Fate Condensed

I have never played Fate, but I know something about it's DNA (here's a post about FUDGE). This post is mostly about Fate Condensed.

If Fate Core was too damn crunchy...

FUDGE was a toolkit RPG. You really couldn't just open the book and start playing. You first had to understand its structure and then make some key decisions about what kind of game you were going to play. Because FUDGE was a freeform, universal, do-it-yourself gaming engine. It was a tool you used to build your own RPG.

A lot of minds went into the development of this game. Fate has a rabid following. I really had no idea other than hearing it mentioned on podcasts here-and-there, especially when I started listening to gaming podcasts not laser-focused on the OSR (hey... people play other games!).

(As an aside, I see that Leonard Balsera was a co-creator of the game. In my many investigations of ways to handle initiative, I have heard the term "Balsera initiative" or "popcorn initiative", which I am a huge fan of. It's the initiative style where each player decides who goes next. Like, I go then I say you get to go, etc. Here's a write-up of a version of it.)

The book starts off telling us what we need and telling us what's been changed from Fate Core. Then it goes into the first order of business with any Fate or FUDGE game: what's your setting? Because, remember, these are generic games. I'll talk more about that shortly.

Special Insert: Holy shit... I  just remembered vaguely that maybe I did play in at least one session of Fate several years ago. I have this crude memory of a tank and a revolution... no wait... that's not MY memory! It's a memory of a podcast where they played Fate? Holy shit I'm getting old.
/insert

Next it goes into describing characters. These are the main elements of a character:

I can see the DNA of FUDGE here because there is no straight list of attributes. You have to define your character by their Aspects and Skills and stuff. Now, in FUDGE, from what I remember, you're asked to come up with your own list of attributes. So maybe you're going to do western action and you decide that all characters will have Grit, Smarts, Shootin', and Ridin' as their main attributes. In Fate it seems to be less centralized. Each character has their own individual list of attributes.

This appears to be a very player-facing, player-friendly game.

I remember some podcast or another in which the host expressed a little confusion about how to use Aspects vs. Skills. The text says that Aspects are who you are while Skills are what you can do. That seems like a reasonable distinction but I can also see where it would be confusing in play. If my Aspect is that I'm The World's Deadliest Assassin and I have a Skill called Stab a Bastard... actually as I type this it kinda makes sense, doesn't it? The Aspect is broad and the Skill is narrow.

In fact, that is exactly the descendant of the FUDGE structure. You'd select an attribute, such as Dexterity, and then you'd have your skill, such as dancing. Dex is broad, dance is narrow.

Fate Ladder

Things are rated in +/- with an adjective to describe them. This is straight FUDGE, but they've added 2 additional levels at the top and bottom of the ladder. What I remember about this ratings table is that it doesn't satisfy the desire for granularity. People who love percentile systems where they can get +1% incremental improvements will not love the adjective ladder. However, this is very efficient and clear. It should be intuitive that the person who is a Good shot is a better shot than the person who is Fair. And that's what Steffan O'Sullivan was going for when he created FUDGE. Bravo.

There's a list of 19 standard Skills, such as Athletics, Lore, and Stealth. This list is similar to what you'd see in modern D&D and it seems like it would cover most of the bases for a generic game.

Skills are ranked per the adjective ladder. All PCs begin with 1 Great, 2 Good, 3 Fair, 4 Average, and the rest Mediocre. Seems legit and simple. No fiddly bits here.

Then the text tells you that when you're building your setting you'll want to consider do you want to keep this list or do you want to change it? This list seems custom-made for the most bog standard kind of RPG experience: exploring, fighting, getting treasure. So if you're thinking of using Fate to do a teenage angst drama club melodrama then maybe you'll get rid of Shoot in favor of Freestyle Rap.

I like the FUDGE dice roller.

Stunts are cool and unique things your PC can do that others cannot. Like... Smack Talk Smack Frenzy.

As we get into the details of how to play I spy a really nice, important bit of advice: fiction first. That is, describe what you want to do then figure out how it works in the system. This seems intuitive but I think we all get caught up in what's on our character sheet and forget that this is how RP works.

I played in some D&D 4e games (I think about 10 sessions in total) and this was a really big problem. Let me be clear: the game was fun. I enjoyed the hell out of playing it and would gleefully play again. But I was not doing much roleplaying. It was mostly battle mat combat with minis. I did spend most of my time analyzing my character sheet and deciding which powers to use next. This is the opposite of roleplaying. Fun, but not RP.

No, this is not a sourcebook.

There's a "bogus rule". This seems to be there as a mitigating factor for handling players that will milk the shit out of a system. These are the players who are hardcore gamers. If it is possible to get +10 instead of +9 they will velociraptor the fuck out of that fence until they get +10. So... "I bring down my axe into the wizard's skull. I'm using my... Raised by Frogs Asepct... because... when I leap up I'm looking frog-legged."

Other players: "BOGUS. Denied."

There's a nice bit about creating aspects (small "a") during conflicts. If I'm reading this correctly, it's just a way to formalize the use of terrain, environment, conditions, etc. So if you knock a bookcase over in front of a door maybe that becomes an aspect of the battle: BOOKCASE BLOCKADE. So when your villain tries to escape you can invoke BOOKCASE BLOCKADE and get some mods. Or something like that.

I dig that idea. Not sure how it works in play as I've never tried it. It does feel like the traditional turf of the GM to keep tabs on how that stuff affects a scene. You can do this in any RPG, narratively. But Fate gives you a crunchy rule for it.

There's a lot more to this book. It's 58 pages and what I've talked about so far is through page 28 or something. There is a lot of advice about playing and running the game, NPCs, character development Fate Points, etc. I feel like this book contains a lot of useful tips that are widely applicable to RP in general, not just this game.

And this fucker is free. So, no reason not to check it out. Will I play it? I dunno. Definitely not on my hit list to run and I'll most likely never run it. But I'd happily play in a game being ran by someone else.

That RPG Folder Over the Rainbow

Yet another post in this series, as I sort out my RPG folders, proper like.

Exodus System by Jacob D.C. Ross from Thunderegg Productions is a genre-neutral universal RPG loosely based on a D&D framework (6 abilities, class, level). The system also borrows from Savage Worlds (the abilities are rated by dice steps) and Cypher System (I'm not familiar enough with this to recognize the elements). I also noticed The Black Hack showing up via usage dice.

At a glance, I'm not into this at all. I typically don't enjoy universal RPG systems because it feels like when you try to please everyone you please no one. A lot of people disagree, which is evidenced by Savage Worlds' popularity. When I popped this open and just browsed it, I was turned off by a few things. One is that it's a generic system. Not my jam, but there's nothing at all wrong with that. This is just a preference.

Second thing is the layout. No one is credited with the work, which I think is a bad thing. Always credit your creators. Maybe Ross wrote the game and laid it out? Anyway, there's this HUGE border work that eats up about 40% of each page. That's kind of a lot. It includes chapter headings in big font, which is nice. But the main text is much smaller and confined to a rather small area of the page.

Third thing is the art and how it works with the layout. The art isn't bad, and some of it is really good. The cover isn't bad and there's a killer hawk man on page 5. The credits don't say which artist did which pic, not even the cover, so I don't know who to credit there. Some of the art just feels generic as hell*. And that's probably on purpose since this is a generic game. Some of the images are presented rather small on the page but they seem like they would work well if they were larger. I'm being super picky here, I know.

I haven't read the game. Just browsing how it works, there's some interesting ideas here. You "build your own class" by selecting a party role, combat role, and two flavors. So for example you may create a Face who is a Controller and also a Noble with Energy powers. This is kinda cool, but the language and arrangement is very D&D 4e and maybe World of Warcraft. It's the sort of vanilla treatment of high fantasy at the gaming table. I get it, it's fairly elegant, but it leaves me cold, personally.

This looks like a fairly complete little game and I bet you money it runs smoothly. So definitely check it out, even though I just can't get into it.

*I hate being critical of artists. These creators are good. This is a small, niche game in a small, niche market and they deserve respect and support. So please don't take my criticisms as me picking on them in any way. There isn't a single piece of art in this book that suggests a bad artist. It's just that not a lot of it jumped out at me, and some of that might come down to context. The huge border on each page is extremely sci-fi in an Alternity fashion, but a lot of the art is vanilla high fantasy and sometimes it's a little jarring seeing that juxtaposition. And this is coming from a guy who loves pre-80s fantasy that mixes lasers and unicorns without any concern for genre boundaries.

House of Dogs is a journal of RPG theory and practice. Which is lofty speak for "RPG zine about RPGs". Oddly, the first thing I noticed about this was how its table of contents looks like AD&D. The font is something like Futura and it has the gray bars like a DMG table. Nice touch.

The articles are cool. You got articles discussing Tomb of Horrors, Gardens of Ynn, Fuck For Satan, and more. I really loved David Shugars' discussion of Gardens of Ynn and its wonderful mechanic for travel.

Good read with some interesting art by Odysseus Jones and Evey Lockhart.