Evil Hat Productions’ FATE is one of the increasingly-popular narrative roleplaying games. The narrative nature of the system is what first attracted me, since I am much more a Role-player than a Roll-player. For RPGs, I prefer games with less or simpler mechanics and FFG Star Wars had taught me me how much more fun gaming was when you worked with GM to tell a story rather than viewing him/her as an opponent. FATE is a fun system that is designed to be used for a wide variety of genres and isn’t very expensive. My Friday Night Group has now played three vastly different genres with FATE–Oriental fantasy, futuristic and Dresden Files. Evil Hat offers several iterations of FATE. Core is the full system, while FATE Accelerated (FAE) is somewhat simplified. (Dresden Files is based on an older version of FATE and is a much more complex variant due to the magic-heavy setting.)
The mechanics are based on the FUDGE engine, which uses unusually-marked six-sided dice. Two faces have a + sign, two a – sign and the remaining two are blank, giving results of -4 to +4. Skill ranks and any bonuses are added in. The skill list is fairly short, meaning individual skills are often broad, and GMs are encouraged to develop their own campaign-specific lists. In addition, a character may have three Stunts. These are something like the feats and talents in d20 games, but often specific to the PC, although the books include example stunts. The GM is encouraged to tailor mechanics to their liking, to get the best for their setting and GM style.
Speaking of setting, FATE encourages group involvement with not just character creation, but setting creation. The books push for having the first game session be a GM-and-players collaboration on setting details, campaign theme/tone and how PCs met. Your mileage on this “Session Zero” may vary, depending on how interested the group is. For the most part our group does the traditional thing and leaves setting for the GM to develop and any pre-campaign dealings or relationships between PCs get developed through informal conversations between players. However, we are having similar, just not as formalized or in-depth, discussions for more of our games now, even non-FATE ones.
Another pleasant surprise for me, is the lack of emphasis on purchasing & selecting equipment. With few exceptions–lightsabers–I’m not one of those gamers who wants to spend time choosing from a long list of similar weapons or gear, each better in some way than the others. In FATE, if you have the ability to do something–have the skill–you’re assumed to have the gear to do it. If your spy’s cover is fashion photographer, she’s got, say, her expensive digital camera & pistol; the Red Sonja clone comes with a blade and itty-bitty, teeny-tiny chain mail bikini. And if your pet, weapon, vehicle, or super-gadget is really, really special, there is a mechanic, Extras, to represent it.
The most unique aspect of FATE, though, is Aspects. These are details about the PCs and NPCs that can affect the narrative and check results. Aspects are chosen as part of character creation. Characters have 2 special Aspects, High Concept and Trouble, plus 2 or 3 additional. High Concept is what your PC is or does, such as Woman Samurai or Dashing Starfighter Ace. Trouble is what makes your PC’s life difficult–read, “How the GM can most easily make your PC’s life difficult.” Son of a Traitor or Spurned Alazais the Sorceress might be Troubles. Other Aspects may be personality traits or values, an animal companion, signature or heirloom gear and so forth.
Character Aspects of all types are double-edged, which makes them great adventure hooks, as well as tools for both GM and player to affect encounters. My Woman Samurai’s Heirloom Armor of course protects her when a fight breaks out, but can also be useful in social encounters, with those who realize the wearer is a skilled warrior, or even, in her homeland, that the wearer is the Daimyo’s warrior sister. On the other hand, that same Heirloom Armor enabled a rival doing some dishonorable business to recognize her, making that run-in and the rest of the session extra-troublesome. Combined by a clever GM with the PC’s Trouble of Daimyo’s Legitimized Sister, her personal relationship status just got updated to “It’s Complicated”–in a bad way!
Scenes/encounters also have Aspects (Dark and Stormy Night, Cluttered Floor), added by either GM or, with GM’s okay, players. Characters may also gain temporary aspects (Blinded) from injuries, etc. Like a PC’s or NPC’s personal Aspects, there are rules for utilizing them mechanically, either for free or by spending Fate Points. To me, and some others in my group, this was the hardest part of learning FATE. It wasn’t that this is a complex mechanic; it isn’t any more difficult than FFG’s narrative dice. The problem was that it was so different from even other narrative games we’d played (aside from 1 Dresden veteran).
With your first characters especially, you can feel put on the spot to have to come up with 4 or 5 (preferably cool-sounding) PC traits that will affect you for the entire campaign. This is probably why Core & FAE emphasize that only High Concept and Trouble have to be picked at creation and the rest can be developed in play. Then in our first sessions, those of us new to the system fumbled to figure out how to use Aspects–character and scene–to our advantage. Heck, a couple times people forgot they could do so, period! But, we quickly learned.
Helpful hint: If your group is mostly/all new to FATE, even if they play other narrative games, try something simple first. I suddenly “got” using Aspects when a group member ran a futuristic one-shot where our PCs woke up after being put in cryo-sleep for medical reasons to discover they had been lied to about a lot of things. The GM, while narrating a scenario he’d been wanting to run for a while, asked us to make minimalist FATE PCs and “surprised” us with some additional stunts/aspects in play. I think this set us up well for our current feudal-fantasy Oriental campaign, run by another group member, with a complex background and story. The GM did have us create characters with slightly fewer Skill Points and Stunts than typical FATE PC’s–but not so few that we didn’t have cool and capable PCs. We’ve completed our first arc and we’ve had few problems with mechanics but a lot of fun.
Another thing I like about FATE is that it is budget friendly, especially if you stick to electronic formats. The FATE Core PDF is $5.00 (US) and the physical book (plus PDF) is only $25.00. FAE is even less. Core and many setting PDF prices are on a Pay What You Want basis, in fact. You also can play without the special dice. There are dice rollers and apps that can do FUDGE/FATE. It is also possible to use regular six-siders: 1 or 2 = -1, 3 or 4 = blank and 5 or 6 = +1.
Linda Whitson
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