Allright. Several people have discussed interest in playing ina PBF FATE game, so here it is. Signups and discussion
What universe do we want to run this in? Do we want to try some sort of home brew Sentinels run or are we going with something like Dresden or just generic Pulp Fiction?
I have the FATE core book, the original Dresden Books, and I kickstarted the FATE kickstarter so I have access to all the PDFs that have been released for various worlds and such.
Let me know whose interested, and what you're interested in playing and we'll go from there!
Interested:
1. Silverleaf
2. Amnachaidh (Tentative)
3. BlueHairedMeerkat
4. Ameena
5. jffdougan
6. Phantomskippy
7. BlueKae
I think we'll stop taking acceptions for more people at this point - CGen will be interesting enough as it is, but with 7 this will take a bit longer to get through :P
Gonna start looking at things like that playby forum website mentioned or others to be able to split this off a little. Well see. Might be able to handle it right through the OFF TOPIC to just give everyone else something fun to read.
I, unfortunately, do not have the time to devote to this. However, I make myself available as a rules and worlds and writing guru, as I am very familiar with the system. Enjoy!
May I put myself down as a tentative? I would enjoy doing so, but there may be others more passionate about it. I have Fate Core, Accelerated and Toolbox for reference.
I love FATE, it's an excellent system and the aspects add huge character depth far beyond shaping your character with the 'boring stat block'. PBF is just too slow for me to enjoy participating in, but I will be reading along to discover the (no doubt) excellent story line that will be weaved.
Count me in :). Are we just gonna be playing it on here, then? I've mentioned RPOL (found at rpol.net) previously, but I expect there are other suitable places where you can run a game and which have the facility for private messages for members, the ability to split different people into "groups" (eg if there is a party split and you don't want one set of players seeing what the rest are getting up to, and vice-versa), map features, character sheet pages for everyone, and so on. It just seems like that would be easier than taking up space with a whole bunch of threads on here just for one game (and you can end up with quite a lot of threads in a play-by-forum game...). When a DnD RPG got started up over on one of my other forums, we ended up having a whole new subsection of the forum created just for those posts to go in, because we had threads for each player's char gen, an OOC thread, several IC threads, and probably one or two other things I've forgotten. And a few PMs floating around as well.
I've never played anything using the Fate system (why does everyone on here capitalise it? In the book it's just written as the word "Fate"...) so I have absolutely no idea what any of their pre-genned worlds are like (Dresden or whatever...isn't that a place in Germany?). If we can come up with our own world from scratch that'd be cool, as no-one would feel disadvantaged by not knowing the setting (something I find highly frustrating when everyone's constantly referring to stuff from that setting's canon which I haven't got a clue about). If we're gonna do a superheroes-themed thing just because of Sentinels, then maybe we could just run it in our own, Earthlike world but which isn't actually Earth so then we can have our own made-up countries and stuff, and are more free to make stuff up. If the genre isn't even decided yet then Fantasy is my primary preference, but I can probably go with almost anything.
FATE is the old name because it's an acronym for something I can't remember, but it's now officially just Fate. I'm oldschool and can't make myself stop thinking of it in capitals.
The Dresden Files is a series of books about a modern-day wizard working as a kind of paranormal PI in Chicago. I've read about half of them and while not brilliant, they're quite entertaining if you want something fairly exciting and not too thinky. Spirit of the Century is a sort of 1920s/30s pulp novel style setting.
FATE (captials) is an acronym for Fantastic Adventures in Tabletop Entertainment. It's an outgrowth of the Freeform Universal Diceless Gaming Engine, or Fudge system. It's the creation of Fred Hicks and Rob Donoghue, who are the two principal folks behind Evil Hat (a "brand" which existed before FATE from their time running things for AmberCon Northwest, although that's a tangent I'm not taking here).
Fred's a friend of Jim Butcher's going back to Jim being in the professional writing program at Oklahoma State where he first began writing the Dresden Files (more below). When the decision got made to do an RPG based on Dresden, Fred ws more or less the only person Jim would trust to do it right. As Fred and Rob found out, they needed to write another game in order to get their design chops polished enough to do Dresden right - that game was Spirit of the Century.
The Dresden Files is an urban fantasy series set in Chicago, whose protagonist is in the yellow pages under the heading "wizard." There's lots of snark and pop culture references, and we're just getting to a point where the series metaplot is kicking into another gear altogether. I think they're great fun to read, and the author is really, really funny to hear do a Q&A/reading.
The Fate Accelerated Edition is a streamlined version of the same system that was funded as one of the stretch goals. Primarily it replaces the skill system with Approaches, of which there are six - Clever, Sneaky, Quick, Flashy, and a couple others.
Skippy, you're able to purchase a digital copy for any price you like - including free.
I think we sell (or have sold) some of the Dresden Files books at work - I recognised the name when I saw it and imagined the first shelf of our Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror section so presumably that's where I've seen them - we definitely have the occasional Jim Butcher novel, but I can't remember any of the names (or even how many we had on the shelf). I don't know whether I'd fancy playing a game which has so specific a setting - an American city which I've never been to or really know anything about other than its name. But I suppose it would be no different from taking place in a fictitious city (which happens to be American) with a map included in the rulebook.
From what's been mentioned of Spirit of the Century it sounds like it's in a similar vein to Hollow Earth Expedition, which is "officially" set in 1936 but of course you're free to mess around with anything you like - pretty much any time anything is described in the rulebook it basically says "This is how it is in the basic setting...but you're free to change anything you like, as GM, to fit your own game". As the game's title implies, the planet is hollow and you can go inside it, discovering a whole world of dinosaurs (and other prehistoric creatures who found their way there before going extinct on the surface world), lost civilisations (any kind of people from history, really, from 17th century-style pirates to Roman soldiers to cannibalistic tribes), giant creatures (insects/arachnids, birds, gorillas...yes you can have King Kong if you like), all that kind of stuff. Plus beastmen (lizardmen, hawkmen, mantismen, etc). And Nazis. Or any combination of the above - I'm running a game on RPOL right now and sticking mainly to dinosaurs and later, beastmen adn some other stuff, but that's not come up yet.
Umm...so anyway, I had a look through the Fate rulebook but really only read the stuff on character gen, and didn't read every last detail just yet - I tend to get hold of this stuff better when I'm actually doing it. Plus it looks like the group needs to work together to contribute to each other's backstories and stuff, assuming they've all met before the game actually starts. Presumably there's a way to do gen which doesn't require every character to have met at least one of the others at a previous time.
I do recall reading vaguely about the Fudge system a few months ago so I've heard of that but that's about it :).
Well the Dresden setting isn't specifically Chicago - that's just where the books are mainly set. The setting is basically "modern day with magic" rather than a geographical location. The last DF campaign I was in was mostly set in Great Yarmouth (the GM's home town, he'd picked it because he's very familiar with the place) with flashbacks in Berlin and Anglesey (places from our various backstories).
Yeah, a big part of the character gen has to be done as a group. It's nice to have a history with the other characters to give you reasons to work together rather than just the traditional "You're all in a a tavern..." Best to have a vague character concept in place before you start though.
Okay! So for all interested, please vote on the following - give your preference please, on a slidding scale.
Option A: Sentinels Themed game
- This will require a bit more work before we actually get playing, having to develop custom knacks for super powers.
Option B: Spirit of the Century
- Weeeeeeeeeeee Pulpfiction. I don't actually ownt his book and haven't read it, but getting a copy would not be difficult for me to procure.
Option C: Dresden Files
- i -love- the Dresden Files. But if people don't get the world, may not be all that useful.
Option D: Just ... a world.
- Some custom Knacks, some ability to be whatever you want. Some change of pace and some randomness in the world. Think ... Our World with some crazyness in being heroes.
No idea what a Knack is, but it looks like I'm not the only one there ;). I'm guessing they're similar to Talents in HEx and the 40k games, or Feats in pre-4th edition DnD or something. I'll go for Option D as my first choice of setting, then I suppose option A. Not too fussed about playing in either of the pre-existing worlds as I know sod all about either of them.