To Boldly Go: Lessons of Fate

Originally published March 5, 2014

A month ago, I began my first Fate game in my setting To Boldly Go. More on that setting can be found here. Since then I've learned a lot about the system, how not to do things, and what things work well.

Adventure Design

I've found that Fate really excels in plotting and setting up scenarios. The advice in the core book focuses building plots from the problems created by the characters' Aspects. I find pretty enjoyable brainstorming up these combinations of troubles to threaten and inconvenience the characters.

Here are some examples from my first adventure:

Because Steve Walmart is a Mid-Level Suit and Samsung is an issue, it implies that both of them may be looking to establish business relations with the same groups of people. Therefore, finding out that the oligarchs of the Hub, who Steve is negotiating a trade treaty with, are breaching their contract with Samsung would be a big problem for him.

Since Max Petrobras has What does this button do? and Rochelle Total has Come on, It’ll be Fun, it implies that the two of them might experience local technological fads together. So a bad batch of Sentient Snacks, part of the latest craze, going homicidal would probably be a big problem for them.

Since Rochelle has Well Traveled Bodyguard and Steve has “I had no idea she was your wife!" is makes sense that she has to watch out for his dalliances. So a seductive agent of Samsung hired to keep Steve out of the action for the trade talks would be a big problem for them.

This scheme of "because you have aspect X, that implies Y. Thus Z is a problem." is a surprisingly simple but effective tool for brainstorming. It nicely draws on the subplots of the players (via their Aspects) and flows naturally into connecting them into the larger narrative.

The other great idea is using questions as prompts for scenes. While not quite as useful for brainstorming to me, I did find it fairly interesting and a nice tool for working out branch points in the story as a whole.

A few sample questions from my initial session include:

• Do Max and Rho bring samples of the Sentient Snacks back to the ship?
• Does Steve avoid being captured by Samsung’s agent?
• Does Steve manage to arrange a treaty between the Hub and the Federation?

Creating Obstacles

I've found creating opponents in Fate to be particularly easy. I think that since Aspects both describe the character both conceptually and in terms of their abilities, it greatly shortens the design process for me. For me, it naturally flows from coming up the character concept to building the Aspects for the character. I also like the upfront division between nameless characters (who need minimal stats and background), minor characters (who have a bit more mechanics and some background) and major characters (who are built much like the player characters.

For my initial adventure I had a few characters to make (I'll be presenting many of these in the weeks ahead):
Sentient Snacks (nameless characters): these are the main physical threat of the game, small edible enemies.
Oligarchs (minor characters): the primary role for these characters was as plotters and negotiators. So after establishing their Aspects it was simply a matter of prioritizing their social skills.
Samsung (major character): CEO of a rogue company making biological android (bioroids), Samsung is a major threat for the game and has higher skills and more Aspects than the other characters.
Ju Li (minor character): bioriod agent who poisons Steve and later tussles with Rho.

One issue I had with the opponents in play was with referencing them in game. This was due to how I keep my game notes on my notes on Obsidian Portal via my iPad. Switching tabs however takes a few seconds which is frustratingly long for the speed of play we were involved with. In future I'll be including an abbreviated version of the character in my main game notes (including important information such as the number of Consequences they can take). For example for Sentient Snacks I've found this to be a good format:

Sentient Snacks

• Description: 8 inch high humanoids, taste like syrupy meat, tell bad jokes
• Aspect: Tiny Edible Robots
• Skills: Computer +2, Combat Training +1, Provoke +1
• Stress: 0

Gameplay

The actual playing of the game has been a mixed experience. Mostly it is a matter of becoming familiar with a new system. I've been slowly learning to balance the difficulty of obstacles to the characters, starting from a low base and increasing it as I go. This has kept the characters from being swamped but hasn't encouraged to them to use Create an Advantage very much. That in turn tends to make most fights either too easy (and boring) or too hard (because the players have yet to fully grasp how they can stack Aspects to achieve high levels of success). I think I need have my non-player characters use Create an Advantage more (thus leading by example).

I've also had some difficulty remembering to target the characters' main skills. I hope to rectify this by keeping a full skill list for the player characters, focusing the challenges on the characters' best skills.

Additionally I've had some complaints that rolls can be very random, something I'm not sure quite what to do about. Part of it I think might be that the characters are not using Creating an Advantage very often, instead using Overcome repeatedly (which often for major scenes have a difficulty set around their skill level). That tends to creates a roughly 50/50 success rate which might be the source of the feeling of arbitrariness.

A definite failure on my part has been forgetting to apply Milestones at the start of a session. I also haven't done the best at calling out Aspects on non-player characters and locations. Part of it is that I use a white board for drawing maps and labeling Aspects, but most of my players are sitting opposite me. So it slows the game down to turn the board around and write the Aspect in large print (another failing of mine). I did see a nice technique of using post-it notes for temporary Aspects and Boosts. That would let me write the note quickly (facing me) and then toss it where it needs to be.

Another weakness of mine has been in defining the beginning and ends of scenes. My players tend to go off on their own tangents and it makes it difficult to determine where a scene begins or ends. One game had no real pauses and so ended up being one scene. I think I should broken it up somehow but then that would have allowed the problems they were facing to recover Stress, thus making the session more difficult.

Social combat is something the group excels at and something I'm going to need to learn to work with. Not sure yet how I will handle that. Perhaps using mental stress damage to measure success in negotiations.

Going forward, I'll be using a personalized Reference Sheet, highlighting those aspects of the game I'm weakest in. A copy can be found here.

Not Fate Related

The last item I've learned involves my use of ambient music. The first session I used drone zone but the flow of the game wasn't what I wanted. It lacked energy. The second session I used a custom playlist with variety of ambient music of varied tempos (including some nice dramatic music). The players remarked afterwards that the music really helped that game session. So something is going right.