[Kerberos] Power Tiers

If you followed the development of the FATE supers hack on this blog that eventually found its way into The Kerberos Club (FATE Edition) (hereinafter KFC, for "Kerberos FATE Conversion"), you'll already be familiar with much of how Strange FATE, the version of FATE used in KFC, came to be. However, if you're new to the blog, perhaps because you recently purchased KFC and found your way here somehow, or if you just want more information on what makes Strange FATE different from its esteemed predecessors, this series of posts (crossposted with the Arc Dream site) should be highly informative.

I'm going to start with one of the system's most dramatic additions to the FATE Toolbox: Power Tiers.

In brief, Power Tiers are a way to make super-strong, super-fast, or super-whatever characters in FATE without resorting to super-big numbers. Generally speaking, skill bonuses above +6 or +7 don't sit right with me. Part of what I don't like is that it means the dice matter less and less, but part of it's also because all we really care about with skill bonuses is the margin between yours and mine. I mean, Fair (+2) vs. Good (+3) is really no different than Epic (+7) vs. Legendary (+8) -- they're both one point apart, so all that matters is that one guy's skill rating is one higher than the other guy's, but they're still adding +7 and +8 to their rolls. The upshot is that they end up with big numbers when small numbers would do equally well.

I don't like that.

Personally, I cap the skill pyramid (or tower, or whatever) at Great (+4). I like the symmetry there with four Fudge Dice, which also top out at +4.

So what Power Tiers do is let you keep skill ratings low while still accounting for wildly different levels of ability. There are five Tiers in total, from Mundane on up to Godlike. Mundane Tier skills are just regular FATE -- characters in Spirit of the Century or Legends of Anglerre all have Mundane Tier skills, by this method. It's the realm of real-world human effort. Every Tier higher than Mundane means a proportionately higher increase in effectiveness over what ordinary humans can do.

Note that I said "effectiveness" there, and not "ability." Mundane Tier skills can cover abilities that ordinary humans don't have, like flight or telepathy laser-beam eyes. It just means that your Mundane Tier flight won't let you travel any faster than a human could run (although it will let you fly over obstacles). Likewise, Mundane Tier telepathy will get you the same level of information as a simple Empathy roll (although you probably won't have to engage in conversation to get it). If those laser beams you're shooting from your eyes are a Mundane Tier attack, they're no more dangerous than a fist or a sword or a gun (which is to say they're still pretty dangerous in FATE terms). We're talking degrees of effectiveness.

When two characters face each other using skills in different Power Tiers, the one with the higher-Tier skill replaces one Fudge Die with 1d6 for each degree of difference. The one with the lower-Tier skill always rolls 4dF.

So if I'm using a Mundane Tier skill against your Extraordinary Tier skill (that's one degree of difference), I'll roll 4dF and you'll roll 3dF+1d6. If you're two Tiers higher than me, you'll roll 2dF+2d6, and I'll still roll 4dF. And yes, if you're using a Godlike Tier skill against me, and I'm still using a Mundane Tier skill, you'll roll 4d6 and I'll roll -- as always -- 4dF. But if both our skills are in the same Tier, whether that's Mundane or Extraordinary or Godlike, we'll both roll 4dF, like normal. We're on even footing, whether we're smashing faces or smashing mountains.

A difference of a single Tier is definitely going to favor whoever's on top, but it's hardly a guarantee. The range of dice results changes from -4 to +4 to -2 to +9 -- a big leap on the high end, certainly, but a less likely result than +4 on 4dF. Besides, if I had a nickel for every time I've seen someone roll -2 on 3dF+1d6, I could buy a sandwich (and not a little one, either). Once you're two or more Tiers higher than your opponent, though, it's almost always a blowout. As it should be, if you ask me.

The "almost" is key, though. Even if my skill is Mundane and yours is Godlike, there's still a chance I'll roll +4 and you'll roll +4. Not much of one, but it's there. I like that.

Back when the beginnings of the Power Tier idea first started coming to me, it was basically a binary system. Is your Tier higher than your opponent's? Then you win. You're only rolling dice to add something to the narrative. The Hulk will always be stronger than Captain America, Cap will always be stronger than Mockingbird, and Mockingbird will always be stronger than Jarvis. Boom, done. But, as was pointed out and soon became obvious, there's the matter of what came to be known as Iron Man's Resolve, or the Defense Dilemma. Should Iron Man really always lose a mental battle against a psychic opponent? Is that fun? The answer to both questions was "No."

The concept, though, was sound. I'd already been using a die-replacement mechanic in other genre hacks, but powered by a second player resource pool (variously called Chi, Will, Elan, etc., according to the genre), so it was a relatively short leap to adapt it.

And it's been working great. Even if they're already familiar with FATE, nearly all the players in the games I run at conventions have been new to Strange FATE, and nobody's had a real problem picking it up. It's been called "crazily intuitive" by one of them, which seems like a pretty solid endorsement. From a player-satisfaction perspective, I love seeing the gleam in a player's eye when they realize they get to swap out a Fudge Die or two for some sweet, sweet d6s. The power of Power Tiers!

[Kerberos] Updates!

So! Just got off the ol' Skype from my first call with Shane Ivey at Arc Dream about this whole FATE Kerberos project, and I have to say... I'm pretty damn excited. There's a lot I can't disclose yet, but there are a few things I can, so let's do that.

• It'll be a standalone book. No surprise here, really -- without a definitive version of FATE that everyone can agree on, we kinda don't have another option. I don't think many will complain, though. This means the standard bits on what aspects are, what skills are, how the Fate Point economy works, and etc. I will endeavor to keep all of this as concise as possible, but not so much so that it isn't easily understood. This book will not stop a bullet. That's the Mike Olson guarantee.
• FATE trumps ORE. Many bits of KC are very FATE-friendly as-is, but where ORE's mechanics and FATE's are incompatible, or where replicating what KC does with ORE would be a convoluted process, the relative rules-lightness of FATE (not that it's actually rules-light, mind you) will take priority. It's my feeling that people who buy FATE Kerberos will be doing so in large part because they like FATE, and they'll want a decidedly FATE-y version of things that plays to FATE's strengths instead of a game that tries to turn FATE into ORE. ORE is a very different animal than FATE, so if it's an equal choice between, say, making a bunch of dice rolls or just compelling an aspect, I'll go with the latter.
• Fudge Dice are the default. My take on scaling powers uses both Fudge Dice and d6s, so that's what we're going to use. However, I know that not everyone likes Fudge Dice, so there'll also be guidelines and advice on using one or two other dice mechanics instead. Regardless, the rules will work no matter what dice mechanic you choose to use.
• The KC you know and love will be preserved wherever possible. By this, I mean that many of the concepts used in KC (and Wild Talents, as applicable) will be retained and FATE-ized with as little alteration as I can manage. For example, characters will still have an Archetype and Convictions, but as aspects, not as their own discrete mechanical elements. If I can find a cool halfway point for a given component between ORE and FATE that stays true to both and doesn't require pages of explanation to work, then I'll take it.
• WE NEED PLAYTESTERS. Seriously. I can't go into specifics about the timeline, but we're going to need to get some good playtesting done within the next couple months. If you're interested in this, and I know you are, leave me a comment below, send me an email, or whatever with your contact info, and we'll get materials out to you ASAP. Please note that this is contingent upon me getting my notes and stuff together in a form that can actually be sent out to people, so if you email me today, don't expect to get a playtest packet tonight. Or tomorrow. Or over the weekend. I'll also be fishing for playtesters in the FATE RPG Yahoo! Group and on RPG.net. And Facebook, too. Sure, why not. Maybe I'll set up a group there we can use. 

There's a lot more, but it's all either minutiae or stuff I just can't talk about yet. It was a pleasure to finally speak with Shane in person-ish, though. And now if you'll excuse me, I have a crap-ton of really awesome work to to do....

FATE Kerberos Club: Let's Make It Official

Sometime back, I mentioned that Arc Dream was interested in doing a FATE version of Benjamin Baugh's awesome Kerberos Club setting, and how equally awesome it'd be for me if I got to work on it. While it's still on Arc Dream's back burner, thanks to a constant and undeniable stream of Greg Stolze, I can finally say this: I got the gig.

(I actually got it back in May, but I didn't want to say anything without Shane Ivey's go-ahead. This made for some awkward exchanges with people when they asked if I'd gotten it. "I don't think I should say anything... which probably gives you your answer, I guess.")

I'm especially excited about this project in light of the fact that there isn't a "mainstream" FATE treatment of the supers genre on the market right now, which means that this will be the first! System-wise, I think it'll have the potential to set a standard for FATE supers in the same way that Legends of Anglerre has for FATE fantasy -- and obviously the setting itself is, as I said, already awesome, so that doesn't hurt, either. In my ideal scenario, we'll later break the mechanics out into their own generic FATE supers book (with a free online SRD!), but for now I'm more than happy to work on what I've been given.

Apart from The Kerberos Club, Ben Baugh is probably best known for Monsters and Other Childish Things and Don't Lose Your Mind, but a couple years back he was attached to a few SotC-based projects for Evil Hat, including New Horizons (social outcasts fightin' the good fight) and Shadow of the Century (SotC in the '80s), both of which sounded awesome but unfortunately never materialized. I look forward to picking his brain.

While I haven't gotten beyond playtesting mechanics yet, I can promise that my chief goal will be to leave Kerberos's fantastic setting completely intact and mold the mechanics around it. The alternative -- making little edits here and there to accommodate the change in systems -- is... distasteful to me.

Gateway 2010 Post-Mortem

This year's Gateway was one of those cons where I can say I was honestly happy with every game I was in, whether playing or GMing. I may have been utterly, comically incompetent in one (EX-47 the assassin droid in Josh's Star-Wars-via-Smallville game) and joined in the teeth-gnashing over the rules for another (Andy's otherwise very fun Shadow, Sword & Spell game), but it was all a good time. (I even got to play the Castle Ravenloft boardgame during the dinner break on Saturday, which was a nice surprise, thanks to the Vegas/Utah contingent.)

My FATE Supers game was no exception -- only Morgan was already familiar with how my particular supers hack worked, and the other four players didn't seem to have a ton of FATE experience, so it was a good playtest group. The opening scene, in which the team leader reviews the team's dossiers with her commander while the rest of the team tells stories about her, worked really well, and nobody ended up screwed by the aspects they received in the process. And it did what that opening-scene thing usually does: Give each player some spotlight time and the chance to make a skill roll. In terms of the narrative, it injected a little uncertainty about Ballista's ability to effectively lead, and let Ballista voice her concerns about her relatively inexperienced team in a safe environment.

Every character felt useful and effective and got to have at least one or two kick-ass moments. My only real regret is that I made the same mistake I seem to so frequently make in FATE games, and that's putting in Fair minions. I always think, "Well, these guys should be a cut above the Average minion," but I'm always, always wrong. As soon as I said "A couple dozen HYDRA -- er, CHIMERA guys swarm out of the doors and the jungle," I should've known making them Fair would mean the scene would eventually drag.

As a corollary, when I make minions too strong, I'm always too slow on rectifying the situation by either reducing their Quality right then and there, or simply answering the question "How many more are still standing?" with something less than complete honesty. I mean, if they don't know, and I want to move on already, just lowball it! As soon as the super-powered badguy of the scene went down, I should've wrapped things up more quickly.

As it was, all that time spent punching out mooks meant that the endgame was rushed, which was too bad. It went from "Ack! Horrible situation!" to "Ah, well that's that that dealt with, then" in a matter of minutes. I cut two major NPCs entirely for time, and the two they did face in that final scene just didn't get enough screen time to be especially effective or interesting. I tried to convince everyone that something big was happening through the clever use of words, but I don't think I really pulled it off. Ah well.

Anyway. My players were great, and despite the occasional what-skill-should-I-use-now? dithering things went very smoothly on their end. Plus, I'd like to think the game illustrated several key lessons of FATE:

• Don't bother citing all your aspects before you roll. Roll first, then deal with aspects. This is a no-brainer for FATE veterans, but newer players often see this list of descriptors and want to focus on those to the exclusion of all else. You're not a slave to your aspects -- not every action you take has to be justified by them in advance.
• Don't feel limited by what's on the character sheet. If you want to do something but aren't sure how to do it, tell the GM. If that GM is me and I'm not being a short-sighted idiot, we'll quickly work something out and get on with it.
• When you have three Fate Points, you have a lot of Fate Points. Spend 'em. You can't do anything with them once the game's over, so spend away.
• Simply acting in line with an aspect is not the same as compelling that aspect. A proper compel makes your bad situation even worse. Whatever action you take in accordance with the compel has to put you in a disadvantageous position. Taking an alternate approach to a scene that still deals with the conflict in that scene more or less effectively is not worth a Fate Point.
• If you spend all your Fate Points to avoid taking a point or two of stress, you are not allowed to then complain about your lack of Fate Points. You've chosen to blow your narrative-currency wad on not getting hit, which necessarily means you're going to be a slave to the dice for a bit. You don't have to win every roll. Seriously. Let it go. Take some stress or a consequence. You'll have more fun for having done so.
• Moreover, unlike many other fine RPGs, in FATE you want trouble for your character. You want things to go poorly, then take a turn for the worse. If you go around playing it safe all the time, you'll never earn the Fate Points you so desperately want and/or need. Alternate, non-mechanical reason for wanting all that to happen: Where's the fun in everything going your way?

Afterward, Morgan took all the character sheets for himself, no doubt to reverse-engineer them. Morgan, just ask! I'll send you whatever you want!

ADDENDUM: Speaking of Morgan, my platonic FATE-mate, I neglected to mention his DFRPG game! Or "games" plural, really, but I only played in one. As it happened, I'd played the same scenario at Gamex back in May, but that was the hole in my schedule I'd left for a Morgan game without knowing what he'd run in that slot, so that's what I happened to get. But I played a different character, so for me it was a totally different game. About half the table knew the Dresden-verse well, a couple more had only read one or two of the books, and then there was me, pretty much completely ignorant of it all. The only things I know about Jim Butcher's series are what I've picked up from the sessions of the game I've played. This time around, I played the succubus assassin who feeds off of lust, so I engineered a virtual orgy in the first scene, because that seemed like something I'd want to do. Fortunately, Morgan had the good taste to fade to black on that before... y'know.

At any rate, I enjoyed it a lot. It was like the eighth time he'd run that particular scenario, and I really like DFRPG's particular iteration of FATE. It's definitely going to inform my FATE Supers conversion, that's for sure.

A parting note re: DFRPG. In the absence of a definitive version of FATE that can be cited as the "default" or "standard" rules, it's interesting to me now to note how DFRPG is gradually taking the place of SotC in the public perception. Not that there's anything good or bad about that -- I just find it interesting.

Gateway 2010: More Stuff

It occurs to me that throwing those sheets up here yesterday without an explanation or two might lead to a little confusion.

You may notice some blank spots in the characters' aspects marked "Assigned" -- Flagstone has one, and Ballista has four. I usually like to give players in one-shots like these a chance to finish off their pre-gens with an aspect or two of their choosing. It gives a sense of investment in or ownership of the character. In this case, though, I'm doing something a little different.

Instead of each player giving his or her own PC an aspect, the players will assign each other aspects. The characters will be split into two groups: Ballista, and everyone else. Ballista, as the team leader, will be in a mission briefing with the game's Nick Fury analogue, going over the team's dossiers with him and making evaluations. One by one, she'll assign each of the other four PCs an aspect based on her assessment of their skills (which the player will invent, hopefully based on what's already on the character sheet).

The other PCs will be together somewhere else on the Hover-Carrier, talking about their team leader and the experiences they've all had with her in training or whatever. The delivery vector for this is somewhat inspired by John Harper's Agon: One player tells most of a story involving himself, Ballista, and another PC. At the climax or turning point of this story, he'll pick a skill relevant to his role in the narrative and roll it; the other PC's player will do likewise, with the same or a different skill. Whoever wins gets to finish the story and give Ballista an aspect.

So in a way, it's what I almost always do with these games -- start off with individual spotlight time, possibly describing a character's final phase, that culminates in a skill roll and an aspect. There's just more of a competitive element to it this time.

Now, there is certainly the possibility that Ballista's player could stick one or more PCs with an amusingly crippling (or crippingly amusing) aspect that kinda screws them over, but everyone should keep in mind two things. One, they're going to want everyone else to be as competent as possible. Two, turnabout's fair play. Almost all of Ballista's aspects are going to be assigned by other players, so a little diplomacy wouldn't hurt.


Part of that, too, is likely to depend on how familiar the players are with each other already. I'm willing to bet you'd be more likely to screw over a friend than a total stranger.


Here's another PC for the game, Dreamer. He's a bit of an amalgam of Planetary's The Drummer, Doctor Strange, and maybe Stormwatch's The Doctor. And Druid from Secret Warriors, too, at least in physical appearance. I find Druid compelling in that Nick Fury kicked him off the team for being a liability (by posting a note to his bedroom door, no less). Dreamer is what Druid might be like if he didn't screw up so much. His aspect "The Sorcerer Supine" pretty much says it all, if you ask me -- immense magical power in a guy who sometimes has a hard time getting up from the couch.

Gateway 2010: Sample Characters

Hey there, little blog! How've you been the past 22 days? Sorry for the neglect. You can blame the baby. Let's all blame the baby!

Anyway, Gateway's in a couple weeks, more or less, and I'm running a FATE Supers game (and two sessions of Leftovers). The setting's a cross between Marvel's Secret Warriors and Wildstorm's Stormwatch (under Ellis, anyway), so it's very different from the Silver Age teenager FATE Supers games I've run in the past. For reasons known only to myself (and, like, four other people), I want to see if my supers hack can handle something with a more serious tone.

Here are a couple sample characters. There's a lot of rampant ripping-off of stuff like S.H.I.E.L.D. and HYDRA and all that they entail, so don't let that bother you. It's an homage.

Ballista, energy-projecting team leader
Flagstone, the brick

As you can see, there's a lot more mechanical detail on these sheets, including point costs and individual super-skill trappings, so people can see what's going on a little more.

Spirit of the Kerberos Club

A few people have brought this to my attention today, so I figured I'd pass it along, in case you haven't seen it.

Here's the upshot: Arc Dream wants to do a FATE version of The Kerberos Club, and they want someone to help them do it. Me, I have a FATE Supers hack that's been a blast in playtests, and I want to put it to good use somewhere. C'mon, Arc Dream, let's make this thing happen! You and me!

I figure competition will be tight for this, so I'm not getting my hopes up. But it'd be pretty cool, wouldn't it? ORE partly inspired my FATE Supers thinking, so it seems only fitting.

Supers: Escape from Fake Prom Vines

This is something I meant to mention in my last post, and although it's labeled with the "supers" tag, it isn't really supers-specific. However, it did grow out of something that happened in that last FATE Supers game I ran.

Here's the situation: Prodigy takes a section of iron railing and wraps it around the Headmaster to restrain him. This is, under standard FATE 3.0 rules (as far as I know), a kind of Block. The problem is that Blocks are supposed to be maintained every round, whereas the circumstances of this Block clearly don't require that. Anyway, Prodigy rolls his Superhuman Might and gets a 16 -- which is what the super-intelligent ape and his Extraordinary Might will have to beat to break free. Hard, but not impossible. (In fact, thanks to a good roll and a couple Fate Points, he does indeed break free to wreak a little more simian havoc in that scene.)

Before that happened, though, Prodigy pulls a similar trick with Temper, a villainous metal-manipulator, only this time he ties him up with some decorative vines (...the scene is a jungle-themed prom, so decorative vines are readily available). This time Prodigy gets a 17 -- and Temper has literally no chance to break free without spending, like, six Fate Points. From fake prom vines.

This, to me, is a problem. Fake vines should be inherently easier to deal with than an iron railing. At the same time, wrapping someone in iron should be harder than tying them up with vines.

So here's what I'd do if I had to do it all over again: I'd steal from HERO.

• Assign the material in question a difficulty: Mediocre, Fair, Great, Fantastic, or Legendary.
• The material's difficulty is the target number when using it to restrain someone with a Might roll. For example, that iron railing would be Fantastic, while the fake vines would be Mediocre (they aren't made to be sturdy, after all).
• If the wrapper-upper's Might roll beats the difficulty, the restraint has a stress track with a number of boxes equal to the shifts obtained. For example, Prodigy's roll of 16 for the Headmaster's restraints would mean a stress track with 10 boxes, whereas the stress track for Temper's vine restraints would have 17 boxes.
• When the restrainee attempts to escape, roll Might against the material's difficulty. Shifts obtained are stress dealt to the restraint's stress track. So the iron railing, with its Fantastic difficulty, is difficult to budge; the average person will have a tough time making progress. The Headmaster, with his Extraordinary Might, will have an easier time of it, but it'll still probably take him a round or three. The fake vines, on the other hand, can be escaped by anyone given time (Temper included).

OrcCon 2010 Wrap-Up

So! OrcCon was a blast for the nth year in a row. This is a convention I used to go to in junior high -- I remember buying Dungeoneer's Survival Guide there -- and sometimes it amazes me that it's still going on and I'm still going.

The FATE supers playtest was a hit, and confirmed what I'd suspected: that this power-tier/die-replacement method really, really works for me. Everyone had a great time, and the characters felt appropriately "super." The mix of contemporary character aspects and Silver Age-y campaign aspects worked fine -- "[See issue #4. --Ed.]" ended up being tagged and everything! And "Power and Responsibility" was good for a few compels to make sure at least one of the PCs stayed in the story when the player was somewhat at a loss.

The plot involved a science class full of giant ants, an villainous ape named the Headmaster, Insectobots, a final showdown with the insect-themed supervillain the Dementomologist, and much more (including some creatively used donuts and beer cans). Along the way, they racked up a few Heroic consequences: Becky's Mad at Chet (created by a character with a secret crush on Chet, attempting to drive a wedge between him and his girlfriend), Gas Leak, Chemical Spill, and Acid-Splashed Bystanders. That last one was a Severe consequence, so if we were to keep playing beyond that one-shot, I'd have to change one of the campaign aspects to reflect the fact that the heroes allowed some innocent bystanders to get in the line of fire of the Dementomologist's Insectobots and their formic acid cannons.

Right now, I can't think of anything that I'd change apart from a couple minor behind-the-scenes things to do with the cost of some trappings. That's pretty remarkable and rare -- I almost always come out of these things with a few changes to make.

But this time, everything went swimmingly. The invoke-for-effect to add a trapping to a power came up enough that it was clearly a good safety-net addition, but not so much that it was a problem. For example, when Morgan realized that his super-strong opponent Ajax had a weakness for sonic-based attacks, he grabbed a couple pieces of sheet metal, spent a Fate Point to add the Unusual (Sonic) topping to his Physical Conditioning attack, and smashed them against Ajax's ears like a pair of cymbals.

(Moreover, that fight involved Morgan, playing the super-powered quarterback MVP, shouting "Let's do this, Greek Week!" at Ajax -- then taking a 12-stress hit from his Trojan War-themed foe. So double-plus good, that.)

Granted, it wasn't an extremely rigorous playtest -- the PCs and one notable enemy were built on 80 points, whereas most of the opposition was built on around half that -- but at this point, the only things I'd want to change would be in character creation. After those tweaks, the next step would be giving the rules to a player and letting them make their own. I find there's often a world of difference between my thought process when making pregens for a specific scenario and a player's thought process when making their own character for an entire campaign.

I can't talk about my game, though, without mentioning the other FATE game I was in: Morgan's Sky Pirates of the South China Seas game. Pulp aviation and adventure, 1930s-style! I was Ignacy "Phoenix" Sokolof, an Austro-Hungarian "Honorable Enemy Ace." My fighter-bomber had an aspect of "NEERRROOWWWW!!!" Good times.

Like I said in an earlier post, before the con we'd talked a bit about how to do dogfighting. Now that we've seen those dogfighting rules in action, Morgan and I agree they're less than ideal. I mean, the game was still great -- don't misunderstand me there. It's just that the rules didn't feel very... playtested. On paper, they look great: You have to get in position before you can make an attack, and getting in position requires getting spin on an opposed Pilot roll. On your turn, you can maneuver to create an aspect, or make a positioning roll. I mean, on the face of it, it's not so different from my swashbuckling Advantage thing.

However, it has the same problems the Advantage system had, as originally written. One, it can have the undesirable side effect of making combat drag. Round One: Maneuver. Round Two: Position. Round Three: Oh, he beat me by three on a Pilot roll, so now he's escaped. Back to Round One. You can cut that down a round by skipping the maneuvering, but that's, like, skipping what's supposed to be the fun, desirable bit: creating aspects.

In the meantime, once you get position and attack, you aren't actually all that better off than you'd be in, say, a fistfight. Dogfighting is all about "waxing" your opponent's "fanny," in old WWII fighter-pilot parlance (apologies to my British readers -- "fanny" means something different to you, but there's nothing I can do about that). That is, once you get behind the enemy plane, he's done for. But not with these dogfighting rules, and that's a problem. You invest multiple rounds in maneuvering and positioning, and your payoff is likely to be, say, two points of stress. That ain't right.

James Ritter, also a player in that game, suggested requiring three aspects before being able to attack. This makes aspect-creation more central to the process, but it also means that you'll only be able to attack every four rounds. At least you'll be able to tag those three aspects for a +6, but still, things shouldn't be moving that slowly. I countered with the idea that you'd be able to create one aspect per two shifts, but that's more or less trading Fate Points for time. Whether that's a good or bad thing is your call.

My quick fix would be to eliminate the separation between maneuvering and positioning, and say that getting spin on any opposed skill roll with your target will get you in position. I understand that it makes things easier, but it also makes them faster, and that's a fair trade, if you ask me.

In the end, it was probably only me, Morgan, and James who gave it all that much thought. Half the table were FATE newbies, and it was good (as it always is) to see people new to the game get used to its concepts and mechanics. As the pilot of a fighter-bomber, I enjoyed maneuvering as much as possible to let my gunner get plenty of spotlight time by tagging all those aspects. Any game where you blow up a zeppelin is all right by me.

Supers: Three OrcCon Characters

All six PCs for OrcCon are done (well... one of them's about 90% done), so I figured I'd post a few character sheets so people could check them out.

MVP, the physically enhanced football star
Gold Star, the psychic overachiever
Madcap, the wisecracking speedster (having some trouble with the website on this one)

I also have a "campaign sheet" with the game's campaign aspects, space to list Heroic consequences, and a quick rundown on how power tiers work.

In case anyone's curious, the campaign aspects are

• Power and Responsibility
• Secret Identities
• Splash Page!
• Code Against Killing
• [See Issue #4. --Ed.]
• Monologue

Tone-wise, it's apparently a sort of mish-mash between ironically detached, modern-day teen heroes and Silver Age tropes. In fact, it's almost an even split between the PCs' aspects and the campaign aspects. We'll see how that works out.

Supers: Consequence Pools

I was thinking about this team of supervillain-types the PCs will encounter in my FATE supers OrcCon game, and two things occurred to me:

1. These aren't minions, but neither are they important enough to the story to warrant full PC-like treatment. Stress tracks, sans consequences, seem like a disservice.
2. I don't want to track consequences for five or six named NPCs at once.

So it hit me: I already effectively have a "pool" of consequences for the campaign. Why not have something similar shared by the team? Say, four Minor and three Moderate -- enough that everyone should have the chance to take one, but not so many that more than one or two of them could take more than one.

Logistically, I'd fill in the consequences as they were taken and indicate with initials or something who'd taken which ones, so they can still be tagged without confusion. I think it's kinda interesting for a group of traditionally selfish badguys to share survivability like that. It'd be interesting on the player side, too, but not for this game. (Y'know what I bet it'd work great for? Survival horror.)

Then I thought of this other thing: Tie it into the Fate Point economy. Normally, as a GM, I allot Fate Points to myself on a per-scene basis, not per-character. It feels more appropriate from a narrative point of view and makes it easy to control how tough, long, or important a conflict will be. For every one of these shared consequences I take, I lose a Fate Point. I can continue to take consequences after I'm out of Fate Points, though.

What about making it weirder than that? What about being able to take a consequence in lieu of spending a Fate Point? What about not giving myself Fate Points at all, and only having consequences? On a single-character basis, this wouldn't work, but if I'd have 10 Fate Points spread between five characters, how much would it screw things up to give myself, say, six Minor consequences and four Moderate consequences instead? Or fewer than that, but Minor consequences give me the usual +2 bonus and Moderate consequences give me a +4? It'd definitely make the badguys more vulnerable, since they're going to rack up consequences with trivial ease, but I could temper it by making the Minor consequences fragile -- they can't be "spent" again, but once they're tagged they're gone. And tagging a Moderate consequence frees up a Minor consequence slot.

In essence, it'd be a Fate Point economy without the Fate Points. I can't figure out if I like it or if it's just an odd idea that I'm curious to see in play.

Either way, I'm feeling pretty good about the shared consequence pool on a conceptual level. Anyone have experience with doing this kind of thing?

Supers: Two Characters for OrcCon

I'm having a pretty good time here making pre-gens for this FATE supers game I'm running at OrcCon, so I figured I'd post a couple of them here to be scrutinized.

Here's the blurb for the game:

Final Exam Crisis!

Are you ready for some exciting but essentially non-lethal Silver Age-type action? When supervillainy threatens Pacific City, it's up to Seaside High School's motley assortment of teenage superheroes to put a stop to it. And during finals week, no less! Come playtest this new superheroic version of FATE, the ruleset that powers Spirit of the Century, Diaspora, and the upcoming Legends of Anglerre.

See how everyone got a plug there?

First up is one of the aforesaid motley assortment of teenage superheroes. When she isn't fighting crime, Gold Star is the future valedictorian of Seaside High, Class of 2011. She's the type who does crosswords to improve her SAT scores and who organizes everything in a ten-foot radius within an inch of its life. As Gold Star, her powers include telepathy, telekinesis, low-grade mind control, and that kinda thing. She's hunted by the Headmaster, a sort of evil-ish version of Professor X -- a powerful psychic who collects the smartest metahumans he can find and puts them to use for his own nefarious purposes. Gold Star would be a good get for him. (Her Catchphrase aspect is empty -- that's for the player to fill in.)

Gold Star (PC)

• Skills:
• +4: Academics
  
• +3: Telepathy (M), Investigation
  
• +2: Telekinesis (E), Science, Resolve
  
• +1: Alertness, Contacting, Athletics, Rapport, Computers
  
• Cost: 21
• Super-Skills:
• Telepathy (Mundane)
• Trappings: Persuasion (Mental, Range), Reading People (Mental, Range), Detect Lies (Mental), Attack (Mental, Range)
  
• Complication: Hunted by the Headmaster
  
• Cost: 27
• Telekinesis (Extraordinary)
• Trappings: Attack (Range), Move (Unusual, Spread), Parry (Range), Physical Force (Range, Spread)
  
• Major Complication: Honest to a Fault
  
• Cost: 22
• Stunts:
• Cost: 0
• Refresh: 2
• Cost: 10
• Aspects:
• Concept: Psychic Overachiever
  
• Catchphrase:
• Complication: Hunted by the Headmaster
  
• Major Complication: Honest to a Fault
  
• "Harvard's my safety school"
  
• Extra-Curricular Activities
  
• Mind Over Matter

I'm ashamed of and giggly about Electro-Cute's name in equal measure. Fortunately, by the time the game starts, she's left this nom de villainy behind. Still, come on -- she's an electricity controller who considers her physical attractiveness to be her most important asset. At the same time, she's bitter over not being the most popular girl in school (that honor belongs to Heather Donaway, aka Clique, one of the other PCs) and possessed of a near-pathological greed. Electro-Cute may be a ridiculous name, but it's exactly the sort of name she'd come up with. This version of her doesn't actually show up in the game; it's just for fun.

Note that Electro-Cute has a Complication: Secret ID aspect, whereas Gold Star doesn't. That's because, for this game, "Secret ID" is a campaign aspect.


Electro-Cute (NPC)

• Skills:
• +4: Rapport
• +3: Electric Blast (E), Deceit
• +2: Art, Athletics, Alertness
• +1: Stealth, Empathy, Contacting, Electricity Control (E)
• Cost: 20
• Super-Skills:
• Electric Blast (Extraordinary)
• Trappings: Attack (Range)
• Complication: Secret ID
• Cost: 10
• Electricity Control (Extraordinary)
• Trappings: Security, Invulnerability (Electricity)
• Major Complication: Greedy (-1 point)
• Cost: 10
• Stunts:
• +2 Empathy with assessments
• Use Deceit instead of Empathy to detect lies
• +1 Athletics to dodge
• Cost: 15
•  Refresh: 5
• Cost: 25
• Aspects:
• Concept: Electricity Controller
• Catchphrase: "Shocking, isn't it?"
• Complication: Secret ID
• Major Complication: Greedy
• Catfight!
• Determined to Take Down Heather Donaway
• Style Over Substance

As you can see (or could guess), characters have seven aspects: a Concept, a Catchphrase, and five "free" aspects. Complications, Weaknesses, and Items (but not Snags) take up these "free" aspect slots. The upshot is that having super-skills means limiting either the scope of your powers (with Snags) or the nature of your aspects (by devoting some of those aspect slots to Complications, Weaknesses, or Items).

The game's set for Saturday the 13th at 8:00 pm, so if you're going to OrcCon, come on by and check it out!

Supers: Heroic Consequences

Let's leave aside for a moment all this stuff about how to handle powers and instead talk about this other thing, which I'm calling, at least temporarily, Heroic consequences.

Heroic consequences are a third "pool" of consequences (in addition to the usual Physical and Mental), but one shared by the PCs instead of belonging to any of them individually. They represent, and give more significance to, their failures -- stuff like property damage, civilian casualties, falling reputations, and the like. Think of them like campaign aspects, but... y'know, consequences instead.

When a PC fails to defend against an attack, the player can choose to reduce the incoming stress (because we're using that, at least for the time being) with either one of his own consequences, or a Heroic consequence. The latter means that the PC gets the reduce the stress without suffering himself, but something bad happens to the environment around him. An innocent bystander could get knocked out, a car could be crushed, an office building could burst into flames, the public could turn against the PCs -- whatever.

For example, Roborilla, the supervillainous robotic gorilla, throws a compact car at the Blue Knight, who throws up one of his trademark blue force fields to stop it. But he's too late -- his defense roll fails by 4. The Blue Knight has three choices:

1. He can take 4 Health stress, a result of dodging out of the way in the nick of time. 
2. He can take a Physical consequence, like "Knocked Off Balance" or "Cracked Ribs." The car's hit him, and he's worse off for it.
   
3. He can reduce that 4 Health stress with a Heroic consequence, like "Smashed Storefront" or "Civilian Trapped Under Car." The car's missed him, but it's caused some trouble elsewhere in the scene.
   

So in one sense, it makes the PCs a little hardier in the face of head-exploding super-strength punches and brain-melting psychic blasts. More importantly, though, Heroic consequences obey the usual rules (well, my usual rules, anyway) of consequences.

To recap: Minor consequences go away at the end of a scene, Moderate consequences can only be removed with a Great skill check, and Severe consequences only go away at the end of the story -- but they change an aspect when they do.

So going back to the example of Roborilla and the Blue Knight, "Smashed Storefront" is a Minor consequence. It's not really something the PCs are going to be expected to set right. We can assume that it's mundane enough that someone else will take care of it later. However, it still represents collateral damage, and the PCs are still indirectly responsible (Roborilla was throwing that car at the Blue Knight, after all), so it's fair game for a Heroic consequence.

"Civilian Trapped Under Car," though, is best as a Moderate consequence. It's a clear and present dilemma for the PCs to solve, either during the scene or right after (after that, for a consequence like that, it's too late -- the story's moved on to the next scene). If they don't solve it, the consequence sticks around -- and the next time they might want to take a Moderate Heroic consequence, maybe they'll have to take a Severe consequence instead, maybe something to do with the fact that they just left some dude to be slowly crushed under a car. "Public Turns on the Hero League," say. At the end of the story, one of the campaign aspects changes to reflect the public's similarly changing attitudes towards the PCs.  For example, "Hero League to the Rescue!" could become "Misunderstood Heroes."

How late is too late to deal with a Moderate consequence? Right now it's a matter of common sense, I think. If a guy's trapped under a car, he'll need immediate assistance. I'd say that if you don't take care of it before the next scene, you missed your chance to clear that consequence slot. If your reputation takes damage, though, that's more of a long-term issue, and something you should be able to try to remedy almost anytime. Of course, it's also more involved than a single civilian under a car -- you need to call a press conference, get yourself on TV, or something along those lines. It's all very Marvel.

Here's another one: Ultra-Violence drops a hostage from the top of a 10-story building. If the PC fails to save the hostage (by flying up and catching him, using TK to get him safely to the ground, cushioning his fall with an awning or something, etc.), he can take a personal consequence, indicating that the hostage actually was saved, but the rescue took a toll on the PC. It can be something as minor as being winded or as significant as almost killing himself in the process of saving an innocent life. Alternately, if the PC goes for a Heroic consequence instead, that indicates that the guy actually was hurt, if not killed, in the fall. He can walk away from a Minor Heroic consequence, a Moderate Heroic consequence will probably require medical attention (or, if the consequence involves the PCs' reputation instead, a Great Art or Rapport effort later on), and a Severe consequence will likely mean the hostage fell to his death.

The upshot is that these Heroic consequences can help drive the narrative. "Building On Fire"? Someone should probably take the time to put that fire out, possibly in the midst of combat if they want to free up that consequence slot for use later in the scene. Press conference? Failing to get the press on your side may be a Moderate Mental consequence ("Frustrated!") or a Moderate Heroic consequence ("Front-Page Hatchet Job") -- and if the latter, you probably want to get that cleared up, before your poor public image bites you in the ass later (i.e., you only get one Moderate Heroic consequence, so if you don't clear it, you may find yourself stuck with a Severe Heroic consequence later on).

Lastly, Heroic consequences can be tagged or compelled like any other consequence, as long as it makes sense. "Smashed Storefront" might not make for an easy compel, but "Civilian Trapped Under Car" sure does. A supervillain attempting to cow an auditorium full of would-be victims is going to be able to tag your "Distrusted by the Public" Heroic consequence as part of his Art roll, because these poor people just don't have any confidence that their "heroes" are going to save them.

Supers: The Defense Dilemma

As pleased as I am with the progress that's being made on this (on a daily basis, no less!), I'm not so taken with it that I don't recognize its flaws. And even if I were, I have commenter Robert Stehwien, aka The Guy Who Keeps Me Honest, to point them out, which is awesome. No, really -- it is. I mean, I know it's hard to read tone of voice over the Internet, so you may want to take that "awesome" as sarcastic, but seriously, it's sincere.

Specifically, the issue that keeps coming up is the Defense Dilemma: If you haven't bought up your mental and physical defenses to Extraordinary or above, you're boned the first time you run into Jean Grey or Superman. This potential pitfall exists in other games, too -- most notably Hero and M&M -- but that doesn't change the fact that it's a pitfall. On one hand, I'm heartless and inflexible. Of course someone without appropriate defenses is going to be screwed, and rightly so. But my frosted side knows it isn't fun to get one-shotted by a psychic from a mile away.

So, in the spirit of that, here are a couple clarifications currently present in the rules as they stand.

First, a mental attack is defined as the Attack trapping plus the Unusual topping, to account for its telepathic aspect. Those two plus Range makes your standard Ego Whip at least one trapping more expensive than a run-of-the-mill attack power like force beams or fireballs.

Second, as free hatani has pointed out:

Correct me if I am wrong, but couldn't Superman, under you hack, just pay a Fate point to gain "Mental Defense" trapping on his Super-skill for the scene?

 This is absolutely correct, as I acknowledged in the comments yesterday, with two caveats:

1. Superman's Concept aspect must be something that could reasonably be invoked for effect to improve his Mental Resistance. It doesn't have to be dead-on perfect or anything -- "Last Son of Krypton" would be fine, if the player could make a case for it. It references the fact that he's an alien, so maybe his alien mind is harder for a psionicist to navigate. "It's A Bird! It's A Plane! It's Superman!" would be less fine, because it doesn't reference anything except the fact that he's neither a bird nor a plane.
   
2. Superman must have a super-skill onto which Mental Resistance could reasonably be tacked. As with the Concept aspect, as long as it's close enough, it's fine. Not to repeat myself from yesterday, but a super-skill called Alien Physiology would work, Man of Steel might, with a lenient GM, and Kryptonian Vision just would not do, ever.

So those are the checks in place right now against the Defense Dilemma. Clearly, there are some conditions that need to be met for the invoke-for-effect to actually work -- if your Concept aspect is "Sci-Fi Cowboy" and your super-skills are things like Six-Guns and Space-Bronco-Buster, odds are you're still screwed. And charging an additional trapping makes a mental attack power more expensive, true, but that's hardly a roadblock to abuse.

Keeping that in mind, here are some other things I'm considering:

• Make Psychic a topping of its own worth two trappings. You'd apply it to any trapping that doesn't already fall into that category, like Attack or Perceive.
• Invoke an aspect for effect to increase the tier of a defensive skill for one exchange. That's not exactly elegant, but nor is it unthinkable.
• Reduce starting points to 80 instead of 100. Combined with the Psychic topping, this would make mental attacks a more serious investment. Hell, I might do this anyway, psychic attacks or no. It isn't a nice round number like 100, but there's more to this than nice round numbers.
• Something involving consequences that I'm not ready to discuss yet. 

Thanks again, guys, for keeping the discussion going! It's helping!

Supers: Sample Characters

All right. Let's put this thing to the test. Here's a Superman knock-off built on 100 points. I think he came out pretty good. He doesn't do everything every Superman can do, but he can fly, toss a bus around, see through walls, and burn holes in things just by looking at 'em. That's close enough for me.

Note that because I plugged in a standard skill pyramid with an apex skill of Great, I've just abstracted his skill costs to 20 points. However, there's no need he has to follow the standard pyramid -- I could probably squeeze another few points out of there if I wanted to -- but I wanted to make him as well-rounded as possible.

Incidentally, here's the tiers (and the cost of a stunt that lets you have a skill in that tier) so far:
Mundane (0 points)
Extraordinary (10 points)
Superhuman (20 points)
Godlike (30 points)
Cosmic (40 points)

Paragon (100 points):

• Standard skill pyramid peaking at Great (20 points)
• Superhuman Stunt: Great Super-Strength (20 points)
• Trappings: Physical Force, Attack, Physical Resistance
• Major Weakness: Riptonite (-4 points)
  
• Extraordinary Stunt: Good Flight (10 points)
• Trappings: Move, Unusual (Flight)
• Complication: Lana Lane
  
• Extraordinary Stunt: Fair Riptonian Eyes (10 points)
  
• Trappings: Examine, Unusual (X-Ray), Attack, Ranged (Heat Vision)
  
• Snag: No x-ray vision through lead
  
• +2 Trappings for Fair Riptonian Eyes (4 points)
  
• +1 Trapping for Great Super-Strength (4 points)
  
• 2 Refresh (10 points)
• +1 Average skill (1 point)

It all looks pretty self-explanatory to me, but just in case it isn't:

• Physical Force is a combination of Might's lifting and breaking trappings. (It seems unreasonable to be able to do one but not the other, so they've been combined.) Paragon can use his Super-Strength to be super-strong.
• Attack lets him use the super-skill to cause damage. This does mean that he's a totally awesome fist-fighter, which isn't completely in line with Superman, but I'm thinking about work-arounds for that. For example, if his regular Fists skill is Good, maybe we could re-interpret the rules for complementary skills a little to say that his Super-Strength complements the tier of his Fists skill, bumping it up from Mundane to Extraordinary. That sounds pretty good to me, but I haven't given it much thought. If that were the case, I'd replace that Attack with Health Capacity, which would let the super-skill grant him bonus Health stress boxes. (It feels weird to talk about stress tracks....)
  
• Physical Resistance lets him use his Super-Strength to defend against physical attacks, not by dodging (a separate trapping) but by "taking it." He relies on his toughness to shake off damage, but his ability to avoid attacks isn't exceptional. If he uses this skill to defend against a non-damaging physical attack, his effective skill is Mediocre (and his effective tier should probably be Mundane, as well).
• Unusual is a topping that lets a trapping work differently than usual -- in this case, it changes the Move trapping from ground movement to flight. The mechanical upshot of this is that it should let him ignore all but the largest barriers.
  
• Examine is careful, prolonged examination of something, the main component of Investigation. The Unusual (X-Ray) topping lets him use Examine to see through walls.
• Ranged lets him use the Attack trapping of his Riptonian Vision at range -- it's his heat vision. Without it, the player could still flavor it as heat vision, but he'd only be able to affect targets in the same zone.
• Snag is a limitation on his Riptonian Vision, but not common enough to warrant a Major Snag (which would in turn net him an additional trapping for his Riptonian Vision).

Note that he's still left with 2 Refresh, which isn't terrible, really, but is still pretty low. Can't get much lower, really. Just the way it should be.

Something I noticed about the Snags and Weaknesses is that it encourages you to take a Major one of those on your most-expensive super-skills -- if you take a Major Snag on an Average super-skill, it only gets you 1 point, but on a Great super-skill it's worth 4 points. In other words, it's more efficient to put greater limits on your biggest powers than on your smallest ones. A happy accident!

(Two hours later....)

I couldn't stay away. Here's another character, this time a Captain America/drum corps tribute named Vanguard.

Vanguard (100 points):

• Standard Skill Pyramid peaking at Great (20 points)
• Extraordinary Stunt: Great Super-Soldier (10 points)
• Trappings: Dodge, Health Capacity, Attack
  
• Complication: Secret ID
  
• Extraordinary Stunt: Good Vanguard Shield (10 points)
• Trappings: Physical Resistance, Parry, Unusual (vs. Ranged Attacks), Attack, Ranged
• Obvious Item (-3 points)
• Extraordinary Stunt: Fair Resolve (10 points)
• Major Complication: Code of Honor (-2 points)
  
• +2 Trappings for Good Vanguard Shield (6 points)
• +1 Trapping for Great Super-Soldier (4 points)
  
• Two stunts (10 points)
• 7 Refresh (35 points)

Really pleased with how this guy turned out. There's a little min-maxing to be done here, for an enterprising player -- that Major Complication could be stuck on his Super-Strength instead of his Resolve, which would net him one more point -- but that's okay. Another Average skill isn't going to break anything.

Supers: Quick Update

Just a minor update here to say that progress continues to be made on this.

I combed through SotC's skill list and extracted every trapping, explicit and implied, for a Big List of Trappings, then culled from there -- renaming, deleting, combining, adding -- for what looks to be a pretty decent selection. Funnily enough, in practical terms, it's really a list of powers. It's just that every real "power" in this conversion will essentially be the equivalent of a Hero multipower, or an M&M framework.

Similarly, some effects are best achieved through what I'm calling Toppings for now, probably because I'm hungry for frozen yogurt. They're essentially advantages and limitations, but severely streamlined into just a few broad categories each, and taking inspiration from SotC's gadget-creation rules. Despite the slight increase in fiddliness these add, I really do believe it's the way to go (for now, anyway). What added crunch there is disappears after character creation, which remains a concept-focused process.

Even still, I have the uneasy feeling that this is how Champions got started. And that way, as far as FATE is concerned, lies madness.

Hopefully sometime in the coming week I can post some sample characters, but before I do that I have to figure out how many points to budget for an "average" superhero. I will, however, enjoy puzzling that out.

Supers: In Which I Shoot Everyone Down

No, I'm just kidding. I sincerely appreciate all the feedback. It was great to come back from a day at Crystal Cove and see all the discussion my last post engendered. I'm going to try to go through the suggestions and comments and respond semi-intelligently. This is a long post, though, so... fairly warned be ye, says I.

Instead of replacing the Fudge dice with d6, how about adding more Fudge dice but you still keep the best set of 4.

That's exactly what I do with fencing styles in my swashbuckling hack -- knowing a style means you're more likely to make the best of the situation. It's great for increasing the odds of a character doing the best a human can do. I want something more than that here, though. I want superpowers to let you do things normal humans just can't do.

However, I have considered this as an alternate Will mechanic for supers. Instead of replacing Fudge dice, you add more and roll-and-keep. An unintended but appropriate side-effect is that it's less efficient to spend Will on attacks versus lower-tier defenses than it is against higher-tier defenses.

Perhaps stated more appropriately, what's a reasonable way to translate these characters into a form where we can continue to "play at the speed of FATE" and still have any hope of doing these characters justice?

That's a good question, and something that weighs heavily on my mind as I muddle through this. Moving closer to a pure point-buy FATE feels alarmingly like re-inventing Hero. At all costs, this supers thing must avoid being (or feeling) that crunchy. It's not what I want, and it certainly isn't what the system does best. When I start thinking about having to list a super-skill's trappings in addition to everything else that's already on the character sheet, it seems a little overwhelming, but I'm convinced it wouldn't actually be overwhelming in practice.

One thing the powers-as-trappings model does that's a radical departure from other FATE hacks I've done/seen is that it makes characters much more individualized where skills are concerned. Sure, every FATE character has his own set of aspects, but you can always count on, say, Fists being Fists no matter where you go. With this, though, one character's Fists will likely differ from another's Martial Arts, and each character's liable to "play" a little differently. That's definitely something that feels more like Hero or M&M than FATE. I'm not sure how I feel about that, but I'm also too curious to see how this would work to turn back now.

The more broad the skill/power the more it costs per "die" in WT (a dice pool system).

It'd essentially work the same way here, incidentally. You get your free trappings, but the more trappings you tack onto a super-skill the more it costs. A few cheaper, narrowly focused super-skills, or fewer, broader super-skills at a greater cost?

And yeah, the effectiveness of that broad factor is definitely weighted towards the knowledgeable / experienced player.

This goes back to that character-differentiation thing I was talking about. Your choices in character creation become more important than in SotC -- at least, it seems that way to me. But I don't want a lack of foresight to cripple a PC (unlike in that other game -- you know the one I'm talking about!), so the plan is to allow a player to invoke the character's Concept aspect for effect to add a trapping to a power for... a scene? An exchange? I don't know. Probably the former.

Hmmm. Interesting direction. I would like to say, I prefer the three scale thing. Simple, clean, and easy to remember.

I understand and anticipated this reaction. My answer is "Then only use the first three tiers." Seriously, it won't break the system. If the issue is that you just prefer to absoluteness of the earlier proposal, then that's a whole other thing. Personally, I steered away from that because of Robert's contention that the first thing he'd do in chargen would be to find a reason to buy up his defensive skills whether it made sense or not, because if he didn't he'd be auto-screwed. If it works for you, though, go for it.

I don't like a constant d6 die sub for scale difference. I think it runs into the same problem as a bloated scale. "I rolled a +15. What did you roll?"

Well, that isn't as likely to come up as you think. If you got a +15 for your effort, it's because you're facing off against someone who's probably a few tiers below you, in which case that guy should be screwed. He just isn't auto-screwed simply because he forgot to get Super-Resolve. He can spend invoke and tag, or even just roll well, and still have a slight chance of walking away from this one. Not a very good chance, but a chance nonetheless.

Just in case it wasn't clear from my last post: Since you're taking the difference of tiers into account, if two combatants are dealing with each other using skills in the same tier, it's a straight 4dF + skill. No d6s are involved. If Superman punches non-powered Lex Luthor in the face, he's rolling a few d6s, but if he punches power-armor-suited, Superhuman-skill-having Lex, it's business as usual.

And I will tell you now that, in my experience, 3dF + 1d6 does not usually wildly better results than 4dF. Probability be damned. I can't tell you how often someone's rolled --- and 1, but I can tell you I've only seen +++ and 6, like, twice. The plural of "anecdote" isn't "data," of course, but I've seen enough of the die-replacement thing in action to be comfortable with a one-tier difference in skills.

I think it's a fair assumption that supers often face off against other supers. Unless you're fighting mooks, the odds of you replacing more than a Fudge die or two are probably pretty slim -- and thanks to the standard gang-up rules, a few Good-quality minions can still pose a threat to a super a tier or two above them, and large group of them (10+) would still threaten just about anybody, especially if they're well armed (e.g., wielding weapons that bump their attacks up a tier, which is very easy to implement here). That's not normally how we handle groups of minions in FATE, but whatever.

How about this? You can't attack a higher scale without tagging a Weakness, but you can place Maneuvers! Has to fit the narrative, of course. Those thugs won't put a scratch on ol' Supes without a really good Aspect or Weakness to tag. But can they make him "Disracted", have him "Entangled", or even "Irritate" him? You betcha'. In fact that is their purpose. Not to threaten heroes. To slow them down, to complicate things, and of course to fall down before them in great numbers.

This is a very interesting idea -- the can't-attack-without-tagging-a-weakness bit. I'm just not sure it works for everyone. It's great for Superman, but not every superhero has a weakness that works like that, or a weakness at all. The Hulk seems to take a point or two of stress from heavy artillery now and then, but I'd hardly say that his weakness is artillery. What about the Flash? He manages to get tripped up by a mundane explosion in his path every so often, but not reliably enough that I'd call it a weakness.

I guess what I'm getting at is that I like those corner cases, and I want to retain them. That's another area where the former proposition wasn't working for me.

As for the maneuvers -- you betcha, indeed. None of that runs contrary to any version of FATE I've seen, and it's a great way to play hordes of minions.

Rolling the dice should always be important. So Superman isn't rolling to see if he hits a mook. Of course he does. He is rolling to be able to narrate how he does it heroically.

Agreed. Fortunately, we have overflow, so a really fantastic hit against one mook means taking out a group of them, and that's where the rolling stays relevant. Naturally, the player is free to narrate that however he wants, and if he does so in a way that goes against his nature, the GM should compel an aspect to keep him in line.

I'm equally comfortable with a hero dropping a wall on a group of mooks, or taking one of them out so handily that the others just turn tail and run, as long as the player's choice is consistent with the hero's concept and aspects.

Have you looked at a game called Risus?

Indeed, I know Risus pretty well; it and PDQ had an obvious influence on my aspects-as-skills idea from a couple months ago. I'm not into inserting multiple die types into this, though, beyond the d6 (although in other games, I'm all for it).

It may also help to check out some of the discussion of the Dresden RPG about Freewill vs Nature (sorry, can't find a link). Purchasing supernatural powers reduces refresh -- the extreme case would be starting a session with 0 FATE points.

While I'm largely in the dark about DFRPG -- not by choice, I assure you! -- I do know about the powers-reduce-Refresh thing. I'm going for a practical application of that here by either allowing you to sell back Refresh in exchange for more skill points, or simply making Refresh another thing that costs points. Whatever the point budget would be, it'd necessitate sacrificing Refresh for powers.

Basically, use the original 3 scales and say that skills used for defense to not have a tier.

I do have a concern about Superman (it's always Superman, isn't it?) being able to dodge a little too well, although he should certainly be able to take a hit. FATE doesn't really differentiate between these things, though -- if I let Superman defend against bullets with Man of Steel, it's functionally identical to the Flash defending against the same with his Super-Speed.

One thing that occurred to me today while I was out was splitting up combat trappings rather narrowly, like differentiating between Resist Damage and Dodge. Superman does the former, and the Flash the latter. Again, functional difference? Nonexistent. Flavor difference? Huge. But does it make the game more fun? That, I don't know.

1) Aspects can overcome scale:
- Hit superman with a stick and nothing happens because they are different scales. Put some kryptonite on a stick and the kryptonite aspect overcomes the scale difference.

Indeed, that's exactly what I had in mind. I'm torn on whether I'd charge a Fate Point for it, though. It's kryptonite -- it's going to work every time. I mean, I wouldn't want to charge Sinestro a Fate Point every time he uses something yellow against Green Lantern. My mind's divided between mechanical consistency and common sense.

- In Star Wars, what good are snub fighters going to be against a Death Star? Got the Plans + Found a weakness + manoeuvre down the trench + use the Force and you overcome the scale difference.

Well, we're getting far afield here from the genre, but... I'd call the two-meter exhaust port right below the main port a major weakness, so firing a proton torpedo down there is going to reduce the Death Star's defense by four tiers. I'd still require a roll to hit it, though, which is where "Got the Plans," "Found a Weakness," "Maneuver down the trench," and "Use the Force" come into play. Tag those for a +8 to hit. The torpedoes, I imagine would have some sort of damage modifier, as much as I usually dislike that kind of thing in FATE, but... hey, I'm not responsible for sorting that out using these rules! You tricked me by mentioning Star Wars!

- Don't fire your bazooka at the super hero. Instead fire at the wall behind him. Bazooka + collapsing wall overcomes the scale difference.

The collapsing wall, IMO, is arguably a matter of special effects. It's an aspect to maneuver/tag, sure, but in FATE, if you want to say you shot a guy between the eyes or shot the rope holding up the chandelier to make it fall on him, either way he's defeated. The flavor's up to you. So if the bazooka already boosts your attack by a tier, that's all you need to know in terms of mechanics.

I'm enamored of the basic concept, but I'm not of a mind to change how aspects work (invoke or tag for +1 tier), or to make their functions situational ("If you're evenly matched, they work like this, but if not, they work like that"). I encourage you to take it farther and report back, though, because it's interesting.

Brad Murray (Diaspora) had a suggestion on how to handle giant bugs in his blog that might work.

Awesome -- I'll check that out. My copy of Diaspora just arrived in the mail yesterday, and I dig it. Look for scopes to figure into this hack in the near future.

The really hard part is super vs normal. When superman punches a normal why doesn't the guy's head explode?

Okay, disregarding my quickie answer for the time being, my long-winded answer is essentially the same as my last response: If you want Taken Out to mean his head asplode, or if you want it to mean he's knocked out, that's up to you. The important thing is the end result: He's Taken Out.

If, however, you want to do this Authority-style, it's be an interesting challenge to let the attacker voluntarily pull his punch in an effort to avoid outright killing a dude. I'm not interested in that degree of reality, though, and neither is FATE. I much prefer genre emulation (all the time, always, for all genres), and in this particular one, Superman doesn't roll like that.

Supers: Balancing the Scales

I've been thinking aloud about this whole scaling issue -- specifically, how to handle disparate power levels without climbing higher and higher on the ladder -- and I think I have an answer. Haven't really been able to bounce it off anyone but one loyal reader (at least, I assume you're loyal -- I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt on that one), so here it is for everyone else to take a whack at.

First thing we do is remove the Will mechanic. It's not that I don't like it, because I like it a lot, actually, but it doesn't really work with this new scaling thing. So out it goes, at least in its current incarnation.

Next, instead of three tiers of power, we have five -- 1 to 5, or 0 to 4. Either way. Names are important for flavor, but right now that's up in the air, so let's at least agree on Mundane for the lowest of them and, say, Cosmic for the top end. You get the idea. Like before, skills fit into these tiers and your skill pyramid simultaneously, with some skills designated as Mundane, some as Superhuman, and so on.

When you act against someone else, look at the tiers of your skills. Whoever has the higher tier notes the difference in steps (e.g., Tier 1 vs. Tier 3 means two steps) and replaces that many Fudge dice with d6s. Then roll as normal.

(Yes, this still involves swapping out Fudge dice, but I like that, and I've seen my players like it, so it's a perfectly fine design element as far as I can tell. If you don't like that sort of thing, this won't really work for you at all.)

The point remains to emphasize the difference in power levels between two parties, but still allow them to interact. The latter bit is where the earlier system kinda fell down. More tiers means it isn't easy to just buy up your Mundane skills to Cosmic without spending a boatload of points. How many points, I don't know yet, but it wouldn't be cheap, that's for sure.

So, with that mechanic in mind, look what else we can do. When someone tags your weakness aspect, it reduces your defense by one tier. If your weakness is defined as a "big" weakness (we need another adjective there, obviously), it reduces it by two tiers. Or more, maybe. Maybe it's two and four instead of one and two. The point is, it allows a regular human with kryptonite-on-a-stick to pose a danger to Superman in a way that's internally consistent and fairly elegant. It may even be that the weakness isn't an aspect, or at least not one in the usual sense, but I'm not going there right now.

Why would you have a "big" weakness instead of just a regular one? Because if you take that in conjunction with a super-skill, that super-skill starts with three trappings instead of two.

That reminds me, since I'm rambling anyway. There are three kinds of "negative" aspects: weaknesses, complications, and restrictions. A weakness is what it was in the last post, but complications are limited to things in your personal life -- DNPCs, enemies, secret IDs, and so on. Restrictions are constraints on your super-skills, like "Can't Affect the Color Yellow" or "Power Armor."

Complications and restrictions should have "big" versions, too, with the same extra-trapping trade-off. A big complication means that negotiations for compels start at two Fate Points instead of one. A big restriction is... I dunno. Still thinking about that.

The most shocking thing is probably that I'm thinking of including Diaspora-style stress tracks. Superheroes tend to batter each other a lot pretty casually; it'd feel weird to give, say, the Midnighter a consequence every time he's hit in combat (not that he can be hit in combat, but you get the idea). I like Diaspora's middle ground between SotC and hit point-style stress. It might mitigate some of the potential Authority-scale ultra-violence, too.

Supers: Iron Man's Resolve

I think Robert's comments on my last post are extensive and insightful enough to warrant a full-post response -- the highest honor I can bestow to a reader! -- especially where this passage is concerned:

My concern isn't if Iron Man can take out the minion - of course he can with an apex skill of +5 vs the minions apex of 1 to 3 (the guy with the 3 might be carrying a bazooka).

With different scales as you have proposed where you either need to buy into the scale or spend will to temporarily act on that scale. My concern is more that Iron Man forgetting to take his Resolve to the super scale and Psychic Blast dude with a Fair super scale mental attack being able to casually mop the floor with Iron Man.

First thing I'd buy under your system is a super defense in every conflict category (probably Endurance and Resolve). And when everyone needs to do something like that to "feel playable" then IMHO something is wrong.

I totally understand the concern re: Iron Man's Resolve (didn't Hemingway write that?), and I'm aware this needs tweaking -- possibly past the point of recognition, but that's how these things often go. (I'm less married to the scales than to the player-defined super-skills-plus-trappings thing.)

My concern with removing the scales, or redefining what Superb means based on genre, is that within the supers genre abilities can vary so wildly I'm not sure a scale of +1 to +10 would really cover it. And once we get up past Superb, it really bugs me that the character's bonus far outstrips the variability of the dice. I admit it is more intuitive to just say "I'm the Hulk -- I have +10 Super-Strength!" but the +10 itself puts me off.

This reminds me a bit of something that came up for Legends of Anglerre. When we were tossing around ideas for epic-level characters, an early one someone proposed was the idea that you'd spend spin on an attack to do something extra, or to have an effect -- like spending spin to be able to harm a dragon -- but all that really boils down to is a +3 to the defender's defense. LOA still makes use of spin for epic-level stuff like that (last time I saw it -- who knows what it looks like after editing?), although the problem remains that equally matched high-skill opponents are no more likely to get spin on a roll than their equally matched low-skill counterparts.

That's the kind of thing I want to avoid, and am struggling with (or "with which I struggle"). I'm not comfortable with the Hulk having Superb Might while a mook has Average Might, but nor do I like expanding that range out ad infinitum to accommodate those extremes. I really want the split between Human and Superhuman to be more than a few degrees' difference on the ladder. I fervently believe there's another option, and if separate scales isn't the solution, then there are other switches and dials still left for me to fiddle with.

Supers: Cracking the Nut

Often in the past I've lamented the lack of a supers FATE hack that appeals to me. While I've seen some totally workable supers rules for FATE in the past -- in that I can say "Yes, I see how this would work well for other people who aren't me" -- they've all been either too hand-wavey (all superpowers basically work like the Theory in Practice stunt) or too crunchy (lengthy, pigeon-holing stunt chains) for my tastes. No offense intended to anyone involved in their creation, of course. We just have different tastes.

But! I've been giving it more thought lately for some reason (I've actually made periodic stabs at this one for a couple years, at least) and I think I'm on to something. It's a pretty radical departure from the way I normally handle these conversions, but the superhero genre presents some unique challenges -- consider, for example, that Capes and Champions are both basically trying to do the same thing, albeit in radically different ways.

The first big departure: Skills are bought with points, not merely slotted into a pyramid. Starblazer Adventures does this, and while I'm not usually keen on it (I really dig the simplicity and implicit philosophy of the pyramid), it's the way to go here. So let's say characters start with 35 skill points. That's enough to give you a pyramid that peaks at Superb. Maybe that's too much, but it's not important right now.

These skills are in three broad tiers, which for now we'll call Normal, Enhanced, and Superhuman. Each tier has its own ladder, so you could have Great Athletics (Normal) or Great Athletics (Enhanced) or Great Athletics (Superhuman). As might be expected, Normal covers the normal range of skills in SotC. It's the realm of what normal people (albeit heroic ones) can do. Enhanced is better than that -- Wolverine's speed and olfactory sense, or Wonder Woman's or Luke Cage's strength. Beyond what a human could normally do, but not Earth-shattering. Superhuman is Earth-shattering: Superman's or the Hulk's super-strength, the Flash's super-speed, Daredevil's super-senses. That kinda thing.

Skill ratings are only relevant if you're dealing with an opposing skill that's in the same tier as yours. Otherwise, Enhanced always beats Normal, and Superhuman always beats Enhanced. Go ahead and roll, but it's just for effect. If you have Fists (Enhanced) and your opponent has only has Normal skills for his defense, you defeat him. End of line. I know that seems harsh, but there's a way of mitigating it -- I'll get to it in a bit.

Skills cost a number of skill points equal to their quality (e.g., 3 skill points for a Good skill), plus 5 skill points per tier above Normal (+5 for Enhanced, +10 for Superhuman). So Superb Might (Normal) costs 5 skill points, but Superb Might (Superhuman) costs 15.

That can eat up skill points pretty quickly, but you can "sell back" Refresh to get more. Players can trade Refresh for skill points on a 1:5 basis. Refresh starts at 10. Something that often gets bandied about is lowering Refresh in exchange for superpowers; this is obviously similar, but without the arbitrary factor.

However, no skill list is going to cover everything that superheroes do -- nor would you want a huge skill list for a FATE game anyway. It's antithetical to the system. I'm solving this with super-skills, as so many have doubtless done before me.

There's a generic stunt called Super-Powered (or something) that lets you take an Enhanced or Superhuman skill, or a super-skill. These are player-defined, and can be as specific as Flight or Ice Bolt or as general as Utility Belt or Man of Steel. Super-skills are characterized by their trappings, so... we're going to need a list of skill trappings. When created, a super-skill begins with two trappings for free. Each trapping added on top of that costs skill points equal to the skill's quality.

So you can see the dilemma there: Do you get a cheaper, narrowly focused super-skill, or a more-expensive super-skill with broader application?

For example, that Man of Steel super-skill I mentioned earlier could start with the Physical Force (lifting/breaking) and Toughness (additional physical consequence slots) trappings. Great Man of Steel (Superhuman) with those two trappings would cost 14 skill points. (Of course, it's much funnier as "Average Man of Steel.") Adding the Unarmed Combat trapping would cost another 4 skill points, because its quality is Great, for a total of 18 skill points.

Let's do Utility Belt. There should be a lot of trappings here, if you're making the God-Damned Batman -- stuff like Ranged Combat (batarangs), Climbing (grappling line), Locks, Security, Lab Work, and more. Even with just those five, a Good Utility Belt (Normal) would cost 12 skill points. An Enhanced version of same would be 17 skill points -- nearly half your starting allotment. Better trade in some Refresh.

Don't think you have to buy everything in advance, though. Every character has a special aspect -- his Concept aspect. This is exactly what it sounds like: a brief description of the character's shtick, like Last Son of Krypton, Super-Soldier, World's Greatest Detective, or Fastest Man Alive. Pay a Fate Point to invoke it for effect and get an additional trapping for that super-skill, probably for the length of the scene.

Now then. In addition to the stunt, taking a super-skill also means taking another special aspect, either a Weakness or a Complication. I think we all know what those mean, so I'm not going to dwell on it too much, other than saying that a Weakness is something that's harmful to the character, or something against which his powers are especially weak (kryptonite, the color yellow, "strong magnetic fields" -- always a classic), while a Complication is basically an Aunt May, a Mary-Jane Watson, or a mild-mannered secret ID. You need one of these two for each super-skill you take. There's some more possible motivation to consolidate your superpowers into a small set of super-skills.

A brief word about Will. This is a character resource (as opposed to Fate Points, which are a player resource) that can be tapped when a character wants to put extra effort into something. Spend a point of Will to replace a Fudge die with a d6. But here, you can do something else with it: You can spend a point of Will to bump a skill up one tier for one roll, but only if targeting or defending against a higher-tier skill. For example, if someone's coming at you with Fists (Enhanced), you can spend a point of Will to improve your Athletics from Normal to Enhanced for your defense. But you can't spend Will to get Fists (Enhanced) just to punch out a mook.

How do you get Will? Every time you obtain spin on a roll, you earn a point of Will. Like I said, it's a character resource -- performing well boosts your confidence, and etc.

Will goes by many names -- Chi in "Spirit of the Fist," Elan in "Spirit of the 17th Century," Grit in "Spirit of the West," and so on -- so I'm inclined to call it something different here, too. Whether that's something warm and fuzzy, like Heart, or something more tied to the medium, like Pow!, I really don't know. Whatever it's called, it lets you bridge the gap between skill tiers.

Anyway, this is just the beginning of an idea, I know -- there are a lot of details to iron out -- but I really think it has legs. I haven't been this satisfied with FATE supers since... well, ever.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled Spirit of Greyhawk series.