I’ve been thinking a lot about things you can do when you change the assumptions of the Fate Point economy, and I hit upon a curious trick, one which is very simple as a rule, but very deep in its implications. The rule is this:

• If the player rolls a -3 or -4, they gain a Fate Point.

Simple, yes? But lets unpack the implications a bit.

First, there is no requirement that the low result stand. If the player wants to spend a fate point for a reroll or a bonus to offset the roll, then they can, and the first such point gets rebated. But the only way that they get to keep the free fate point is to let the roll stand. That is to say, the player is accepting a bad outcome in return for currency. Or, put another way:

The dice are offering a compel, which the player may accept ot not.

Once you think about it like a compel, it all kind of clicks into place – the bad die result is no longer an outcome, rather it’s a trigger for a twist, a complication or something else appropriate to a compel. It’s an invitation for trouble. Which, in turn, means the effective dice curve of results is now -2 to +4, which is satisfying on a few levels.

It is so satisfying, in fact, that I’d actually be inclined to expand this to -2, -3 and -4 results. That would means dice compels come up more frequently, and the remaining dice results are very respectful of character capability.

What’s also interesting is that there is no particular interaction with aspects in this. Originally, this idea struck me as I was pondering replacements for the current fate point economy. In the absence of GM-driven compels, this could be the sole source of Fate Points for players, which might satisfy players who don’t like that kind of GM authorship. Or it could be used in a game that doesn’t use aspects at all to still allow for a bit of organic pacing.

What intrigues me most about this approach is that it could be used as a step to decouple fate points from aspects. As to why someone might want to do that…well, that’s probably its own blog post.

I have thought about diceless Fate on numerous occasions, but it’s a hard sell for fairly personal reasons. See, one of the reasons Fate exists is that Fred & I loved the Amber DRPG, but wanted to bring some randomness back into it, for our own sensibilities. Still despite that resistance, the reality has always been that Fate is trivial to convert to diceless play by simple virtue of the 0-centered dice results. If you just assume that all dice rolls come up 0, you’re about 90% of the way to supporting diceless play.

This works ok. Play becomes much more about the exchange of fate points and the impact of aspects, which is kind of fun, but also demands a little bit more precision in the language about where fate points come from and when (thus, the previous post). All solvable problems. But what’s the fun in that?

So I got to thinking about a thing you see in PBTA derived games, where the dice produce flavorful results, but don’t actually take difficulty into account in the rolling. I admit, that sits poorly with me, but it struck me that the idea could be twisted to work by separating the die roll entirely from the question of success or failure.

That is, consider a Fate game where success or failure is determined entirely by whether or not your skill (or approach, or whatever) is equal to or greater than the difficulty of the the task you’re trying. Rules remain the same – treat it like you rolled a zero and keep moving.(fn)
But then add an extra step: Roll the dice for the outcomes.

Now, this is going to be a little counterintuitive for gamers, since we have been trained to consider success/failure to be the outcome, but in this case the question of success has already been resolved dicelessly, so the roll is entirely to determine the other things that the roll would normally handle. The results would be something like (EDIT: NOW WITH THE RIGHT TABLE):

In this system, aspect invocations can be used in two ways:

1.  to add +1 to the skill or approach (to buy success)
2. As die flippers on the roll

Now, it’s worth noting that this is part of what the previous setup was for – in this model, the GM can also use compels to flip dice because that can’t bring failure in the traditional sense, but it can complicate a situation.

OK

Now given that, here’s the really interesting trick. The Press Your Luck mechanic.

If you are facing a situation where you know you’re going to fail, but want to try anyway, you absolutely can.  Go ahead and roll the dice.  Then remove any plusses you rolled – each plus so removed increases your effective skill/approach by 1.

If that’s enough for you to succeed, then great! Just use the remaining dice to determine your outcome as normal.

If it’s not enough? Well, you still use the result, but replace “Succeed” with “Fail”.

This has been rattling around in my head for a bit now, and I really need to try it out.

I was writing something else, and ended up needing to think a bit about GM compels, scene aspects and a bunch of other things that can sometimes be a bit fluid in Fate.   Specifically, I’m working on a toolset where it’s entirely appropriate for the GM to spend compels for mechanical effects (like flipping dice to minuses) which is a bit of a bugbear in Fate.  So I ended up coming up with some terminology to make it a bit easier to talk about, and that took on a life of its own.

I am genuinely not sure if this is the final form of these ideas, but I’m pretty happy with them as they stand. I think they clarify some ideas that are useful to me, and give me some hooks for other things I have in flight.  However, I have blind spots, so I’m sharing my thinking here because I’m curious what people think.

Anyway, the core here is 4 terms: Dramatic Compels, Mechanical Compels, GM Fate Points and Scene Fate Points.  The ideas behind them will be very familiar to Fate players, most of the newness is in terminology, and most of that is to set up a way to talk about compelling scene aspects.  Take a look and see if it makes sense.

A Dramatic Compel is a compel without an immediate mechanical effect, such as the GM offering a hard choice or appropriate complication. While it may lead to mechanical issues, the compel itself is entirely a function of the fiction. Dramatic compels cost the GM a fate point, and if the aspect compelled is on a character, then the fate point is given to the player unless they pay a fate point to resist the compel.

A Mechanical Compel is a compel with an explicit mechanical effect, and it costs the GM a fate point. While there may be other uses (from stunts or other rules) the default use for a mechanical compel is to either reduce a character’s skill by 1 (before the roll) or flip a die to a – (after the roll). The GM spends a fate point for this, which is given to the player who is acting or rolling. These compels cannot be directly resisted – rather it is expected that if the player wants to counter it, he will spend points for a countering bonus. Mechanical compels are almost always paid for with Scene Fate Points.

GM Fate Points are the GM’s bottomless supply of points used for most dramatic compels. If when the GM spends a GM fate point, it is given to the player upon resolution (so it cannot be used to resist the compel, but it’s available for use to deal with the consequences of the compel).

Scene Fate Points are the GM’s limited budget of scene-specific aspects. The differ from GM Fate points in the following ways:

• They may be spent for mechanical compels
• They are awarded to the player affected at the end of the scene.
• The GM has a limited reserve of them at any given time.

Scene Fate Points can also be used for specific sorts of dramatic compels – dramatic compels on scene aspects.

One use of this is familiar – if a character is tightly tied to a scene aspect, then the aspect might be compelled against them as if it were an aspect on their sheet. In this case, it’s just like invoking a personal aspect, with the point going to the player at the end of the scene,

The other use may be less familiar, and that is to compel the scene. That is, the GM may spend a Scene Fate Point to compel an aspect on the scene in a way that changes the scene. This is a very powerful tool in the GM’s arsenal, and it’s important that the GM follow the narrative logic of the scene when using this, but within those bounds, this provides a simple tool for reflecting the consequences of action in play without it being entirely arbitrary.

To illustrate, consider the example of the building being On Fire. It’s a classic, and offers plenty of opportunities for use, but sooner or later that fire is going to have consequences. The fire department may show up. The sprinklers may come on. The building may collapse. These are all reasonable consequences of the existing aspects, and the GM could very reasonably use a scene compel to make them happen. In this case, the Fate Point is spent but goes to nobody. If the GM does something like this but targets a specific character (such as by bringing in their nemesis), then that should be a dramatic compel of that character, and pay out appropriately.

Mechanically, these compels will usually be reflected with either the addition of a new aspect on the scene, or by rewriting an existing aspect.

There are a couple practical things this does:

• It allows the GM to keep the scene dynamic without requiring NPCs to do strange Create Advantage rolls or similar.
• At the same time, it keeps the amount of changes bounded by the GM budget.
• It gives a little more potential life to the various aspects that players tend to create on a scene in order to get free invokes, then forget about. Players will be careful to make sure they’re not things the GM can easily use, but if the GM is able to spend to create consequences and results of those aspects, then there’s a lot more room for organic action.

Sidebar: Consequence Countdowns

This is not actually relevant to this discussion, but here’s a tool that has some situational use (with credit to Blades in the Dark which this is derived from) – the GM may opt to add a track (like a stress track) to an aspect she creates (either in framing the scene or that he creates later) as a signifier that this aspect is going somewhere. What leads to checking off boxes is situational, but might include:

• When the aspect is invoked/compelled
• When a particular NPC takes an action
• As a consequence of “Success, but…” or similar rolls.

There might be ways for players to uncheck boxes too. Again totally situational. Whatever the case, when the last box is checked, the aspect “flips”, and becomes its consequence. Effectively it’s a scene compel that the GM doesn’t need to pay for because she provided advance warning and an opportunity to react.

Examples might include an alarm which flips into reinforcements arriving, or a fire that flips into the building collapsing.

As presented, this is an open ended tool for the GM to use whenever she likes, which is all a high trust table needs. There are absolutely ways to mechanize this to make it more constrained, but I’m not going to dive into those now, because this is already a total tangent from the topic at hand.

How Many Scene Fate Points?

There are a ton of ways you could figure out the right answer to this question, and I encourage experimentation. However, I’m very lazy, so I use a simple rule of thumb. Start with X scene fate points where X is the number of players (not including myself). The scene budget is X for most scenes, 2x for scenes that seem more interesting and 3x for big scenes (finales and such). If I’m not sure how interesting a scene is, I check how many aspects I’ve written up in framing it. That tends to roughly correspond with the multiplier.

Named NPCs may also have their own reserve of Scene Fate Points. Ideally it would be something like X, tied explicitly to that NPC and used over the course of a session when necessary. In practice, that is more bookkeeping than I’m likely to do, so if I am doing this, I tend to just add half an X to the scene if there’s a named NPC.

We like to encourage the use of colorful aspects that have a lot of meaning in them, but those are not always a good match for players who aren’t starting play with a strong sense of who their characters are and want to find out through play.

One option for dealing with that is aspects-on-the-fly. Leave your aspect slots blank and fill them in during play as inspiration (or need) strike. This is a lot of fun, but it’s a bit too extreme for some folks, and with that in mind, there’s a middle path.

At character creation, feel free to pick broad aspects – ones that may not have much detail, but convey the broad strokes of the character in your head. If you want to play a big, strong, heavily armored soldier type, then the aspects: Big, Strong Armored and Soldier will completely do the job, and will be entirely playable.

That’s all you need to do. However, at the end of any session, you may decide to elaborate on one of your aspects. This is not a complete re-write, but rather a restatement that maybe gives a bit more context. The idea is that the aspect is still perfectly usable as it was before, but now there’s a bit more to it. We know more about the character now.

Sometimes the path to this is obvious – it’s not hard to discover some background in play and change Soldier to Veteran of the Pijelo Campaign. Something like Armored, which seems external on the face of it, can be unpacked into talking about what the armor means (whose armor is it? What does it signify?).

Sometimes it might not be so clear – how do you elaborate on Big, after all? In those cases you might ask why the character is big, and end up turning that into Scion of Clan Bennek (since everyone knows the Bennek’s are huge!).

Or, honestly, maybe you never elaborate it at all. You are never obliged to do this.

So, this is a pretty simple trick, but I wanted to lay it out there for people who are maybe not syncing with aspects at the moment of character creation, but still want to take a swing at it. Feel free to start with broad strokes – you have every right to refine them as you play.

“Always On” aspects is one of those ideas that has been kicking around as long as aspects have existed. There are a lot of great implementations do things like  grant simple bonuses for aspects. TinyFate is based on this idea, and the truly excellent Three Rocketeers by PK Sullivan is almost iconic in its application.

With that in mind, I decided to solidify my thinking on this approach to aspects in a way that makes them easier to talk about, and to that end I want to talk about locked and dynamic aspects.

What’s a Dynamic Aspect?

That one’s easy – it’s a “normal” aspect. I’m applying this label purely for clarity.

What is a Fixed Aspect?

A fixed aspect is written up like a normal aspect, but its Fixed nature is denoted by it being underlined. Mechanically, a Fixed aspect’s impact is very simple: If it would help on a given roll, it grants a +1 bonus. If it would hinder a given roll, it applies a -1 penalty. Simple as that. Note that there is no interaction with fate points in this – it’s simply something to be taken into account.

How to Use fixed & Dynamic Aspects

As designed, fixed aspects can be used interchangeably with dynamic aspects. In fact, their use is the easiest part of this. If I have the aspects:

• Strong
• Fierce Fighter

And I make a roll to attack, let’s say I get a +2. Now, Strong is a fixed aspect, so it’s going to give me a +1, bringing that to a +3. Fierce Fighter is a dynamic aspect, so if I spend a fate point, I’ll bump that to a +5. Mechanically, this is all very simple.

Where this gets a little more complicated is the question of what aspects should be locked and which aspects should be dynamic. To that end, there are a few different models:

Free For All

The simplest model is to simply decide what type each aspect is when it’s created¹. As an option, you may allow for an aspect to be ‘flipped’ by spending a fate point to change it from fixed to dynamic or vice versa. This works well if there’s a balance, but it breaks down in edge cases. Specifically, if characters simply load up on fixed aspects, then bonuses can quickly get out of whack, and characters will also get much more boring, since the usual advice (“More interesting aspects are more mechanically potent”) stops being true, and aspects that grant more bonuses more often become more desirable. As such, this is not a recommended approach.

Constrained – Capped

This is the same as the Free For All, with the single caveat that the bonus from fixed aspects is capped at +3. This is still quite potent, but it can work decently well in games where there’s a more constrained set of other bonuses (such as FAE).

Option: If you like math and a world FULL of aspects, instead of a hard +3 cap, consider 1 aspect grants a +1, 3 aspects a +2, 6 a +3, 10 a +4 and so on.

Constrained – GM Only

Another approach is to make fixed aspects the domain of the GM, and any aspect the GM creates is considered to be fixed, while character and player-created aspects remain dynamic. This model has a lot of advantages – it drives any GM invokes and compels towards the players while allowing for simpler mechanical application of things like environmental aspects and unnamed NPCs (who could be expressed purely as aspects). In fact, under this model, the GM will probably almost exclusively create static aspects except for very key elements (like named NPCs or plot points worth hanging a lantern on).

Blended

Note, this model does not work well with skills or even approaches, but it is a solid way to handle aspect-only play. In this model, aspects are both fixed and dynamic. That is, they will provide their passive bonus or penalty, but can also be invoked or compelled for an additional +2/-2 as appropriate.

While this is very simple on its surface, the one complication is the question of what fate points are used for. Because the fixed bonuses can be substantial, players may decide they do not need as many Fate Points to function, and we can end up with similar problems to the free for all. If your game has some additional use for Fate Points (either because you’ll be pushing compels hard for setting reasons, or because they have some other mechanical value, such as fueling stunts) then you should be fine, but if not, consider implementing a cap.

Pure Fixed

As with Blended, this works poorly in conjunction with skills (unless you introduce a cap, as in the Constrained-Capped model) but this is another way to do aspect-only play if you have always been interested in Fate but less into the whole hippie-dippy fate point economy stuff. This will complicate specific games that require fate points for mechanical elements (Dresden Files, for example) but for many games, this offers a different but functional model of play.

Other Options

There’s still plenty of room for nuance and tweaking within this space – the approaches I’ve outlined are far from the only ways to handle it. But for all that, this can be a useful tool to throw into your toolbox, especially for GMs who like the descriptive  nature of aspects, since it allows the GM to go aspect-only in many situations.  Starting up NPCs is as easy as noting they’re a Stupid, Brutish Thug and you know they have +2 to most violence, -1 to anything depending on cunning, and you’re good to go.

This also can interact well with consequences.  While I recommend that most character aspects are dynamic, consequences can be a reasonable exception to that for games which want injury to carry a lingering impact.  This becomes even more true when you decide to replace stress and consequences with conditions,

Anyway, my goal here is not to exhaust the idea, but simply to talk about it in a way that allows easy interchangeability between fixed and dynamic aspects. If nothing else, it’s provided me a way to talk about it in the future, so I’m good with that.

1. Important mechanical note: if you create a fixed aspect, then that effectively forgoes the free invoke (or extra free invoke for success with style) and that may disincentives creating fixed aspects. That sounds like a bug, but it’s really a feature, since it means player-created aspects will tend to be dynamic, while GM-created aspects (those for framing a scene) will tend to be fixed. ↩︎