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Fate Accelerated And Fallout

Last weekend I wanted to give Fate another chance. Even though I have given up on Fate several times before, I wasn’t happy with that decision. In theory I love what Fate Core and Fate Accelerated represent. If I just could get into the right mindset, Fate could become one of my go-to games especially because of its endless flexibility.

My players were all fans of the Fallout series, so I decided to run a Fallout one-shot using the Fate Accelerated rules. This is something I’ve actually done before, but last time I replaced Fate Accelerated’s Approaches with Fallout’s S.P.E.C.I.A.L. attributes. This time I decided to use Fate Accelerated basically rules-as-written to make things easier for me. If you’re not 100% comfortable with a system you always should run it RAW instead of writing and using house rules.

I actually had a lot of fun preparing the game. I created an awesome Fallout-themed character sheet (you can download the PDF here) and made some notes on how to implement weapons, armor, chems, etc. from the video game series using Fate Accelerated rules. Unfortunately I didn’t have as much time as I hoped preparing, so I had to improvise a lot of the adventure.

One thing I noticed is that Approaches work well for active use but things become a bit more muddy, when you’re making passive tests. Often we had a hard time to decide which Action and Approach to use for detecting enemy presence, resisting radiation, or something similar. If you, my dear reader, have any advice, this would be very much appreciated. As I said before, I am still in the process of learning Fate.

Things actually worked great. We didn’t get to try all aspects of the Fate system, but that’s fine. At least noone disliked the system so far and everyone has said that they are open to playing another game using Fate in the future. One thing I noticed is that it’s very handy to have poker chips or something similar to represent Fate points. If you don’t have a physical representation of the FP lying in front of you, you tend to forget to use them, which is vital for Fate to work as it should. Next time I’ll make sure not to make the same blunder again.

But overall I was happy with how things turned out. I’ll definitely run a few more games using Fate Accelerated to get more familiar with it.

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8 comments

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Roger Eberhart

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.
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LibrariaNPC

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.
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tonemilazzo

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

    Hehe.
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Drew_Zilla

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.
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Robert Hanz

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.
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Roger Eberhart

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.
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John Bedder

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
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