After a few years of sharing around my Fate Core principles post, I have had further conversations with people about it and developed some more ideas about Fate (broadly, not just Fate Core) that explain a lot of the issues that people report to me that they have with Fate. If you've struggled with it, especially if you were around for the Dresden RPG or Spirit of the Century, give it a look, hope it helps.
Here are the two things I want to try to get at:
1. People love Aspects too much. They shouldn't. Aspects are great but when you love one too much it can get in the way of what their actual function is.
2. If you're feeling both "I shouldn't get Fate points just for doing something I would or should do anyway" and "I'm always running out of Fate points", someone at the table is badly miscalibrated about what the action of the game is.
Fate's Historical Accidents
I think there is an accident of Fate's development that led to the Aspect/Point economy being weirdly attenuated from the fiction that undermines its usefulness as a concrete/pulp systemic element.
The modern "branch" of Fate started splitting off at Spirit of the Century and then Dresden Files. In both those games, characters are conceived of as larger-than-life noir or pulp heroes, each fully personified protagonists in their own way - therefore, each comes with a High Concept, a Trouble Aspect and a series of other aspects related to "past adventures" of the characters. Play that plays to each of these characters, therefore, is highly based on players who firmly take the spotlight to themselves to play out their motivating factors (this is really what Trouble is) and the job of the plot is to corral them all onto the Orient Express, Indiana Jones' traveling red line, or into the nightclub where Frankie the Squealer is rumored to be. It incentivizes good natured pushing for spotlight time. But this actually is sort of an odd decision for the adaptation elements of both properties.
1930s adventure pulp is based around one or at most two protagonists; their supporting cast can really be summed up in one brief statement at most (sometimes not even that - plenty of 1940s pulp sidekicks just have a name and nothing else!) And our heroes probably have a much smaller personal set of aspects that they carry with them. These are not deep characters with elaborate psychologies. They wear their hearts on their sleeves and more or less address the reader with what they think in a situation.
Read a Doc Savage or Shadow novel. Doc Savage is a pretty well rounded character, Aspect wise. Lots of concrete things that affect his immediate adventure. Now how about Doc Savage's "Fabulous Five"? .....is there any world where these are in any way equal to Doc just in their Relevant Fictional Details? Absolutely not. They certainly have a High Concept, and maybe another Aspect, but that's it!
A highly detailed, finicky situation where dozens of facts are immediately relevant just isn't exciting in a pulp sense. So if you really want to make a good translation what you need is for some characters to just...not have as many Aspects. The more characters you have, the less Aspects each of them can fruitfully offer into the fiction.
It's a little more understandable in Dresden, because the "multi-POV" urban fantasy novel is a thing, and a very popular one, but not in the Dresden Files books! Usually the multi-POV urban fantasy novel uses the multiple points of view to comment on the development of one or more relationships culminating in two or more characters' romantic relationship. Dresden just puts a camera over Harry Dresden's shoulder and that's that. (I'm increasingly convinced that as-written, a 4-person Dresden Files game (both editions!) should play like 4 separate Fate games in a shared universe, and there should be a love tetrahedron betwixt the players.)
One final element of Fate's development was more cultural than textual, which is the almost complete ignoring of the Minor Milestone. This might be a consequence of convention play (no real advancement in convention play) or of the over-focusing on Aspects (more below) but the Minor Milestone more or less disappeared off people's radar in playing this game and I think it's vital. The number of Fate games I've played in where people don't do ANYTHING on the Minor Milestone...or remember that they exist...is significant.
In part (my conclusion, not necessarily a fact) because Dresden and SOTC loom large over early Fate Core thinking, when people started to try to do other things with Fate, the Trouble Aspect became a sticking point. "Wait, am I really going to get paid just to do this thing which I should be wanting to do anyway?" This overlooks that "Trouble" here is referring specifically to the noir (and perhaps even more specifically to Raymond Chandler's) conception of "trouble" as "the thing the main character gets into". The High Concept Aspect is a statement of identity and the Trouble Aspect is a statement of action. You should rename "Trouble" to be something else if your game's not pulp adventure or noir-esque! But it should be the thing you're doing in the game.
And, importantly, because of the Minor Milestone, which urges you to change non-High Concept Aspects all the time, all Aspects in the game should be fictional statements or phrases relevant to what you're doing exactly at this moment. Aspects run into problems when they're 1) not relevant, 2) not immediate, 3) not actionable due to vagueness or because they're a pun or too clever, or whatever.
Once I got my hands on Fate Core I really started to "get" more of what Fate was after and how Fate games should be constructed from the ground up. In this they're more like Cortex turned out to be than GURPS.
Building a Fate Game
So if you construct a Fate game from the bottom up, what does it look like? You have the High Concept Aspect. That stays the same. It's kind of a catch all character concept Aspect. "This is 'my thing'." In fact, my stern notions about what an Aspect should be can be relaxed when it comes to High Concepts. Make a really baroque, involved High Concept, it's fine! Really put some work into that one because that's the one that stays the same throughout.
You need to have a "Trouble" Aspect...what are you doing addressed to the fictional action of the game at this exact moment? Here are other names I've given to Trouble Aspects:
- Production Aspect (for a director trying to finish a film)
- Case Aspect (for a cop trying to solve a crime)
- Curse Aspect (for a witch trying to break a curse)
- Demon Aspect (for brothers trying to banish a demon)
Some considerations: 1) Should there be a joint Trouble Aspect? In my game with the brothers, they were gonna be a team. When they were dealing with demon problems, I gave them both a fate point based on the Demon Aspect because it was always the same. It's essentially the same outcome if you just give everyone an extra fate point and an extra problem per game, but I like to have more proactive characters and so the players tell me what they're up to and that becomes an Aspect that can remind them if they get into a subplot or out into the weeds somewhere.
2) Should you allow Trouble Aspects to be updated on Minor Milestones in addition to another Aspect being updated? (This is probably my most significant actual house rule.)
But how many Aspects should you have after you have a High Concept and some kind of "Thing We're Doing Right Now" Aspect?
You have to be really realistic about your group's social dynamics, the footprint of a session, how often you meet, how many sessions can you spend running around each other before people get bored. Because there's a limited amount of fictional facts that are relevant to pulpish (now using the broader term) conflicts.
So if you have 25 Aspects sitting at a table on character sheets, you have dead weight - not good if the players have worked really hard and really invested in their Aspects, which the game (wrongly IMO) says you should. Worse, the GM is gonna introduce more Aspects, and the players are gonna introduce even more Aspects during play. What a nightmare!
Instead, you should start from 0 Aspects and add Aspect types based on the themes that you want to address, types of themes present in the setting or genre that you want players to weigh in on through personal action. It's a little different from the "action of the campaign" because you already have an Aspect for that (Trouble.) But they are things that the characters will want to address at some point during the campaign.
Here are some Aspect collections that I've used in the past:
* Space Western: The Law, The Land, The Gun
* Gotham City: Wealth, Love, Pain (more specifically, the 'Thing that happened or happens to you that you just can't shake and every time you're alone in the dark it's there with you')
* Supernatural Family Drama: Inheritance, The Dark Book (the source of the family's wicked power), The Town
So as the characters pursue their current goal (Trouble), you throw in material that's related to what you, the GM, have identified as relevant fictional stuff. You can bring in locations with Aspects and NPCs with Aspects and all that and it'll be fine because they'll be Aspects that draw players into conflicts along lines you've already steered them towards.
If there's fewer Aspects on the players' sheets, and the Aspects are always more relevant to what's happening then the pressure to get Fate Points is more relaxed; you'll naturally give out more. This allows you to be more of a dick about which Aspects can be invoked on which actions, which is vital. The players will fall in love with their Aspects and try to shoehorn them in everywhere. But you shouldn't let that happen! If they have an Aspect they can't figure out how to use, they can fix it at the end of the session at the Minor Milestone! They should constantly be changing how they address the fictional situations you're putting them in - and that's how they get the Fate Points they need to hit the big numbers when they hit the dangerous situations (or roll nine -3 results in a row, as I always do.)
If you're in a game where your Aspects aren't hitting and you're really scrimping for Fate Points, you and the other players (including the GM) have not communicated to each other what the campaign's about and focused your fictional attention. Once you do that, it works just fine.
