Finding The Fate RPG Frustrating?

When you’re out and about on the Internet reading blog posts, scanning through Twitter or listening to a podcast on a drive you encounter numerous criticisms of things you like. This is especially true of TTRPG systems as there are numerous elements to them which then intersect with the desires and playstyles of those involved.

So there is a lot of potential dislikes.

I’m perfectly fine with people who dislike TTRPG systems I like. It does bug me when people dislike TTRPG systems, whether I like them or not, for outcomes at the table that aren’t anything to do with how the system works. They’ve made an assumption, overlayed past experience with another game or bulldozed their gaming philosophy over the one represented by the system.

It happens a lot with Fate, so this is an attempt to outlay what Fate actually is.

What This Post Is Not

This is not an attempt to persuade you to like Fate. There are many reasons why people may dislike Fate and not wanting to play it is fine. If this post is anything it is an attempt to ensure people don’t dislike it for things it isn’t.

It’s also true that this post does describe elements that are described right there in the rulebook. So why repeat them? Well, it’s obvious for some reason the rulebook doesn’t penetrate the natural flow of the reader’s individual playstyle so this is my attempt to try. I like to delude myself into thinking I can provide a different perspective.

Take it as you will.

Simple, but Philosophically Different

While the elegance and complexity (which can be two different axis) of a system is always relative to the individual and other systems I will fight to my dying breath that Fate is a complicated system. It’s not. It’s incredibly simple. I also happen to think it’s elegant, but I suspect it’s elegant on a philosophical grounding that throws people. It’s also the implementation of that elegance at the table that proves more art than science.

The problem comes when the whole thing comes together: resolving the fiction, the philosophy behind Fate characters, Aspects, Compels and Fate points, etc. Not because it’s complicated, but they’re tied together via a philosophical underpinning that people often ignore or ignore in parts, or overlay a different approach and as a result, the whole foundation collapses or partly subsides.

The Key Reasons Fate Fails

When Fate discussions come up misinterpretations come from numerous sources: –

1. Not playing and resolving the fiction
2. Using Aspects as advantages and disadvantages, not fictional signals and permissions
3. The table doesn’t allow the characters to be the impactful protagonists they are
4. Using Fate points as +2’s and permission to do things
5. They forget Compels exists
6. Players don’t accept their role as a writer, rather than just an actor
7. The system is seen as a reductionist 90’s system and it’s played that way

Reason (7) can be taken as the other six all rolled up together, but I’ve itemised them out as you see the elements. We’ll look at each one, it just might be best to cover them in a different order than listed.

It Only Looks Like A 90’s Game

When people describe their interpretation of Fate you can often see it’s been read through the lens of other games and philosophies. That lens is often a style of 90’s game that once you get passed D&D is a style a lot of games follow to this day.

Fate does a good impersonation of a popular 90’s rules format: –

1. Roll against a difficulty number
2. Roll +stat, +skill or stat+ skill (Fate is +skill, though Fate Accelerated is +Stat)I
3. Use a dice pool
4. Use advantages and disadvantages 
5. Use a currency to boost character effectiveness

Fate has all these elements at the most basic, reductionist take. The challenge is they work differently. You may be rolling +skill against a difficulty number but you’re explicitly deciding the fiction. Aspects are not anything like the advantages and disadvantages yet you often hear them described ‘just like that’.

Fate points, and the way they flow, primarily because of compels.

Key point: If you interpret and play Fate like a 90’s game it will be unsatisfactory at the table and it’ll be a bit like watching a horror film and complaining it wasn’t funny. This often goes for overlaying concepts from other games onto Fate rather than accepting how they are intended.

Competent, Proactive And Dramatic

Characters in Fate are very competent, proactive and dramatic. Fate models protagonists in fiction and these people are not like us, they’re of the species Homo Fictitious and Fate leans into that. This is where the beauty of it is in actual play and how everything comes together. You literally can’t play the game effectively without leaning into it.

Fate characters are competent because the skills they have chosen to be good at will be +2 or +3 higher than the typical opposition roll. Since Fate works on +4 to -4 dice pool that +2 is a very big advantage. On a pure skill level, you’re competent and this is without interaction with rules to ‘create advantage’ and generate aspects to get free, additional +2 bonuses, etc.

If someone was to criticise Fate for being competency porn? I’d agree, but you have to accept this within the whole of how the game works.

The fact your character is dramatic speaks to how Aspects are not a transactional advantage and disadvantage system – they are a dramatic painting of who your character is and are dramatic permissions and signals to what your character’s story is about. If you have the Aspect ‘Recovered Drug Addict’ this will feature in your story as everyone will use it to actively author and drive the story in interesting, dramatic ways.

The characters are proactive because they have ways to use aspects, skills and actions to push the story forward. They can discover aspects on characters and compel them, create advantages and then use their high competency on skill rolls to find information. While some games pride themselves on NOT providing the solution on the character sheet Fate does the exact opposite and allows the characters to push/create the fiction.

Key point: If you play Fate with a belief the characters aren’t competent, proactive and dramatic or try to control or restrict it you’ll have a frustrating experience. While the game provides the power for the characters to be proactive the players have to use it and the GM has to allow it. ‘Failure’ is often defined just as much through compels than constantly failing skill rolls.

Aspects Paint A Dramatic Picture

Aspects are not just another name for a flowery advantages and disadvantages system.

They’re not an advantage and disadvantage system because they’re both positive and negative at the same time (the best ones are anyway). You’re not buying some random disadvantage to suddenly be better at something unrelated, the crappy old ‘Dependenant: Sister’ so I can be as strong as Thor rather than Spider-Man schtick. The whole foundation of how a lot of advantage and disadvantage systems work do not apply to Aspects.

Aspects are two things: a permission and a signal.

They are a permission in the sense they are true. All the aspect entails is true. This may include permission to undertake certain actions. Where it places you in the world. Defining enemies that are after you. They are a signal in a similar way, as it’s a signal to everyone at the table that this is part of what your story is about. If you have the Aspect Renowned Swordsman of the Red Guard then suddenly the Red Guard exist as do their enemies. As does that character’s position within the Red Guard. Your renown will sway the fiction in both good and bad ways and can be actively used.

Importantly, that aspect is always true and the world reacts as if it’s true. Your story will be in some way about your relationship with the Red Guard.

Key points: If you approach Aspects as vanilla advantages and disadvantages your experience at the table will be frustrating. They are a way to paint the dramatic picture of your character and act as a set of dramatic permissions and signals. They also define how you are compelled.

Resolving The Fiction

Fate is built on a fiction-first principle. In a way, it’s a fiction-first version of generic systems like GURPS. That’s probably a bad analogy, but you get the idea.

This means you’re always resolving the fiction of what happens, not the physical reality of what happens. This is important because the mechanics of the system assumes this throughout and you’ll find numerous things don’t make sense unless viewed through this lens. All the rules and elements are set up to resolve the fiction.

This tends to mean numerous things.

Describe your intent and choose the rules with the intent in mind. The rules do not define what you can do. They are an abstraction to resolve fiction. This tends to mean action statements can have multiple resolutions. Let’s say a character wants to cut down a chandelier with swashbuckling panache while in a sword fight with an opponent. There are a number of truths about this.

1. If the character has an Aspect of Flashy Swashbuckler he has complete permission to do such an action. You don’t need to spend a Fate point to have permission to perform this action. Competent, dramatic and proactive remember?
2. If he wants to damage the opponent it’s just a normal Attack Action
3. If he wants to Create An Advantage (trap the opponent in the chandelier) it’s a straight Create An Advantage action
4. This should just be a normal roll. It should be no more difficult. It’s not achieving anything extra than the normal action would result in

Done. Describe the fictional intent, choose the action that’s most appropriate and make the roll. What the character can perform is set by the fiction the group has agreed on not restricted by defined rules that limit player action to set strategies or rote options along ‘game challenge’ or ‘reality simulator’ lines.

If the chandelier was not described in the scene the player can just announce it is present as long as it isn’t crazily incongruent. As long as the integrity of the scene and game is maintained players are free to author most physical aspects of a scene that make sense to everyone. There is a rule to use Fate Points for ‘story detail’ which could be used for this, but I think that’s better used for higher-value things like announcing past relationships, etc, rather than stuff that makes sense but just wasn’t described.

There is a lot of shared storytelling.

What about needing the Aspect? It’s true the Aspect may not be needed for permission. If you’re playing a game where everyone is essentially a flashy swashbuckler you may decide not to represent that with an Aspect and everyone has permission. It’d be like playing an all Jedi game, they are ALL Jedi (though it’s common for everyone to have a Jedi-like Aspect to define different types or relationships with the order, etc). The reason I included the aspect was to demonstrate how Aspects provide permission – in this case, Flashy Swashbuckler is a permission and a signal that the player wants that to define his character in some way (others will not have it).

So what happens if a character without that aspect tries it? First, you have to consider whether they would? A cop-out? Not really. The other characters will have painted their own fictional permissions and signals and as a result, why would they try something that didn’t fit that? So the character who has Unstoppable Ox in his Aspects won’t be doing such flashy moves he’d do something else. My experience is that players rarely do similar things or they do the same thing but the fiction of it is very different.

This fictional reality is also true from the GM side. The player’s author in an approaching tank in a pulp game? You don’t suddenly have to model a tank, though you could as all things in Fate are characters at a few different levels of detail, it could also just be a threat that isn’t actually interacted with, an abstract stress pool or an overcome roll. It could also be multiple of these things moving from one to the other as the fiction changes. What does the tank mean in the fiction at a point in time?

In a recent game, we had an approaching horde of alien insects as an approaching threat, which would have become a swarm as a stress pool but as the fiction changed it became an overcome action because it ceased to be important in the fiction so the character brought a mountain down on them with a single overcome action.

Key point: If you play Fate without a laser focus on resolving the fiction and instead focus on the real-world realism of things or how it would work in actual physics you’ll be frustrated at every opportunity. The system is designed as a way to abstract the fiction so it can be used to resolve and decide said fiction.

Fate Points Aren’t Cool Points

Fate points aren’t ‘cool points’, as we’ve already demonstrated you’re that naturally. Fate points aren’t just a way to do things better.

Fate points purely exist to emphasise what’s important to you in the fiction. There is literally no need to use them in any other way and trying to will lead to a rather banal experience. Remember, you don’t even HAVE to spend them to stop your character from dying as that is by player choice in Fate.

At the basic level, Fate points can be used to: –

1. Invoke to provide a +2 or re-roll
2. Invoke to declare a story detail (I tend to find there is a lot of just letting this happen for free if it’s within Aspect range – we tend to)
3. Compel an aspect (wherever it is)

I believe the challenges people have with how Fate points come down to these things: –

1. Ignoring the inherent competent, proactive and dramatic nature of the characters and making them spend Fate points to do stuff they can JUST DO due to raising difficulties or demanding a Fate point for permission to do it
2. Purely concentrating on the mechanism to get a +2, which is related to (1), and also using them to ‘just to win or survive’ when this isn’t really a thing in Fate conflicts (unless by choice)
3. Completely forgetting that compels are an essential part of the game

The first two result in the frustration of feeling you need Fate points as permission to do extraordinary stuff when in truth they are not a factor. Since your character is competent, dramatic and proactive they can do that by default just with basic actions.

The third means the table isn’t using compels which means Fate points dry up anyway which becomes doubly problematic if using them as outlined in reasons 1 and 2.

This brings me to compels, which I believe, outside all of the things we’ve discussed so far, is the real core of the challenge as it’s all about the compels.

Key points: Fate points are not needed to be cool. They are not a permission to do the extraordinarily competent. They are purely there to influence, trigger and shape what you believe to be important outcomes in the fiction.

All About The Compels

I believe the core of the problems people have with Fate that results in disliking it for the wrong reasons is also the defining reason why people might not like it for the right reason: compels.

Compels are at the heart of Fate. Yet whenever you hear about a game that didn’t work or outcomes are attributed to it for reasons that aren’t true there is a distinct lack of discussion around compels to the point they may not have been happening in any shape or form.

Role-playing game systems sit on a scale between active and passive. Some systems sort of sit in the background and don’t overly contribute anything. Fate is a very active system. You have to actively use it in the game to move it forward. If the system has become passive it has 100% drifted into running like a 90’s game that we talked about earlier.

The active nature of Fate is essentially all about compels. Why? Because they are both the way characters get Fate points back and they represent the most exciting use in the game.

It could be said the +2 use of a Fate Point is the boring use.

Compels tend to come in event and decision compels. I’m going to give the pattern of both, primarily because it helps with examples and is a short-hand, but don’t get hung up on the prescriptive nature of the pattern in actual play the flow is more organic and based on constant conversation and trust.

When these things happen either through the GM raising one, the player suggesting it should occur or just naturally and proactively through role-playing they get a Fate point. If the player accepts the drug of the demon flower because he’s a ‘Recovering Addict’ just through natural play he gets the Fate point and the story unfolds as the recovering addict, unfortunately, takes the demon flower. Even better, the story unfolds along the lines the player actually signalled and gave permission for everyone to focus on!

If these compels aren’t being raised or recognised the Fate points aren’t being regenerated. In our last game, a lot of the pivotal plot situations and key, major blowout moments (if it was a TV show or comic) came from compels and I’d not even say we are the best at doing them all the time – but it still worked.

It’s important to recognise this is not the only use, player characters can use Create Advantage actions to discover Aspects on NPC’s and then compel them in a hostile fashion. In our last campaign, a whole conflict was avoided this way when a player did this and used a compel to suck the enemy into their dramatic trap. This is cool because this is what dramatic characters do and it also meant the fiction unfolded in a way true to the protagonist. You also see players happily falling into dramatic situations protagonists fall into in books because they’ve signalled and gave permission for it to happen and they get rewarded for it!

The compels are often how key moments you see in other mediums play out in Fate.

It’s worth noting at this point, that compels aren’t a hard move, a prescriptive, forceful and brute force action upon the recipient. All this stuff is a vehicle for cooperative authoring in the game so if it’s not part of a constant conversation it’s gone wrong. A GM can offer a compel, maybe it’ll get slightly reframed, often making it better, and on you go. It’s true the character’s owner can reject a compel with a Fate Point spend but it’s my experience that rarely happens – if it happens a lot I’d say that the signals and communication at the table aren’t working.

Is it true anything a compel drives could have happened without compels and fate points? Yes, but you can say that for anything and have no systems at all. I truly believe when it’s approached correctly it further encodes the players acting like writers and failing and succeeding like protagonists in other fictional media and makes it a core, intentional part of the experience.

Key Point: If you’re not playing Fate as an active system with everyone at the table having an eye, not an obsession, to compels you’re not actually playing Fate and you’re playing something else.

Accepting Your Role As a Writer

When playing Fate, because of its active nature, the existence of compels and the proactive nature of the characters you pretty much have to accept that your role in the game is one of a writer as well as an actor. You can’t avoid it. If you’re somehow avoiding it I’d argue you are playing something else again.

Along with the ‘mysterious dropping of compels’ this is the second most encountered reason for Fate games ‘failing’. The players drop into just actor mode or in some cases almost audience mode to the GM and this will just cause the game to collapse or fall into the weird 90’s game impersonation already mentioned.

You have to accept that you will step outside your character, act as a writer to frame situations and then play out the consequences. I get that for some this is a complete no. It may also be jarring for others. I tend to find it’s fluid and makes perfect sense but then I’ve always approached ttrpgs as a writer so for me Fate was finally the system that fully supported it. At almost every level of its existence.

I could come up with various analogies for this, but I find they are all less than perfect, it suffices to say you will be authoring, a lot.

Key point: You can’t play Fate in the role of audience to the GM. You can’t even play Fate just as just an actor. You have to accept that in some way you are also a writer otherwise you’re not authoring compels, you’re not actively using compels and you may not be being dramatic and proactive.

And, Finally…

It felt weird writing this post. It felt weird because there was a danger it would be preachy or appear like some zealot-like tirade persuading people they are stupid for not liking Fate. That isn’t my intention and I apologise if anyone reads it that way.

My intention is purely a reaction to people not liking it for outcomes which are nothing to do with how the system works. I don’t like this happening with any system no matter what my view on it. If you dislike it for exactly how the system works and the outcomes it delivers then I’m all for such insightful criticism.

I am possibly deluding myself I have added anything to this topic, but I’m also aware I sometimes write these posts to clarify my thoughts, understanding, beliefs and approaches to things just as much as I do to, hopefully, help someone else in some small way.