As I mentioned yesterday I picked up FATE Core and FATE Systems Toolkit as a self gift for the holidays. Money well spent. And not much money at that. I shop at DriveThruRPG and both books were pay what you want. For FATE Core that was one dollar. I was planning just get it to review after all. FATE Systems I payed the full suggested price of five dollars and consider it money well spent. FATE is a bit of a niche game. Not because it has limited options but because it lends itself to a certain style of play. It is rules light and narrative. Any one who has been following these posts for the last year knows that particular combination is well up my alley. FATE Core is a generic rules system. Usually I dont care for those. I prefer a good rule system that lends itself to well to the actions that are going to make up the game. FATE showed in the base rule system how it could very easily and cleanly adapt to a multitude of genre. I was having more ideas over a wider array of game directions, while reading this, than I have had in many years. The central mechanic of FATE is using six sided dice (four of them), with each die producing one of three outcomes -1, 0, or +1, to produce a randomly generated number between -4 and +4. This total is added to a static total from your skill. That is it. These can be modified further by aspects, descriptions of characters objects or circumstances, which when evoked add +2 or full reroll to the skill at hand. To do this you spend a FATE point. These are generated either by a refresh that happens at the beginning of a play session, or when aspects are evoked against you by the GM or NPCs. PCs and NPCs use the same rules (unlike Numenera for instance) but most the time NPCs are less developed than PCs. While I was reading FATE Core I started getting a seed for a Gothic horror game set in the swamps of South Carolina. Usually I would have turned to White Wolf or Call of Cthulhu, my favorite two horror games, but the character-centric and group world building that is suggested by FATE Core really appealed to me for this project. Enter FATE Systems Toolkit. This book is designed for taking the Core rules and hacking them to produce specific genre applications, such as class/race fantasy skins, magic and high martial art characters, horror, super heroes, and military units, not to mention the best swashbuckling combat system I have ever read. It also offers one or two alternate uses for nearly every rule in the core book. In the end you have your own personalized RPG. In the end I really feel that between these two books you could design games for any genre of play and have a hell of a lot of fun doing it. I never looses that narrative play style, which I think is great. You could easily re-skin a this system to match a favorite setting but to play it in a completely different way. For instance if you wanted to play a STAR WARS game and focus on senate floor level political drama this game would work better than the more action oriented d20 STAR WARS. I think every serious gamer should pick up and read through these two books (for two bucks if you like) just to see another interpretation of the hobby. Hell if you decide to run something let me know.
Posted on: Mon, 05 Jan 2015 14:00:10 +0000
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