Futurama Story Intro

My group will be playing our first roleplaying session of Fate Core on Monday.  We have played a few sessions to playtest the Fate Starship Battles rules I developed. Those were a great intro to aspects and Fate in general. On Monday we will play out first session of Fate Core.

We previously made characters which can be found here.

What follows is the introduction to the story:

Everyone is sitting at the company table at Planet Express HQ. Professor Farnsworth comes in carrying a package that occasionally jumps in his hands.

"Good news everyone! We have a very special delivery to make today. It is a special cat, named Slinky. You see, he's extremely special because his mother has been bred with a spring. He is the most playful cat there ever was! We must deliver him quickly to the Lrrr, ruler of Omnicron Persei 8 so that he can give it to his wife, NdNd as a make up present. You see, he's still in the dog house since the last time he pretended to invade Earth."

"Speaking of dogs, unfortunately we have to fly past the Dog Star. The Dog-un despise cats and have developed a powerful Smell-O-Meter that can detect cats that come close to their star, so that they could be DESTROYED! We must be careful! If we fail, Lrrr threatened to really invade earth this time! The world is in our hands."

There is a sound out of the box: "Mrrrow!"

Skill Permissions

There's been a lot of talk on the G+ Fate Core group regarding skills, skill lists and skill permissions. I thought I'd post the blurb about skill permissions I am adding to the rules for my space opera setting. 

When your character concept indicates that you would not know what you are trying to achieve, the passive difficulty will be 2. When your concept indicates that you might know what you are trying to achieve, the passive difficulty might be 1. When your concept is clear that you do know there would be no passive difficulty to your roll. The passive difficulty should never be more than 2 in this respect. The difficulty may go higher, but that would be the passive difficulty to everyone because of whatever story reason is needed to make the task harder. 

One such example would be Science, the skill encompasses all aspects of science. This does not necessarily mean that your character is both a master of the biosciences and astonomy at the same time. Your aspects will indicate where your expertise lies exactly when it comes to the broad coverage of skills. If you had an aspect such as Alien Cyberneticist for example and you had to roll for something related to cybernetics, your roll would be standard. However, should you need to roll to calculate the optimal trajectory of a starship (also Science) in order to avoid any legal entanglements, your passive difficulty might be 1 or 2, depending on how the GM feels your character is knowledgeable in that particular field. This passive difficulty is entirely based on the aspects of your character.

A couple of other examples follow:

A Cyborg Gun For Hire is most definitely knowledgeable in the repair and maintenance of his projector and armour. However now he must roll Technology (or whatever skill you use) in order to hack a lock which is blocking his way. He is cybernetic in nature, but his concept is a for-hire soldier and the passive difficulty might only be 1. Fortunately for him, a Retired Assassin is with him who is an expert at opening ways. The Assassin would not have any passive opposition on their Technology roll because of their concept.

A Drunkard Mercenary has obtained a datapad with data related to his investigation. Since the mercenary is not that adept at combing data for information, his Investigation passive difficulty might be 2. He decides to take it to an Egg-Head Hacker he knows. The hacker will also roll Investigation when combing the data, without any passive opposition.

In summary, the intent, the skill being used and by whom it is being used must be evaluated to determine whether the person using the skill is competent in the action being taken. If they are not, then they will have a harder time than someone who is knowledgeable in that area. Aspects are your indicator on who the character is and what they should know really well, what they might know, and what they just wouldn't know.  Character aspects should make that determination fairly simple in most instances. If unsure, let the table decide which of the 3 categories it falls into. Fate Core has a smaller skill list, and skill bloat in your game is bad (yes, I abandoned my Skill Fields approach a while ago). With less skills and more broad skills, looking at who is doing what can help you make better use of skills and keep things flowing in a realistic way.

Mind Maps For Fun and Plot

Every GM in the history of the hobby has struggled with how to best keep notes and design a game session. About two years back I started putting my ideas and session notes into a mind map. I never looked back since.

Mind maps are a way to visually outline information in a hierarchical tree-like fashion. They are, for lack of better words, a dump of your thoughts. In this respect, they make amazing notes for my roleplaying games.

During my years of gaming, I've learned a couple of things. The first being is that I dislike published modules. The primary problem with them is that when you get one, it's like studying for an exam before a gaming session. That, does not appeal to me in any way. I was never the one to study much during school. I certainly do not want to do that in my hobby. I prefer to have the entire adventure in my mind and the easiest way to do so is to make it up yourself.

The second is that prepping for a gaming session is damn hard. No matter how much effort you put in, you can never be prepared enough. One of the hardest things for me is to ensure that all the really wicked ideas I have get to see the light of day. I hate forgetting that amazing thing I planned for a story, only to remember after the session ended. For me, one of the most fun things is to throw out the awesome things brewing in my head and watch the players reactions. Forgetting them lessens the enjoyment of GMing for me.

I do not want to discount pre-written modules. I still buy them occasionally for games I really, really enjoy.  They are great source of ideas and additional background material. When using them, I steal ideas or locations and fit them into my story instead.  I cannot recall the last time I ran a published module, though. Most of the time, I rely on my own ideas; often inspired by novels and stories I have read.

When designing a session, I always pull out my trusty mind mapping software. I try not to write anything down until I have a general outline in my head. I find that sitting in front of a screen often results in writers block, unless I already know what I want to write down. Something about computers interferes with my creativity. Perhaps because I program them for a living. My logical brain switches on and takes over. Or something...

Once I have the basic premise in my head, I take down some notes. The notes are very brief, often just ideas or phrases which will remind me about the in-depth idea I have. I note down the most important things about that aspect of the story on the mind map. I try to keep the mind map light in information because reading too much during a session tends to interrupt it at the worst possible times. Just the facts!

The whole concept of a mind map is to note down only the important things. These are phrases and words which will remind you later what that idea was. At a glance, I can discern what it was that I wanted to include in the story. The fact could be a specific description I wanted to read out, something important for that part of the story or a specific event. This is really about organization rather than details. I structure the notes around scenes and locations for the most part.

Once the mind map is fleshed out and I have noted down the important things about the story, I link them together. The linking is important because it lets me associate the same important fact with multiple pieces of information on the map. It also helps me visually to see the relationship between these different aspects of the story.

Seeing the relationships and flow of the story visually is perhaps the most valuable benefit of mind maps for me. When the story goes off the rails and the players completely surprise me, I still have my visual representation of the story facts. I can quickly re-arrange them in my head and on the map and make them think I incredibly thought of everything.

I also use the mind map to note down important events and facts driven by the players. The mind map becomes more detailed during the story. At the end I have a complete view of what the story was, what the players did and any major outcomes. I also have notes about possible new ideas for the next session and what story elements I need to tie up later.

My current software preference is MindNode Pro. It is Mac only, unfortunately. I do most of my designing and writing on my Macbook Air anyways. Being a Linux user, I would prefer an open source solution. I've looked into a number of mind mapping apps and MindNode Pro always seemed to be the best choice. There are a number of nice open source software packages out there, including ones for your tablet (iOS or Android).

The following is an example of an Eclipse Phase mind map I created for a story very loosely inspired by Alistair Reynold's Pushing Ice novel. The Ice Baby Collective was hired to push a comet to Mars for the terraforming project. Contact with it was recently lost and Firewall sensors detected exotic radiation emanating from the comet. Considered a possible X-Threat, sentinels were dispatched to investigate. The mind map won't give you the full story, since that's in my head. But it is an example of how I structure them and it is one of the more involved ones with lots of notes.

Fate of Starship Battles

My first serious Fate Core hack was an attempt at the creation of starship combat rules which could be used stand-alone and as part of roleplaying sessions. The version I reference here is the 3rd iteration of the rules. My group and I have done a few playtest sessions which resulted in some minor and major modifications to the rules. I feel that this 3rd iteration has come a long way and has streamlined much of the rules.

For the impatient, the rules may be found here. There is an example battle map and a starship sheet you can print for your games.

During playtesting, we attempted a number of approaches to weapons and damage. The way starship skills were allocated changed very early on as well. I documented many of the approaches in Fate to weapons, armour and damage here.

An early modification was to change the starship skill pyramid into a double column. The first playtest was with a pyramid, and we played with Enormous (6) Hull ships on each side. The amount of skills (systems) gained was crazy. Ships had three or more beam weapons and multiple squads of Marines - 4 in one instance. Ship creation also took much longer than it should have for a one-off battle. It was all a bit much. I didn't want a small ship with a Medium (3) Hull to only have a couple of skill slots. The balancing was difficult because at larger hulls, you end up with way too many. Eventually, after running some numbers I arrived at a double column. This was a very good fit for all sizes of ships. I'm quite happy with this now.

The first weapon system we tried was a variant of Weapon Min Stress vs. Armour Stress & Consequences where weapons did a minimum amount of damage based on the skill ranks. This turned out to be too hard to remember and figure out when a starship had multiple weapons of various ranks. I abandoned the armour stress early on before the first play test after reading comments on the G+ Fate Core group which indicated that would make combat last longer and bog it down. I only kept the minimum stress for the first playtest. The problem we found was with tracking the minimum stress since if you had more than one weapon, they all did different minimum damage based on the skill ranks. What really complicated things was things like Flack, Shields and Drones. They had to fit into the system with what they offered. Things got unbalanced and too complicated for what I wanted.

The second weapon system was an attempt at using For Better Or Worse where the scale was determined by the skill ranks in the skill rather than hull size. For example an Average (+1) Structure was considered Small in scale and a Legendary (+8) Structure was Huge. The progression was 0-2: Small, 3-4: Medium, 5-6: Large and 7-8: Huge. Up to two shifts were considered for a max bonus of +2. This was in many ways even worse because now there was a whole mix of ranks of weapons and defence which confused things tremendously. Again the Flack, Shields and Drones proved to be hard to fit into this system without additional rules. At the end of the day, this was less favourable than the first attempt.

The final weapon revision came about mid way through the last playtest. We got annoyed with how things were calculated and took a time out to discuss the pros and cons of the current and previous systems. We quickly agreed they were not ideal, nor intuitive. During discussion I threw out there the free invokes system which the Fate Freeport Companion had. Immediately everyone's ears perked up and they all nodded. We tried it, and it worked amazingly. The tracking was simple with a few boxes on the starship sheet. I decided that the number of free Boosts you get per battle scene is equal to the ranks in your skill. A maximum of two may be used at a time, like the limit of a single Advantage. The rest is detailed in the starship rules link above.

The exercise of these standalone battles was a great introduction for my group to the basics of Fate. Since were were just having fun and trying to figure out an optimal system, everyone had a great time playing something everyone knew how - miniature battles.

In the second playtest we used Aspects. I was surprised at the amazing Aspects the players came up with on their own after a brief intro to what they do and how they are used. The Aspects became on many different occasions and the players quickly grasped how to take advantage of them, and when.

Give the rules a spin, let me know what you think and how you think the rules might be improved. Not everything in the 3rd revision was playtested either. As a designer, I found it most helpful to stand back and GM the battles rather than play them. The time I had to observe the players and where they stumbled or had issues was a huge benefit.

For those curious, the miniatures we used were from the Fading Suns Noble Armada starship board game.