Random Shiny

[benabik]

Real quick, here's my shiny of the moment:

Fate RPGThe entire rules are available for free online as a PDF or RTF. The examples make me giggle and go "I want to play in their games". And the rules are about the most free-form I've seen without giving up dice. ("And now you pick four skills. Not from a list, just pick four...") I like it. I

Comments

[eseme]

Me, me, me?

*bounce bounce*

When would this game take place?

With Dresden coming out in (hopefully) the next year under this system, I'd love to try it out. Plus, Spirit of the Century sounds like fun.

[benabik]

No idea when I'd run it. I'm just moving development to Fate instead of Hero. If there's demand, I suppose I could run it whenever schedules match.

Spirit of the Century looks somewhat interesting... I don't care too much about the pulp setting, but I'm curious what kind of alterations they've made to Fate, particularly:
adventure design is a snap with three methods for creating relevant, flavorful, player-focused stories at a moment's notice. Spirit's mission is to deliver an evening of fun, a "pick-up" game that requires little preparation, but provides hours of entertainment.

~~ Evil Hat Productions

[froborr]

That is shiny, but possibly a little too loose as regards skills. For example, what if one player picks Running while another picks Sprinting? Also, convincing players to take negative aspects may be hard. I'm not sure.

I think I like the system in general, though it requires a lot more negotiation than I'm used to in character creation. However, I'd probably want to chuck the combat system in favor of something more detailed.

[benabik]

There is a skill list in the back of the book (end of PDF, whatever) that you can use. Each area of skill has a "broad", "general", and "specific" category. So, to take your example, the broad skill would be "Athletics", the general "Running", and the specific "Sprinting".

I like totally open lists, myself, with common sense (read: GM fiat) deciding what's too narrow or too broad. I'd personally either treat similar skills identically or give them an edge in specific situations (rolls on sprinting have penalties after the first couple minutes of running, but a bonus on initial rolls). An overly broad skill, say "Academics" could tell you similar things that a "Physics" skill could in general, but while Academics would let you know generally about gravity, Physics would let you calculate where that boulder is going to land.

In White Wolf games, I tend to say "Roll something" instead of "Roll Dex + Athletics". If the player can come up with a good reason to use any given skill, it's fine by me

[froborr]

On combat: Mostly I think it's lacking any suggestions of rules for positioning. You know, surrounding people, how far can you move in a turn, etc.

[benabik]

Ah. I see. I was looking at it as a rules-lite system so didn't notice that... Eh. Okay. It's missing. I don't care. I wouldn't use that strict a method time/space keeping system with Fate. If I want to run a game with combat detail, I'll use HERO or d20.