Best posts made by Kairos

@Wyrdathru

From a licensing point of view I think the major advantage of Fate over Fudge is the fact that the current rev of Fate - Fate Core - is licensed creative commons as are a number of the Evil Hat developed supplements. ( Information here: http://www.faterpg.com/licensing/licensing-fate-cc-by/ )

This makes pick-and-mix quick and painless and any hacks are legit in a quite literal sense. In fact that licensing scheme has been a major consideration for me in the past. It's supremely unlikely, of course, to be assailed by a C-and-D but knowing you won't be told off for putting your system rules on a wiki is nice peace of mind.

Now in Open Beta

"A red horse went out and to him who sat on it, it was granted to take peace from the earth"

The Age of Heroes is gone, snuffed out before most people even knew it had come. It ended in the fire and fury of a global war - The Gene War - and the great purge that followed. It took earth's mightiest champions and in some ways the earth's hope. The worst, however, was yet to come.

"And behold, a black horse and he who sat upon it held a pair of scales in his hands."

Humanity’s judgement has come. It did not come with the end of the heroes. It did not announce itself with the thunder of war, nor the lightning flash of atomic fire as many thought it might. It crept in slowly and quietly, slipping through cities full of people too caught up in their own worlds to notice the silences and voids amid the bustle and din of life.

"And behold, an ashen horse and he who sat on it had the name Death; and Hell followed him."

The genophage got into everything: air, water, soil. It spread to every corner of the globe. There was no cure. The result was not a tide of mass death but rather the absence of life. Birth rates plummeted. Schools shut, and the echo of children's laughter disappeared.

It has been twenty years since the last known live birth of a genetically human child. The only new people are mutants whose genetic X-factor seems to make them immune to the Phage. Most of those are clones or hybrids created from genetic material found in strange ‘arks’ hidden around the world. As the mutants rise again, so too do heroes wielding powers beyond the ken of mortal men.

Are these champions the guardians of a new era for Earth, or the harbingers of the final darkness?

"And behold, a white horse... and a crown was given to him, and he went forth as a conqueror."

The Age of Heroes may yet come again, if the world does not destroy itself first. Whichever happens, though, this much seems true:

These are the last days of humankind.

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Brought to you by the team behind The Lost Dominion...

The year is 2050. The place is Chicagoland, an area sharply divided between the safe and in some cases glittering city proper and the sprawling, decaying urban jungle that surrounds it inhabited by people in their millions. Megacorporations thrive, the political landscape grapples with old rivalries and dangerous new realities and in the shadows and chaos villains thrive as always they do.

The world is going to hell, but it’s taking it’s sweet time getting there. Between war and worse, the heroes vanished decades ago. Now their genetic legacies are being revived as the last best hope of a world dogged by a plague that has crippled mankind’s ability to reproduce and thrust mutants into the role of inheritors of the earth… if it lasts that long.

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While over the years games have incorporated a website to support and enhance the game, it’s always been an add-on and much of the way MU*’s are used hasn’t changed a lot over the years.

On Inheritance Gambit, we’re stripping down the game server side of things. You won’t find any ‘News’ files inside the game such as ‘news policy’ or ‘news roleplay’, They’re all on the website. You won’t find a +jobs system or a +bb system. Instead, we use Support Tickets and categorized blog posts. These days people are almost always multitasking and this lets you access information without scrolling your RP and conversations off your screen.

We know it’s new, and different. We expect some growing pains. We expect to have to change things. We’d love your suggestions! You’ll find places to leave us feedback all over the site. Don’t be shy. We hope you’ll enjoy the changes.

Visit our website at https://inheritancegambit.com/
Or connect to us at inheritancegambit.com port: 2099

Fables, which has been mentioned before, is quite good. I'll second that. I've heard good things about Saga as well but can't speak from experience.

One of the things I understand from the forum is that there are people for whom FATE is not really their jam for a variety of (perfectly good) reasons. To those people… sorry, this probably won’t be very interesting for you.

For the rest who might be curious in the ramblings of a guy on the internet taking advantage of the new spot to talk about games and making them, welcome. This is the the place to talk about FATE, using it and hacking it, something I have a small amount of practice doing.

To start with I figured I would briefly discuss what I think FATE is good for and what it’s not good for. This is just all, of course, in my opinion. Take that for whatever it’s worth.

So what is FATE not good at? What are the downsides? Well, for starters it’s not very good at detail and in a related way it’s not very good out of the box at putting hard numbers to what stats it does dole out. How strong IS a character with Physique +4. How fast, or slow, is a character with Athletics +2. The adjectives applied to the numbers only help a little bit. Knowing that a +1 skill is ‘average’ is great, but ‘average’ is going to mean different things to different people. That’s not an issue in a tabletop game with a single DM to adjudicate things, but in a MUSH it can cause some consternation.

FATE also requires a shift in thinking about RP. Because it’s mechanics are a bit more collaborative in nature, it requires its players to think a bit more about their RP in terms of story than in terms of a game in order to get the most out of them. Some will pick it up faster than others as with anything but unless the players in question already know FATE you can be pretty well assured they haven’t encountered anything they can compare it to and that can make picking it up in a MUSH context either daunting or annoying or both.

What is FATE good for, then? As a tool for collaborative storytelling I’m hard pressed to think of one I like more. When used as written - or even mostly as written - it gives players a high degree of agency in situations where other games either rely entirely on the DM or have them at the mercy of the dice. It’s lightwight and if folks want something that’ll be there when they want it and stay out of the way otherwise, there are worse systems to use to be sure.

FATE is also very, very hackable. While it only has a few tools in its box in terms of mechanics, it takes quite well to modification and while it’ll never be a crunchy or simulationist game compared to others, it can stand the addition of a fair amount of detail. It’s also very easy to adapt to different settings out of the box.

Finally it’s easy to get and there’s a lot of resources for it. The base book and a good number of the supplements are available for free and Evil Hat has gone so far as to license a number of its Fate works in such a way that it’s legal to copy, hack and post them on the internet. While that’s not something most MUers or MU devs will worry about it’s certainly something that’s a point in its favor in my mind. And if you’re willing to spend money, well, I’ve seen games that run the gamut from Bronze age fantasy RP to conversions of Eclipse Phase, so odds are good that if you don’t feel like hacking it, someone has already written something in the genre you’re looking for.

Anyway, those are my general ramblings on that system. If people have other ideas, questions, thoughts, experiences or what have you on using FATE, modifying it or just playing with it in a MUSH context I’d love to hear them.

Hello there @ixokai

On an (almost) totally unrelated note you might check out the Fate World 'Aeather Sea' (found here: http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/139872/Aether-Sea--A-World-of-Adventure-for-Fate-Core . It's free. Well, it's 'Pay What You Want') for some quick and dirty vehicle rules that could be used for ships. Also the 'Camelot Trigger' setting whose rules are designed more for mecha but could also be used for ships (Found here: http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/119384/Fate-Worlds-Worlds-in-Shadow . It's less free. But fun anyway).

Could be that you've already thought out how you want to handle it but as a fate fan I thought I'd toss those out there in case you hadn't heard of them and in case you didn't already have that stuff established.

Best of luck!

Speaking of 20's-40's mobsters... just gonna leave this here.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1582756696/capers-rpg

Have no idea about it or the people behind it but it came up on my kickstarter feed and seemed timely to the discussion.

@Collective

I definitely agree with you that slowing down MU combat is problematic. In any rules system no matter how rules lite it may be adjudicating combat is almost always the most complex portion of those rules simply because of the number of 'moving pieces' to consider.

That said, I would like to observe that even in systemless MU's - I did play on one superhero MU that was pretty much entirely consent based - combat is a slow thing. My experiences both with that and with tabletop RP lead me to believe that it's a function of both the potential stakes and the fact you're using your poses to account for seconds or at most minutes of action in most cases. A lot happens in a very short period of IC time which means that a lot of OOC time is spent figuring out and describing what happens even when there are no dice to be seen.

Long story short, combat in any kind of RP setting is pretty much always going to be one of the slowest activities anyone engages in and the best ways to speed it up - at least in my opinion, take it for what it's worth - are narrative and not mechanical. Make sure everyone is clear what is going on, who is aware of what and what the possibilities are. Also, you know, prompt people for their actions before they need to pose (if you're using a system of any kind that requires rolls or non-narrative player input) and know when the fight has accomplished it's narrative purpose be that to establish a level of danger, to show off how badass the heroes are or to acquire or prevent something and be ready to end it.

Just a quick update: We have gone to ‘full open status’. I’d like to take this moment to thank again all of our alpha testers and everyone who came over, beta tested and suffered through our annoying code bugs and system glitches to get us to this point. There’s one or two things left to be implemented but the major work is done.

We’ll be holding an opening RP event on February 10th and everyone is welcome. If you haven’t checked us out already we hope you’ll stop on by.

IMO, the potential pitfall of an OC world is the amount of explaining staff have to do for people to get even a halfway decent gasp of it and even then they're probably still going to do things that are iffy-to-gamebreaking without meaning to because their conception of the setting is different to Staffs without a lot of active policing.

And while that's true of Earth or Earth Analogue settings to a degree, at least you can expect people to be familiar with the basic rules and history of the world. And if they're not, there's always google.

This is, of course, not to say 'don't do it'. Just 'doing it is going to be a LOT more work'.

I think you left out Palpatine on CoMux (be it ever so briefly). That said, it's Marik. Nice to see you and I thought you were plenty memorable.

@Bobotron

A valid point. For 'simple' my go to is Fate or FAE. But given that it was @fatefan who started the thread I figured I wouldn't mention the obvious. OWoD is a good one and any mortals level WoD does 'gritty' fairly well. As you point out It wouldn't be hard to transpose some of the mortal level 'magic' rules from either Mage or some of the attendant mortal level books (Second Sight and Skinchangers come to mind for NWoD, dunno if they had OWoD equivalents) into a fantasy setting at all. WoD anything has the additional advantage of having a fairly high profile so less explaining will be needed.

@JinShei and @Kumakun

Quite correct that any kind of system with a numbers based progression will eventually have dinosaurs. One method I've used to solve that in the past was good old decay and cap. Make progression slow after a certain point and then stop altogether after another. In the past the people I've worked with have coupled that with awarding experience to the player rather than to the character and letting them spend it on whichever character they like.

This DOES introduce the additional wrinkle that you do eventually have to come up with something else for players to spend their milestones on because at some point they'll have all the characters that they want and those characters will be maxed out but so long as you tune your progression system right you won't have to think of that for a little bit.

Also hello Jin! I remember DS quite fondly. Nice to see you about again.

My limited skim-through of the latest DFAE version and my only slightly more thorough read of the version before that did lead me to believe that it was much more MUSH-able than the DFRPG. Don't get me wrong, the DFRPG is a great table top game and in it's base form certainly isn't any more complicated than comparable WoD titles (at least in my opinion) which folks use in MUSH environments all the time but it's based on an older, much less streamlined (and heavily modified) version of Fate. (Fate... 3.0 I think?). Fate Core and Fate Accelerated (upon which DFAE is built) are more polished and I think it's safe to say the Evil Hat folks learned a thing or two about how much crunch you really need for magic.

DFAE is a lot more flexible and a lot less crunchy. I'm sure that'll be a draw to some and a drawback to others, but I personally like what Evil Hat did with it. For what it's worth I believe that the Darkspires folks had been considering moving to it - though I have no idea at all what the outcome of those discussions was. I haven't played there in some time.