The Campaign Builder's Guild

THE ENTIRE CONTENTS OF THIS POST ARE IDENTIFIED AS OGC AND WILL BE INCORPORATED INTO THE TERRA MACABRE SRD.
[note]Updating with the new information[/note]For those of you familiar with FATE, Terra Macabre will likely come as no surprise. For those of you who have played the Dresden RPG, or read the book, it's going to seem even more familiar. I'm going to be making a number of alterations, of course, but kind of following the maxim of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." We're going to focus at first on the crunchiest bits, then get into the fluffier stuff later.  

Character:
Your character is defined primarily by 3 factors: Your Aspects, Skills, and Attributes. These are broken down in the following categories.

Aspects:
You have two categories of aspects:
High Aspects represent fundamental traits of your character. Each character has 3 High Aspects: Your Destiny, Desire, and Danger.

Your Destiny is the overall statement of who you are and, barring major changes, who you will be: Misbegotten Rebel Against England, Chriopetri Bounty Hunter, Yith Agent Of The Czar, Reckless Aethership Captain, or something similar. It's called your Destiny because it's something that rarely, if ever, changes – it's a fundamental part of the character.

Your Desire is what you want, your primary motivator: Peace and Justice in Asgard, Sex-Drugs-And-Travel, Find My Lost Family, etc. It's assumed all desire statements are preceded by "I want." Your desire can change if it is fulfilled or your character undergoes a shift in perspective – They become jaded to the prospect of ever finding peace, they realize drugs are killing them, they find their lost loved ones.

Your Danger is something that plagues you – typically, its a difficulty you'll have to deal with on a regular basis: "My Child, My Enemy", "One is Too Many, Two is Not Enough,"  "The Best Intentions". It's something that will come up most sessions and a major source of difficulty for your character - and only changes when it is resolved in some way.

Your Phase Aspects are much more mutable - these are aspects that arise from your life experiences. You start play with 5, and they can change throughout play - and ever so often, when a Substantial Scenario is concluded, you gain a new one.

Stress: Is going to be handled one of two ways:
[spoiler=Option A]Stress Tracks:
For your typical character, Stress comes in two varieties - Physical, Social, and Sanity. How much stress you can take in any of those areas is determined by your ranks in in the relevant skill – in order, Endurance, Presence, and Resolve

Physical stress is exactly what you'd expect – blows taken to your body.

Social social is much more insubstantial, but in essence is damage to your reputation or social standing – which can be crippling.

Sanity stress is based on your ability to withstand long term rigors on your mind – essentially, your ability to battle interrogation, scare tactics, even torture (though that also inflicts physical stress.). In addition, it's also the stress track that you take to endure psychic assault. It is also[note]The tone of the game you want to run can easily be set by how often you inflict Sanity Stress against players. In games with a more mystery/horror bent, feel free to use this judiciously. In a game with an action/adventure bent, use it sparingly. For exploration games, perhaps midway between the two is best. Test it and see what works best for your game/tone/group.[/note] the stress you take from encountering the truly alien, incomprehensible, and twisted. It can be caused by anything from finding a horrifically mangled body to witnessing a Servitor shedding their human skin for the first time to directly encountering a Great Old One. Some beings can deliberately attack your sanity, taxing your ability to comprehend the rational world. [/spoiler]

[spoiler=Option B]Consequence Tracks:
This works much as the above, but instead of having 3 stress tracks, you only have one, and any stress you take goes against that no matter what type it is. After that, you have consequence tracks – 3 of them. Again, physical, social, and sanity, the difference being that you take consequences here, rather than ticking down stress.[/spoiler]

Skills:

This is a list of what your character can do. A typical TM character starts with 30 skill points, and builds their character up as a pyramid – if you're not familiar, I can outline how this works later in more detail, but the short version is you must have at least as many rank 1 skills as you do rank 2, and so on and such up the pyramid (which can really end up being more of a column, despite the name.) Each rank in the skill costs one point, so a rank 5 skill costs 5 points.

Alchemy – The ability to create and recognize different alchemical substances. Separated from inventor since this skill can be used to unique applications – creating concoctions (which will have its own section) and some quasi-magic effects.  With inventor and occult, one of the three "casting" stats.
Alertness – Awareness of surroundings, ability to notice things, initiative
Art – The creation, appreciation, knowledge, and appraisal of various forms of art.
Athletics – running, jumping, twisting, dodging, tumbling – moving your body.
Burglary – Breaking and entering, pickpocketing, casing a location, and other criminal activities other than being sneaky.
Contacts – Knowing who's who, knowing how to get in touch with people, getting information from who you know.
Deceit – Lying, tricking, manipulating, conning.
Empathy – sensing someone's intentions, getting to know them, getting them to understand you and talk to you, diplomacy.
Endurance – How tough you are.
Fists – You use this skill to punch things.
Guns – This is for shootin'. And maintaining the things you shoot with.
Influence – Wealth, prestige, social power bundled into one – exactly how your particular influence manifests itself is related to your aspects. If you have a poverty-striken aspect but a high influence, you have some means of social power though you lack financial resources.
Inventor – You create technological devices. It's kind of self explanatory – the exact mechanics for this are still being worked out. With Alchemy and Occult, one of the three "casting" stats.
Investigation – Searching, understanding clues, research, associated abilities.
Presence – Your force of personality, youra bility to be intimidating
Pilot – control ships, airships, aetherplanes, or any vehicle.
Might – Brute strength – lifting, pushing, pulling, breaking.
Occult – Knowledge of rituals, incantations, Great Old Ones, and other realms. Can be used for ritual magic, making it one of the three casting stats.
Resolve – Your determination, willpower, and ability to confront the mind-shattering and emerge intact.
Stealth – This is for sneaking.
Survival – Riding animals, identifying plants, surviving in the wielderness.
Technology – Understanding and using technology. Unlike Inventor, not used to make it, but can be used to repair it – but most commonly used to use it.
Weapons – If it's not punching or shooting but still involves hurting, you use this skill.

Stunts:
[note]Both Stunts and Attributes are bought with Talent Points. A typical game starts you with 15. Stunts cost one Talent Point, Attributes cost either 1 or 2[/note]
Stunts are additions to skills that are bought through a yet-to-be-determined mechanism. A list of ideas will be added later, but here are some basic things you can do with Talents:

Add +2 to a skill for a particular situation
Add +1 to a skill in a broad set of situations
Allow the use of one skill in place of another in certain circumstances

Of course, there are more things you could do with Talents, but these are just the basics. Examples will come later.

Attributes: Attributes are a separate category of abilities that don't have a direct skill linked to them and require more than a simple stunt. Examples include Chiropetri flight, Rethulid wall-crawling and web weaving, Duval multi-bodiedness, Elder Thing toughness, a human's grafted limb, Mi-Go Aether breathing, etc. This list will be codified later, but as with stunts you are free to invent your own – perhaps even creating an entirely new race recently emerged or re-emerged.

Weapons
A weapon has a fixed damage between 1 and 5. When rolling damage, roll your relevant skill (guns, fists, or weapons) vs. your opponents defense (typically athletics or agility, but can also counter fists with fists, weapons with weapons, and some stunts allow broader skills) (Armor will matter, but that's to come later). Assuming your succeed, you inflict a number of stress equal to how much you beat your opponent's defense by, plus weapon damage. (Note that if you tie your opponents defense with a weapon, you can choose to do stress OR to inflict a temporary aspect as if you had done a maneuver. If you tie your opponents defense unarmed, you land a hit and can inflict temporary aspect as if you had done a maneuver or forgo that, but do no damage without stunts)

What's new is how weapon aspects work.

All weapons have two aspects. One of these is set by what the weapon is, and a list will be given below. The other can be anything fitting that type of weapon - use your imagination here, but some examples for something as simple as a dagger: the dagger might also have the "rune-inscribed" aspect (making it more effective against servitors and some Elder Things, at the cost of being a bit more fragile since it has runes in it, so non-Servitors or Elder Things can tap that aspect to make it less damaging), or the "ancestral blade" aspect (allowing you to tap it when someone attempts to disarm it or steal it, since it has more emotional value to you, or conversely allowing the DM to tap it BY having it stolen, a compel to try and get it back or focus on whoever disarmed you or make an unsafe move to recover it), or the "obsidian" aspect (you tap to make better than normal against flesh or hide, they tap to make less effective against metal or such). The big thing is to make the aspect broad enough where it's not just beneficial. If no idea for a second aspect presents itself, then simply give it the "mundane" secondary aspect - it's perfectly ordinary for its type. Very careful consideration should be taken before adding a 3rd aspect to a weapon, and consider if the aspect should be applied to the weapon or the character - as a general rule, weapon aspects are an inherent part of the weapon, while anything that relegates how the character behaves towards/with that weapon should be a character aspect. (Only exception would be a cursed weapon.)

Here's a list of possible weapons with their damage values as well as their "assigned" aspect. I'm still making some decisions on biotech weapons, so those are being left off for now.

Weapon 1:
Dagger ASPECT: Light-Weight            
Gauntlet/Brass Knuckles ASPECT: Fist Covers
Shortspear ASPECT: Surprisingly Nimble
Simple Club ASPECT: Blunt
Shortbow ASPECT: Penetrating Range
Holdout Pistol ASPECT: Too Small to See
Whip ASPECT: Very Long-Reach

Weapon 2:
Short Sword ASPECT: One Hand is Easy
Longspear ASPECT: Can Stab A Good Distance
Mace/Heavy Club ASPECT: Very Heavy
Longbow ASPECT: Long-Range Shot
Gearlock Pistol ASPECT: Geared-Reloading
Spiked Chain ASPECT: Flexible Reach
Rapier ASPECT: Light and Nimble
Elder Thing Light Weapons ASPECT(S): Vary

Weapon 3:
Longsword ASPECT: One Hand Strength
Greatsword ASPECT: Two Handed Blow
Gearlock Rifle ASPECT: Ballistic Range
Greatbow ASPECT: Huge and Ranged
Flail ASPECT: Unpredictable Angle
Spraygun (shot) ASPECT: Spread Pellets
Elder Thing Medium Weapons ASPECTS: (Vary)

Weapon 4:
Spraygun (slug) ASPECT: Single but Brutal
Phlogiston Thrower ASPECT: Oh God, It's Fire!
Grenades ASPECT: Thou shalt count to three...
Gearlock Autocannons ASPECT: Stationary Death
Many Elder Thing Heavy Weapons ASPECTS: (Vary)

Weapon 5+
Battleship Weapons ASPECT: I'm On A Boat
Elder Thing Massive Weapons (some) ASPECTS: (Vary)

And that's what I have for now. I'm still working on a number of details – how damage is resisted and avoided, how natural or unnatural abilities work, etc. This is obviously very rough right now, so any and all comments are appreciated.

Okay, first, I love that you're going with FATE. It warms my heart.

Second, bear in mind that everything I say is said from a position of near-total ignorance about your setting and its fluff, so put all my suggestions and comments inside that context of ignorance. FATE is extraordinarily customizable, and there's really no "optimal" way to set it up, just a lot of options to tweak, to customize it to the feel and tone and setting you're using it with.

One thing I notice is that you're using kind of a lot of different stress tracks. If those do a good job of reflecting the kinds of conflicts you want to run in this system, more power to you. (They're not even the weirdest FATE stress types I've seen, either.) I think you could simplify a great deal, though. Consider the "composure" stress track that Spirit of the Century uses, to track anything that would make you lose your cool. (SotC just uses physical "health" and social/mental "composure"; that's it.) I think you could probably fold social stress, mental stress, and addiction into a single "composure" stress track, and let that handle any sort of willpower/resolve/assertiveness issues that aren't actual "I glimpsed the Old Gods!" sanity issues. I use separate social and mental stress tracks in my own FATE stuff, and there are plenty of times where it's really unclear which one a particular effect should use. (In fact, magic being mental and reputation being social is pretty much the only time it's actually clear.)

The thing about stress is that it's not a big thing, by itself. Consequences are a big thing-- they're important, they're interesting, they're meaningful-- and stress is just a pressure valve controlling consequences. You can get a lot of neat effects in your game just by fiddling around with stress and how it works-- how many stress tracks there are, how long they are, how stress is accumulated, etc.-- which makes stress really fascinating when you're designing the game. When you're actually playing the game, though, stress is super boring and consequences are where it's at.

The other thing about stress is that it's short term; it goes away at the end of the scene. It's great for answering "will I take a consequence in this scene?" and "how many consequences?" and "what kind?", but it does not work for tracking long-term, cumulative trouble. This is why I think an addiction stress track is maybe going to be problematic for you, because unless you're getting a lot of addiction "attacks" during the same scene, that stress is never going to accumulate (so it'll never spill over into consequences).

The weirdly counterintuitive thing is that the more types of stress a character has, the better they are at managing stress overall. Consider: my character is in an Intimidation shouting match with a rival (social stress) while simultaneously struggling to contain complex sorcery (mental stress) while simultaneously bugged by his cocaine habit (addiction stress) while simultaneously flipping off the Old Gods (sanity stress). As long as those are on four different stress tracks, they never interact with each other. The stresses never compound, and dealing with all of those things simultaneously is no more taxing, from a stress-absorption point of view, than dealing with them all individually.

On the other hand, if they all affect a single composure stress track (or whatever), that stress track fills up four times as fast, and if I'm trying to do all that stuff in the same scene, it's much, much harder (and I am probably boned). So this is the point in your design process where you decide how difficult stuff is for characters, by making the decisions that determine how much shit they can take before they start to fall apart.

Before I leave Stress alone as a topic, I do want to say I love the idea of addiction being A Thing in the game, and I think you should definitely keep it as a mechanic in one way or another. Generally my reflex is to use aspects for things like that-- if I have an "addicted to cocaine" aspect on my character, that's a really fantastic way to set things up, because you can compel that aspect in so many different ways, and I can burn Fate Points to exercise willpower and keep control (or I can give into the addiction, which then becomes a source of Fate Points). I'm intrigued by the idea of an addiction making attacks and causing stress and consequences, and I'm totally interested in exploring that as an alternate treatment of the topic, but aspects would also work beautifully for that sort of thing.

More later, skills next.

Good post, LC.  I enjoyed reading that.  Makes sense, and shines a light on a possible counter-intuitive.

Wow, that's a lot to chew on, LC. Thanks!

I do agree that stress tracks are pressure valves on consequences, though I'd never thought about them that way before - but now that you pointed it out, it's infinitely more interesting in game design than it is in gameplay. The addiction stress track, as it is, would not work at all, you're right about that - and honestly, the intention behind it was a more generalized version of Dresden's feeding dependency Hunger stress track, something that could be applied more universally - even to normal humans. However, most of what I want to do with it would likely work better in aspects. I'm not going to fully abandon the idea of a mechanic for addiction, because it's an interesting aspect that many games ignore and something I want to be somewhat prevalent in the setting, but it doesn't work as a stress track. As you said, I want it to be A Thing - partially because it's interesting, partially because odd addictions could also highlight the "alienness" of the non-human Nascent Things and the Elder things.

Quote
The weirdly counterintuitive thing is that the more types of stress a character has, the better they are at managing stress overall. Consider: my character is in an Intimidation shouting match with a rival (social stress) while simultaneously struggling to contain complex sorcery (mental stress) while simultaneously bugged by his cocaine habit (addiction stress) while simultaneously flipping off the Old Gods (sanity stress). As long as those are on four different stress tracks, they never interact with each other. The stresses never compound, and dealing with all of those things simultaneously is no more taxing, from a stress-absorption point of view, than dealing with them all individually.

On the other hand, if they all affect a single composure stress track (or whatever), that stress track fills up four times as fast, and if I'm trying to do all that stuff in the same scene, it's much, much harder (and I am probably boned). So this is the point in your design process where you decide how difficult stuff is for characters, by making the decisions that determine how much shit they can take before they start to fall apart.

That way of looking at it is more helpful than I can even begin to describe. More stress tracks make things easier for players and delay consequences longer - and consequences, as you pointed out, are where the real fun's at. I don't want things to be crippling difficult (a single stress track scenario) for the players, but having 4 total stress tracks allow the players to take a lot until the consequences come into play, which is not a good idea.

I think I'll eliminate the mental stress track and replace it with Sanity. The two cover the same general things, and calling it sanity instead of mental just gives a better tone to a setting with Lovecraftian Horrors - and encourage players, when taking consequences, to consider things like delusions or such in addition to the typical "mentally exhausted" I saw my dresden group always fall back to.

Hmm. Since consequences are where it's at...I kind of want to delve into that more. Almost a "consequence track" that expands what you can do with your consequences before you get into the more severe ones. I'll have to mull that one over.

Added an important note that's an update to the weapon system.

Don't know whether or not I will have time for a more involved post later tonight, but I'm still brewing this over.

Wanted to drop by and give you a link to the FATE devblog (http://www.faterpg.com/), in case you don't already have it bookmarked. It doesn't update as often as I'd like, but there's a ton of good information on there, and it should give you plenty to think about. (For more on stress and consequences, here's a great post (http://www.faterpg.com/2011/stress-consequences-and-the-fractal/) which ought to blow your mind a little.)

You could always do away with the stress track altogether if you want just consequences. Instead of 2/4/6 or whatever, you could have the ability to absorb multiple minor consequences, like 1/2/3/4/6, or whatever kind of track you want to use. It might make keeping track of damage a little more troublesome, but it does add some realism as well, and allows for a multitude of different interesting consequences. However, the other thing it does is make sure that anyone who's been hit in combat has a consequence to tag, and, for free at that. That causes a sort of "downward spiral" effect, making it increasingly difficult for someone who has taken a damage in combat to prevail, as the consequence makes it easier to get hit again, and by getting hit again, that adds another consequence, and so on. So there is an argument for using the stress track, too, at least if you want to avoid this effect. It's kind of boring, but it's also "harmless," at least until there's too much of it.

As for the weapon damage, I'm not sure how sure you are that this is really what you want to do, but I personally don't think FATE dice work very well for rolling weapon damage. In particular, adding lots of dice for supposedly highly damaging weapons is just increasing variance, not actually making the weapon likely to do any more damage. The "0 damage" thing is also kind of weird, and I'm not sure if just adding aspects is really going to accomplish the goal, or if it'll just draw out combat to a boring degree because nobody's really hurting anyone, like vanilla SotC suffered from. Some solutions might be:

- Go with the FATE convention of having base damage determined by the degree of success of the attack. Of course, you could always roll dice or add damage to this.
- Have damage be constant or determined by dice other than FATE dice, i.e., something that isn't likely to impose a negative modifier.
- Have damage determined by a constant plus FATE dice, but make sure the number can never be negative, like 2F+3, or something.

@LC - That Devblog looks awesome, I'm gonna have to read through it when I have some more time.

@Sparkletwist - I thought about that, but then realized that a consequence only system would have a problem I'm not sure how to resolve: it would bog down combat quite a bit, since every successful attack would require adding a consequence, which includes thinking up an appropriate consequence, and if you have 3 minor ones already coming up with a 4th becomes difficult. Also, I'm not sure the downward spiral is a good thing - how often in cinema and books to we see the hero beaten to a pulp rise to become the victor? I'm not sure I want to make that even more difficult than it already is. But I'll still ponder it.

As far as rolling weapon damage, I agree that it increase variance, but that's kind of the point - my big problem with FATE is that it rarely really matters what weapon you're using, because it's just a Weapon 1, Weapon 3, Weapon X - all weapons that are weapon 1 are exactly the same. And if it adds temporary aspects...well, it's kind of like the "No stress" system you suggestion, and gives people interesting options in combat. In theory. The problem is, you may be 100% right, and the only way to know for sure is to finish the rest of the combat portion of the system and then test the weapon stuff to see if it works as intended or if what you suggest is accurate. So for now, I'm intending to keep this in the "Alpha" version of Terra Macabre FATE, but I'm definitely going to really test to make sure that it doesn't cause the very valid problem you raised.

For the solutions:

-I wouldn't mind doing that if there was something more to distinguish different types of weapons - I'm not fond of them all being grouped into one lump category. I want it to matter what kind of weapon you're using - any thoughts on how I could do that in the default system?
-Definitely something to consider - my only concern is that the numbers could get HUGE for how small stress tracks are. Then again, that's a minor concern - I can just use small dice, ranging from a coin toss at the low end to a d5 at the high, using d4 and d3 (by halving d6 and d10's respectively.) I'd like to avoid that, however, just because part of FATE's appeal is that you only need 4 dice to play it, and they're all the same.
-If my current idea doesn't work, that's probably the way I'll go - it gives the me the variance I want without negative damage. Thanks for the Plan B - I didn't have one at all that I liked until that. :D

I am more than not sure; my opinion is that the downward spiral is definitely not a good thing. I wasn't advocating the consequences-only approach, but I was just throwing it out there for completeness. I like the "safety margin" granted by some kind of stress track or HP system or whatever.

Anyway, as far as weapons, keep in mind that part of the fun of FATE is the way it is designed to allow roleplay and narrative to have mechanical ramifications. Does a strong distinction between weapons really need to be "built into the system," or can the players and GM worry about that as it happens with the consequences that end up being assigned? Some powerful weapons might have special consequences that are assigned, but to me this is more like a "status effect" in a CRPG: a special effect of the attack above and beyond doing simple damage. As for the numbers getting too big, whether or not you use extra dice, you could always lengthen the stress tracks and scale everything up appropriately, if that starts to become an issue. The raw numbers don't really matter as long as everything is "to scale."

Last night I played my first real FATE game, as opposed to theorycrafting and some test fights. It's completely changed the way I view the system for the better. You make some very good points there, Sparkletwist, and as we discussed in the IRC...I'm really now completely unsure of how I want to handle weapons and damage, really. I'll probably, once I get the rest of the system hammered out, do some playtesting with different ways and see what comes up most interesting.

I'd love to hear details, both about your game, and about your epiphanies.

[spoiler=Description of the Session in skeleton detail][note]I'm going to be starting a thread where we can talk about our current games, and will fill out the non-combat oriented parts of this game in that thread - everything here just relates to my FATE epiphanies[/note]Okay, the game is Dresden RPG. I'm playing the firstborn of a new Vampire Court, the Grey Court - also known as Necrophages, since they feed on ghosts. Of course, I (and to my knowledge, no one) knows this yet, but that's just brief character background. Anyway, I'm the self appointed guardian of Saint Louis (the rest of the party is the great-great granddaughter of Van Helsing who is here because Saint Louis is the last true stronghold of the Black Court, a changeling bounty hunter whose father was the Erlking but he's barely manifested, and a information broker who traffics with demons and other things (though never Outsiders) for profit, so none of them are particularly focused on our city, just here by either home or circumstance), which is getting into way more information than is needed because, for this game, it was just me and the DM (who has Adam as PC because we're rotating DMs).

Long story short, I got into a total of 3 fights. The first time, I got jumped by 3 "Super-Reinfields" - Enslaved vampire thralls, but these ones also had Inhuman speed and strength, as I discovered when one ripped off the door to my car. Now, keep in mind this was my first actual fight in an actual fate game, not a theorycrafting fight against myself or against someone else. So my initial reaction, honed from years of d20, is to throw around some magic. I pop up a shield, which saves me that turn, and next turn blast someone - and through a lucky roll, manage to one-shot him. I'm thinking, "okay, cool, I can do this." My shield drops, and the one that had tore off my car door threw it at me. I got lucky and he missed. The other one punched me for 2 physical stress - leaving me with one physical stress remaining. I tossed a spell at one of them...and also missed. Now I have one open mental stress - meaning if I cast I'm going to be running a huge risk, one open physical stress, and there's still two opponents up, both of whom had the strength to tear the door off a car and hurl it like a Frisbee.  My DnD stand and fight style was about to get me killed. I run into an alley and stealth, and finally start thinking like FATE: I spend a fate point I had gained earlier to apply the aspect "It's extremely dark" to the alley because a bulb got burned out by the stray magic. Since i get a bonus to stealth in shadows, and roll Superb, I bought myself some time to think. They spend a turn looking for me to no avail. Burning another fate point, I apply the aspect "There's a fire escape" to the alley, and use that last mental stress to cast a spell as a maneuver, attempting to apply the "There's a fire escape on their heads" to them - and fail the roll, take backlash and a minor mental consequence of "Dizzy" so it still goes off, and now they have a fire escape on their heads, allowing me to emerge victorious and find out why they were attacking me - it was a test to see how dangerous I was.

The next night (having done some plot relevant non-combat stuff that doesn't relate to my epiphanies but is notable for gaining fate points from it) I go out again to feed, and while driving get ambushed in my car by an actual Black Court vampire (For those of you who don't know Dresden, Black Court Vampires have all the weaknesses of Stroker's Dracula so mostly got exterminated, meaning the ones still around were the biggest BAMFs or any 'child' of theirs. Again, thinking DND, I try a direct approach at first, which merely gets the vampire onto the roof of my still moving car where, after punching through my roof to hit me on my shoulder, kicks through my front windshield for a massive 5 stress. I have to take a moderate consequence (in this case, blinded in one eye, due to it swelling shut from the impact), and once again starting thinking FATE - so slap down a fate point to state there's a nearby creek, and tapped the "it's gonna crash" aspect the DM had given my car to crash it into said stream as opposed to a tree - since running water and black court vampires don't mix well. (I made a Lore check to remember this.) While the vampire was now unable to get to me, I was still stuck in the stream. So I did an assessment and figured out she had the aspect "Cruel Killer", which I reasoned meant she had a lot of ghosts left behind...and since I can see dead people and they are drawn to me, I tapped that aspect and rolled discipline to draw a ghost that had a beef with her up. The problem was how I worded it - I told the DM "I'm sure there's at least one ghost out there that has a hard-on for her, and I want that one to show up." So he did...and the DM decided it was a ghost who was obsessively in love with this vampire during life and she had killed. Through some trickery on my part I get her to state how much she despised the "Pathetic little twat," causing him to go berserk, turn into a giant squid monster and manifest in physical form, swallowing her whole since a second spell on my part bound her. As I'm sitting there thinking "Damn, I'm good," the DM taps my Trouble - "My Child, My Enemy" which translates to any being I metaphorically or literally "father" is going to be a problem for me (which will be nasty when the rest of the Grey Court Vampires arise). This manifested horrific ghost who is feeding on a black court vampire for power, not to mention the power of my binding spell, rampages off.

That scene ended, wiping away my physical stress and reducing the moderate consequence I had to mild (since I have inhuman recovery), and I do a self compel for another FATE point on my aspect of "Saint Louis Is MY Town" and follow instead of doing the smart thing and waiting till dawn to contact someone who could help. I tangle with the giant squid monster (the black court vamp had escaped and, presumably, gone to lick her wounds) and get thrown through the window of a bar because I - yet again - started out the fight trying to be directly combative as opposed to thinking FATE. Finally thinking, I use a fate point to put the aspect "This is Adam's Bar", since I was supposed to be meeting him at a bar and it was near where I got jumped by the vampire earlier, so the DM's PC could be there - and since he's an expert at summoning and binding, he's exactly what I need. I fight the ghost while he's drawing a circle trap, but instead of trying to hurt him I'm tapping aspects and applying maneuvers to keep him off balance long enough - which is successful, even though it did get my swallowed whole for a bit. Finally - because this ghost had told me his name when I promised him I'd get the black court vampire his message - I actually do a combat spell to trap him within the circle and get out so Adam can put the circle up, winning the fight.[/spoiler]

What does all this boil down to? What did I learn from all of this?

1) Aspects. Are. Awesome. Moreso than I had imagined they would be.
2) Applying temporary aspects to things or making declarations about the scene is one of the most fun parts of FATE combat - and lets  you fight things that are out of your league (to a degree).
3) The stress track is only interesting as a way to build suspense - when I had one stress left I was suddenly like "Oh god." It's a countdown, like you said, but it's not entirely boring in the game - that countdown decreasing is like watching the hand tick on the Doomsday Clock if it's set up right.
4) Consequences are so much more fun. Again, something you all told me, but I didn't realize how true that was until I played the game. That's what makes fights really interesting and fun, not the stress track ticking down.
5) FATE can be brutal. I'm playing a Hip Deep character and he's not a pushover - and almost got myself killed in all 3 fights because I was trying to fight like I would in any other RPG. You have to think in terms of your environment more than any other system, and you have to be smart and not get into a slugfest (unless you build your character specifically for slugfests, but even then putting aspects through maneuvers on someone before slugging it out is going to work out better.)


As for what that means for my system...I'm not sure yet. I want there to be a heavier focus on aspects than I currently have, and I want to reflect that in the weapons system - I'm thinking about negative damage working like a maneuver being applied to your target - you hit them but don't hurt them because, say, they parried, but the blow was hard enough to give them the aspect of "off balance" for one round.

I'm going to try to come up with a way to make the "countdown to doom" feel of the stress track more pronounced so it's less of a dull count down and more of a "oh god, I'm one closer" feel.

I'm still processing this game, but now that I'm playing FATE as opposed to reading it, I'm getting a slew of new ideas - many of which are still half formed ideas for stuff that's not even mentioned in the above post.

Well, that's where I'm at now.  Off to do some reviews and update the actual setting for this system. :P

Quote1) Aspects. Are. Awesome. Moreso than I had imagined they would be.
2) Applying temporary aspects to things or making declarations about the scene is one of the most fun parts of FATE combat - and lets  you fight things that are out of your league (to a degree).

This is the stuff I'm always trying to tell people, but it's hard to get a handle on it until you experience it yourself.

Aspects rock. Maneuvers (to place temporary aspects) rock. Once you get the hang of the basic types of actions (attacks, maneuvers, blocks) you can make the system do anything you like.

I am pretty convinced you could take everything else away and leave only the aspects, and still have a hell of a system.

QuoteAs for what that means for my system...I'm not sure yet. I want there to be a heavier focus on aspects than I currently have, and I want to reflect that in the weapons system - I'm thinking about negative damage working like a maneuver being applied to your target - you hit them but don't hurt them because, say, they parried, but the blow was hard enough to give them the aspect of "off balance" for one round.

This was a large part of what I wanted to tell you about your weapon system (but was too busy to write that long post.) Here's the short version:

I don't think your addon damage system really gets you much benefit overall. I think adding an extra die roll for damage is unnecessary and inelegant, and it throws FATE's nice, simple, symmetrical system off its stride. I think adding extra dice to certain weapons doesn't do anything worthwhile for you (since an extra fudge die doesn't make you more likely to get a higher result, it just makes the probability more erratic.)

I think your weapon system has admirable aspirations but a really unfortunate implementation. Your goals are good: to create a scale of damage between "minor" weapons and "serious" weapons, and to give individual weapons a unique feel. That's good stuff, but I'm not convinced your current system will get you there. I propose a two-part solution:

1.) use Dresden Files RPG's weapon value / armor value system (this differentiates between small and big weapons), and
2.) give aspects (!!!) to things like weapons and armor (this gives each weapon a unique feel).

If we're in a FATE fight and I'm stabbing you with a dagger (weapon value 1, and with the "light-weight" aspect), I might tag the aspect to give myself a bonus sneaking a concealed dagger onto your airship, you might tag the aspect to give my dagger a hard time punching through your armor, I might tag the aspect to give myself a bonus throwing the aerodynamic weapon across the airship's pitching deck, and the narrator might compel the aspect to have the weapon pitch overboard when the airship crashes into a floating island. Or whatever.

Basically, I'm pretty convinced that whenever there's a problem or question or issue in FATE, aspects are going to be the solution 90% of the time.

There's a thing I read somewhere, I forget whether it was in DFRPG or in an Evil Hat blog post about DFRPG, about attacks that are hits with zero shifts. (That is, the attacker and defender roll the same number, which is technically a success for the attacker, but the attack inflicts [x - x] stress: zero stress.) The idea is that since the same result would have been sufficient to place a temporary aspect if the attack had been a maneuver instead, why not let it count as a maneuver retroactively? Rather than hitting with an attack that does nothing, let it apply a temporary aspect (exactly like you suggest.)

There are some interesting interviews and blog posts out there from Dresden Files RPG designers, talking about things they learned from Spirit of the Century (a game with a totally different feel) and the ways they went about adapting the same FATE system to DF. This includes a lot of talk about stress and consequences and how to use them to make combat feel more intense. You'll probably get a lot of mileage out of them. Here's Fred Hicks interviewed on Narrative Control (http://forum.narrativecontrol.com/discussion/25/narrative-control-episode-13-interview-with-fred-hicks/p1); put it in your ears, it'll do you some good, I think.

Quote from: Luminous Crayon

Quote1) Aspects. Are. Awesome. Moreso than I had imagined they would be.
2) Applying temporary aspects to things or making declarations about the scene is one of the most fun parts of FATE combat - and lets  you fight things that are out of your league (to a degree).

This is the stuff I'm always trying to tell people, but it's hard to get a handle on it until you experience it yourself.

Aspects rock. Maneuvers (to place temporary aspects) rock. Once you get the hang of the basic types of actions (attacks, maneuvers, blocks) you can make the system do anything you like.

I am pretty convinced you could take everything else away and leave only the aspects, and still have a hell of a system.

I think you might be right there - except for it'd be hard to manage Maneuvers if you had only aspects. :P But Aspects are the core of FATE even more than, well, anything, and they're a beautiful both mechanical and narrative tool.

Quote

QuoteAs for what that means for my system...I'm not sure yet. I want there to be a heavier focus on aspects than I currently have, and I want to reflect that in the weapons system - I'm thinking about negative damage working like a maneuver being applied to your target - you hit them but don't hurt them because, say, they parried, but the blow was hard enough to give them the aspect of "off balance" for one round.

This was a large part of what I wanted to tell you about your weapon system (but was too busy to write that long post.) Here's the short version:

I don't think your addon damage system really gets you much benefit overall. I think adding an extra die roll for damage is unnecessary and inelegant, and it throws FATE's nice, simple, symmetrical system off its stride. I think adding extra dice to certain weapons doesn't do anything worthwhile for you (since an extra fudge die doesn't make you more likely to get a higher result, it just makes the probability more erratic.)

I think your weapon system has admirable aspirations but a really unfortunate implementation. Your goals are good: to create a scale of damage between "minor" weapons and "serious" weapons, and to give individual weapons a unique feel. That's good stuff, but I'm not convinced your current system will get you there.

The more I talk to people who know FATE, the more I hear that. It's unfortunate - one of those ideas I want to work so badly - but between my Dresden DM, Sparkletwist, and now you, the response has been almost entirely "Great concept, poor execution," and in the wake of 3 people who know FATE better than me, I'm forced to concede my dice rolling for weapons just isn't going to work. No point clinging to an idea that seems set to fail. *tosses that idea in the garbage bin*

QuoteI propose a two-part solution:

1.) use Dresden Files RPG's weapon value / armor value system (this differentiates between small and big weapons), and
2.) give aspects (!!!) to things like weapons and armor (this gives each weapon a unique feel).

If we're in a FATE fight and I'm stabbing you with a dagger (weapon value 1, and with the "light-weight" aspect), I might tag the aspect to give myself a bonus sneaking a concealed dagger onto your airship, you might tag the aspect to give my dagger a hard time punching through your armor, I might tag the aspect to give myself a bonus throwing the aerodynamic weapon across the airship's pitching deck, and the narrator might compel the aspect to have the weapon pitch overboard when the airship crashes into a floating island. Or whatever.

Basically, I'm pretty convinced that whenever there's a problem or question or issue in FATE, aspects are going to be the solution 90% of the time.

And just as quickly as you caused me to discard one idea, you've given me a beautiful, beautiful new one. Sparkletwist had suggested something like this as well in IRC, but at the time I was still desperately trying to salvage the rolling system...and the example you gave was so evocative.

I'm now thinking every weapon has 2 aspects. One is an aspect that weapon always has - "light-weight" in the case of a dagger. However, the dagger might also have the "rune-inscribed" aspect (making it more effective against servitors and some Elder Things, at the cost of being a bit more fragile since it has runes in it, so non-Servitors or Elder Things can tap that aspect to make it less damaging), or the "ancestral blade" aspect (allowing you to tap it when someone attempts to disarm it or steal it, since it has more emotional value to you, or conversely allowing the DM to tap it BY having it stolen, a compel to try and get it back or focus on whoever disarmed you or make an unsafe move to recover it), or the "obsidian" aspect (you tap to make better than normal against flesh or hide, they tap to make less effective against metal or such), or something else the player and DM can come up with. Not only will that make a dagger different than a longsword, but it also allows individual daggers and longswords and greatswords and guns and bows and what not to be unique from each other, even though they're the same wapon without having to come up with a huge, long list of possible ways to make unique weapons - and allows the players to customize their gear in a way that's balanced and gives them more investment, and conversely allows a DM to provide loot that's unique from what players already have if that's right for the type of game (Mainly ruin-delving/exploration games). BTW, the whole "two aspects" thing is something that just now occurred to me - what do you think about it?

QuoteThere's a thing I read somewhere, I forget whether it was in DFRPG or in an Evil Hat blog post about DFRPG, about attacks that are hits with zero shifts. (That is, the attacker and defender roll the same number, which is technically a success for the attacker, but the attack inflicts [x - x] stress: zero stress.) The idea is that since the same result would have been sufficient to place a temporary aspect if the attack had been a maneuver instead, why not let it count as a maneuver retroactively? Rather than hitting with an attack that does nothing, let it apply a temporary aspect (exactly like you suggest.)

I'm going to put that into the Terra Macabre core rules. It gives me what I want - and since weapons will have aspects, it even gives you a basic idea of what kind of maneuvers a 0 damage attack could reasonably be used for with that weapon. :D

QuoteThere are some interesting interviews and blog posts out there from Dresden Files RPG designers, talking about things they learned from Spirit of the Century (a game with a totally different feel) and the ways they went about adapting the same FATE system to DF. This includes a lot of talk about stress and consequences and how to use them to make combat feel more intense. You'll probably get a lot of mileage out of them. Here's Fred Hicks interviewed on Narrative Control (http://forum.narrativecontrol.com/discussion/25/narrative-control-episode-13-interview-with-fred-hicks/p1); put it in your ears, it'll do you some good, I think.

I'm awful with podcasts, though I have been reading their blog. However, I'll start popping them in my ears now and then, hopefully get some good ideas from them - considering how helpful that blog was, I think they will. :P

Re: two aspects, I think that might be useful in some cases and unnecessarily formalized in other cases. Some weapons are going to be central and interesting enough to potentially have a crapload of aspects if you want to portray them that way ("Forged by the Ancient Kings" plus "Dragonbane" plus "Under a Vile Curse" plus "Ogre-Sized", etc., that might be too many to keep track of during most circumstances but you get the idea) while less central weapons might be hard to squeeze a second aspect out of.

Ultimately the strength of aspects is their flexibility, and the way they can be different things to different people, or in different situations. Different characters might treat essentially identical weapons as the "Light-Weight" dagger, the "Never Leave Home Without It" dagger, the "Gift From My Father" dagger, the "Ceremonial Implement" dagger, the "Many-Folded Steel" dagger, etc., etc. I think that typically the most interesting aspects for this kind of thing are less about the item, and more about how someone feels about the item. (You'd better believe Indiana Jones has an aspect about his hat.)

If you read up on the devblog, you'll run into mentions of the "FATE fractal." This is the idea that elements that usually apply to characters (i.e., they have aspects, stress, consequences, skills, the ability to make attacks and maneuvers, etc.) can also apply to other things. These elements are basic enough to be transferable like that. So an aspect can have aspects of its own, or a consequence can have the ability to make attacks, or an object can have a stress track, etc. There's a neat example of a disease being treated as a consequence with aspects and which makes attacks against the patient, and a doctor engaging in a conflict where he's trying to treat the disease with maneuvers and temporary aspects and stress. You can do some neat things this way. (You can also get in too deep and give yourself a headache.)

QuoteRe: two aspects, I think that might be useful in some cases and unnecessarily formalized in other cases. Some weapons are going to be central and interesting enough to potentially have a crapload of aspects if you want to portray them that way ("Forged by the Ancient Kings" plus "Dragonbane" plus "Under a Vile Curse" plus "Ogre-Sized", etc., that might be too many to keep track of during most circumstances but you get the idea) while less central weapons might be hard to squeeze a second aspect out of.

Ultimately the strength of aspects is their flexibility, and the way they can be different things to different people, or in different situations. Different characters might treat essentially identical weapons as the "Light-Weight" dagger, the "Never Leave Home Without It" dagger, the "Gift From My Father" dagger, the "Ceremonial Implement" dagger, the "Many-Folded Steel" dagger, etc., etc. I think that typically the most interesting aspects for this kind of thing are less about the item, and more about how someone feels about the item. (You'd better believe Indiana Jones has an aspect about his hat.)

Very good points there. What I'm thinking now is to keep the two aspect system, but one aspect can always be "mundane" - it's perfectly ordinary, which can be tapped here and there for particular benefits/drawbacks, but for the most part is basically "This item doesn't have anything special about it compared to other, similar items." That way, if a second aspect doesn't fit, you slap the mundane aspect on it and don't have to worry about squeezing a second one into it.

As for stuff like "Never Leave Home Without It" or "Gift From My Father", those strike me more as being aspects that the character has - which will always be more interesting than the aspects on an item itself. I don't think Indiana Jones' hat has an aspect, but like you said, he has one about it. Conversely, however, if a dagger is in fact a ceremonial implement of a cult leader, taking that dagger out of his hand doesn't make it suddenly no longer a ceremonial implement - that's an aspect on the dagger itself. Same goes for "Many-Folded Steel". I see your point, but like the idea of two aspects on a weapon so it /can/ be made unique from other, similar weapons, though I will admit doing that to ALL weapons is absurd, hence the "mundane" aspect. Do you think that solves the problem? (Also, I intend on making all items limited to 2 aspects - if you take the ceremonial dagger and have it reforged into a many-folded Steel dagger, it loses the ceremonial dagger property)

Quoteyou read up on the devblog, you'll run into mentions of the "FATE fractal." This is the idea that elements that usually apply to characters (i.e., they have aspects, stress, consequences, skills, the ability to make attacks and maneuvers, etc.) can also apply to other things. These elements are basic enough to be transferable like that. So an aspect can have aspects of its own, or a consequence can have the ability to make attacks, or an object can have a stress track, etc. There's a neat example of a disease being treated as a consequence with aspects and which makes attacks against the patient, and a doctor engaging in a conflict where he's trying to treat the disease with maneuvers and temporary aspects and stress. You can do some neat things this way. (You can also get in too deep and give yourself a headache.)

I remember reading about the FATE fractal (I think the post you linked to actually explained the concept in detail) and found it utterly fascinating and entirely headache inducing. While I understood the concepts, I don't think I have enough experience with fate to apply a stress track and skills and aspects to a disease...yet. Adding aspects to weapons is about as close as I can come and not be out of my depth at this point. However, as I play more and develop this system, I want to delve a bit into the FATE fractal - not going too deep, but deep enough to add a bit more than most FATE systems do. For the most part, however, I intend on leaving the deeper aspects of the fractal in the DM's hands, other than simple things like aspects for weapons and such. Gonna ponder going a bit deeper into it, though, because there's a ton of potential there.

Weapon update complete.

Okay, currently considering something while chatting with Sparkletwist on IRC - taking the old axe to that massive list of skills and distilling it down to maybe 10-15 (at most) core skills, with stunts used to highlight specific areas. Not sure how well this could be managed with a FATE-style Pryamid, but then again, I could also put that on the chopping block. It'd result in a simpler system that's more flexible with what you can do with each skill, as opposed to the longer, more nit-picky, d20 style list.

Quote from: Xathan Of Many Worlds
Okay, currently considering something while chatting with Sparkletwist on IRC - taking the old axe to that massive list of skills and distilling it down to maybe 10-15 (at most) core skills, with stunts used to highlight specific areas. Not sure how well this could be managed with a FATE-style Pryamid, but then again, I could also put that on the chopping block. It'd result in a simpler system that's more flexible with what you can do with each skill, as opposed to the longer, more nit-picky, d20 style list.

Seriouspost: this was also going to be my next bit of advice to you. I'll be glad to help you shape that list.

As a general question, is there a reason behind some of the skill name changes?

I'd appreciate any help on the list. I want to make it as narrow as I can without it creating uberstats - right now, what I'm kind of thinking is Awareness, Endurance, Fitness, Agility, Dexterity, Might, Intellect, Scholarship, Presence, Grace*, Weaponry, Technology. Endurance would influence physical stress, Scholarship Sanity, and Grace social stress.

*in the social sense, not graceful movements.

As for the renaming, part of it was trying to give it a more Lovecraftian feel, part of it was just kind of testing out different names, seeing if any of them would fit the world better than existing ones. :P

What each Skill would be used for:
Awareness - How aware you are. Initiative and noticing, mainly.
Endurance - The name's fairly self explanatory. Also influences your physical stress track.
Fitness - Run faster, jump higher, swim deeper. While endurance is how long your body can hold out doing those activities, Fitness is how good you are at them. Also governs unarmed attacks.
Agility - Avoiding damage and being all acrobatic-y and stuff.
Dexterity - Manual manipulation of objects. Basically, agility for your hands. Also, how good you are with ranged weapons/guns/etc.
Might - Strength, lifting, breaking.
Cunning - Your base smarts - streetwise, cleverness, wisdom, intuition.
Scholarship - Book smarts - a good rule of thumb is that if you can be taught it, it falls under here. Influences your Sanity stress track, since the better you understand something the less likely it is to drive you mad.
Presence - Your force of personality, how good you are at influencing people. Intimidate, empathy, diplomacy, etc all fall under here, and it's the primary skill used to make social "attacks." Influences social stress track.
Grace - How versed you are in socially deflecting rumors, manipulating people, lying, all of that. Social defense skill, and can be used for social attacks as well.
Weaponry - You hit things with weapons. Can be rolled to block weapons with other weapons. If a weapon is involved, this is a good bet.
Technology - Understanding, using, and building devices.

With all of these, to specialize you should pick up stunts, which I'll get into later.




How's that look as a starting point? This is me throwing an idea out there off the top of my head.

I am a FATE novice as opposed to your two mentors, but I read through your thread (taking notes all the way; OneNote is the best software Microsoft has ever made) and I hope I can help out or at least provide you with some inspiration.

Going all the way back to the first post, there seems to a few minor discrepancies (to be expected for a WIP thread, of course!) namely the number of stress tracks and the skills that govern them. I remember the stress tracks as having static size, but might have changed with Dresden? Now they seem to be governed by Grit, Charisma and Determination. Yet these do not feature in your skill list later.
Tying the stress tracks to skills seems dangerous with broad skill categories; having a skill do nothing but affect the size of the stress track seems dull, but adding it to an existing skill makes it too powerful.
A have an idea for some more lovecraftian names for the stress tracks: Vigor and Psyche.
If you are still kind of interested in something akin to an addiction track, might I suggest something like a Desire track? If you group social and sanity under Psyche and add Desire you have three tracks which seems doable, and attacks to Desire might see your character pursue their goals or be tempted into bad deals and worse actions. Seems to fit the tone well enough, anyway. Would also be a good way to keep the plot moving if necessary.
A minor rules question: can I pick any number of skills as long as I observe the pyramid requirement you mentioned? And what is the lower level of the pyramid in this case, as I assume you are not forcing characters to assign the very worst rating (although you should certainly go beyond average to the bad ratings, just not all the way).

I don't really get the weapon categories; there should be something motivating a character to take a Category 1 weapon instead of a Category 3. This something might very well be the aspects tied to it, admittedly, but since all weapons have aspects it still seems a little unfair.
I realize that most warriors would rather hold a sword than a dagger in any fight, but this is a fairly cinematic setting which means that you'll probably have characters who want to use any and every insane combination of weapons available in their fight against ultimate alien evil.
I do like your example weapon aspects though, some of them are hilarious :D

As to the skills, many of them seem to be parallels to what one would consider an "attribute" in other gaming systems (e.g. might, dexterity etc).
I don't know whether this is a good thing, but it depends on your design goals. I feel like things that should be skills are things that are A) acquirable and/or improveable B) auxiliary to your character's nature. Things like might and dexterity reflect  how your character looks, handles and acts (they are, in  a way, a more ingrained part of a character) and I propose they might be better modelled with aspects. The problem aspects introduce, on the other hand, is a lack of range as it essentially limits you to being either "strong", "weak" or normal. (yes yes, these are horrible aspects; they are just for the sake of argument!)   
I wonder whether FATE could handle some kind of modular/scaled aspect?

Since you said you were looking for more Lovecraftian skill names, changing Grace to Etiquette (or Gentlemanship?) might work, although Grace isn't half bad. "Technology" (as a skill name) kind of bothers me, but I am having trouble coming up with an alternative. After some thesaurus browsing I found Machinist to be an apt candidate, but I don't know whether it completely encapsulates what you want that skill to cover.

Addressing the "more stress tracks mean less hurt" issue, a single general stress track that takes half damage no matter what gets hurt could be useful. That way three or more stress tracks wouldn't mean waiting forever to get hurt. I'm not sure what the general stress track would do exactly, though.

EDIT:Not entirely certain the purpose of the social track, but I'm not too familiar with fate generally.

Quote from: Superfluous Crow
I am a FATE novice as opposed to your two mentors, but I read through your thread (taking notes all the way; OneNote is the best software Microsoft has ever made) and I hope I can help out or at least provide you with some inspiration.

I need to check out OneNote. And I'm glad you're a FATE novice - It's good to get the perspective someone who doesn't know the core system backwards and forwards, since not everyone I hope to play with knows fate. :P

QuoteGoing all the way back to the first post, there seems to a few minor discrepancies (to be expected for a WIP thread, of course!) namely the number of stress tracks and the skills that govern them. I remember the stress tracks as having static size, but might have changed with Dresden? Now they seem to be governed by Grit, Charisma and Determination. Yet these do not feature in your skill list later.

Dresden did change that - your stress track had a base of 2 and could increased based on ranks of the related skill (it was +1 stress for every odd skill level you had, so 1-2 was 1 extra stress, 3-4 was 2, etc.)

As for leaving them out...that was just a result of trying to get this post out before I had do something, I think, and now that I'm revamping the skills, that bit is obsolete anyway, but will fix. :)

QuoteTying the stress tracks to skills seems dangerous with broad skill categories; having a skill do nothing but affect the size of the stress track seems dull, but adding it to an existing skill makes it too powerful.

Hmmm...I hadn't thought about that. I don't like the idea that anyone, regardless of how able they are, takes the same amount of stress...do you think it would be less powerful if it instead expanded the number of consequences? Or made it's increase to stress even less than Dresden, so you'd have to put a ton of points into it to get more than one extra stress?

QuoteA have an idea for some more lovecraftian names for the stress tracks: Vigor and Psyche.

Sold on Vigor. Will address psyche further down. 

QuoteIf you are still kind of interested in something akin to an addiction track, might I suggest something like a Desire track? If you group social and sanity under Psyche and add Desire you have three tracks which seems doable, and attacks to Desire might see your character pursue their goals or be tempted into bad deals and worse actions. Seems to fit the tone well enough, anyway. Would also be a good way to keep the plot moving if necessary.

I'm going to tinker with that quite a bit, because the base idea is very solid - my only concern is that at that point, the Desire stress track begins to overlap with the compels of aspects (if you're not familiar with it, a DM can put a compel on one of your aspects, offering you a fate point in return for something bad happening.) I don't want that, because aspects are my favorite part of fate, but I'm not saying no yet either - and Desire is an awesome name. :D

BTW: As for Pysche, I love the name, and might replace Sanity with it so I could be the first Lovecraftian RPG to not have any stat called "Sanity", but combining social and mental stress isn't something I'm sure I want to do - Sanity stress is your ability to handle a mentally taxing thing, be it a spell or traversing non-Ecludian Geometry or something similar, while Social stress is damage you take from rumors, blackmail, etc.

QuoteA minor rules question: can I pick any number of skills as long as I observe the pyramid requirement you mentioned? And what is the lower level of the pyramid in this case, as I assume you are not forcing characters to assign the very worst rating (although you should certainly go beyond average to the bad ratings, just not all the way).

You have  a set number of points you can spend to increase skills. If I keep the pyramid, the lower bound is +1, with any skill with no ranks being +0 - however, the basic pyramid allows for 5 fair (+1), 4 average (+2) 3 good (+3) 2 great (+4) and 1 superb (+5)...which is 3 more slots than I have skills right now. As such, I might be getting rid of the pyramid and replacing it with a tower, so you must have at least an equal number of lower ranked skills, giving you the ability to take 2 of each rank, and then one additional fair and average, to have something in all skills...or since it's so narrow now, I might just do away with any structure at all and simply place a cap on how many ranks you can have in a skill, and make it expensive enough where if you have 2 superbs everything else is mediocre (+0). Going to have to toy with this some more now that the pyramid is less viable.

QuoteI don't really get the weapon categories; there should be something motivating a character to take a Category 1 weapon instead of a Category 3. This something might very well be the aspects tied to it, admittedly, but since all weapons have aspects it still seems a little unfair.
I realize that most warriors would rather hold a sword than a dagger in any fight, but this is a fairly cinematic setting which means that you'll probably have characters who want to use any and every insane combination of weapons available in their fight against ultimate alien evil.

You're right, there should be some benefit to using the lower damage weapons (though I don't intend on penalize people for taking higher ones.) I'd love to hear any ideas on this, but right now my first though is to allow weapons in the lower category some benefit to your attack as well as damage rolls, or make it easier to apply a temporary aspect to someone with them (since it's easier to finesse with a dagger than a cannon). :P But those are just some preliminary ideas - kind of stuck on how to expand that.

QuoteI do like your example weapon aspects though, some of them are hilarious :D

Thanks! I'm probably going to re-write that entire list, because it wasn't until halfway through I remembered that aspects do not need - and indeed, should not - have bland, short names.

QuoteAs to the skills, many of them seem to be parallels to what one would consider an "attribute" in other gaming systems (e.g. might, dexterity etc).
I don't know whether this is a good thing, but it depends on your design goals. I feel like things that should be skills are things that are A) acquirable and/or improveable B) auxiliary to your character's nature. Things like might and dexterity reflect  how your character looks, handles and acts (they are, in  a way, a more ingrained part of a character) and I propose they might be better modelled with aspects. The problem aspects introduce, on the other hand, is a lack of range as it essentially limits you to being either "strong", "weak" or normal. (yes yes, these are horrible aspects; they are just for the sake of argument!)

I see your point here, and I might rename them slightly - the idea is that these are skills and attributes from other systems bundled into one, and to get the refinement you'd expect to see in a skill set is done though aspects and stunts. And I considered having strong/smart/etc as aspects, but then realized there are times when crunch is needed - if you have the aspect of "strong," what are you going to roll to kick down the door?

QuoteI wonder whether FATE could handle some kind of modular/scaled aspect?

If I can figure out a good way to do this, I might ditch pretty much everything together and go for an entirely aspect-based system, but so far a satisfactory answer has yet to present itself. Any ideas?

QuoteSince you said you were looking for more Lovecraftian skill names, changing Grace to Etiquette (or Gentlemanship?) might work, although Grace isn't half bad.

Etiquette is an awesome name, and I'm tempted...but since what it can do also represents social manipulation, and isn't really limited to nobility, Etiquette carries a bit too much of the latter and not enough of the former, I'd have to shelve it. Etiquette makes a great stunt name, thought!

Quote"Technology" (as a skill name) kind of bothers me, but I am having trouble coming up with an alternative. After some thesaurus browsing I found Machinist to be an apt candidate, but I don't know whether it completely encapsulates what you want that skill to cover.

I don't like technology either - Machinist is a cool one, but then...Technology covers biotech and alchemy, so it doesn't quite fit there. Again, Machinist would be an awesome stunt for someone who's Technological ability is best for clockwork technology as opposed to all Technology.

Quote from: BeejazzAddressing the "more stress tracks mean less hurt" issue, a single general stress track that takes half damage no matter what gets hurt could be useful. That way three or more stress tracks wouldn't mean waiting forever to get hurt. I'm not sure what the general stress track would do exactly, though.

I did consider that when LC brought it up, but at that point you're right - what exactly is a measure of just general "stress?" Maybe it's just me, but I feel different stress tracks should represent different things as opposed to the general one - good idea for how to handle it, thought!

QuoteEDIT:Not entirely certain the purpose of the social track, but I'm not too familiar with fate generally.

Blackmail, rumors, attempts to alienate you from your allies - those sort of things are social stress. It's great to have one, especially for intrigue-themed games.

This is going to be a big post, I think. Going to address as much as possible at once. Wish me luck.

About the List of Skills
There's some general philosophy to handle before we look at your specific choices. That general philosophy will help you decide how many different skills you want to have on your list.

Assume for a moment that each character has ten skills on their pyramid. (I'm going to choose extreme numbers to make a point.) Now imagine that there are twelve total skills on your list. Each character has ten of the twelve on their sheet; there are only two skills they're totally nonproficient in. This is great if you want broadly competent characters, but it makes niche protection difficult. If you have two characters who each have ten of twelve possible skills on their sheets, they'll overlap in at least eight of their ten skills-- it's hard to have a thing that your character is essential for, especially in a group of four or five.

Conversely, if you have ten skills on your sheet out of a total of thirty, that gives you a lot of options and makes niche protection easy. It also means there are a ton of things out there that any given character is bad at (because twenty of thirty skills are nowhere on your sheet at all).

Sometimes the best way to strike this balance is to fiddle with the number of skills each character has, too. It's a subtle issue, and how you set it up is going to be different from one FATE iteration to the next, and from one setting to the next. My gut instinct says your first draft has too many skills (and a lot of overlap between them) and your next draft has too few, but then, what the hell do I know?

Now let's talk about proportions a bit.

Your current draft has twelve total skills. These don't always break down neatly into categories like this, but of these twelve, in general, six are about physicality and combat, two are about social interactions, and four are about mental acuity. (I'm counting Awareness in this last group because really it is pretty all-purpose, but since it traditionally governs initiative order in a physical conflict, it's arguably a seventh physical skill, at least part of the time.)

Anyway, if you want about half your game's action to be physical action, a third of the action to be mental, and a sixth of the action to be social, you've probably got some good ratios set up. If that doesn't appeal, I'd keep tweaking. For example, if you wanted to put social action more firmly into the spotlight, adding more social skills does a lot of things for you: it means there are more different angles to approach common sorts of situations, it's more interesting to build and play a social character because there are more options, and you don't have two social "god skills" dominating a huge portion of rolls and actions. Conversely, if you want social action to be marginalized, it's best to have a small number of skills-- because why spread a small amount of social action out between a large number of mostly-unused social skills?

About your particular list of skills:

I never like Agility and Dexterity side-by-side in the same game, because I think that's asking for confusion. But Agility vs. Fitness is probably a bigger tangle here. The core FATE skill Athletics has apparently been divided into Agility and Fitness (the latter also includes Fists), but I'm mostly uncertain about when I'd roll what. Based on your descriptions, a lot of activities could go either way, and I'm honestly not sure these cover enough ground to warrant being separated in this way. Dexterity seems pretty catch-all: it presumably covers everything from gunslinging to lock-picking to harpsichord-playing to needlework? That's hella broad.

Cunning, Technology, and Scholarship all measure smartness in different ways, but I'm having trouble thinking of a lot of different ways for Cunning to be used, particularly in the "wisdom and intuition" part of it. (Those things are often pretty hard to represent in a game. Intuition might be best done with a very broad "I Trust My Gut" kind of aspect [which could be compelled for damned near anything].) In general, Cunning almost seems like a more social skill than anything; being streetwise is often done with something like Contacting-- knowing who to talk to to get things done around the city-- or an urban flavor of Survival. I think Technology works great as a single skill that people can use stunts and/or aspects to specialize and direct.

Presence and Grace seem to be barely differentiated at all; they list mostly similar applications, and I'm not sure how I'd untangle their different uses during the course of a game. I think this is the biggest problem issue that you're facing right now, in terms of skill. My Super-Simple Social Skill Solution (see below) can get down to about three clearly defined ones, but that's about as low as I feel comfortable going-- I personally use quite a few more.

The quick and dirty draft:
- Social Skill 1 - Reputation and Networking - Determines your social stress track, used to start rumors, find contacts, set trends, and generally influence the social world indirectly
- Social Skill 2 - Direct Interactions - Use to befriend/convince/intimidate/deceive others you are talking to directly, or to defend against the same
- Social Skill 3 - Empathy - Use as a "social Awareness" to understand social situations, read others' aspects, determine social empathy.

In the interest of full disclosure, the current state of my Jade FATE tinkering includes twenty-six skills in all. Of these, seven are purely social in their applications, and there are two "adjunct social skills" whose applications are significantly but not exclusively social. That's what I like for my setting and its needs, but there's no single best solution for everything.

Quote from: S CrowTying the stress tracks to skills seems dangerous with broad skill categories; having a skill do nothing but affect the size of the stress track seems dull, but adding it to an existing skill makes it too powerful.

Some people experiment with divorcing skills from those secondary functions. (Decoupling skills from combat initiative is another one I've come across.) I don't really think it's necessary in general-- often, skills that govern stress tracks get rolled a lot less than other skills, so passively increasing stress capacity is a big part of their role.

The fewer skills you have overall, the more I worry this system might break down, because each skill has to do more and more.

Quote from: S CrowIf you are still kind of interested in something akin to an addiction track, might I suggest something like a Desire track? If you group social and sanity under Psyche and add Desire you have three tracks which seems doable, and attacks to Desire might see your character pursue their goals or be tempted into bad deals and worse actions. Seems to fit the tone well enough, anyway. Would also be a good way to keep the plot moving if necessary.

This is an interesting angle, but because of the way stress works, I still think it's much better done with an aspect.

Dresden Files introduced the idea of special, central aspects designed to define characters and drive plot and motivations-- they have a special aspect called your Trouble, which is always cropping up to harass you and spur you into action. I'd love to see a system where characters are similarly driven by each one's particular Desire aspect.

Quote from: S CrowA minor rules question: can I pick any number of skills as long as I observe the pyramid requirement you mentioned? And what is the lower level of the pyramid in this case, as I assume you are not forcing characters to assign the very worst rating (although you should certainly go beyond average to the bad ratings, just not all the way).

Typically in FATE, your pyramid includes some but not all of the available skills. You have some +1 skills, some +2 skills, etc. (the height of the pyramid [i.e., the value of your best skill] varies from game to game), and everything not on the skill is rolled at +0.

Skills don't go negative; you use aspects to represent any serious deficiencies.

Quote from: S CrowI don't really get the weapon categories; there should be something motivating a character to take a Category 1 weapon instead of a Category 3.

Same as in any game, sometimes a dagger or a paperweight or whatever is just what happens to be on hand, and a machine gun is too expensive or can't be smuggled past security or whatever.

Quote from: S CrowAs to the skills, many of them seem to be parallels to what one would consider an "attribute" in other gaming systems (e.g. might, dexterity etc).
I don't know whether this is a good thing, but it depends on your design goals.

FATE traditionally doesn't draw a line between "attributes" and "skills"; there's no "roll Strength plus Melee" paradigm. Typically, most skills are things you've learned to do, and skills which represent any kind of innate potential (such as Endurance or Might) are the exception. I agree that Xathan seems to be taking this in a different direction.

Sometimes aspects can be used to "fill the gaps" and represent things we're used to representing with other kinds of stats, but I'd resist the automatic assumption that we need to fill those gaps. In most FATE settings, including mine, there's no good way to talk about a character with "high Intelligence"; it's really difficult to use the stats to say "I'm smart." (As you mentioned, aspects like "genius" are boring and generally best avoided.) Instead, you're forced to say those kinds of things in more specific, more interesting ways. You can use the allocation of your skills to say "I'm well-educated" or "I'm good at dealing with people" or "I'm a great inventor", and you can use aspects to say things like "I have a PhD in astrophysics" or "I'm an eccentric millionaire recluse" or "I'm a precocious child prodigy". All of these are various ways to approach the issue of "I'm smart", but they force a player to express their character's prodigious intellect in a way that says something more interesting than just "I'm smart".

Another side effect of this system is that every FATE character is "smart", for a given value of smart. You tend to get characters in FATE that are adept and resourceful: they all have a broad base of general competencies and a small handful of things they're really good at. Most of all, the system rewards you for approaching problems in creative ways, and everybody can benefit from that, regardless of what is on their character sheet-- every character, stats nonwithstanding, gets huge advantages from "doing smart things." I think the absence of any stat representing Intelligence helps to bring that out. You can't really say "your character has a higher Braininess stat than mine, so it's best if you come up with the plan", or anything like that.

Quote from: XathanYou're right, there should be some benefit to using the lower damage weapons (though I don't intend on penalize people for taking higher ones.) I'd love to hear any ideas on this, but right now my first though is to allow weapons in the lower category some benefit to your attack as well as damage rolls, or make it easier to apply a temporary aspect to someone with them (since it's easier to finesse with a dagger than a cannon).  But those are just some preliminary ideas - kind of stuck on how to expand that.

Are you still going with separate attack and damage rolls? I'm a skeptic about that, but I'd love to at least hear some general thoughts on how you envision that system working. It's not really intuitive or obvious within FATE.

Quote from: Xathan

Quote from: BeejazzEDIT:Not entirely certain the purpose of the social track, but I'm not too familiar with fate generally.

Blackmail, rumors, attempts to alienate you from your allies - those sort of things are social stress. It's great to have one, especially for intrigue-themed games.

Beejazz, I'd be glad to give you a general rundown, but that's best reserved for one of my "intro to FATE" threads that's floating around. I don't want to derail Xathan's setting-specific thread for FATE basics (any more than I already have, I mean).

Xathan, don't forget that "social stress" also involves direct confrontation, any time one character tries to convince another to do something they're not generally inclined to do. This includes running a con, bargaining with the king, pleading your innocence in court, smooth-talking your way past a bouncer, trading insults with a noble to try to make each other look bad in front of the fancy partygoers, locking a rival in an intimidating eye contact to see who blinks first, debating a professor to try to get the assembled crowd to believe your theory instead of his, convincing the cannibals not to eat you, etc. All these things are run as conflicts, where you'd try to get your desired result by forcing your opponent to concede or to be taken out, and you'd use attacks, stress, and consequences to push toward that desired result.

Rumors and blackmail are great ways to pit characters against each other socially in indirect ways, but there's a ton of ways to socially conflict with someone directly, too. Don't forget about the direct ways!

Going to get to the rest of your post later on today, but really quickly wanted to respond to this:

QuoteAre you still going with separate attack and damage rolls? I'm a skeptic about that, but I'd love to at least hear some general thoughts on how you envision that system working. It's not really intuitive or obvious within FATE.

No, damage is no longer rolled (that was a typo) - it's something that, like you said is not really workable within FATE without some major rewriting. Weapon and damage stress works exactly like it does it Dresden (and I assume most fate) - you inflict stress equal to the degrees by which you beat your opponents "avoidance" roll, plus your weapon damage rank. What I was pondering there was some way to give you a reason to use a Weapon 1 or 2 other than aesthetics, perhaps by giving you a benefit to some other roll.

------------

Also, another quick question before I start responding to the rest - on my original list, could you mention some areas the skills overlap so I can look at pulling that together a bit tighter?

Quote from: XathanWhat I was pondering there was some way to give you a reason to use a Weapon 1 or 2 other than aesthetics, perhaps by giving you a benefit to some other roll.

Maybe it's naive of me, but I always assume this will work itself out naturally. Sure, you do more damage with a rocket launcher than with a pocketknife, but you tend to attract a lot more attention trying to walk down the street, ammo might be hard to come by, and it's a lot easier to have a backup pocketknife in your pocket in case of emergency. In practice, aspects will cover some of this and common sense will cover the rest. Having some kind of game mechanic where, occasionally, in some ways, a "worse" weapon is "better" is a neat idea, and I'd be interested to see what you can do with it. But I don't think that without it everyone is going to be toting around Orbital Detonation Plutonium Cannons all the time or anything.

Quote from: XathanAlso, another quick question before I start responding to the rest - on my original list, could you mention some areas the skills overlap so I can look at pulling that together a bit tighter?

Sure. Let me pull a few quotes from your first post. I'll comment on a few of these groups, but for ones without explanation, just assume I'm saying "come on, man, these are the same thing."

QuoteAthletics (Running, climbs, swimming)
Agility (Tumbling, rolling, dodging, dancing, gymnastics)

QuoteAcademics (Scholarly learning – use Talents (below) to specialize in certain areas)
Research (Researching things)

QuoteComprehension (Sanity resistance, seeing the "bigger picture.")
Willpower (Resist addiction, self control in general)
Determination (Mental resistance)
Alienism (Understanding Elder Things's motivations)

Alienism is in here because it's related to sanity, and these are the "sanity and mental strength" skills. I'm not sure you want a skill for "understanding Elder Things' motivations" anyway, because if anybody can understand that stuff, they're a lot less scary, and if nobody can understand that stuff, it's sort of a bait-and-switch to give players an option to invest in a skill like this. I feel like Elder Things are typically 100% beyond mortal comprehension (because if not, they wouldn't  really be Elder Things), but you may be going a different way.

QuoteUrbanism (Street knowledge, who's who on the streets)
Contacts (knowing people, connections)

Urbanism is just Contacts in the ghetto.

QuoteThievery (Breaking and entering, criminal acts)
Stealth (Sneaking)

I had to do a lot of gymnastics before I could be comfortable with these two. So maybe this is an overlap and maybe it's not, depending on how you want to slice that pie.

QuoteCrafting (Building things -  use Talents (below) to specialize in certain areas)
Creation (Making artistic things -  use Talents (below) to specialize in certain areas)
Piloting (Controlling clockwork vehicles)
Clocksmith (Inventions, working with technology - use Talents (below) to specialize in certain areas)
Biotech (understanding the technology of Elder Things, using their weapons)

Several issues here.

You might want to fold Piloting into Clocktech (so that making and using these things are the same skill), or if not, fold it into a general "Ride/Drive/Pilot/Sail" skill.

Or, you may want to fold a bunch of these "make stuff" skills together. If Creation is Art and everything else is functional machinery and technology, great. (You could use this as an opportunity to fold in some other arts, if you want to, also.) If all this is one big "build stuff" skill with stunts to specialize, that's great too.

Generally, if all else fails, remember that one skill can modify another, and this is a way you can combine skills without creating a million of them. So you can get some extra flexibility with ideas like "dancing is an Art roll modified by Athletics", or "forging a document is Scholarship modified by Deceit or Deceit modified by Scholarship", or things like that.

I'm going to throw in my two cents with a slightly different viewpoint.

You can agonize over a big list of skills and such, but it seems like no matter what you do, there is always going to be some overlap and some deficiency. You can keep creating skills, and subdividing your skills, and such, but then you're moving away from what I think is the "spirit of FATE" and in many ways the spirit of fun gaming in general.

So, another approach is to go with something similar to the Strands of FATE approach: instead of skills, as such, you have a list of general attributes describing what you're good at. These are more generic han FATE skills, and are more like core stats in other RPG's. Your rolls would be based on these numbers, generally. You could then have aspects: maybe you'd call them "linked aspects" and they could be invoked for free (i.e.., no fate point required) when you were doing something "skilled" with the linked stat. In a way, this is a bit like D&D 4e's simple trained/untrained distinction for skills, only it seems to fly better in FATE because of the way FATE rolling works.

If you do want more resolution than just binary aspects (and I could see how you might) then you could also go back to the stat + skill method of rolling, but make the skills more or less ad hoc, specific to each character to describe what he or she is particularly good at. As for the FATE list of skills, it would be a suggestion, and you could add your own suggested skills as well. This is similar to what I did for Asura; in some ways, this brings FATE back closer to its FUDGE roots, but I don't see this as an inherently bad thing. It puts a little more burden on players and GMs, but with a sound system and a good list of suggested skills, I don't think it's a lot of trouble.

...skills are proving to be much more complex than I had initially thought they would be.

Right now, due to the previous posts and my own thoughts, I'm looking primarily at the 4 following options, though pondering some of the other excellent suggestions I received as well.

1) Go back to attributes, cutting my above list even further. Skills are instead Stunts that add a bonus to using a skill in a particular circumstance, sort of parring the attributes with Sparkletwist's suggestion of letting people make up their own skills while still giving the structure attributes provide.
2) Use the base skills of FATE and add my own to fill in the needed gaps, which shouldn't be many - looking at FATE's list, I would probably only need to add 4-5 skills to that list and wouldn't really need to remove any of the existing ones, sort of like what LC has been doing for Jade Stage
3) Use the simplified, halfway-between-skills-and-attributes route I had been looking at before, cleaning up the list to make it smoother and eliminate overlap between various skills, while more clearly defining other skills, using a lot of LC's suggestion.
4) Go the attributes-with-linked-aspects-as-skills route that Sparkletwist suggested, which I can see being very good if somewhat difficult to precisely implement.
5) Go full on FUDGE, make up your own skills route with just a suggested list.

Oh, and LC and Sparkle, sorry for not doing my usual line-by-line reply - I loved reading your posts and got a ton of ideas and good points from them, but I'm a bit strapped for time and wanted to get those 5 main ideas up ASAP. If time permits and the discussion doesn't move ahead too far, I'll do my usual line-by-line. :)

Until then, anyone have any thoughts on the above 5 methods - be the thought in practice, in implementation, or in fun?

Okay, still lack the ability to do a line-by-line response, but here's where I am right now: totally stuck. I love both viewpoints and not sure which one would be best, and spent a good deal of time developing, testing, pondering, and rethinking in my head about how to best tackle this issue, when suddenly (as in, right now, as I'm typing this post) it hit me:

I can do both.

Terra Macabre FATE is going to be redeveloped as two seperate systems - one which uses the more defined and understandable yet ridged system that's classically FATE, drawing a great deal from the feedback LC has given me. The other system, what I'm calling Macabre Light, is going to be developed in large part from Sparkletwist's suggestions, using a very limited pool of attributes which you can invent your own stunts or use aspects to expand upon and limit, which will be a more flexibile system (and probably one that's easier to use for the upcoming IRC game.) Of course, this doubles my workload, but since I already decided to do that for the setting itself, I've got not problem doing it for the system.

Oh, and as a brief aside to the other contributors, you're not being discounted and your feedback has been invaulable - however, I mention LC and Sparkletwist specifically because they advocate two very different viewpoints on how the system would be done, while other feedback has been more geared towards small refinements - both vaulable contributions, and things I can use for both Macabre FATE and Macabre Light, but the latter doesn't advocate a specific, overall design philosophy. I need both types of feedback, so thank  you all - I look forward to seeing what everyone comes up with as I continue my first serious delve into system design. :D

Quotehowever, I mention LC and Sparkletwist specifically because they advocate two very different viewpoints on how the system would be done

One of us is the shoulder angel, the other one of us is the shoulder devil. I'll just let you speculate on which is which. :yumm:

Dividing your project into two different development branches is a gutsy move, and I'm intrigued by it. I'll be interested in following along with both your versions, and will be glad to offer whatever help I can.

One problem that I had in designing the Asura system is that I'd get lots of good suggestions from here and other places and then, since I rather liked a great many of them, I'd try to implement them all. What resulted was often a clunky mechanic that tried to do too much, and often had redundant approaches that did the same thing slightly differently.

So don't do that.  :grin:

I'm not sure if subdividing the system is the right idea (especially since you've already divided the setting) but, well, it's your system, so whatever works for you! It just feels a bit like a case of scope creep (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scope_creep) to me, but maybe that's the programmer in me talking.

That's excellent advice.

It is good advice...and scope creep, though I didnt know the term before, is something I'm very vulnerable to -which leads to me getting overwhelmed, which leads to abandoned projects.

As such. I think it might be best to, at least for now, take the path of least resistance - ie, the base I know best. Therefore, I'm going to go with a strong FATE base, especially for skills, and leave the 'create your own' to stunts, aspects, and Desires (which, thanks to crow's initial idea and LC's expansion on it, is going in as one of the 3 Primary Aspects - your concept, your Desire, and your Danger)

More to come as I get work done after class tonight.

I could explain what I've posted, but it's easier to just go back and re-read the first post - the only thing unchanged is one of the possible ways to handle stress, and weapons. Everything else? Massive update.

Oh, and for clarification - I'm happy with the skills as is, though I'd like to know if they'd any overlap or areas uncovered, im still torn on how to handle stress tracks, and would love some ideas on how to 'spice up' stunts and weapon aspects, as well as suggestions for attributes. Of course, feedback on all areas is greatly appreciated, but those are some of my primary focuses right now.

I'm reading back through this and enjoying the interplay. 

Hah, yeah, there's been a ton of back and forth on this thread, which has been immensely helpful to discussion development - every time I get stuck, I re-read the thread and draw ideas from what people have posted on the various 'sides' of things, to use the term loosely.

Update Teim!

First of All, Stress. After some deliberation, I've decided to go with a hybrid of both: Stress is taken against either your physical, social, or sanity stress tracks. The amount of stress you can take is fixed here at 3: no matter what, your stress track will always be 3 in those area. Each stress track has an associated consequence track: by default, you can take 3 minor, 2 major, and 1 severe consequence in each area, and exceeding that limit will cause you to be taken out. Increased ranks in the relevant skill – Endurance for Physical, Presence for Social, Resolve for Sanity – changes how many consequence slots you have: every odd numbered rank gives you an extra minor consequence, every even numbered rank gives you an addition major consequence, and ever 5 ranks gives you both the extra minor consequence and the severe consequence. So someone with Superb Resolve would have 5 minor consequences, 4 major, and 2 severe available to them. As in most FATE games, a minor consequence reduces stress by -2, major by -4, and severe by -6.

Now, on to attributes. Here's some I've come up with, though I'll be adding to this list as time goes on. The (#) after an attribute is its cost.

-Addition FATE point (1): This is the catch all, the place you spend your leftover Talent points. It can be taken multiple times, but cannot be taken more times than 5+the campaign's level (more on that later)
-Grafts (0): The attribute is not an innate part of you, but comes from
-Aware (-1) Your graft is aware, with its own goals and objectives. While this reduces the cost of the graft (though it can never be reduced below 1 – applying this to a graft with a cost of one reduces it's cost to .5), at times your graft may take actions you would not normally do, though it is rarely an action that is suicidal to your character – the graft has self preservation instincts, after all.
-Wings (2): You can fly. Need I really elaborate? (I know I do from a mechanical sense. But for now, it's pretty self explanatory.
-Extra limbs (1): You gain a +2 bonus on checks relevant to what type of limbs you have, typically maneuvers using those extra limbs or resisting maneuvers (extra legs give you increased balance, extra arms better for grabbing). This can be taken multiple times to give you +2 in additional areas, but never to give more than +2.)
-Claws (1): A catch all for any natural melee weapon. It functions as a weapon:1 with a relevant aspect depending on what kind of natural weapon it is. Additional ranks can increase this to weapon 2 or weapon 3, but no higher.
-Spit Weapon (2) As above, but the weapon is ranged.
---Limited Supply (-1). You can only use the weapon three times per scene. You can take physical stress equal to the weapon value of your spit weapon to gain additional uses.
-Horrific Visage (2) By revealing your true appearance, you can inflict Sanity stress, much in the same manner as Spit Weapon.
---Uncontrolled (-1): Your horrific visage is always visible – anyone looking at you has to make resolve checks to resist sanity stress. Typically not a valid ability for PCs.
-Shapeshifting (-1) You can shift into an alternate form, typically one of a servitor or misbegotten. Buy additional attributes under this power – these powers are only available while shape shifted. Horrific Visage is very commonly found under shapeshifting. 

I have some doubts about your system of stress and consequences. While your stress tracks aren't long, you do have three of them, and, in addition, you have an awful lot of consequences available. Characters are going to be really, really hard to beat down with all those consequences available. Additionally, characters that have taken more than a few of them may find the time to get back in the game totally free of consequences rather cumbersome. While there's a certain realism to this, it seems like it may be a bit counterproductive in the spirit of what FATE is usually trying to do, which is to keep things quick, easy, and fun. I will say SotC had a problem with characters being really hard to take down with its 5 stress (on two tracks) and 2/4/6 consequences that you could take all at once before going down, and most people recommend house ruling a bit more "hardcore" of a damage system. You might want to consider some alterations to what you have now in light of that.

You've got some good points - "quick, easy, and fun" is something I"m aiming for, and I don't want it to get bogged down. Would reducing the number of consequences OR the 2/4/6 to something along the lines of 1/3/5 be enough, or would reducing both be needed? Alternatively, would the single stress track work well enough?

Quote from: sparkletwistI will say SotC had a problem with characters being really hard to take down with its 5 stress (on two tracks) and 2/4/6 consequences that you could take all at once before going down,

That's not quite how SotC's consequences work. The whole 2/4/6 idea is post-SotC, and is a major step in the right direction. (In SotC, all consequences, regardless of magnitude, were effectively worth infinity. You had to overwhelm someone's stress track a lot of times to take them out, because consequences were so powerful.)

I just think you have way too many consequences. You've increased them in number from three to eighteen. That's enormous.

Ok, so it's even worse than I thought in SotC. I still stand by my point.  :grin:

Part of me is really, really tempted at this point to say "Screw it" and go the Dresden route.

Or go with one other idea I had. One stress track that's 1 stress long. Still have the 18 consequences, but on pretty much every hit you're gonna have to take one. Thoughts on that?

Quote from: Xathan DovahkiinOr go with one other idea I had. One stress track that's 1 stress long. Still have the 18 consequences, but on pretty much every hit you're gonna have to take one. Thoughts on that?

That's an absurd amount of Aspects that you could potentially have on a character. Almost to the point of needing to worry about having an additional blank sheet of paper to keep track of them all.

Do you want that for the game? If so, keep. If not, don't.

I don't really see the point of 18 consequences. I like the idea of some kind of stress track, to provide a small buffer and reflect the ability to "roll with the punches," and then consequences for when things start getting a little more nasty. You might also consider changing the stress track to a "point pool," more like a HP system, which still gives you a buffer, but also means you will probably get to consequences sooner.

The thing about having shorter stress tracks and more emphasis on consequences is this: you're going to end up with characters that can take a ton of punishment, but that punishment has lasting effects. This is for characters who are tough and durable, but who "feel every punch". That's a goal I can get behind, but I think your particular details are overkill, personally.

Part of the appeal of one consequence at each level of severity is a sense of escalation. If you've taken a mild consequence already, you know the next time someone hits you hard, you've got to take a more serious consequence-- things are going to get worse. If you're suddenly able to repeat consequences at the same level of severity, I think it's likely that you'd lose a lot of that sense of mounting tension. Also, I'd think it'd be hard to take any single consequence that seriously when you've got so many more available to bail you out in a conflict.

Part of the appeal of having a single, shared pool of consequences for all your stress tracks is that it means there are more ways for consequences to affect you globally. If you go into a sword duel and you're already Demoralized and having a Crisis of Confidence because of a difficult debate in the town forum that you just came from, you're a lot more likely to fare poorly in the duel because not only can those social/mental/emotional consequence be tagged by your opponent, they also take up space in your consequence limit, so you can take fewer sword-duelin' consequences before you lose. You have less of a buffer, because the buffer is shared.

Also, shared consequences allow you to get asymmetrical with conflicts, because consequences don't have a "type". If you've got two duelists with swords and Alice is trying to chop Bob to bits (physical attacks with physical stress) but Bob is just trying to talk Alice down and get the fight to stop (social attacks with social stress), both tactics are equally at home in the conflict and both are valid. If, halfway through the scene, one of the participants changes tactics (say, Bob has had enough and decides Alice needs to suffer, so he drops the attempts at persuasion and goes all out with the sword with physical attacks), that person doesn't have to start all over trying to wear the opponent down through a totally different set of fresh consequences.

I dunno, man. I just get the sense that you're trying to get a bit too fiddly with all this stuff, and the fiddly bits are going to get in the way of your game.

Listening to all the arguments - and shocked by the fact that my three main sources of feedback (Sparkletwist, LC, and SabrWolf) all agree on something in that my idea is going to create more problems than fun, I've decided that I'm going to go with the standard FATE route, A-la Dresden, operating under the mindset of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." :P Thanks for the feedback guys - sorry this post isn't more detailed, but it'd boil down to "you're absolutely right" :P

Now for an alternative question - any thoughts on my proposed method of buying stunts, attributes, and the sample attributes?

I'm seeing your list for buying attributes, but I don't see anything there about stunts. What's the deal there, just make your own, Dresden-style, and each stunt costs one point?

"Buying Fate Points" is just a way of saying you have FP equal to the amount of character-building points you didn't blow on other stuff? Is this like a default "refresh level" of FP (i.e., if I spend three points here, I have three FP at the start of each session/campaign/story/whatever) or is it literally just buying FP at a 1:1 exchange and once I spend them, they're gone?

Your entry on "grafts" cuts off mid-sentence, so it's unclear what that actually means. I'm curious about what it's meant to represent, since a cost of zero is basically saying "take this if you want, or not, whatever" so I'm interested in the ramifications of making an attribute a graft or deliberately not doing so. Also, I'm a little confused from your chart about which of the other powers are meant to be graft options and which are not.

I'm not sure Shapeshifting needs to have a negative cost. I understand you're basically using this as a way to partially refund the cost of other powers by making them available only part of the time, but as far as I can tell, it's still always going to be a benefit to grab Shapeshifting, not a drawback. I think having Horrible Visage some of the time would actually be more useful than having it all the time, and as far as I can tell there's no reason not to pick up Shapeshifting + Claws or Shapeshifting + Limited Use Spit Weapon, because stuff like that is free and you can always turn it off if it's inconvenient for some reason, so why the hell not?

Quote from: Luminous Crayon
I'm seeing your list for buying attributes, but I don't see anything there about stunts. What's the deal there, just make your own, Dresden-style, and each stunt costs one point?

Bingo. I'll get some samples up, but if you know how it works Dresden-style, then that's how I'm running it - I'm adopting an even stronger "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" policy. :P

Quote"Buying Fate Points" is just a way of saying you have FP equal to the amount of character-building points you didn't blow on other stuff? Is this like a default "refresh level" of FP (i.e., if I spend three points here, I have three FP at the start of each session/campaign/story/whatever) or is it literally just buying FP at a 1:1 exchange and once I spend them, they're gone?

Yeah, it's pretty much a different way of explaining refresh, mainly because it took me about 15 read throughs to finally get how refresh is supposed to work, and explaining it this way makes much more sense to me.

QuoteYour entry on "grafts" cuts off mid-sentence, so it's unclear what that actually means. I'm curious about what it's meant to represent, since a cost of zero is basically saying "take this if you want, or not, whatever" so I'm interested in the ramifications of making an attribute a graft or deliberately not doing so. Also, I'm a little confused from your chart about which of the other powers are meant to be graft options and which are not.

Oh, wow, can't believe I missed that. Grafts is kind of like Wizard's Constitution in Dresden - it's mechanical impacts on the game are minimal, but it's important to have present. Essentially, having the Grafts allows you to get powers that aren't part of your normal physiology. I'm still debating which powers should be allowed as Grafts - or if there should be any restriction at all. It's a flavor thing, hence the no cost - though part of me is debating making it cost 2, since it's the only way to have a powered human, and would end up having the same mechanical effect as vanilla mortals having 2 extra refresh in Dresden.

QuoteI'm not sure Shapeshifting needs to have a negative cost. I understand you're basically using this as a way to partially refund the cost of other powers by making them available only part of the time, but as far as I can tell, it's still always going to be a benefit to grab Shapeshifting, not a drawback. I think having Horrible Visage some of the time would actually be more useful than having it all the time, and as far as I can tell there's no reason not to pick up Shapeshifting + Claws or Shapeshifting + Limited Use Spit Weapon, because stuff like that is free and you can always turn it off if it's inconvenient for some reason, so why the hell not?

Hell...with that argument, Shapeshifting should have a positive cost, not a negative one. Which I suppose it should - the benefits of it make it less of a drawback unless there's some kind of requirement you need to shift, or delay in how long you can shift, or something along those lines.

Thanks for the help!

Random thought: scratch the 2pt cost for grafts I was talking about, and instead allow an "unaltered human" attribute worth -2, with the catch it's the only attribute you can have.