Saturday Special: Fate rocks!

Yesterday evening I ran my first Fate Accelerated Edition game. Ok, it was not exactly FAE as written, but instead of FAE’s approaches we used the attributes of Fallout’s SPECIAL system as skills. Aside from that, we basically used the rules as written.

Creating characters and giving an overview over the rules took about three hours, but we also squeezed dinner and an episode of “Legend of Korra” into it. Coming up with cool and fitting aspects was a breeze. Creating cool and (not overpowered) stunts was a bit more tricky, but I am very happy with how everything turned out.

What surprised me the most is how easily we got into using all aspects of Fate (pun intended). For some reason it really felt very natural. My players created advantages, used all kinds of aspects (from character one’s to situation ones), we had a couple of cool compels, and everyone was really enjoying themselves.

I am sure we mangled a couple of rules and in several situations I just used some handwaving. But since we all had a lot of fun doing so, I really don’t mind. Still, I think I’ll give the rules another thorough look before our next session – just in case.

Overall my players and I enjoy the switch to Fate and we are already considering going full Fate Core as soon as we are comfortable with the core concepts. Using just the seven attributes from Fallout works, but there were several situations where a higher granularity would have been nice.

But one thing is sure: FATE ROCKS!

Michael Wolf is a German games designer and enthusiast best known for his English language role-playing games blog, Stargazer's World, and for creating the free rules-light medieval fantasy adventure game Warrior, Rogue & Mage. He has also worked as an English translator on the German-language Dungeonslayers role-playing game and was part of its editorial team. In addition to his work on Warrior, Rogue & Mage and Dungeonslayers, he has created several self-published games and also performed layout services and published other independent role-playing games such as A Wanderer's Romance, Badass, and the Wyrm System derivative Resolute, Adventurer & Genius, all released through his imprint Stargazer Games. Professionally, he works as a video technician and information technologies specialist. Stargazer's World was started by Michael in August 2008.

2 comments

comments user
johnkzin

Glad it went well! if you get a chance to post some of the stunts you came up with (and/or the characters themselves) that’d be cool. Fallout is one of my all-time favorite C-RPGs (though, I haven’t played the newer versions, only the original 2 + the first brotherhood of steel), so more info on what’s working for you, and such, would be awesome 🙂

comments user
revlazaro

Cool thing is with the Core book and Tool Box, you can scale everything all crazy like and even change things up. I don’t really think there’s a “wrong” way to play the system.