Designer, Entreprenuer, Father, RPG Gamer
I’ve been reflected on the difference between D&D-style RPGs and Fate. It is a question that comes up a lot when talking about Fate. Yesterday the right phrase popped up in a conversation about something else. “Everyone is Crew, Not Passengers.” As a player in D&D you are a passenger. You have full control over …
Continue reading ““Crew, not Passengers”, the core difference between Fate and D&D”
FoundryVTT is a new-to-market virtual tabletop for playing RPGs. It has been in production for a long time now, over in Patreon. It will get out of beta this month, releasing on May 22, 2020. Foundry is open to modification from users. The community has contributed many modules, gaming systems, and quality-of-life of improvements. If …
Continue reading “Using FoundryVTT to run a Fate Game (Secrets of Cats)”
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 …
Continue reading “From Reddit: What would you change for a hypothetical new edition of Fate?”
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 …
Continue reading “Managing a Long-Term Fate RPG Campaign Online”
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 …
Continue reading “Getting Permission to Enter a Foreign Land, Run as a Long Conflict (Fate RPG)”
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 …
[et_pb_section admin_label=”section”] [et_pb_row admin_label=”row”] [et_pb_column type=”4_4″][et_pb_text admin_label=”Text”]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. …
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 …
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 …
