I'm going to be running a Fate Core game (elsewhere) pretty soon, so I thought I'd collect the various house rules that I was using and post them here, in case they're useful to anyone. To me, Fate is a pretty good system, but it has a few lingering flaws that I find these rules address pretty well:
- You don't have to follow the skill "pyramid." You get 20 points for skills and can spend them however you like. The only limit is that no skill tier can have more skills in it than the one below it. This one is just because I like the flexibility that Dresden's way of doing it gave you.
- You can always refuse a compel. If you refuse a compel with 0 fate points, you now have a negative fate point. A negative fate point represents a fate point in the hands of anyone, anywhere, that may be spent against you— so it can be rather dangerous. Being forced to accept compels at 0 was always kind of annoying to me, and this lets you continue to have narrative agency while making it quite risky to do so.
- If you attempt to create an advantage and fail, you can invoke an aspect to automatically succeed at creating the advantage. Aspects and free invokes are pretty easy to come by, so I figure that if you're willing to spend one (or a fate point, which is equivalent) then you might as well get the payoff, all the time.
- A boost is more limited than an aspect, only allowing a +2 bonus before the dice are rolled. This make boosts more like spin from Dresden, and it makes stunts that upgrade a boost into a full aspect actually worth something.
- Player characters can agree to trade initiative spots. Fate doesn't really treat initiative order as a big deal, so I don't see the harm.
Sneaking around is also going to be an important part of this game, so we're experimenting with using a Stealth stress track. The way it works is that Stealth stress represents peril of detection, caused by failing Stealth checks. When you're "taken out," then you are busted.
As I do still definitely want to run Alptraum for you (and, eventually, others) using Fate, I'd be curious to hear about how the game goes. Are you running it based out of another site, or just through IRC? Skype?
I am still all for Alptraum. :D
We're using Roll20, which wouldn't be my first choice for Fate, normally, but their tools do support rolling dF so it'll probably work well.
The players wanted to use the grid map since we're on Roll20 anyway, and one of the players made pretty tokens for the party, so we're also using some optional rules for Fate that translate zones to grid squares. Although this removes the abstract positioning, one interesting thing it does it makes zones dynamic-- "one zone" is now the space surrounding you, wherever you may be-- so this should be fun too.