[Dork] Things I Must Remember

I took out a copy of Free FATE (a stripped down version of the FATE rules which is still not quite stripped enough for me, but what the hell) to see if I could make an Autumn War character that felt like an Autumn War character and played kind of like one.  Fortunately, I have a standby, a character who has been made many, many times in many, many versions of the system.  Her name is Jane, and her past is... complicated.  She's a bright kid who fell for a bad man, and ended up in prison, learned the system, put herself on top of the prison hierarchy (or in a comfortable near-the-top spot) and escaped at the first opportunity.  Jane's ambivalent about revenge, but she is keenly interested in staying free and securing herself using her criminal skills. 


There were a few things about the system that annoyed me, though.  Putting Aspects into things seems a little heavy on the terminology for no good reason (or maybe it's just the terminology runs together too much) and a little heavy on the "mother-may-I."  Spend Fate, ask the GM, if the GM says yes, you can do this, but then it has to be used immediately and vanish thereafter and... blablablabla.  Now, I've never seen this in action, and I suppose, so I might be missing out on how this works, and I know from experience that getting players to take *any* control over what happens outside their character's direct actions and says-on-the-character-sheet capabilities is a particular brand of tooth-pulling that is frustrating to you and incomprehensible suffering to them.  The economy of the game's namesake is something I sort of missed out on, maybe it was tucked in somewhere weird in the rules.  There were other, minor annoyances - initiative, for one thing, which really doesn't have a place in a game that isn't very tactical.  Okay, this game is slightly tactical in the sense that you act on something that is passive to your actions and then it activates, you become passive and it acts on you.  It's irritating, and it necessitates, if you are paying attention, you to purchase a lot of skills that do nothing outside of protect you in certain Conflicts, if you like staying in them.

I mean, a lot of that is pretty easy.  Just throw out all the parts where the GM rolls against the PCs and institute an ApocWorld style - you roll and either you succeed or I get to do something.  It may be bad, it may be to you, and it may be a direct consequence of your action, but it may not be all three or any...  Still.  It's like the system wants to do some things on one side of the indie/trad fence (as it's been established to universal horror from everyone who cares) while leaving a lot of itself on the other side.  I don't fault it for trying, but I don't think it succeeds. 

So, tweaks abound.  But that's not the point here.  The point is the stuff that I must have.  The truly important parts of the game that have to remain, whether it be a homebrew (that turned out to be embarrassingly like Cortex, at some point), and ApocWorld Hack, a Fate Hack, or, shit, a mostly freeform thingie, floating around on the internets. 

1) Every die roll changes something that is made apparent before the scene ends - This used to be the combo of Failing is Stupid/Losing is Awesome; but saying losing is awesome a thousand times does not make anyone who's tried it so far agree.  So instead, this is it: every die roll changes something.  

Let me explain in an old-school sort of fashion.  Adventurers enter a room with a secret door; most of them have a 1 in 6 chance of finding the secret door, the elf has a 2 in 6.  Everybody rolls, everybody whiffs.  Everybody moves on to the next room, content behind that secret door remains in the GM's loose leaf.  That's the old-school way (and WE WERE GRATEFUL [there was a fucking water weird behind that secret door, and those mofos kill PCs dead]).  Adventurers enter a room with a secret door.  Now I put that secret door in there for a reason, and the reason might not just be for the PCs to find, but nothing exists until I say it does.  So if anyone asks, I give them the notion that there might be more to this room than meets the eye.  I give that person who asked the chance to look, to roll a die and see if they find it.  If it works, awesome, if not then while the other PCs are lining up to search as well, either the door opens with an avalanche of spiders or ambushing bandits or some trap goes off.  It's not you failing to find the secret door, but you being ambushed from it before you find it on your own. 

It's a subtle difference, but I am tired of rolling dice and nothing happening.  Roll - oh, you don't notice anything out of the ordinary.  whiff.  Nope, something changes.  Something changes in that Scene.  If there was nothing out of the ordinary in the room, you could have just told them. 

2) Sort of related - everything that causes you to roll wants something which is not status quo.  The pathetic fallacy is not.  The lock does not want you to fail to pick it, it wants you to be caught picking it when the guard comes by.  The dark cold night doesn't just want to deny you shelter, it wants to make you stumble into the cave full of Ugly Birds.  Every thing in the world has active designs and desires.  

3) Players have some control over their bad outcomes.  Whether this is Angel/Devil, Victory and Defeat Calls or if it's just you narrate what goes bad for you, keeping in mind the desires of the opposition that I have communicated, and I narrate what goes well for you, keeping in mind what you have communicated to me.  I haven't figured out how I would do that from this angle, yet, but I am working on it.