitely lean that way. (Probably doesn't help that he's a teenager.)

I do want to talk about moderate and severe conditions, because they're their own respective beasts, but this is long enough as it is. I'm going to save that for another blog post. Hey, anything that gets me posting more than once a month is fine by me.

[Faith Corps] Hey, Star Wars!

Event pre-reg for this year's installment of Gamex opens tomorrow at noon, and one of the games I'll be running there is a highly anticipated (by me) Faith Corps treatment of Star Wars Rebels.

Your first question may be, "Mike, what're you, some kinda bag of hammers? How could you misspell 'Fate Core' so completely?" Fair question. Rude, but fair.

Twist answer: I didn't! Faith Corps is the game system that powers the new edition of Demon Hunters: A Comedy of Terrors RPG. Designed by Cam Banks and Amanda Valentine -- maybe you've heard of them? -- it's mostly a blend of Fate Accelerated Edition and Cortex Plus with a little Atomic Robo thrown in. I've used it for a couple of Star Wars games at conventions since last fall, and I'm really digging it. The mechanics are pretty similar to Cortex Plus, with plenty of room to play around with different dice tricks, but it plays almost identically to Fate, so it's been very intuitive for me. (And, y'know, just different enough to trip me up sometimes.) And since it's that close to Fate, well, I figure talking about it on this blog is fair game.

Anyway, last fall I ran a Faith Corps Star Wars game called Rebel Scum in which the PCs were Imperial Intelligence in the nascent days of the Alliance to the Restore the Republic. They were tasked with infiltrating a Rebel cell and finding out what they could about the Alliance's plans. What they ended up doing was assassinating Mon Mothma, framing someone else for it (right before convincing a group of Rebels to space him), and assuming leadership of the Rebellion. Take that, canon!

I followed that up in February She-Devils of the Outer Rim, a mash-up of volume 7 of Atomic Robo with a bunch of EU stuff I'd never heard of before I found it on Wookieepedia. Given the source material, I'd expected and planned for a whole lotta dogfighting -- came up with some simple dogfighting rules and wrote up a bunch of ships, using WEG Star Wars and the X-Wing minis games as general guides -- but they didn't really end up doing much. Point is, I have a set of good, workable, easy dogfighting rules. Plus sweet Star Wars-ized portraits of four She-Devils from Robo, courtesy of Scott Wegener.

At the end of the month, at Gamex, I'll be running this Star Wars Rebels scenario. It's the first time I've really statted up canon Star Wars characters of any kind, let alone such fairly well-known ones, so the pressure's kind of on (in my mind). I managed a playtest of most of it last night with four local gamer-friends, and it went well, so I'm looking forward to the real thing. I'm trying to blend elements from a few different eras of the Star Wars saga; we'll see if it's too much. Of course, by then it'll be too late, but whatever. Come play it anyway! 

(If it goes well, I'll try to run it on-demand at Origins and, assuming I can make it up there, put it on the schedule for Big Bad Con.)

[Gamex 2015] Fate On Demand

Gamex is coming up over Memorial Day Weekend. That's just a few weeks! Event pre-reg opens tomorrow, so if you're planning to attend or just thinking about it, here's a roundup of the scheduled Fate games thus far. Not as Fate-heavy as some Strategicons past, but still plenty of variety. And you may notice there's something a little odd about this list of games. Can you guess what it is?

Voyages of the Starship Loki (Friday 2:00pm, GM: JiB)

Deep in the farthest reaches of the galaxy, far from the security of the Federation a lone Peacemaker class starship explores the unknown parts of the galaxy. These are the voyages of the starship Loki. Will the crew survive the dangers so far from home space? Voyages is a sci-fi game set in a Star Trek-esque future where humans have spread out to explore the galaxy using the Fate Core Rules.

JiB's all Fated-up for Gamex! He's normally a Hero kinda guy, but for this con he's going all-in for Fate. And all it took was years of positive experiences! Anyway, this sounds fun, right?

Kingsman (Saturday 9:00am, GM: JiB)
Welcome to Kingsman, tailors to the finest of gentlemen for over 100 years. MI6 has reported a potential threat to the crown. Arthur is certain that the government wankers won’t be able to do anything about it, so it’s up to Kingsman to save the realm yet again. Kingsman is a modern super spy game set in London using the Fate Core rules. Can you save the queen and the realm?

Hey, it's that movie everyone liked but me! Regardless, it's a super-solid premise for an RPG -- exactly the sort of thing that appeals to me. Clandestine private paramilitary problem-solving agency, secret history, fancy umbrellas... it's all there. You should be there, too!

Neon Rose: A Cyberpunk Mystery (Saturday 2:00pm, GM: Patrick Thompson)

A mystery set in a post-apocalyptic, futuristic world where corporations rule and technology is abundant.

So... cyberpunk, in other words. Patrick, playing it close to the vest! If you like Fate, cyberpunk, mysteries, things held close to vests, or GMs named Patrick, this is the game for you. And if you like all of those things, this is the game you've been waiting for your whole life.

Spirit of Hyboria (Saturday 2:00pm, GM: Seth Halbeisen)

Rippling Muscles, dark shadowy cultists, and way too many snakes. What every great struggle in begins with, except for you! Bring you sword, your skill, your subterfuge, your spells. Vanquish the rising tide of evil. Save innocent sacrifices. Barbarians always welcome.

Didja hear about that new Conan RPG coming later this year? Well who needs it! Seth's running this thing in just a few weeks! This is a Fate Accelerated Edition game, which seems perfectly suited to Conan to me, and Seth's been running plenty of Fate at Strategicon -- not to mention an ongoing Atomic Robo campaign at home -- so check it out. Enough talk! *throws dagger*

Aeon Wave (Saturday 8:00pm, GM: Patrick Thompson)
Discovery of an ancient Martian radio signal known as the Aeon Wave has led to the development of advanced technology called Aeontech. The shift of technological power toppled governments and gave rise to the megacorps who currently wage war over the priceless secrets held within. Hidden in the shadows of the megacorps freelancers battle to save humanity from the fate portended by the Aeon Wave.

Did you back this on Kickstarter? Either way, it exists now, so here's your chance to play it.


[UPDATE] The Wages of Despair (Saturday 8:00pm, GM: Morgan Ellis)
How you ended up on this worthless rock of a planet in the ass end of space is your own tale to tell. Another day paradise living on borrowed time and maxed out credit. But now OrbitOre Interstellar needs to move 80 megatons of unstable Anti-Matter across dangerous, uncharted space. They have a ship, all they need now is a crew. It’s a suicide mission, but a hell of a payday. What else have you got to live for? (Come play Bulldogs! Sci-Fi That Kicks Ass)

See here! Morgan's running not just a Fate game, but a Bulldogs! Fate Core game. (Did you back that?)

Vinternacht (Sunday 9:00am, GM: JiB)

People don’t travel away from Ebbe in the winter. But, then Ulrich was murdered and now none of you are safe. The Jarl’s thugs are searching through the town for you, but you escaped into the forest and climbed the Trollvegge. Now the weather is turning bad and it’s going to be hard enough just to survive the winter night. Vinternacht is a Viking age game using the Fate Core Rules.

JiB's really got a thing for Norse stuff, am I right? Anyway, this sounds like a fun game about camping.

Aeon Wave (Sunday 2:00pm, GM: Patrick Thompson)

Kinda the JiB and Patrick show, huh?

And then there's Games On Demand, running all day Saturday and Sunday. I don't know exactly what'll be on offer there, but odds are Fate games will be happening at least once or twice a day, so if you miss out on everything else somehow, go take advantage of that. RPG coordinator Jim Sandoval really wants Games On Demand to be a big thriving thing at Strategicon, and you can help get it there simply by playing a game on demand.

Anyway, did you spot the odd thing about this list of games? It's that I'm not on it! Yeah, for the first time in I don't know how long, I'm not running a Fate game at Strategicon. I am running a game -- Star Wars: Blood Moon, Friday night -- but it uses Mini-Six, not Fate. Change is good. Plus I have all of these other games that I don't often get a chance to explore. Plus it's just good to play a variety of games. Okay, I think I've justified that well enough.

If more Fate games get added, I'll update this list. Like I bet Morgan's probably planning to run something. Stay tuned!

[Atomic Robo] Crimson Skies Characters

In order to force myself to be done with fiddling with these Crimson Skies pregens for Gamex this weekend, and as is often my wont when it comes to convention pregens, I'm sharing them with you. And also so you can see them, I guess, if you're interested. They're built as ARRPG characters, but I have this other little mini-game for dogfights that's new, so you can just ignore any references to that. Anyway, I think they'll be fun.

We have:

• Cliff Secord, brash young air-circus pilot
• Charlotte Steele, founder of the Hollywood Knights (the militia, not this)
• Reginald Creighton-Laysworth, a former air pirate who is either British or just pretends to be
• Jefferson Reid, Ace American
• Moxie Boyd, girl genius

So if you're keeping track, that's the protagonist of a contemporaneous film, a canon character from Crimson Skies lore, two Thrilling Adventure Hour characters, and one lone original character who is either a pathological liar or kinda off-kilter. I'm aware that Robo himself could've been a PC in this game, but I didn't want to stray that far from what people might recognize as Crimson Skies (he said, shortly after admitting he'd put the Rocketeer in his game).

I'm looking forward to this game.

[Gamex 2014] Días De Los Juegos!

Pretty definitive, I'd say.

Gamex pre-reg opens tomorrow at noon PST, and naturally I'm running a couple games. In honor of Atomic Robo: The Roleplaying Game being kinda out, or at least available in the wild as an actual put-together book instead of a binder of out-of-date rules, I'll be running two games using ARRPG -- one set in the Robo-verse, and the other set in an entirely plausible but unrealized version of the Robo-verse.

Saturday night is my Crimson Skies game using ARRPG as a base. If you don't know what Crimson Skies is, that picture up top should go a long way toward filling you in. Here's the blurb:

The year is 1937, and North America has shattered into more than a dozen competing nations, rife with conflict. With interstate highways and railways a thing of the past, travelers take to the skies. So too do a new breed of air pirates, kept in check by you, the brave men and women of Blake Aviation Security! 

The Crimson Skies setting has a (to me) surprisingly fleshed-out background for a minis game. Yeah, there was the PC game too, and I played the X-Box game a ton, but a lot of it never really comes up in those games, at least not that I remember. If the blurb reads a little vague, that's because I only have a vague notion of what the scenario will be about, but it'll come together before then. It always usually does!

I wrote, obsessed over, and then playtested some Fate-based dogfighting rules that were meant to evoke the Crimson Skies minis game. And they were a lot of fun, let me tell you. I'd play it again right now if I could. But they were also way too involved to stick into the middle of an RPG scenario a couple times. So I've gone back to the drawing board to simplify, simplify, simplify, and I'll be trying this new set of (still fun-seeming) rules out sometime before Gamex.

(For what it's worth, that overly complex version we playtested last night really is a lot of fun and does a pretty good job of translating what most of us think aerial combat is to the tabletop milieu. I stand by it and think it's probably worth developing. But if I were to register that game, it'd be in the Miniatures department, not RPGs.)

Sunday night is a sequel to "Bring Me the Head of Dr. Dinosaur!", the ARRPG game I ran at OrcCon back in February. The PCs feel like they have a lot left in 'em, and that first scenario (which did indeed result in the death of Dr. Dinosaur when a sentient lemur bullseyed the not-a-velociraptor with, if I recall correctly, Jenkins' combat knife) ended on a real "Okay, so what happens to these four weirdos now?" cliffhanger, so that's what we're going to find out. The blurb offers... some hints:

The Asterion Four in "Dia De Los Inmortales!"In 2011, a crack commando unit of genetic experiments was very nearly sent to prison for a crime they definitely committed. Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of fortune. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if they didn''t cause it to begin with, you''d better hope you can figure it out without the help of... The Asterion Four!

Beginning to sense a vague pattern here? I thought it'd be more fun to establish who these four are rather than summarize a premise, which might end up spoiling something in a way that spoils some other fun.

What else is going on, Fate-wise? Well, Morgan's running a sorta-related ARRPG game Sunday morning:

Robo Atómico Y La Invasión De Los VampirosThe future of the world depends on Atomic Robo to save Mexico City from a full scale invasion by the sinister Dr. Valkyrie and her army of extra-dimensional vampires. Atomic Robo, Luchadors, Spies, and Science! Using Evil Hat Productions'' brand new Atomic Robo: The Roleplaying Game.

I'm not sure why we're both running games with Spanish titles. Maybe it's a Cinco de Mayo thing.

He's also running a session of Brian Engard's excellent Venture City Stories Friday afternoon, but I'm not going to be there Friday afternoon, so I don't approve that at all, but it might work out for you, I dunno:

The Corporations have unlocked the genetic code to create super humans. Now heroes and villains clash in the streets of Venture City. A gleaming metropolis surrounded by decaying urban sprawl, a city full of superpowers, villainous corporations, and ruthless gangs in a near-future setting where superpowers are for sale. Come play this new Superpunk setting for Fate Core from Evil Hat Productions.

Friend of the both the blog and me Wes Otis is running a Fate game Saturday night that... well, the blurb makes my head swim. I would play in it if I could. In a heartbeat. Check this out:

Hassbeck's CaseHassbeck was a jerk, now he's a dead jerk. He was also a net runner with a lot of credits in the bank and no loyalty. Karma came calling after years of bills not being paid and he found himself in the dead book. the city of Sigil is full of dead cyberpunks who thought they'd live forever. But before he died, Hassbeck stole files from the Lady of Pain, and now the hunt is on, winner takes all.

Like, WTF is going on here? Cyberpunk meets Planescape? What hath mad science wrought?

[Atomic Robo] Various Updates

How I feel lately.

Man, it's been a while, right? I've just been too busy and/or tired to talk to you. You know how it is. But let's have a few updates to keep you in the loop.

What's Up With ARRPG?
I don't know why I was so excited that the edit punch-list was so short when it only takes three words to say "Rewrite this chapter."

To that end, I've enlisted the aid of Brian Engard to help get these Jeremy Keller-edited chapters revised and back to Jeremy Keller. Brian, of course, is part of the Fate Core team, so I have every confidence etc.

A big -- really big -- part of the revision process has been reformatting all of the examples in the book to align with the new aesthetic. We're still using panels from the pages of Atomic Robo to illustrate rules concepts and provide examples, which is great, but instead of just showing panels with captions (like the one above), we're providing a running dialogue between the GM and the players, all of whom happen to be Action Scientists. It's been a ton of work, I'll be honest with you, but the results are really satisfying, and it's going to result in a more engaging experience for the reader.

So, to sum up, it's coming along, and soon it will be out of my hands entirely, at which point we can talk about things like printer and shipping delays.

How Was Gamex?
Great! Two of the three games I ran were a lot of fun. The one that wasn't was an ambitious endeavor that didn't really come together the way I'd imagined.

I'm running the ARRPG scenario, "Robo Force," at GenCon. Wanna see the character sheets? Here.

I also ran a D&D-like Fate Core-based (based!) game called "Return to the Expedition to the Sinister Temple of the Reptile Cult on the Borderlands." There were blaster pistols and a froghemoth. Wanna see those character sheets? Look upon them and be confused!

As for the games I got to play, Morgan Ellis's really wacky way-out-there TMNT Fate Core game didn't involve any teenagers, ninjas, or turtles, although we did have a super-evolved marmot, a walrus from Ancient Egypt, a sentient hadrosaur from another dimension, and my character, Oreo Futurebaby, P.I. It was... pretty silly. And a lot of fun.

Respected TV critic and not-really-my-RPG-protege Todd VanDerWerff ran another Fate Core game based on the TV series Vikings. It was... well, look, there were some problems with the game, but still, it was gratifying to see Todd, a mere year and a bit after I introduced him to RPGs, running a game that I'd helped write. That was awesome. And I sure like that Vikings show. He promised me I'd have a chance to play Athelstan, and he did not lie about that, more or less.

Isn't San Diego Comic-Con Coming Up?
It is, yeah, and I'll be running ARRPG there, too, on Thursday at 2:00. I don't think the gaming schedule's up yet, but when it is, I'll be on it. (I'm also scheduled for a Saturday game, but I'll tell you right now, I'm going to have to bail on it to see this.) I'm also probably going to run a game at Gam3rcon that weekend, as is tradition, sort of.

[Gamex 2013] Fate Core Games A-Poppin'

Robo Force in action.

We still have a couple days to go before Gamex this weekend, and there are a bunch of Fate Core games on the skedge (that's short for "schedule" -- like I said, only a couple days left, so I don't have time to type out "schedule"), so let's break 'em down.

Friday 2:00 pm: "Death of an Aristocrat" (GM: Brian Allred)

Someone must really want this guy dead. Sounds easy, but for 20k nuyen, 

there must be a catch somewhere...

I've known Brian for years -- we spent most of those years playing in a couple of weekly D&D campaigns -- but I have no idea what this game is about. Sounds cyberpunky. Nuyen... isn't that a Shadowrun thing? Regardless, I'm sure he knows what he's doing.

Friday 8:00 pm: "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness" (GM: Morgan Ellis)

It's 1984 and the City is overrun by crime and corruption, the gangs control the streets, terrorism is rampant, corporations fueled by greed seek power and control, and Ninja clans lurk in the shadows. Only a small group of Mutant Animals born of some Strange Encounter, or created by Science, 

and trained in the ways of the Ninja can clean up the City. Let's play some TMNT&OS using Fate Core.

First of all, this is how you write a blurb for a convention game: evocative but totally open-ended and vague. I can only assume Morgan wrote it that way for the same reason that I write 'em that way: because holy crap, the deadline to submit games is this Friday and I have no idea what I'm going to do, but I know I'd like to run a game of whatever, so here's something compelling without going into specifics. Textbook. Anyway, I'm in this game.

Saturday 9:00 am: "Robo Force" (GM: Me!)

Robo Force is the codename for the UN's league of highly trained Action Science Commandos. Their purpose: to defend human freedom against Baron Helsingard, a ruthless megalomaniac determined to rule the world at any cost. Led by the daring Atomic Robo and armed with cutting-edge science, Robo Force never gives up the fight! Rohhh-BO!

I ran a session of this at a Dead Gamers' Society meet-up back in March, and it went pretty well, so now I've put more effort and thought into it [read: I've been watching GI Joe] with the idea that it can go even better. It's also a chance to shine it up a bit in preparation for GenCon.

Saturday 2:00 pm: "Shadowpunk - Tailchaser" (GM: Seth Halbeisen)

Backstabbing and betrayal. Business as usual. But now it's happened to you. Well, you and your team. Now you've got a crap ton of marked data and no where to sell it too. No paycheck, and it looks like the target corp wants vengeance. Just another day in paradise.

I still don't know Seth Halbeisen! I believe we're connected via Google+ or something, but that's it. He's the most prolific Strategicon Fate GM I've never met. But he keeps running these games, and players keep signing up, so that's gotta be good.

Saturday 8:00 pm: "Vikings IN Vikings: Among the Vikings" (GM: Todd VanDerWerff)
America's love affair with Vikings continues, in this brand new adventure of seafaring Norsemen. Ride out to find strange lands off somewhere in the far West, lands filled with unusual men and fearsome beasts. Characters will be provided, or you can make your own Viking.

I'm not in a position to give out awards for best game titles -- but if I were, Todd would at least be in contention. I'm really looking forward to this game, not only because Vikings and Fate Core, but because I have this weird sense of... I dunno... pride? I introduced Todd to RPGs last year when I talked him into attending OrcCon, and now here he is, running a game I helped write! (He's also running Cat and Prime Time Adventures, a game he's supremely qualified to run on account of him being a TV critic and all.) But really, the fact that he's GMing multiple indie games per Strategicon has almost nothing to do with me and almost everything to do with Todd being a natural at this stuff.

Saturday 9:00 pm: "Spirit of Hyboria"

Come adventure in a land of ruthless warriors, vengeful barbarians and dark sorcerers. Where magic is a curse, and things man was not meant to know walk the land. Where the gods are watching, so be bold and live well. All this and swords too!

Obviously, if I weren't playing in Todd's Vikings game, I'd be in this game, guaranteed. I especially appreciate the "Spirit of" construction -- it feels old-timey at this point, which I like.

Sunday 2:00 pm: "F3: Return to the Expedition to the Sinister Temple of the Reptile Cult on the Borderlands" (GM: Me!)

OMG you guys, there are totally some more problems that only a party of adventurers can solve! This ode to AD&D (via Fate Core) is a sequel to a couple games I ran at the last OrcCon. If you played in those games, come reclaim your character! If not, come claim a character before those returning players beat you to it! Experience with Fate Core not required.

More of this nonsense. It was fun at OrcCon, so I'm going to see if we can keep it going. Because if we can, I'll run one of these at every Strategicon using the same PCs. Just like before, I'm using this game as an excuse to playtest something new I've been working on, so the PCs will look a little different than they did last time.

So there you go! A lot of great Fate games, just like I said. I did not lie. If I get a chance before the con, I'll post the Robo Force and D&D-ish characters.

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.