How bad I am at running Fate
I love running Fate. I think it’s a fantastic game that’s got a lot of great mechanics that both simplify and enhance the play of just about any genre of game.
But just because I love it, doesn’t mean I’m good at it.
Don’t get me wrong, give me a good group of players and some Fate dice and we’ll all have a tremendously good time. I’m a pretty good GM, and Fate is my weapon of choice for a lot of games.
But there are a lot of things that Fate does, awesome things, that I just don’t do well. I forget them, or ignore them, or just use them insufficiently. My play style doesn’t fit some of them.
Take Aspects. Fate is built around Aspects. In Fate, everything has aspects. The PCs, the NPCs, the game itself, the scenes, everything. When you succeed with style on something (which just means getting a result on your roll several shifts better than you needed to—if you didn’t know what that was, it’s because I rarely ever use it) you can add a temporary aspect to what you’re acting on, called a Boost. A lot of the game is about discovering and applying aspects.
Now me, I give the scene aspects if I’ve prepared for the scene in advance, and the PCs have their aspects of course, but other than that? You barely see them. Because I just don’t think about things that way, and so I don’t use them that much.
And Fate Points. They’re used for so much! For invoking an Aspect, yes, but also you can gain them by having an Aspect of yours compelled, i.e. used against you. But do I ever think of that? Well, if you’ve been listening to Lantern Cove you know that I do not. Fate points are also used to declare something about the setting - like, ‘I spend a Fate point to have there be construction on the road the bad guys are escaping down,’ or something like that. But that doesn’t work too well with the horror genre in my opinion, because part of what separates horror from adventure is that in horror the characters never really have the advantage, or if they do then that advantage is going to turn out to be a negative in some way later on. So Fate Points aren’t the exciting dynamic in my games that Fate makes them out to be, and it’s something I’ve come to accept.
But all that said, I love Fate and I will probably continue to use it for more games in the future. Possibly not as well as it could be used, but that’s life.
Sera
