#if you're not into tabletop gaming this will probably be meaningless to you

[robindaydream]

My tabletop group played a campaign of Fate recently and I have a lot of thoughts about it and it got me thinking a lot about RPG mechanics.

I didn’t love Fate. I think it had a lot of cool ideas, and I liked how it got rid of a lot of the math and dice rolling and multi-page spreadsheets, but ultimately, I don’t think it worked as well in practice as in theory.

For those that don’t know, in Fate, your characters’ core traits are defined by “aspects.” An aspect is just a little phrase about your character that defines some part of them. Maybe a wizard has the aspect “Likes conjuring fire more than controlling it,” or a thief has the aspect “Loves to brag about their accomplishments.” A good aspect has ways you can use it (getting a bonus to casting fire magic, or convincing someone that you can do a job), and ways it can be used against you (being unable to control a spell you cast, or bragging about your illegal activities to the wrong person). Each character starts with a few of them, and they can change as your character does.

And that’s a really cool idea! I love that! I love it because it’s something you could only do in a tabletop game. No computer could replicate a mechanic like that. And I love it because it’s a really simple way of marrying mechanics and narrative. Your aspects describe your character as a person and their place in the world, and they also have a function in the rules of the game. It’s just really neat.

But in practice, I feel like our characters’ aspects didn’t matter as much as they could have. Partly this is because it is actually quite hard to write good aspects. It’s easy to think of defining features of your character, but it’s hard to compress those features into little nuggets of information that will regularly be useful for (or against) you. So it’s easy to make a character and then feel like your aspects aren’t good for anything, or that they’re good for situations you’re never in.

And because invoking an aspect isn’t free, I often felt like “oh I don’t need to use it, so I’ll save up,” which ultimately was always unnecessary. And that all combines into a system that's kind of hard to play with, and ends up feeling like a cool idea that isn’t actually present while playing. I ended up wishing I had more aspects so I could get a little more granular with them and they’d be more useful, and that they didn’t necessarily cost something, or at least didn’t always. It doesn’t make sense to me that a player trying to use their character’s strengths and help tie that narrative and gameplay together should have to pay a cost for it. That seems to me like something that should be encouraged.

Another interesting thing in fate is that there are four basic actions you can take (overcome, create an advantage, attack, defend), and there are rules for how each skill can (or can’t) do each of those actions. Which I think is a really cool, simple system that does a good job of sort of unifying everything and creating a structure for what you can do.

But I also felt like it was overly limiting. The only ways, according to the rules, that you can physically attack is with your fight and shoot skills. And... aside from the fact that I just find that really boring, I think it betrays the narrative focus at the core of the game. Someone should be able to say “My character fights by dancing and jumping around so they attack with athletics” or “my character is just big and heavy and strong so they attack with physique.”

And it could be situational! That athletic character gets stuck in a tight hallway where they have limited mobility and they have to attack with fight. A sneaky character is hidden in the shadows and they get to attack with stealth. To me, this is stuff that should be determined by situational or character reasons, not by “well, the rule book says these are the only skills you can attack with.”

But also, if your characters can attack with a variety of skills, then you can have their targets defend with a variety of skills, too! So maybe an attack using athletics is defended with athletics, but an attack using stealth is defended with notice. And now, rather than one character being the best at fighting, always, different characters and different strategies are more effective against different targets! And that’s fun!

This is something you see in D&D or Pathfinder, where different spellcasters use different stats (intelligence or wisdom or charisma) for spellcasting depending on their class. And I always thought that was a cool idea, and I feel like it could be applied more broadly. I don’t think people should have to feel like they HAVE to take points in a certain stat or skill, if they can come up with how they get around it.

Which, I guess ultimately what I’m saying is players want to make the type of characters they want to make, and they want to be able to do cool shit with those characters, and I don’t think those two things should be in conflict with each other.

Most of this stuff wouldn’t be hard at all to house rule into Fate, really. This is just stuff I thought about a lot while playing it because it’s a system with a lot of interesting ideas that just... *almost* worked. So I spent a lot of time thinking about how I’d make it work myself and I had too many thoughts so I had to write a post about it, haha.