Strands of FATE vs. Diaspora & Attributes vs. Skills
Web_Weaver:
This may be purely perceptual, and varied amongst people, I have a preference for skill based systems and turn off when attributes are dominant. I find Attributes too broad to suggest usage. I guess it's the whole 'creative constraints' thing. I prefer attributes to be qualified, say Tall and Willowy or String Build rather than some kind of size attribute for example.
As to FATE in general, it's kind of a middle ground game, it has features like CR, FitM and Declarations but it seeks to appear unthreatening to traditional gamers. Some have described it as a gateway drug to the Indy Scene. The question is what does it achieve by doing this? In my experience it takes a bit of struggle to make FATE work with traditional players, and much actual play of FATE I have seen play style is not greatly changed purely by the system.
Another potential problem is that the FATE/FUDGE community is a very broad church, so individual iterations of the game system may be suited or designed for different styles of play. This may settle down when the core rules are published and it is easier to identify what the game is. I would argue that anything other than SotC and DF are just the community using the new shiny tools available through the OGL, to mixed results.
formen:
I really wanted to like SoF. Really, really wanted to like it. But the more I have read through it and the more I have discussed it with my players, the more it feels, well, too generic. And one of the major reasons for this is the attributes list.
There are concepts in SoF that I plan on borrowing for my future FATE-hacks, but the core rules are too different from the core FATE-line to fit with our ideas. Yes, there are ideas that can be dropped (Aspects Alphabet was dropped immediately), but once we start dropping things we didn't care for, we found that we were coming closer to Diaspora, SotC, LoA/SBA, and DFRPG. So SoF has ended up as a vague ideabox for us, but little else.
Erik Weissengruber:
Always: think about compells in your table's implementation of FATE
It will change the feel of tasks and conflicts. Imagine the difference between a game that allows compells only on the set of canonical skills, not attribute rolls. Or vice versa. Or allows compells on conflicts but not on discrete tasks. Or otherwise.
Diaspora is laser-clear in how that currency is employed in the general mechanics, as well as introducing setting-enforcing compell rules in the sub-games.
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