Almost there! One whole month of #RPGaDay2015, finally completing the challenge I flaked on last year. I’ll leave room for back-slapping and victory laps at the end. Continue reading
Fate
#RPGaDay2015: Week Three
Behold, two blog posts in two days, as I struggle to catch up with my backlog. This week has been a busy one for me and roleplaying – we had the last session of our zombie game in Hillfolk, which ended with delightfully unsatisfying bleakness, and a big 6-player session for my Buffy campaign as a player from last year’s game put in a guest appearance. So now is a good time to update my #RPGaDay2015, since I’m on a bit of a roll. Continue reading
#RPGaDay2015: Week One
It was recently brought to my attention that I’ve now been blogging for over a year. Congrats to me for keeping it up, with only the occasional inexplicable absence. Hopefully the momentum’s built up now for me to continue for years to come.
Anyway, what reminded me of this anniversary was the beginning of RPG a Day 2015, a one-question-a-day autobiographical gaming history thing that I also embarked upon last year. And by embarked upon, I mean I started it, and kept going for most of the month… but didn’t finish. Oops. Continue reading
Stuck In The Middle With You: Mexican Standoffs in Fate Core
Inspired by some very kind comments from the Fate Core Google+ Community, I recently took another look at the Firefly hack I blogged about last year. Whilst far too late to help my friend with the campaign he was running (sorry!), I thought this might still be of interest to other gamers out there. Today, I’ll look at a new sub-system I teased at the end of that post: the resolution of Mexican standoffs. Continue reading
Showing Off: Musketeer Stunts in Fate Core
Some time ago I posted a swashbuckling mini-hack for Fate Core, to introduce a little more strategy and daring into how the game handles sword fighting. This was in advance of joining a Musketeers game, which has been an excellent opportunity to playtest those ideas, within the confines of an already extremely fun campaign.
At the end of that post, I teased the possibility of developing stunt trees to plug into those rules, framed around the six Fight approaches. My design goals for these stunt trees were to generate even more strategic options in combat, and to take advantage of one of Fate’s most neglected mechanics: zones. In a setting where everyone is a sword fighter, the Fate Core default is for everyone to pile into the same zone and stay there, so they always have complete choice about which opponent to attack. This is both a boring way to play, and a poor representation of the genre, in which leaps and dashes through precarious environments are as much part of fight scenes as quips and swordplay.
Below is the result of my efforts. Continue reading
Mini-Review: Fate Accelerated Edition
Is Fate Accelerated Edition an expansion? A fresh system adaptation? A quick-start guide? Fred Hicks suggests that it and Fate Core are better viewed as points of a Fate spectrum than as standalone entities. Maybe that’s true, but it’s awkward from a critical perspective, so I’ve chosen to review it as a separate entity. Unfortunately, the problem with this approach is that comparisons to Fate Core are as inevitable as they are unfavourable. Continue reading
Mini-Review: Fate Core
When I first heard about Fate Core, I wasn’t interested. I’d played Spirit of the Century, I’d played Diaspora – why buy the same system again with all the setting content removed? How foolish that sentiment seems now. Consistency and clarity became the design goals of the new Fate edition, and combined with not-insubstantial tweaks made to gameplay both central and peripheral, they have transformed something promising into the best RPG release of the last four years. Continue reading
“The Egg Must SING!”: Save Game Actual Play Report
So here’s something new – an actual play report of a game I ran last weekend. Whilst I run a lot of Fate Core games, this session was also my first time trying out one of the Patreon settings that Evil Hat have been putting out for the system. The one I chose was “Save Game“, and I downloaded the PDF for two reasons. Firstly, because I was already familiar with Rob Wieland’s brand of Fate from “Camelot Trigger”, a spacebound mecha game of Arthurian legend from the Worlds In Shadow setting expansion, which I consider to be one of the most mechanically accomplished hacks for Fate Core that Evil Hat have released to date. Secondly, I knew that Save Game’s fun set up of 8-bit heroes battling doomsday virus epidemics and jumping puzzles would be extremely relevant to the interests of many of my friends. With a strong enough elevator pitch to enable one-shot play with minimal exposition, it was exactly what I needed to end the December drought of roleplaying campaigns triggered by my players’ seasonal responsibilities. Continue reading
Mini-Review: Diaspora
Two years ago, this might have gotten a rave review – a novel take on the emergent Fate engine, with diverse sub-systems to support many sessions of play. But now we live in the era of Fate Core, probably the most exciting RPG release of the last four years, which introduced so much clarity and consistency into the system as to make Fate-that-was feel woefully obsolete. Diaspora is not bad, but it’s not Fate Core, which lest we forget is available for free. Why indulge in the clunky eccentricities of Diaspora’s social conflict system, for example, when it’s managed so effortlessly by Fate Core? Continue reading
Fate of the Browncoats: Firefly Fate Core Hack
EDIT 28/08/18: Like this post? You might be interested in my follow-up rules for Mexican Standoffs in Fate Core, which is designed for use in the Firefly system hack below!
A couple of months ago I attended Concrete Cow, an event run by the Milton Keynes RPG Club, and was granted the opportunity to run a session of the Leverage RPG. I’d been eager to give Cortex Plus’ Action system a go for years, and picking up the new Firefly RPG at GenCon had only excited me further. Whilst I enjoyed running Leverage, there were elements of the system I was a bit less keen on, and upon re-reading Firefly was delighted to see that they seemed to be addressed within the engine’s new iteration. Certainly I am looking forward to giving the game a try when I get a chance.
This post is not about that game. Continue reading
Roll Plus Hot 
