Spotting an enemy could be treated as Overcoming a “Hidden” aspect on the enemies. Probably Clever or Careful vs. Sneaky. I would treat radiation as an attack against the players resisted with Forceful. Treat them as having armour if they have radiation gear.

1) Radiation: If the players have a specific way overcome it, such as Carefully using Rad-Away, Cleverly wearing anti-radiation gear, Quickly using Rad-X, or even just Forcefully rolling with it, then have them roll those approaches. I tend to have a “default” approach for things in my games (in this case, I agree with Roger with going for Forceful), and let the players pitch ideas based on their thoughts and ideas.

On that note, depending on how you handle armor and items, you could just have the default Approach and use the items as Aspects (like in Freeport), but I find that sometimes does stifle things a bit much.

On a different note, you can borrow a page from Dresden Files Accelerated and add a Radiation stress track, which lets you toss in “Rads”

2) Noticing Enemies: This is often tricky, but like Roger above mentioned, it could be to overcome an Aspect or a vs Sneaky roll. One of my friends and I will often hand out Fate points if there’s an Aspect on the table for the auto-compel to not be noticed, but we tend to save those for special circumstances (snipers, teleporting, etc).

I’m curious what else you’re debating on. I am always up for talking Fate hacks, so if you want to kick ideas around, don’t hesitate to ping me directly.

Bottle caps for Fate points, dude. You can use poker chips if you’re playing in New Vegas.

I like to think about “the most beneficial way” that one could sense a threat when picking an approach for FAE. For example. If someone needed to spot an ambush that was being sprung on them RIGHT NOW! then it would be the Quick approach. If they were on watch then it would be Careful. If they were on the hunt for something in a building (like a SWAT team) and needed to spot something in time to react appropriately then I would use Forceful.

For spotting a hidden enemy, you could use Careful. However, I’d be more tempted to handle an ambush as a Compel on some kind of setting/scenario aspect.

For radiation, if you’ve already prepared for it, you don’t need to roll, probably. If you’ve got a hazmat suit on, you’re protected, right? Otherwise, I’d probably scope *out* slightly, and look at the situation… in other words, treat the radiation as a consequence of a thing you’re doing, rather than the thing itself.

So if you’re trying to run across an irradiated area before you get poisoning, I’d handle that as trying to Quickly get to your destination, and if you fail, you’re going to take some radiation.

Are you trying to stay in an area and just power through the radiation in order to accomplish something? Then you’re going to take the radiation either way, but it’d probably be Forceful to force yourself to keep going and finish the thing… or Quick if you can do it faster in some way or prefer to.

In FAE, the players can make the case for any approach, it’s up to you and the other players to decide if it makes sense. If it doesn’t, you could veto it or raise the difficulty. Fate is a collaborative game after all.

Hi there,
Just found this page, and I love the character sheet. Am working on my own FAE Fallout and my skills were not up to doing anything like as good. Being a game-nerd I bought every special edition of Fallout so will be using the New Vegas poker chips as Fate points and the Bobble Head to show whose turn it is. Thinking of putting my Vault in Milwaukee, I like the idea of a cult of Fonz.
John