FATE Triangle

So RPG.net user Gullerbutry, known in real life as David S. Goodwin, has created a pretty nifty randomizer using only Fudge Dice -- notoriously not especially well-suited to random tables. It's called the FATE Triangle, and you can find a form-fillable PDF of it here.


It works like this: Normally, when you roll Fudge Dice, you're only concerned with the total, from -4 to +4. What makes the Triangle work is that it cares about the actual results of those dice, not their total. So 0000 is not the same as ++--, and 00-- is a different result than +---. This gives you 15 possible results and a bell curve with more variation than what Fudge Dice normally deliver.


I'll let Mr. Goodwin explain it a little more:

I've had two insights into this table concept since I wrote it up.  

The first is that the main difference between it and a regular 2-dimensional range of results (from -4 to +4) is that it opens up the middle of the bell curve. That is, on a normal 4dF, you roll a 0 about a quarter of the time (or something like that). On this table, you expand that single result into three results (0000, 00+-, and ++--). Which is handy, and adds variation, even though it only actually adds 6 new results (15 total, instead of 9). 

The other interesting thing about this tale is that it's actually an equilateral triangle - the three corners being ++++, ----, and 0000. I didn't realize that at first because of how I laid it out, and because FATE trains us to ignore blank side of the die - but it means we've got a chart with three different axis. There are probably a lot of triads you could use that would give you a neat table: crown, church, and guild; social, mental, and physical; heaven, hell, and mundane...

Here's an example he did to illustrate how he intends to use it:

You get the idea. Like I said, nifty.


But it doesn't stop there. In that same RPG.net thread, he shows how you can use this to establish elements of a character's background, intra-party relationships, or the politics of a setting. It's a campaign-in-a-box, basically. It's also awesome.


As I said in that thread, if you combine this with the Random Adventure Generator in the Legends of Anglerre Companion, you can throw a pretty cool game together in no time. Which is probably exactly what I'll do when the Companion comes out, if not sooner. 


Or match it up with Diaspora's cluster creation and figure out some more stuff with those clusters. Really, the possibilities are fairly limitless. Thanks, David S. Goodwin!


(My enthusiasm for random tables is in an especially high gear these days; I just bought the original three Traveller LBBs at DiceHouse the other day, and I've rolled up a dozen or so characters since then, many of whom survived the character generation process.)


PS: Sorry about the weird formatting on this post. It's Blogspot's fault.

[Kerberos] Kerberans! Come Out And Play!

Just a quick note to say I'll be running a FATE Kerberos scenario, "The Pyramids of Atlantis," on June 26th at DiceHouse in Fullerton, CA. It's part of a Dead Gamers Society game day; they do one every few months, and even though the DGS is ostensibly a World of Darkness-oriented Meetup, all kinds of games get run at these things. Last time I played in a Dogs in the Vineyard game, f'rinstance.

As it happens, the scenario I'm running there is also the one I'm running at GenCon in August. Here's the blurb:

When unexpected violence shatters the secret peace between the British Empire and the Atlantean Nations, Her Majesty the Queen covertly sees to it that a number of Strange operatives from the Kerberos Club join Her Naval expedition to "investigate." But after two weeks of deep-sea bombardment and demands for surrender, the Atlanteans remain curiously silent. Just what are they up to down there? A sneak preview of The Kerberos Club: FATE Edition!

Note the gratuitous plugging of the forthcoming book! If you're going to be around, come on by and play a couple games. I know someone's running Dungeon Crawl Classics, but other than that I have no idea what'll be on offer. I believe the DGS will be announcing everything later this week.

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.

Escalating Aspects

So my friend John Armstrong, down San Diego way, has plans to hack Strange FATE (the brand of FATE used in The Kerberos Club: FATE Edition) to run Scion. The premise of Scion has always interested me, but I haven't actually played it. I just don't have a lot of experience with the Storyteller system, and I've always heard that mechanically it's a little... problematic. Thus, never played it, but the idea of taking the premise and transplanting it into another system is attractive.

Anyway, in the course of trying to figure out how to model Legend, we talked about having a character aspect dedicated to how you're perceived by mortals. One idea was that when you use a power related to that Legend and your roll obtains spin, that aspect can change if you weren't acting in accordance with it. I.e., if your actions don't reflect your Legend, your Legend may change to match your actions.

Something else spun out of that, though, that got me thinking. What if accepting an aspect compel made it harder to refuse future compels? The more you establish a pattern of behavior for yourself, the more difficult it is to break that pattern.

So, resolved. But before we get into how it works, a tweak: You can't just spend a Fate Point for an aspect-free +1 bonus (I don't think I've ever seen anyone do that anyway), and invoking an aspect only yields a +1 bonus by default, Diaspora-style. This isn't necessary, per se, but it does make it feel "cleaner" to me. Oh, and there are no more escalating compels, at least not for the aspect in question. All right.

First, the aspect has a row of three boxes. Every time you accept a compel on the aspect, check a box. I guess we could call it a stress track if we wanted to, and say that accepting a compel means taking a point of "aspect stress" or something, but I don't know if that really does anything apart from making this a bit more jargon-intensive.

Second, there's the stick. When the first box is checked, nothing happens. When the second box is checked, the GM has to offer two Fate Points to compel the aspect, and two Fate Points are required to refuse the compel. When the third box is checked, it's three Fate Points instead of two.

Third, the carrot. Every box that's checked on the aspect increases the invocation bonus by +1 -- invoking it yields +2 for one checked box, +3 for two, and +4 for all three.

Fourth, back to ones. When all three of the aspect's boxes are checked and you refuse a compel on it, clear the boxes.

Now, look. I know I haven't thought this all the way through yet. I know that always getting three Fate Point for a compel on that aspect is going to mean building up quite a store of Fate Points, especially since most players tend to accept compels about 90% of the time (in my experience), and that getting a consistent +4 bonus from a single aspect might be a big deal. One word: details. Maybe the payout from a compel stays as-written; the increasing bonus is probably incentive enough. Whatever. We can work it out. Regardless, it's a neat idea worth exploring.