[FATE and Ehdrigohr] Relevance and function

[Ron Edwards]

Harold Wagener posted an interesting piece at his blog: The imaginary and real success of FATE. It seems to me that he and I share a straightforward starting-point concept about the game, which as he says, is that FATE is best understood as an implementation of FUDGE. From this follow a number of points raised (in my experience) in discussions with Keith, Tim Koppang, and Nathan, which is that FATE works quite well toward a specific way to play we all associate with the mid-90s, the most prevalent and reinforced way if you go by the game books and any textual evidence from gamer culture.

That way to play is characterized by uneasy compromises: between GM and player authority, between mechanical consequence and desired outcome, between non-ordered play and IIEE, among all the parts of IIEE, and more.

At its most functional, it's straight-up Participationism which is quite close to theater with imagined puppets, or perhaps making a movie together in which the actors are very close to the director and get to ad-lib their lines, or suggest bits of various components along the way.

It's definite prone to the Impossible Thing Before Breakfast, especially when the gulf widens between what we say the goals are and what really happens.

When that gulf appears, then we're in the Murk and playing like this yields parpuzio, the term coined by Moreno to mean, basically, "GM says what happens and we all fumble about in relation to that."

Like FUDGE, FATE is arguably a way to permit a lot of player agency into genre standards at the outset, which also aids in keeping a person feeling creatively embedded in what's going on, and to settle all the particulate rules concerns into a simple dice-reading system. None of which sounds like a bad thing, and it isn't. However, when you examine toward what end, the constantly reinforced message is to stick to the planned/expected story. It's basically a way to keep the wheels from coming off the tracks.

Through Fate Points, especially Compels, FATE extends that concept to the dice bonuses, character-inclusion, and even details-of-the-moment aspects of play. Basically, if I want a Fate Point, I suggest to the GM "give me a Compel based on my Stubbornness, and I'll be stubborn" and I get my Fate Point, and it makes me more effective. Similarly, the GM can tell me, "Be Stubborn now if you want a Fate Point." I can use Fate Points for bonuses or to say stuff like "This guy is my uncle" sometimes.

What's weird to my eyes is that play has to be negotiated like this before it happens; there's apparently no foundation of my playing my character stubbornly or not because I was planning on doing that anyway, i.e., "play my character." Compels remind either player or GM that the player is playing this character ... as if that were somehow at risk or unstable in the first place. Bring in the fact that Compels are also used for "get into the deathtrap" or "trust this guy" for Fate Point rewards, and the closure of all the junction-points with railroaded 90s play is complete.* Erik Weissengruber explicitly said it in his posts here, "I can't do Story Now with Compels."

That's why I think FATE has always been difficult to discuss for the founding and near-founding Forge crowd. Our interest was in good design and in non-railroaded play. When you get good design (i.e. no Murk) toward railroaded play ... which I fully admit can result in functional Participationism ... it seemed to us to be "way over or even back there" somewhere. That's why we keep referencing the early-mid 90s when talking about it. It seems odd to me that the whole point of the design is to play GM-driven story in such a way that no one gets pissed off enough to do a table-flip.

So what does any of this have to do wtih "generic" really in role-playing terms? Well, it's related to the idea that role-playing is role-playing, and that races and hats and maps and whatnot are all mere "skins" for a fixed and reliable experience. I submit that generic design, especially starting with GURPS and proceeding through the titles I mentioned and similar ones, only seems to be about WHAT to play, when in fact it's assurance that you CAN play (in this way) no matter what it's about.

Which doesn't sit well with the Forge-ish notion that when you play a different WHAT, you design a different HOW.

A Forge-ish notion isn't ideology. The only Forge ideology was self-publishing, so FATE and BTRC and others were all kinds of welcome there. But it's not too surprising that the dialogues about them didn't get off the ground. I'm still working on my SF piece about EABA's NeoTerra, by the way, in just those terms.

So, popularity and fashion. Here we have a way to do X with a bit more transparency, as opposed to saying X itself needs review and isn't itself the standard for role-playing. But if you buy into X being role-playing, then FATE taps into that and replaces "all you need is "a good GM" with "people can do play FATE." It's pretty damn sharp in marketing terms - far more tuned into the hobby mind-set than anything I ever published, for instance.

James Stuart posted some thoughts about (his words) some Story Games at G+, in which Paul directed me to the following quote:

"I've seen a few products recently that spend enormous amounts of  energy on creating interesting settings, raising tricky ethical issues, and creating a world worth exploring. Then, instead of grappling with those issues, the way you address the game is: "Here's types of tasks I'm good at." and it's like: "Okay, but are you good enough to do task Y?"

What's that stating is that the core theme of the mechanics is one of "competence": we use the mechanics to find out whether the characters are good enough to mow down the obstacles in their path."

I agree with James and I think his point applies especially to my thinking about FATE, as well as to some of the current Apocalypse hacks, especially those which buy into the "Apocalypse Engine" concept. The system becomes disconnected from the point. The setting becomes skin. All that really remains of play itself is the system, and the system in question is composed of mere resolution.

This is the curse of FATE becoming the new GURPS, not only in its tag as "the game that can do anything," but in its absolutely direct details. FUDGE was only and ever a way to play GURPS without losing your mind, and FATE is when all is said and done, FUDGE with an embedded "are you listening to me" mechanic among the people playing. This is also what comes of the Story Games tag, in which anything and everything is a Story Game just because it's been introduced at a particular forum or body of G+ circles.

Which brings me to Allen Turner's Ehdrigohr, whose setting is pretty much the most tribal, raw adventure fantasy ever, drawing more freely upon shaman tradition and mythic-fantasy tropes than anything since Cults of Prax. It's heroic. It doesn't cheapen "tribal" with "primitive." It's not Caucasian. It doesn't cheapen non-white ethnicities with tokenism. It's about heroic spirit and depression. It's really exciting to read. The game system is FATE Core.

Allen did his best with it, and I may be presuming but I think his trimming and emphasizing were aimed at getting it to be less FATE and more HeroQuest-y. He minimized Compels in the system and introduces some pretty dramatic failure-features which are likely to doom your character.

What that leaves, however, is pretty much a resolution mechanic based on a nice solid 4dF curve and full of scattered resource-based boosts - a fine thing in its own right, but only the smallest bit of a full-on role-playing system. Therefore the setting has to carry the weight.

I can't possibly summarize the Ehdrigohr setting here. I can focus on the practical play-advice for how to use it, i.e., what it's for, and I find a lot of correspondence with my essay Setting and emergent story. One brief but potent section about scenario creation and long-term play called "The Evil That Men Do" is the heart of the book, in my opinion, especially when combined with the Sorrow and Stress mechanics. I think the whole game-experience is based on the point that the setting is not mere skin at all.

Well, that's what I have for now. All of this is best described as, trying to get myself revved up to play a FATE-engine game. All comments are welcome.

Best, Ron

* I almost wrote, "It railroads, but it makes the trains run on time," but that is bad. Evil Hat is not fascistic and funny is not worth being vicious or wrong. I also dislike that phrase because Mussolini actually did no such thing, and it cements the widespread myth that authoritarianism/fascism genuinely creates stability in social services.

[lumpley]

A side point, but one about which you'll forgive me some touchiness.

...as well as to some of the current Apocalypse hacks, especially those which buy into the "Apocalypse Engine" concept. The system becomes disconnected from the point. The setting becomes skin. All that really remains of play itself is the system, and the system in question is composed of mere resolution.

Please name the games you're referring to?

-Vincent

[Dan Maruschak]

Through Fate Points, especially Compels, FATE extends that concept to the dice bonuses, character-inclusion, and even details-of-the-moment aspects of play. Basically, if I want a Fate Point, I suggest to the GM "give me a Compel based on my Stubbornness, and I'll be stubborn" and I get my Fate Point, and it makes me more effective. Similarly, the GM can tell me, "Be Stubborn now if you want a Fate Point." I can use Fate Points for bonuses or to say stuff like "This guy is my uncle" sometimes.

What's weird to my eyes is that play has to be negotiated like this before it happens; there's apparently no foundation of my playing my character stubbornly or not because I was planning on doing that anyway, i.e., "play my character." Compels remind either player or GM that the player is playing this character ... as if that were somehow at risk or unstable in the first place. Bring in the fact that Compels are also used for "get into the deathtrap" or "trust this guy" for Fate Point rewards, and the closure of all the junction-points with railroaded 90s play is complete.* Erik Weissengruber explicitly said it in his posts here, "I can't do Story Now with Compels."

I don't have rules quotes in front of me, but it's my understanding that compels aren't just about playing your character aspect, it's about being exposed to a new complication or source of adversity that is thematically appropriate to your aspect. So you can be stubborn all day and all night without necessarily triggering a self-compel if all you are doing is engaging with adversity that's already "in play", but if your stubbornness antagonizes a NPC who was previously just background color then it's a legit self-compel. By my reading good Compels have come similarity to Bangs (or the "when the players look at you expectantly, make a GM Move" rule in AW). However, this analysis is complicated by the fact that Fate gives GMs pretty arbitrary discretion to create adversity or complications in the situations the players face, so the choice between X and X+1 amount of adversity can be a hollow one, plus not all GMs follow the procedures for compels that the rules suggest, sometimes treating them more like "good roleplaying award" points in practice without associating the complications. Also, sometimes the compel rules in the various incarnations can be a little muddled.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Vincent,

Monsterhearts definitely doesn't fit the pattern I was talking about, and neither does World Wide Wrestling. Significantly, both have add-on reward mechanics that tie directly into the questions/themes of play.

Dungeon World fits what I'm talking about, or at least I think it does. I don't see much there except for "look look, play with dungeon motifs using Apocalypse mechanics." It seems very Participationist. 

As for the others, I think it's a shoe-fits issue, not up to me. I raised the possibility, I didn't lay down an indictment. I'm not really interested in a battle to the death for the honor of this-or-that game.

Tell me what you think.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Dan,

About when Spirit of the Century came out, I tried hard to conceive of Compels as a Bang mechanic. Lenny Balsera swung a lot of the text that way, as he described to me. And sometimes if I tilted the text one way, that's what they seemed like, and then other times I tilted it another way and they didn't. I'm basing my comments on the exhaustive comments Erik posted here a while ago, which I decided were more authoritative than any speculations or impressions of mine. (Running off now to edit in the link)

I'm not saying this to argue with you but rather to ask more about your experiences playing the game, or rather in playing any of its various forms. I'm finding it a little hard to find such descriptive, classic actual-play accounts. So any such accounts interest me a lot.

Oh yeah - again, going by what others say about their game experiences, I understand that Diaspora represents a significant design specification which "tilts" things into the Bang-centric zone.

Best, Ron

Ah - Erik's thread was actually back in the last days of the Forge: [DFRPG] Occult Toronto - it's ... extensive.

[Dan Maruschak]

I definitely get where you're coming from with the "when I tilt my head this way..." thing, since I've had a similar reaction to the compel rules. When I GMed a series of the Dresden Files RPG a few years ago I decided that when I noticed any ambiguous rules structures I should interpret them in a way that seemed to make the game hang together as a functional whole, so I generally tried to make sure that compels were the "extra juice coming into the situation" types I described above. I didn't chronicle everything at the time, but I'll try to recall a few.

There were two players in the game, one was a wizard from a wealthy family and the other was an ex-cop P.I. who could see ghosts. In the prep I did before the series, one of the situational threads was that there was an ectomancer who had this elaborate scheme involving getting ghosts to possess cops so that he could manufacture incidents of police brutality in an effort to set off some racially-charged riots in the city. It was the first session, so I did the thing where you do a "get them into the right place at the right time" sort of compel by having the PI hired to coincidentally be staking out the person who would end up being the first victim. The first step of the ectomancer's plan was to call in a phony tip to get police sent to a particular apartment. As I described the cop car pulling up to the apartment building the PI was staking out, I offered the player another compel, this one based on his "from a long line of cops" oriented aspect if one of the cops was his cousin. He accepted, if he hadn't it would have been just another NPC with no family ties. When the cops are about to enter the apartment the ectomancer goes to the next step in his plane and triggers his spell, which causes the ghost to possess the cousin, and since Dresden-verse ghosts are mostly just echoes, this one was going to re-enact the events that led to his death which in this case meant charging into the apartment to kill the person inside. Since the possessed cop was the PI's cousin the fallout from the whole thing brought a lot of family tension into things, while otherwise there wouldn't have been any (well, there would have been, but at the "background radiation" level from the character's backstory rather than an active problem in the foreground).

In a middle session in a later series, they were preparing to attack some Red Court Vampires in their lair in the basement of the dance club, but they didn't do much to subdue any of the club employees. As they rammed open the reinforced door to the basement I offered the P.I. character a compel of his Fighting the Darkness-themed aspect to have the power go out (the aspect was about metaphorical darkness, but I thought making it about actual darkness would be a fun literary twist -- the in-fiction justification was that the club employees called downstairs to the vampires where they had access to the circuit-breakers in the building). He took the compel so the vampires were able to leverage several of the hiding and seeing-in-the-dark powers which were very advantageous in the fight, otherwise it would have been a more straight-up fight.

Later, in another session, they had tracked down a red court vampire who had sucked all the blood out of a person and left the corpse in the PI's office as a challenge. In the fight the vampire got punched in the gut and vomited his bellyful of blood onto the wizard, and then they managed to kill the vampire. They ended the session driving away in the PI's car. We picked up the next session as sort of a direct continuation but I wanted to ramp up the tension a bit, so I offered the wizard player a compel of his Wizard-related aspect to have his powers hex the power steering and breaks of the car, resulting in rear-ending another car (wizards and technology not mixing is a trope of the setting). He took the compel, if he hadn't they would have gotten to their destination without incident. Then I offered the PI a compel of his ex-cop-related aspect that the car he was ramming was a police car. He took that. If he hadn't it would have just been some annoyed motorist. Since it was a cop car they had became immediately suspicious when they saw the blood-covered passenger in the car. The PCs decided to go to the station with the cops, which meant in the normal course of procedure (i.e. no extra compels or anything, just following the logic of the fiction) they took a sample of the blood, and eventually would have tied it to the ongoing murder investigation of the corpse the vampire had left, since it was her blood in the vampire's belly.

There were probably some more, but it has been a long enough time that not a lot are springing to mind, although my memory might get jogged if there's stuff you want to discuss. Generally, before each session I would try to brainstorm a few ideas based on the "current events" from the previous session (I'm not really great with scene-framing, so things tend to be a bit more continuous coverage) so I usually had a few potential ideas floating in my head if I needed them. There were probably some that came up spontaneously, too, but I find that's a lot harder to do than the rules imply. (One of my annoyances with online talk of Fate is that GMs beat themselves up with "I need to learn to get better at compels", where I tend to be of the school of thought that if every GM runs into that problem maybe it's a problem with the compels rather than every GM). I also GMed a series of SOTC, but that was even longer ago so the details are even fuzzier. Generally I really like using Aspects as part of GM prep for creating the situations, but I find compels to be really rough.

[Ron Edwards]

That is not only a great account on its own, it also snapped together a couple of things in my head.

A while ago, Jesse Burneko rightly pointed out that consensus mechanics are vanishingly rare in my games. The only one I can think of right now is the group-based play of characters in It Was a Mutual Decision, and even that's limited to specific mechanics and explicitly does not apply to certain other ones (choosing to include a Rat Die, e.g.). My game design is distinctly characterized by avoiding agreement prior to any person's contribution to the fiction. It's also why they're characterized by explicit explanations and expectations concerning what a given person may contribute.

That's why Compels are so weird to me. Why do you need so much prior agreement before the front-and-center most Color-punchy stuff happens?

Compare scene framing in Sorcerer. The GM does it. He or she may well ask the player if the character wanted to do something before 6 AM the next morning, but if not, then not. And only the GM, not the player, says, "At 6 AM the next morning, while you're in the shower ..." without any friggin' negotiation. Trollbabe is even more explicit. Players may request the openings of scenes (especially location), but that's all.

Same with Bangs, within scenes. If I'm GMing in Sorcerer, it's literally against the rules to say, "Hey, I was thinking, you could have a scene with your ex-wife. Want a Fate Point?" Instead, because the ex-wife is there in the circle diagram, and/or because some prior activity in the game prompted the ex-wife into direct action, the GM simply states that this scene begins. Camera up and on. At the character's favored coffee shop which happens to be where he summons demons. The ex-wife stares at him spookily across the table.

That's what I mean by the before-play feel the whole Compel thing has. It's a smoother, a reassurer, a way to keep people OK with what the other person is putting in there or willing to have happen. When that need for an OK is absent, which is to say in my terms, play is clear in its authorities and procedures, then I would totally forget to do it. I anticipate that in GMing Fate, I'd forever be saying stuff like, "Oh shit, I guess that was a Compel back there, you were supposed to get a Fate Point for that," or "See, you should have asked for that to be a Compel and gotten a Fate Point for it," and you'd say, "Dude, I was playing my character here, I put that stuff on my sheet so I could do it, I can't be arsed to tell you I'm doing it."

Vincent, you've written about this at Anyway: the necessity in some games for a player not to be able to wiggle away from something bad happening, something the player genuinely does not want in that moment. As I recall it was mostly about outcomes, not framing ... and it might have been about Dogs in the Vineyard, although I'm uncertain about that. Do you have a link to that discussion?

To get back to Ehdrigohr for the moment, especially since I just found the page of notes I couldn't find earlier today, the bad/grim things that happen to your character are called Sorrows. Allen is quite honest and open about what they are in thematic, about-play terms: raw depression, especially regarding where society is is and why we can't seem to stop fucking things up when the external world is already doing such a good job of that without us making it worse. Sorrows basically cancel out Aspects, or rather, that's what the GM spends them for. Like Fate Points, they never go away really, they're just temporarily spent ... except when the GM permanently spends a bunch and erases an Aspect from the character. And although you can spend Fate Points to counteract Aspect negation, you can't do shit about getting them erased. There's no agreement there. There's no permission. You can remove Sorrow for good through some behaviors and skill rolls, but you can't stop the GM from reaching out and drawing a line through one of your character's most cherished features, forever.

I find both the setting and the Sorrows mechanic work together well in my mind, but also for the standard Fate Core Compels not to work well in that same space. As GM, I don't want to know that a player wants to use his character's Aspect in a way that works against him, hence I give him a Fate Point which is basically my permission saying he can do it. I simply want him to do it, and then (if the game mechanics do this) award the bonus point or whatever. I want all the mechanics to be like that Sorrows-erasure, so we can simply use them lickety-split. It's a social-creative thing, I don't see why permission or even advance notice is a good thing in either direction.

OK, that's coming together in my mind now. It's also helping me focus a bit on my "training sheet" for Ehdrigohr.

Thanks again, Dan.

[lumpley]

On Apocalypse World hacks: Well, I haven't played them all, but I'm pretty sure that James' point applies to none of the published Apocalypse World hacks yet. The ones that are all about how competent you are, like Dungeon World or the Sundered Land, don't spend much energy raising tricky ethical questions, they're like "you get to mow down an obstacle! SLUDGE TROLL! Go!"

The ones that DO take pains to create worlds worth exploring and ethical questions worth tackling, like Monsterhearts, Sagas of the Icelanders, or Wolfspell, DO back them up appropriately with game design.

On "the unwelcome": Let's see. There's 2008-04-09 : Rules vs Vigorous Creative Agreement, and there's 2011-05-11 : The Un-frickin-welcome.

There's some really good stuff deep in the comments of both threads, but you'll have to skim through some exasperating wrangling and hand-wringing to find it. Lord, there were some people who really did not want to hear that game design doesn't just mean always giving the players a way to get what they want.

-Vincent

[Erik Weissengruber]

Wasn't it the Luke Crane who alerted us to the fact that game design is about changing behaviours?

[Jesse Burneko]

I would like to point out that Compels as ways to alter *situation* came about in much more recent revisions of Fate.  Originally, Compels were about rewarding the players for having their characters *behave* in a certain way as to create drama.  Quite honestly, I think the Compels are the only way to introduce dramatic failure into the system.  In my experience if you're rolling the dice, especially in an extended conflict, then the PCs are going to succeed.  It's just a matter how and when.  The system is about apportioning screen time and crafting details.

So, if you're going to have critical dramatic failures AT ALL, you've got use Compels to bypass the system.  "Oh, you're about to enter tense negotiations?  How about they go badly because you're a Hot Head!  Take a Fate point!"  Because, if you were actually going to roll out that Social conflict chances are the PCs would win, unless it's obvious from their skills that they're out classed but then they go into the negotiations expecting to do poorly anyway.

Because that's what Fate is about: serving the expectations of the play group.

Which is why I think talking about the "GM's story" is a bit misleading and perhaps a bit of a disservice.  In my opinion Fate works best when the playgroup as whole is really enthused about the pastiche.  The story goes the way it does because we all already know how it goes.  It's like playing with action figures.  "Oh no!  It's Doctor Methusala!"  "Don't worry, Action Jackson is here to save the day!"  "But we all KNOW Action Jackson is a SHOW BOAT!"  "You're right!  Bam, Bam Doctor Methusala captures him while he's distracted by his own ego!"

So, I'm not exactly sure how rail-roady you can get when everyone is looking forward to and WANTS those moments to happen exactly as expected.

Jesse

[Erik Weissengruber]

Oh yeah - again, going by what others say about their game experiences, I understand that Diaspora represents a significant design specification which "tilts" things into the Bang-centric zone.

I wish I had presented the Diaspora mechanics more clearly. But the employment of a Compel creates a bang. The sub games parse it differently but the impression each creates is "BOOM! Shit just got serious!"

I had hoped that my Dresden player to player compels would allow players to say BOOM, buddy, YOUR shit just got serious.

I played Swords Without Master and at one point the mood was jovial and one player decided that the failure of his spell resulted in a shifting of minds between the 3 PCs.
It was a lame bit of freaky Freaky Friday hijinxs to my taste, but all the players sparked up when it happened. It messed with the canonical pulp colour I was into. But one thing the Aspects system can do is provide colour consistency across discrete sessions and through linked series.

So maybe the BOOM works best when it's in the mode of: "You know that shit you were afraid would happen? BOOM that feared shit is now actualized shit and it is serious!"

And screw rolling. It's fiat. I have my BOOM token that is going to activate shit your character fears. Maybe dropping the boom gets you 2 FP for your own activities.

[Erik Weissengruber]

So, if you're going to have critical dramatic failures AT ALL, you've got use Compels to bypass the system.  "Oh, you're about to enter tense negotiations?  How about they go badly because you're a Hot Head!  Take a Fate point!"  Because, if you were actually going to roll out that Social conflict chances are the PCs would win, unless it's obvious from their skills that they're out classed but then they go into the negotiations expecting to do poorly anyway.

YES!

Because that's what Fate is about: serving the expectations of the play group.

YES! YES!

There is no rule system which can really counteract group expectations. I want to play BOOMY games with others. I have to recruit the people who like the BOOM and not hope vainly that a little prodding will get folks going that way.

Which is why I think talking about the "GM's story" is a bit misleading and perhaps a bit of a disservice.  In my opinion Fate works best when the playgroup as whole is really enthused about the pastiche.  The story goes the way it does because we all already know how it goes.  It's like playing with action figures.

X-mal YES!

Exactly. I don't want to run my story. I want to see what happens. When I played Squad Leader as a kid I would just sent the Russians rushing the German line just to see if any of them would make it to the other side. I like to throw problems and challenges at players just to see how they respond creatively, not either prod them in a direction or fuck them over.

I think my players thought I was running a story, which is what I don't do. And I think a lot of people love the pastiche/participation style. I can run such games but get less enjoyment out of them than a lot of people do.

[Dan Maruschak]

I think the "it's the only way to have failures" analysis glosses over a few other elements of the Fate resolution system, such as skill choice and TN setting. Fate does a thing where you can be pretty flexible about which skills you apply to overcoming a challenge based on how you describe overcoming it. It further blurs the issue by urging players to create character sheets where zero-ranked skills aren't even listed. So, when it comes time to figure out which skill applies to the fiction, people will generally scan the ones on their sheet to find the best fit, sometimes stretching for one of their higher-ranked skills. This creates a sort of competence inflation, since you virtually always face a greater probability of succeeding than you'd expect from just an "expected value" analysis of the way the character generation subsystem works. (Compare to something like Mouse Guard where the situation-creation procedures for the GM generally lead to a broad range of skills being relevant whether or not the PCs have good scores in them). The next problem is TN setting, where some incarnations tell the GM explicitly to base the number on the player's skill level and some dramatic judgement about whether they'd like the roll to be hard or easy. Then there's the issue of how often to compel. I'm not sure it's ever stated flat out, but the implication is often that it's the GM's responsibility to keep players from running out. But basing compel-targeting on players is really problematic in Fate games that use the "referesh" rating as a power differentiator, as in DFRPG. If the GM is handing out compels based on who currently has the smallest stack of Fate points then the alleged drawback of mechanically powerful characters (i.e. they don't have as many Fate points) rapidly evaporates. If some of these floaty elements of the mechanics were pinned down I'm not sure the game would be quite such a "you win!" machine. (Sometimes I daydream about writing an incarnation of Fate that would address these issues, which I would call Inexorable Fate, but I'm not invested enough to do the playtesting so I don't actually do it).

Personally I think both the Participationism and Consensus-machine analyses are going a little far. It's pretty much a foregone conclusion that most people accept compels, it's mostly pro forma highlighting of a character's relevance combined with a bit of "soften the sting" mechanics that lubricate the acceptance of the unwelcome content (or at least it could be -- some people definitely do play in the "consensus, with sprinkles!" style). I don't think there's be much difference if you decoupled the Fate point things from compels and treated them just like "when the player's look at you expectantly" AW moves that are channeled through the flags on the character sheets. (That's how they would work in my other daydream project, Fate of the World, a mechanical combo of Fate and AW). Of course there are also other playstyles you can read into Fate than the potentially-functional one I see in there.

Also, Ron, in case you weren't aware, the rules pretty explicitly anticipate "Retroactive Compels" where you award the points after the fact for things that met the definition of compels but weren't noticed to do so in the heat of the roleplaying.

[Erik Weissengruber]

ON Making FATE point economies a little stricter:

I that overlong and somewhat imprecise description of my Dresden Files experience, I mentioned a GM who was having success running his game.

He also went on to run a Werewolf hack using FATE core. He gave a good response to a question about decision making in conditions of lowered resources:

His blog on the Werewolf/FATE hack: http://skalchemist.blogspot.ca/2014/02/werewolf-in-my-fate-fate-in-my-werewolf.html


______________

ERIK: Any fun moments where economy met decision-making? Where someone needed Fate points and then went out to do something savage and wild? Any point where the lack of an FP caused a major loss.

HM: Good questions, Erik.  Remembering fictional details is not my strong suit; I tend to remember things in a big picture way ... But here is a stab...

1) The example I gave of the axe is one; Sandpiper's player had one fate point, and could have payed out to keep the Axe in her mouth, but decided to let it fall, and thus conceivably be easily retrieved by the enemy.  ...

2) One character had "Murderous Temper" as a Wyrm Aspect.  He was stuck without Fate points, and when confronted with an injustice against his kinfolk, said "I'm losing it here, I'm just charging off towards the direction I think the enemy went at top speed through the bayou."  I payed him off, and then immediately compelled another character on "Unwise Choices", the Totem aspect to just take off and follow him. 

3) One character was being affected by a Bane-possessed NPC and ended up "Enticed".  He was stuck; no Fate point to spend to avoid it in the first place.  Plus side, I compelled him on it almost immediately.

All this is the kind of thing that I think Fate sings at.  In a way, none of that is new; I would hope ANY Fate game would have such moments. 

What was new was seeing them in Werewolf.  They were the spice that made the Werewolf setting really shine through.

EW: My early FATE experiences were characterized by over-inflated FP economies. I like to keep the points lean --- after all, it is hard to kill characters. But I am liking what I have seen from Fate Core. And I was always a bit of a currency hawk (Geenspan?). But you don't need to be right near the zero mark to see players change their behaviour. In Trail of Cthulhu Stability is pretty robust but I saw some players get edgy when they had only lost 15% to 20% of their total. But I like games with sharp decision points, not general moods or feelings.

DS: I don't have a whole lot to add, other than to say that this hack captured the feel of W:tA almost perfectly. 

There were a few points that  likely need tweaking, such as that one Gift that seemed overly powerful. There was some discussion of tweaking Rage as well, if memory serves.

The few parts of the hack that I'm unsure about were the ones that didn't come up in play, and that I hadn't properly read up on in advance. Spirits, for example. I should have paid more attention to the fact that I had one, and tried to figure out how to use it. It's hard to give feedback on an element that I failed to use.

[Callan S.]

Through Fate Points, especially Compels, FATE extends that concept to the dice bonuses, character-inclusion, and even details-of-the-moment aspects of play. Basically, if I want a Fate Point, I suggest to the GM "give me a Compel based on my Stubbornness, and I'll be stubborn" and I get my Fate Point, and it makes me more effective. Similarly, the GM can tell me, "Be Stubborn now if you want a Fate Point." I can use Fate Points for bonuses or to say stuff like "This guy is my uncle" sometimes.

It's probably worth comparing to the riddle of steel, in that there wasn't any real procedure listed for how it is determined whether someone is playing out a spiritual attribute or not. Ie, who figures that out?

Fate actually has procedure on the matter, it seems. It raises the question of whether one could make up a hard procedure for the riddle of steels SA determination and still have story now play, or whether story now play banks on absent procedure to work?