Posts made by Kairos

One way to separate power levels without tamping down on refresh (which is certainly an option), would be to gate your stunts or stunt equivalents. If some people - say dragons and cyborgs - get access to stunts with stacking bonuses and your average beat cop does not, then even at equivalent refresh the former will in theory have an advantage in their specific areas of competence. Bear in mind that situation aspects and the 'create advantage' function of many skills can serve as an equalizer in these kinds of interactions but that's probably okay?

I think a good question though would be 'do you want to hack fate specifically or would you want something more pre-packaged'. Because there is a LOT of Fate out there that can be used. Legally, even (thank goodness for that CC-BY licencing scheme).

@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.

@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.

@faraday said in Fate Accelerated Questions:

But it is very different from what MUSHers/TTRPGers are used to, so it just takes a different mentality for resolving conflicts.

Exactly that. One of the biggest things about Fate compared to other RPGs either in a tabletop or online context is the shift in mentality required to play it and that is probably one of the things that turns off the people that it does turn off.

Also that is a really good way of describing stress, aspects and conflicts, so kudos to your friend.

I've seen a couple of FAE mushes go before and always thought they were okay on the gameplay front. Someone (I think it was Cobalt but don't I don't exactly remember so apologies to whomever it was) ran an Anita Blake mush using FAE for a short time which worked out just fine, and if I'm not mistaken Tenebrous Isles was or is using the Dresden Files Accelerated system or a hack thereof.

Masters of Umdaar specifically I thought was a really fun concept - I have it in print from one of the kickstarters - and I'd be curious to know how it works out for you. For what it's worth my two cents is that I think FAE is a really good system for mushes that don't want or need the level of rules adjudication that comes with larger systems. Actually I think that about Fate in general. It should work just fine in an online environment so long as it's used with an eye toward it's limitations, something which I think is true of most tabletop-to-online uses of such rulesets.

I mean hell, someone once made the Palladium Megaversal system work in a Rifts game and I'd have sworn in court that was impossible.

Out of the box and by itself it IS fairly simplistic, which is by design. It's was originally written as a version of fate so rules lite you could pick up and play with minimal prep and - critically - minimal explaining to your tabletop group of what was going on. There are plenty of ways to add definition to it via stunts - the default way - or via layering extra systems on top, something Fate likes to call 'extras'. While like @ThatGuyThere I prefer regular Fate for most things, I also think that you can probably adapt FAE to pretty much anything you could adapt Fate.

As a mechanical exercise, if you're interested in seeing how FAE can be hacked in other ways I'd suggest taking a look at Aether Sea and Gods and Monsters (which you can get for free from DrivethruRPG) and if you feel like spending a little money, Jadepunk.

Anyway, curious to hear how it works out for you and what you think.

Slight tangent, but as a matter that may be of interest to folks here, it looks like the 40K RPG license has passed from FFG to Ulisses. They are apparently in the process of making this: http://www.ulisses-us.com/wrath-glory-faq/.

God only knows what it will be like but 'classic alien races' are apparently on the table at some point in the line. I would presume this includes things like Eldar. It's a bit difficult for me to think of an alien race more 'classic' to the universe except for maybe the Orks.

Also-also, these people are apparently doing a new edition of Fading Suns.

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'.

@tnp Heh. Sorry. I'm not advocating for their use mind. I'm just saying they exist. I know Fate isn't everyone's jam.

There are straight up like six different Fate superhero systems. Venture City, the one developed by Evil Hat, is my poison of choice there but there are certainly options.

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.

@lithium said in Fate Development Thread:

FATE is easier in a MU format when you reduce the impact of FATE Points themselves. They become less an issue and less a resource management tool, which is /important/ because with a 24/7 online game the time format is a TON different than a weekly gaming session or whatnot, where FATE points become much more manageable.

Once you hack that away, you can then provide other bonuses for accepting compels, or for triggering them.

And generally fate is pretty forgiving of such hacks, and I can TOTALLY see doing so. In my personal experience, people spend so much of their refresh at C-Gen that the general impact of fate points becomes less of a factor, but some of that is down, I think, to personal tolerance. The key thing for me, I think, is that you CAN hack fate to later the rewards for taking compels without worrying too much about breaking things.

It is not a hard system to adjust for MU just nobody has really /tried/ there's a lot of systems that don't do well in MU* format but people seem pretty afraid to even try and change them from the get go so you get hacked in house rules that just confuse everyone worse.

All of this, yeah. And your previous comment about an online game being different from a weekly game session. There's a lot of design assumptions that go into most tabletop game systems that need to be adjusted for MU's. The thing I like about FATE is that for the things I want it on the MU for (optional conflict resolution, c-gen framework, upgrade framework), those assumptions don't get in the way too much.

@fatefan Funny you should mention stunt mad-libs. I was just picking over some of my FATE library for ideas when I ran across that very thing in a game called Crestfallen. Stuff very much along the lines of 'Gain +2 to (action) when using (skill) whenever (circumstance).' It wouldn't be too hard to whip up a short list of templates like that and yeah I think it would be really helpful.

Also, regarding your space sandbox, I am of the personal opinion that no game is a failure if the people involved are having fun. (And, you know, aren't hurting other people doing so, etc etc) and I would still personally encourage you to make whatever it is you want to see out there if you have it in you to go through that process whether it's driven by FATE or not. Just my two cents of encouragement.

Conflict scenes tend to be pretty OOC intensive in general has been my observation, unless the people involved are fairly comfortable with both the setting and one another. Aspect invokes and compels do at to that, but I haven't personally noticed it making combat much slower than it already tends to be - and combat in my experience is one of the slowest RP activities in general whether in tabletop or MU. FATE is more likely than not to involve people who haven't used it extensively so you're right in that it sometimes isn't the tool you want when you're trying to keep OOC chatter to a minimum but by the same token I could much the same of any scene I've been in with at least one party member who hasn't used whatever we're using.

Ironically the best answer I've found to that one is to have a DM who knows when to not use the system.

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.

@mr-johnson

Totally understandable. We decided when making the game that we'd rather not play FC musical chairs but the trade off for that definitely is that no one can be the 'one true' FC.

I should also point out that there is no Steve Rogers at the moment but even if there were you could still app him. The game has been deliberately designed to side step (most of) the usual issues of characters being already played or spoken for.

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.

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

I prefer hard copy books myself but practicality and economics mean I often wind up getting books from DTRPG like many here. It’s easier to keep my collection on my hard drive than on my much-smaller-than-it-used-to-be bookshelf.

@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.

@Ganymede

I like FASA's system for a lot of things. But mostly things on the tabletop. I wouldn't personally consider trying to unleash that in any form on a MUSH. Which isn't to say that it couldn't or shouldn't be done. I'm quite sure it could (it probably has but I'm not fully up on past MUSHes. There were some Shadowrun games though, right?) and in many ways computer environments are ideal for taking some of the drudgework out of stuff like that.

Me personally though? I'll take something with a lower 'simulation' factor. Really, as can be seen from the list of games and systems mentioned here, there are a lot of things that'll work for a gritty fantasy game. A lot of it probably comes down to availability and the coder/staff's comfort level with running and teaching whatever it may be.

Seriously though, that Age of Legends resolution mechanic is a bit strange. It had me scratching my head when I was reading through it. I can totally see why folks might not like it. It's a bit off the wall.