Fate Accelerated... For Girls

Here's the situation: the boys at the school club have been setting up and playing a fantasy-genre game using the Imagine RPG. Over the past few weeks, as a player, I've been taking part in the entertaining efforts of our newbie GM. As a reward, he has attracted a total of three new players to his campaign, taking the table total (including me) to seven.

At the same time, I've noticed at least three girls at the school (all of whom I teach) who are deeply into storytelling and who are very creative. Unwilling to try mixing up with the boys group, I am wondering if the girls might enjoy things more if we pull together an all-girl newbie group alongside the regulars.

Enter the conundrum: how do you set up a cool roleplaying experience for three (perhaps more) 11-13 year old teenage girls?

Enter Fate Accelerated... For Girls.

Fate Accelerated...

Fate is a very flexible storytelling game which has had a big make-over via Kickstarter. It's a fast-paced, adaptable, and easy-to-learn system for modelling... well, anything dramatic.

Fate Accelerated is Fate Core minus around 250 pages. It's super-lite, quick to grab and play, and designed for newcomers. What really appeals more, however, is that it's capable of handling pretty much any idea that's thrown at it... and it can do so while beginners do their learning piecemeal.

Fate can handle characters created in a few minutes using just two short phrases and six values. Come up with a High Concept and a Trouble for your hero: what are they all about and why do they end up in hot water? Order your six Approaches (how you do stuff) from Good down to Mediocre. You're set.

As you play, you are invited to add in two more Aspects (those short phrases that define your hero) and choose a Stunt (something cool that gives you a bonus). These can arise naturally from the story you're telling, so players get to choose them as they feel they've discovered something new about their character.

Fate is intuitive, simple, and allows details to emerge from play. 

...For Girls

The issue for me is that I'm trying to game with three (or more) newbie girls. Never one to wish to sound prejudiced about gender, I'm going to admit one thing: it's slightly daunting to know what to offer.

Chatting on G+ yesterday was interesting: male players make similar assumptions about girls. These include the belief that girls will downplay violence, want to be more collaborative, and seek to play feisty Princesses. Hmm.

All I know for sure is that these girls already enjoy adventure stories. They are readers of fiction. What I am hoping is that the love for stories will translate into a love for storytelling.

To be honest, I think that the best approach will be to go with a blank sheet of paper and ask them what kind of stories they enjoy. From there, through a discussion, we should be able to begin to create some characters and a setting. It'll be down to me as GM to improvise the rest.

Bailing On The Boys?

Well, not exactly. Certainly, if this project gets any traction, I'll be dipping out of the boys' campaign. But I'll be sitting around 2 metres away in the same room, gaming with another group. That makes me accessible for their inevitable queries and interruptions.

In truth, what I've been seeking to do is take a group of players into the hobby and make them independent. Right now, with their own budding GM, the lads are starting to fly. One session without me certainly won't hurt. If the ladies like playing, which I hope they will, it's no big deal to have me drop aside longer term.

To be honest, I think the boys will actually enjoy the freedom to play.

Game on!

Rules Crunch: Dr Jekyll or Mr Hyde?

So here's the problem that keeps gnawing at me like a Targ: while I love the idea of rules-lite, highly narrative gaming I am also a big fan of the crunchy-detailed rules set too. 

My players mostly come from the crunchy style of play too, meaning that rules-lite is not as well-practised in my circles as I might have hoped. The added complication comes from two elements of game rules that, frankly, I like to see crunched up: magic and tech.

Yesterday I was the Mr Jekyll of rules-lite narrative play but today I am the Mr Hyde of crunchy rules. 

What's a poor, maddened GM to do?

Fate versus Traveller5... and other stuff...

Yes, I am prepping a campaign for our new SF universe and proposing to use the new Fate Core rules. 

Great, you say. So what's the problem?

Well... I'm also awaiting delivery of the Traveller5 rulebook. This tome of almost 700 pages contains rules for almost every conceivable detail that an SF GM might need... and quite a few that I am almost certain he won't. It's as much a trip of nostalgia and hubris to welcome this new edition of my favourite SF system into my home... but I also really rather fancy trying it out.

And then there is also the fact that Rick Priestley is proposing using a d10 based system for his forthcoming Gates of Antares tabletop wargame... and mentioned the decimalisation needed for his hoped-for RPG in the same setting. This got me thinking about the limitations of the humble d6 again, a matter that has haunted my love of Traveller for years! Frankly... he talks sense!

Ultimately, I am being torn apart by the temptations of multiple game systems... my mind wanders endlessly betwixt Fate, Traveller, HARP-SF, Hero, GURPS and myriad other games I own... and all the time the question in my mind is, "How can I make this SF campaign feel really cool?"

Do rules matter?

Some will accuse me of madness for asking this question... but, do they? 

What is really needed to model a really cool SF setting? 

Depends on what you want, I guess. 

Fate models literary and movie/TV reality... it's a system where what matters is what makes the story move. You don't need "stats" for anything until it becomes important to the plot. Then it's turned into an aspect. Simple.

Traveller5 seeks to model a kind of future realism. Over the past N-years of development time that I've been involved with the game I've witnessed countless discussions about the relative "realism" of a given sub-system of the game. Frankly, a lot of the time, I've not cared. 

And yet... sometimes, I do care. 

Many things in Traveller work for me. Character creation using a story-creating game engine is attractive to me; you know, the old Term of Service in a career to gain skills and rack up the mustering out benefits. The fact that everything is scaled. The fact that I can just roll up almost anything using some tables... if I really need to.

But what is it that prevents me from really letting go and embracing this new, narrative style? 

I really am not sure.

Perhaps it's the worries I have about magic over-powering the game. Or just that I really like to have a stat line for my Laser Carbine. 

What's a poor, crazed GM to do? 

Any suggestions?

No FATE But What We Make

Pledge to support FATE Core
(image used without permission)

No, this is not a Terminator homage. Actually it's a post about what is exciting me mightily about the FATE RPG system.

For those of you who don't know, FATE is a FUDGE-derivative RPG system which is currently in the throes of a Kickstarter campaign for the latest (and greatest!) edition: FATE Core (by Evil Hat's +Rob Donoghue and +Fred Hicks). BUT... that's not all!

Another FATE-based game, the excellent Nova Praxis (written by +Mike McConnell), has also recently been funded via Kickstarter. This is an awesome Trans-humanist setting and has been long gestating in the mind of the author.

It's the combination of the two releases that's particularly exciting me.

FATEd?

Those who know me best are aware that I am somewhat addicted to collecting and reading RPG systems. So it was that, several years back, I first came across FATE. To be honest, I wasn't impressed at the time: the "skill pyramid" and the narrative style of play didn't fit with my own approach to roleplaying back then.

Over time, however, I kept bumping into FATE. There was Spirit of the Century. Next was The Dresden Files. More recently there was Diaspora. And Strands of Fate. We even played that last one... used it to introduce my Dark Reich setting to the Friday Night Group.

A couple of months ago +Mike McConnell started the Nova Praxis Kickstarter and, frankly, he hooked me to FATE. When the funding was completed, Mike released the Beta Playtest to the supportive fans. Yesterday he released a second update. It's good stuff... very, very good.

But that's not all. Hot on the heels of McConnell's product has come Evil Hat's FATE Core. It's this last product that, as I began to collaborate on our new SF setting, got me thinking that I'm fated to play it.

What's so good?

I liked FUDGE way back when, before the turn of the century. I liked it because, at least for me, it was the first narrative game that made sense to me. Most of all I liked the use of descriptive terms to quantify things: your hero is a Good Fighter, not a fighter with Fighting 12 (or whatever).

FATE is narrative gaming all grown-up and mature. Descriptive play is to the fore and the FUDGE-dice are rolled. Yet... it adds the wondrous dynamics of "Aspects":

Aspects are phrases that describe some significant detail about a character. They are the reasons why your character matters, why we’re interested in seeing your character in the game. Aspects can cover a wide range of elements, such as personality or descriptive traits, beliefs, relationships, issues and problems, or anything else that helps us invest in the character as a person, rather than just a collection of stats. 

Aspects come into play in conjunction with fate points. When your aspects benefit you, you can spend fate points to invoke that aspect for a bonus. When your aspects complicate your character’s life, you can gain fate points back—this is called accepting a compel.

(FATE Core, Kickstarter Preview Dec 4th) 

Aspects define pretty much everything in the game, from heroes to terrain features. It's an immensely simple idea and a very powerful application of simplicity.

For me, I get the freedom of narrative writing and creating whatever I want, however I want it to be, while being able to connect to the game system in a quick and easy manner.

Blending FATE

Today I realised that I have lots of FATE tools in my box. 

We are building an SF setting, which in itself is exciting. To help, however, we have FATE Core to get us started. But that's not all... 

We have Diaspora to inspire the creation of a sector of space. We have Nova Praxis to inspire technology and the futuristic feel of humanity. And we have The Dresden Files to fuel our magick. 

We actually also have the excellent Strands of Fate (and Strands of Power) to help us model the various amazing powers and abilities that might be present in the future. 

In short, we are not short of tools. Just short of spare time to pick them up and use them. The future, it seems, is filled with FATE. All I need to do now is accept it.

Game on!

Collaboration 101

This week has seen some positive and clear progress on the SF setting that I've been posting about on and off over the last month or so. The setting is now under collaborative production with the first pair of players and, frankly, we're pretty excited about the basics we've thrashed out already. If you're new to this thread, check out the previous articles starting with Recurring Themes in SF.

Planning a new campaign, to be played online with friends all across the world, has thrown up a number of new challenges and exciting opportunities. 

This post is a way to help me organise my thoughts and propose a number of cool possibilities. So... here goes with the madness...

Collaboration

First of all, there is serious power in collaboration. 

This idea began to really surface a couple of years ago for me as a pushed-for-time GM running the regular home-based Friday Night Roleplay group. In short, I was hopeful that my players would be willing to join me in co-creating a setting and running games in it. 

There have been serious barriers to this aim, not least of which has been my reluctance to let go of the traditional GM control role. I always wants things to fit my own vision of things, even when players suggest cool innovations, and end up cherry-picking things rather than really listening to player wants.

That said, the other major barriers are two-fold: the players aren't used to collaboration and the systems don't always accommodate it either.

Players don't usually expect to be creatively involved, at least not my players. They are ok with thinking up a hero and, perhaps, tacking on a background slug. They just want to get on with playing, however, and don't want to spend precious session time chatting about setting design... and the rest of the time they are busy with work and life. This is a barrier to the collaborative idea.

Systems assume GM control. At least, the systems we prefer do... you know, the simulationist style games we prefer. In fact, even the narrative style games tend to assume a strong Narrator. I realised this fact only this week as I began to read the FATE Core .PDF (available from the Kickstarter campaign page). 

Why do systems place barriers to collaborative setting design? Well, imagine you want to build the setting I'm proposing using Traveller or GURPS or a similar system; you will be writing crunchy conversion rules for equipment pretty quickly, as well as adapting character traits for the players to choose from. Using Traveller I might need to adapt the Career tables; for GURPS I need to tell them which Advantages are available. Sure, they can help with this... except, who wants to spend games night working through lists of game traits?

No, collaboration has to be built into the game experience from the word go. That's why HeroQuest and FATE have been appealing strongly to me for this project.

Collaborative Approaches

The first step is to take a narrative approach. Ditch the system choice and start by engaging the players in the project. In this case, two guys have shown interest; one is seriously excited about collaborating on the setting, the other is (so far) wanting to show up and play.

Step One for me was to get email chatter bounced to a forum, so we could talk online and keep the thread clear and open. This has, in just a week, generated the basic assumptions and background for the setting - raw, rough and ready to use.

Step Two has been to find a wiki space so that we can record the "canon" of the setting as we create it. Wiki implies collaboration from the word go. It's private, so that we can mess around and not feel that we have an audience yet, but can be made open if we feel we have something to share.

Step Three has been to realise that we can use any system we choose... and that this depends on the style of game we want to play.

Trans-System Setting?

Some settings are hard-wired into the rules that support them. Or, put another way, game designers build a system to play in a particular setting. Examples are games like World of Darkness or Star Wars. With time and popularity these systems can be stripped out of the setting and made multi-genre, but they always taste the flavour of their original form.

Other settings are looser and fit the form. Mykenaea, for instance, has been built for use with Rolemaster. It is flavoured by the system now, most notably in the way that magic works. If I wanted to run Mykenaea with another system I'd need to either model the same magic system or accept a major shift in the setting. D&D does this to settings too. 

This new setting, however, can be trans-system in nature. In other words, it will demand that the system be adapted to suit the setting. Depending on the style of game I want to play then I will use a different style of system.

For loose and high-octane adventure I am tempted to play with FATE or HeroQuest. These model cinematic / narrative styles and suit heroes who are dealing with televisable stories. For more serious and simulationist tales, however, I might choose Traveller5. All of these systems, however, will need to be adapted to fit the setting... not the other way around.

What's My Point?

Well... my point is that the creative fun of the setting is the heart of the collaboration. It's vital to get the setting roughed-out and into play quickly. Thus, the players can be engaged in quick sketching of the setting and then moved towards active play, filling in details as we play, to maintain interest. 

The setting will evolve and grow in play. I'm not going to spend weeks writing alone and hoping that my players will like the outcome. That was how I worked on Mykovnia... and that way is hard work and might lead to a living campaign. Without ongoing interest, however, it is prone to running out of steam if I ever run out of steam.

This setting will evolve and grow to meet player needs. They know that they have a stake in everything the setting offers from Day 1. They will be encouraged to add details and suggestions to the setting as play progresses... and we'll simply record and organise the notes. 

If a player wants to take off on a side-track and detail something they are interested in, who am I to stop them? No, as Narrator, I'll just read and digest the ideas into the campaign as it evolves.

Overall, the setting is a group property. It exists for the entertainment of the group. It is created and maintained by the group for the duration of play. If play continues, it will grow and evolve. 

No matter what, however, the setting cannot become a slave to a system. It's the other way around: the system must deliver on the type of game the setting demands.

Game on!