[DFRPG] Occult Toronto
Erik Weissengruber:
There is a big FATE community and lots of discussion on the various boards. The designers all have active internet presences.
I am hoping my FATE notes are of interest to designers working with FATE-esqe traits and/or trait bidding/rewarding mechanics.
Diaspora has a very satisfying "I'm not deprotagonizing your PC, I'm saying at this moment he or she is flummoxed/outgunned/lust-besotted/out of ammo" approach. And it bolts Compels into the resolution mechanic, and not just in the scene framing, free roleplay parts of the game.
jburneko:
Hey,
I wanted to chime in and say that I think Ron has asked the $64,000 dollar question about Compels. Its an issue I've thought about a lot because I'm currently running a semi-long form Dresden campaign. What I've found in play is that FATE is very much an echo chamber of a system. It basically enables the play group to express whatever they want to express without offering any "opinions" of its own. *I'm* approaching the material with the arrogance of "I can do better." I'm not sure I can say the same for (all) my players.
In practice we've had a lot of ups and downs with Compels. What I've noticed is that in *practice* Compels go through a two tier approval process, not one like the game would apply. The first tier is wholly group based. Someone offers a Compel and it hits the table with an obvious OOOOOO of excitement or a rather grand Thud. In the case of the grand Thud the Compels are usually withdrawn or reformulated *without the expenditure* of a FATE a point. In the case of the excited OOOOOs the Compel has achieved group legitimacy and if it is bought off with a FATE point then that usually translates into a bit of fiction when the character shakes off or struggles through whatever the Compel was about.
I've found that to be a microcosm of FATE itself. There's a lot of permission and approval seeking built into the system. Maneuvers is another example. It's actually extremely difficult to take advantage of your own Maneuvers. Doing a Maneuver eats up a whole action and since degree of success has no impact on action order everything that was going to happen is going to happen before your turn comes up again to capitalizing on your Maneuver. "Selling" the impact of your fictional contribution is very dependent on someone else picking up the result of the Maneuver and acting on it, either by Tagging it for a bonus or compelling it in some manner. As GM I've taken to self-compelling my NPCs when a PC does Maneuvers like "Sand In Eyes". It nets me a FATE point for that NPC and makes it feel like the Maneuver counts for something beyond having to wait for the whole initiative cycle to come around again.
I had an interesting conversation with our resident FATE-fan Morgan. Morgan's FATE games are EXTREMELY popular at our local conventions. Morgan is basically one giant Color machine. He has a collection of FATE scenarios that are basically tributes to his own childhood. He has a Thundar The Barbarian scenario. He has a G.I. Joe scenario. He has a John Carter of Mars scenario. Note: He doesn't use those "canons" but instead creates original material that is probably best described as pastiche with a unique spin. However, these scenarios run purely on enthusiasm for the color. They are pretty devoid of anything resembling a Narrativist Premise in Big Model terms.
Anyway, Morgan was talking about a Dresden scenario he'd like to work up about an underground Changeling rock-band. He was lamenting though that he felt like he didn't have the skills to really push that concept as hard he'd like to make it work. We joked that after he made up the characters he wanted he'd turn it over to me and I'd twist it around to give it the emotional edge it needed. But then we realized that after I did that, that we'd need our friend Colin to run it because he's better than either of us at working the really painful Compels. Colin and Morgan are a really interesting compare and contrast point on this issue. It's no surprise that Morgan's "go to" game is FATE and that while Colin enjoys and is good at running FATE games, his "go to" game is Burning Wheel.
Jesse
Erik Weissengruber:
The FATE community has been having discussion on compels:
Some want to remove GM-side compels
http://www.vsca.ca/halfjack/?p=479
Some are assigning compels to different participants for different areas of the fiction
(frex: The World's compels are GM-side only, Internal compels can be proposed but can be denied by PC's player for free, Supernatural compels are GM-proposed/player pays to deny)
http://ryanmacklin.com/2011/01/internal-vs-world-compels/
Some want to avoid compelling altogether
* This is what I gather from the comments surrounding "Strands of FATE"
I like Leonard Balsera's approach for narrative compels :
http://lcdarkwood.livejournal.com/3824.html
Quote
Aspect is Greedy.
1.) A crime boss offers you money to sell out your friends.
2.) You sell out your friends for the money.
3.) As a result of this, your home base gets destroyed. (And probably, your friends are pissed at you, but they're PCs too, so that's for them to decide.)
or
1.) A crime boss offers you money to sell out your friends.
2.) You want the money, so you give him false information.
3.) As a result of this, he discovers the deception and puts a price on your head so large every bounty hunter within 1,000 miles wants to kill you.
That is working well.
But the mechanics need some linkage back to the fiction.
To pick up Jesse's metaphor: FATE can be an echo chamber. People are throwing things out into the shared imaginative space. The FATE point economy could serve as a reward system to encourage reincorporation of those elements into an evolving world. Players compelling their own aspects are asserting particular parts of their PC's persona, emphasizing some and letting others slip away. Players compelling other PC's (to empower or to challenge) and are offering feedback, providing an environmental constraint on expression of certain PC aspects. GMs are doing that across the board. Players offering OOOOOhs are creating an environment in which certain behaviours and traits will find further expression or go extinct. The dead silence when a lame compel is offered assists the development of that environment. The City, as created, puts hard limits on the way the environment can change, and these hard limits, if reinforced through Fate Points and Compels, will affect the evolution of individual PCs.
The FP economy might work best if input were coming from all decision makers, and pressure on PCs could come from other PCs' players and from the GM.
Reciprocal rewards could produce a kind of Nash equilibrium between all involved parties. The evolution of such and equilibrium would probably come about faster if the FATE point economy were flowing through many decisions makers, not just under the monopoly of the GM or the temporary duopolies formed by 1GM/1 PC interactions.
In concrete terms: if were are all improvising, it would be nice if we could all be on alert and integrate functional suggestions into recurring figures, and which every iteration of chorus we could prove that we were all listening to what the other folks kicked in last time and bring it up again, so that our unfolding improvisation builds up an integral unity instead of being just a bunch of random echoes.
(P.S. There is always a place for a free form freak out, but you can always be Miles Davis instead of Ornette Coleman)
Erik Weissengruber:
Jesse, your APs for Actual People Actual Play, and those from The Walking Eye, were what pushed me to get both Dresden Books.
From the outside it looks as if you picked up on the game's GM-ing advice. In one podcast you talk about how your previous experience in creating mystery scenarios just didn't work out for Dresden. But when you began working with an Aspect-centred mode of prep, the game rolled along better.
Listening to that learning process really taught me to keep my old habits out of DFRPG scenario prep.
Hooking up compels to this mode of prep would bring a kind of coherence and dynamism to the kind of FATE I "feel" is possible but am only beginning to see.*
* Which is not the "skill-based game with a few bennies tossed in and a few player-defined abilities and gear generic RPG" that seems to be the default
jburneko:
Erik,
For clarity, I didn't *quite* prep a truly old-school clue-chain style mystery. My roots are in that style of play and I feel like my current Dresden play is harkening back to that in that I find myself having to generate A LOT of material whole cloth for each and every scenario. My prep (and usage of that prep) looks a lot more like a Dogs in the Vineyard scenario or a Sorcerer game (if you're familiar with either of those). The problem is that I don't have any of the tools those games give me.
My problem is that despite all the advice I find Aspects to be anemic in terms of scenario prep. Here's an example. One of my players has this Aspect: "I hate you almost as much as I hate Vampires." Which according to the advice suggests I should place the player in situations that features people the character hates and Vampires preferably placing them at odds with one another. The problem is that character generation produces no such people of significance to the character. I have to guess at it. At best I can come up with cartoony "bad guys" that are universally dis-likable and mix them up with Vampires some how.
The one Aspect in Dresden that you'd think would be the "meatiest" is the Trouble aspect. The problem with the Trouble Aspect (in addition to the general lack of concretes mentioned above) is that it isn't intended to be a right here, right now crisis point for the character. In other words, Trouble is NOT intended to be the thing "at stake" at the heart of any given scenario such that the player would basically have to re-write his Trouble from scenario-to-scenario as each one fully and completely resolve the Trouble one way or another. Instead Trouble is supposed to be the thing that makes dealing with whatever really is "at stake" in the scenario in a clean and simple manner. Trouble is a persistent, maybe-someday-it-will-be-resolved, which again puts in the position of having to constantly "angle" the PCs Trouble towards the heart of whatever I've made up whole cloth is really "at stake" in the scenario.
If you're listening to AP, AP regularly this is the primary reason we play other things between Dresden scenarios. It takes me the better part of a month to let a really good scenario "brew" in my brain until I can fine tune it.
Jesse
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