Last week I finally ran a FATE game. Since I was introduced to the notion of FATE over on the Podthralls IK RPG discussion forum a while back, I’ve been intrigued by its core character-creation and conflict-resolution mechanisms. When the Spirit of the Century book was released, I got a chance to see FATE in a focused, genre-specific application and liked it even more. My gears started spinning in an attempt to cram my favorite campaign setting, the Iron Kingdoms, over to the FATE game system. But I’d never actually played the game. This lead to several catches in my master plan.

So it was that when my regular playgroup, which has been playing Serenity lately with Dan as our GM, anticipated a disruption in the number of people that could attend, I figured I’d throw my hat temporarily into the ring to run a quick SotC adventure. I posted a couple of half-completed seed characters online for them to take a look at and choose from, and whipped up a rather simple 1920’s adventure that had an element of high society hobnobbing, globe-trotting, a couple exotic locations, and a plot twist.

So with a single game session under my belt, some observations:

• Aspects: They were received very differently by different players. One player, a bit of a power-gamer, kept looking for opportunities to compel his own aspect to accrue Fate Points. The other two players took a little while start warming up to how much narrative control this game system allows through invoking aspects. Lieutenant O’Neal’s player and I had some difficulty with the “Studied under Sifu Wong” aspect on his character. Dr. Bennett’s player added a number of new aspects to his character sheet that fit nicely with the character concept. I thought this was very encouraging, but we didn’t see them put to much use.
• Skills: The skill system worked pretty much as-expected. Having what amounts to a 0-5 point value for a character’s aptitude in a type of action plus a die roll for -4 to +4 against a set difficulty or opposed roll is familiar and easy for everybody at my gaming table.
• Stunts: Rarely came up, aside from Dr. Bennett using his Might skill in combat, allowed through his Wresting stunt and Burn Out using his Hide in Plain Sight. The shticks I tried to place on the two seed character that got used didn’t really translate well into play. Maybe I didn’t do a good job of communicating Dr. Bennett and Lt. O’Neal’s strengths at the outset, or maybe I just built them wrong. This really showed in conflict resolution.
• Conflict Resolution: Here’s something that I need to tighten up on. When fighting a dozen Fair-quality sword-wielding assassins split into three groups, each player pretty much just had his own little fight, basically just making for some Great-level combat skills on the part of the players going up against some Good-level combat skills (after adjusting for quantity under the minion rules). The bad-guys had started with a couple of maneuvers, throwing smoke bombs and cutting the lights to a ballroom, gaining free tags on the following round (effectively making their attacks Superb at the start of the tussle).

  When making an opposed roll of a Superb attack against a Great defense, it takes a net roll of zero to inflict a single box of stress on the defender. With four Fudge dice rolled, the odds of rolling a -1, 0, or +1 are overwhelming, so there’s not a lot of risk to the defender. My players are allergic to taking damage, and when given the sliver of an opportunity to, will spend Fate Points to avoid taking stress. I’m not sure they understood that stress disappears after a scene, just consequences remain. Add the fact that I happened to roll lousy for NPC attacks and excellent for NPC defense all through the session, combat took a lot longer than it should have, and the players didn’t take a single box of stress during the entire session.

  This extended beyond physical conflict over to social conflict. The player characters confronted the dean of Egyptology in Cairo regarding Al Hashan, the man they believed responsible for the earlier bevy of assassins. I misjudged how tall his skill pyramid should be, and the back-and-forth between the professor and the centurions took several exchanges to resolve, with the professor conceding well before actually being forced to take a consequence and the players again being completely untouched by any stress or consequence. For the remainder of the session I decided to drop social conflict pending a review of the rules and probabilities.

  I’m concerned that if I send a proper gaggle of mooks at the players with a named bad-guy involved, things will go one of two ways that I’m not looking forward to: either the mooks’ bonuses to the named bad-guy plus a couple of decent rolls will totally wipe the floor with the players, or things will bog down into each of the three player-characters making ineffectual individual attacks for several passes, frustrating everybody.

• The Way Ahead: Considering that after four hours of play, each character had 7 or 8 Fate Points remaining, I’m thinking that gently suggesting to use more than one Aspect on a roll, at least when it’s important, will make a world of difference. Two Fate Points will get you a +4, which is as good as a very-unlikely perfect die roll. Nobody had to resort to maneuvers due to point-starvation, which I’m taking as an indication that we weren’t tossing them around quite enough.

There’s always a learning curve when you’ve got four people at the table that have never tried a given system before, especially when there are serious shifts in the balance of power between the GM and the players.