[FATE] Orcs In Space!!! first session

[mindwanders]

Hi folks, I just thought I'd post up a few comments about the first session of my goblinoid spelljammer game that I'm running with the FATE system.

I was running this game at the local roleplaying group and it's the first time I've actually attended it for more than a couple of hours. I'd sent out a mail last week to say that I would be running the game, and considering how young most of the players are I thought I'd be beating players off with sticks.

As it turned out one of the other GM's was starting a camapaign of SJ's Munchkin which ate most of my most likely players.

I had 4 players for the first session. I only know one of my players, who swings between gamist and in depth character sim. The others I don't know much about the background of, although one is a big fan of Everway.

First I layed down some ground rules for the game.

1) There would be no IC swearing, characters had to use pirate or goblinoid swear words.

2) Characters would not die unless the player wanted them to.

I then gave them a general overview of the way the rules system worked. It took quite a lot of work to get them to grab the concept and I'm not sure if it was  the fact that the aspect system and skill pyramid are quite hard to grasp or if I was just explaining it badly. Either way, they got the idea after a while.

I then gave them an overview of the planet they would be starting out on. Pointing out that the elves were kind of like romans and were starting to expand thier empire. I then pointed out that it was up to the players to place thier character race on the map and decide what sort of culture they had.

Character creation was painfully slow for most of the players, they just couldn't work out what to pick for aspects. Things got faster as people got used to the idea and showing one player the example aspects really helped.

The everway fan took to the character creation system with great enthuseasm and was finished while most of the players were struggling with thier seconds and third aspects.

We ended up with one Gnoll formal gladiator, who would be the first mate on the ship. One Kobold necromancer who was the ships medic and wanted to start a Kobold empire. A Minotor shaman from deapest africa who would be the ships chaplin.

The final character was the one created by the everway fan would be the Goblin Bosun. However almost all the crew were goblins and he wanted his character to just change names if he died so that he could replace him with one of the other crew. Seemed fine to me because of rule 2 and it seemed like a nice hook to have with a character who had "accident prone" as one of his aspects. I asked him to take this as an Effect that he could use once per session per rank he spent in it.

I then ran a short session for the players to get used to the game system. The characters had all been given shore leave for a day or so and were in a human port and looking for a few drinks. Each character was given two reward cards (cards that have a task for the character to complete each session and a reward value).

The rewards were as follows (the first was specific to the character, the second random):

Chaplin

Find a convert (1 point)
Throw someone out of a window (1 point)

First Mate

Get everyone back to the ship on time (1 point)
Get people singing a sea shanty (1 point)

Medic

Retrieve a body to study (1 point)
Start a bar room brawl (1 point)

Bosun

Get hurt (1 point)
Hit someone with a bottle (1 point)

The players jumped on these rewards and had great fun trying to achieve them. The only ones that weren't completed were the medics "Start a bar room brawl" because another character beat him to it and the Chaplins "Find a convert" which was really too hard in that situation.

The session wa a lot of fun and went a long way towards getting the players used to the system.

Things I'd do differently

I'd make sure that I had several sheets of sample aspects to give to players for some ideas.

Expect character gen to take longer.

Change the health chart for what are basically goons. The people in the bar were too hard to fight when the party was outnumbered. I think this would have been a lot faster if they had fewer health boxes.

Stop players from revealing thier reward cards to each other. The 1st mate decided to abandon protecting the Bosun because he new the Bosun's player had a "get hurt" reward card.

Stress the fortune in the middle combat system more. We had problems with players making big descriptions of what they wanted to do before they rolled the dice. Towards the end I just told people to tell me the target and roughly what they wanted to do. I then got them to narate thier own actions to the rest of the players based on thier success level.

Narrate less stuff. I spent too much time taking the power out of the players hands by narrating what thier character had done. I should have let the players do this themselves.

[iago]

Sounds great -- you did run into some of "the usual" hurdles, alas.  Aspect lists are really key, I think, and the need for them should be stressed in upcoming revisions of Fate.  Chargen-wise, I always expect it to take a while -- I usually make chargen its own session and get heavy on the simultaneous timeline bit.  Some thoughts are currently brewing around providing some more ... streamlined options on that front, however.

[mindwanders]

Yeah, the examples in the book seem to imply it's fine to play fast and loose with the Aspects and I assumed it would work fine. I really should have done up a list of example effects and aspects and handed it out with the skill list. It would have speeded things up a lot.

I usually make chargen its own session and get heavy on the simultaneous timeline bit.

Yeah, I normally would run Chargen as a complete session as well, but I've never run or played FATE before so I really wanted to give it a quick shakedown on the first day.

I also decided to play fast and loose with the timeline in the hopes that the players would start adding in parts of the setting at character gen. Unfortunately I forgot to mention this to the players.  I had a page of notes of all the things I wanted to mention during character creation and getting people up to speed with the rules.

Of course I forgot to take it with me :-)

If I was starting this game again I'd use fewer aspects (I had 8) and more skills points per aspect to create the powerful characters I was looking for.

[xiombarg]

Sounds great -- you did run into some of "the usual" hurdles, alas.  Aspect lists are really key, I think, and the need for them should be stressed in upcoming revisions of Fate.

Is this really a hurdle for most people? I mean, perhaps I've been playing Over the Edge too long, but I could come with with several different Aspects from the get-go for any genre, all off the top of my head...

[mindwanders]

Is this really a hurdle for most people? I mean, perhaps I've been playing Over the Edge too long, but I could come with with several different Aspects from the get-go for any genre, all off the top of my head...

It probably isn't a big deal to most of the people on this site. However if you've been mostly playing things like AD&D and various D20 games then I think it is a harder concept to get your head around.

[iago]

Is this really a hurdle for most people? I mean, perhaps I've been playing Over the Edge too long, but I could come with with several different Aspects from the get-go for any genre, all off the top of my head...

It probably isn't a big deal to most of the people on this site. However if you've been mostly playing things like AD&D and various D20 games then I think it is a harder concept to get your head around.

Exactly right.  I would probably rate the "I'd really like a more comprehensive list of possible Aspects" comment to be among our top three ways players have told us Fate could be improved.

It's the RPG character equivalent of writer's block.