Terra Macabre System (FATE Based) - Stress and Powers

[Xathan]

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.)

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)

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.)

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.

[Xathan]

Weapon update complete.

[Xathan]

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.

[Lmns Crn]

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?

[Xathan]

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.

[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.

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.

[beejazz]

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.

[Xathan]

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

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.

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. :)

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.

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?

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

Sold on Vigor. Will address psyche further down. 

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

I 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.

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 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?

I 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?

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.

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!

"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.

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.

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!

EDIT: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.

[Lmns Crn]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).  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.

EDIT: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!

[Xathan]

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

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.

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?

[Lmns Crn]

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.

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.

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?

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."

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

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

Comprehension (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.

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

Urbanism is just Contacts in the ghetto.

Thievery (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.

Crafting (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.

[sparkletwist]

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.

[Xathan]

...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?

[Xathan]

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

[Lmns Crn]

however, 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.