Streamline getting people playing the game faster. Both Monster of the Week and Blades in the Dark do this well. The players select playbooks, make some selections, and I spend five minutes explaining dice rolling and the game has started. The creative writing part of Fate—making aspects—is IMO the biggest barrier for play, especially for […]
Category: Fate
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Fate Encounter: Pinned Sniper
I’d like to share an encounter I wrote in the hopes that it helps to inspire other Fate RPG GMs. Thematically this encounter is about the PCs taking out a trapped sniper; mechanically this is an encounter that consumes resources that the PCs could walk away from. What is a Sniper? In the scenario that […]
UPDATE November 2019 — the content of this article still stands. I will periodically review it and keep it up to date. I moved to rural Pennsylvania a few years ago and this forced me to move my gaming online. Fortunately, my gaming friends were cool with this and we started playing online. This article […]
Summary: Conflicts can be more than physical or social and can take place on a timescale that isn’t moment-to-moment. I’m running a Musketeer-style game and the PCs are trying to sail into the port of a foreign country that has closed their borders. They would like to do this legally for story reasons (but are […]
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Circumstantial PC Aspects in Fate
One of my favorite things about the Fate RPG is that all of the mechanics of the game are really just ways to redirect focus on the narrative of the game. The most potent tool for this is the Aspect. These bits of description tell us what is important and define when it can be […]
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The Disposable PC, for Fate
Sometimes random people show up for a night of gaming and no one (GM or player) has had time to prep a character for that person to play. Sure, they could play one of the NPCs, but only if there is a fleshed out NPC with a character sheet. So you could have the hassle […]
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How I Evaluate my Fate PCs
Building characters in Fate is pretty easy, but sometimes I wonder if I’ve made a good one. I’d like to acknowledge that “good” is subjective. If you’re having fun playing your character and everyone in the group likes having them there, you have a good one. You’re a winner! Despite this, I have a habit […]
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Compilation of Fate RPG Posts
I’ve been writing about Fate off and on for a while now and I thought that I would gather up links to all of those posts and put them in one place. This is that place. 🙂 Tiered Opponents in Fate, about turning a single opponent into a larger, more interesting boss fight using the […]
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Tiered Opponents in Fate
I’d like to share with you a technique for creating an epic take out the bad person scene in the Fate RPG with what I call Tiered Opponents. (Actually, that’s a lie. I call them Blooming Onions but tiered opponents sounds so much more official.) The key with tiered opponents is that you can’t defeat […]
Even the most regular of tabletop gaming groups has absences from time-to-time and there are many ways to handle it. Personally as a GM, I generally just wave my hand and say, “Oh well, they missed out on this awesome adventure” and the players continue on as if that character hadn’t just mysteriously disappeared. And […]