Fate Hack: The "Awesome" Aspect

Feb 09, 2012 09:21

I've wanted to include something like Exalted's stunting or PTA's fan mail mechanics in the Fate system for a while now; Mechanics based around audience participation, essentially. I've thought about a few ways to do it, most of which involved the movement of fate points around the table. These seem like they'd work, but here's another idea, and one that's maybe a little less involved:

One sure way of knowing that you've got the audience interested is when you get unprovoked exclamations of "Awesome!", or "Dude!" or flicking¹, when another player's character is going through a particularly interesting or intense or compelling scene, or describes a bit of action in a particularly cool way. This is probably the most genuine expression of excitement you can get at the table, and a great measure of investment. It's also a reliable enough response that you can probably hitch a mechanic to it, triggered by the expression.

So, when someone makes an unprovoked exclamation about the awesomeness contained in the scene, perhaps it could be treated as putting a Fragile Aspect (one use, one tag, must be used on the next roll) on the scene. Naming of the aspect isn't really important here, but something like "That was Awesome!", or whatever the expression was, would work. This is something which would happen without discussion, since you don't want to pause to deal with mechanics in the middle of a scene, after all! It'd be a little way of helping to ensure that the effort the player is putting into the scene is rewarded by the fiction, and it's always really nice to see the person you're rooting for win the day².

I say "unprovoked exclamation" because this should not be something the active player is trying to prompt the other players to do by asking; The prompting should come from the content of the scene, not social dynamic of the table.

Anyway, it's a thought.

¹we do this at our table when we want to be quiet about expressing excitement.
²It doesn't come up a lot in FATE, but an aspect could probably also be used to reroll a good result if the player wishes to fail. Maybe even for a self-compel, but it's really difficult to imagine an impactful scene that a player would want to self-compel out of which doesn't involve one of the character's aspects already.

gaming hacks, tabletop roleplaying

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