This is fantastic - looking forward to it Valarian.
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This is fantastic - looking forward to it Valarian.
A few comments & ideas on the ruleset, specifically the Character Sheet :
- Maybe a toggle button between alphabet sorting and level sorting for the skills? It's hard to find a specific skill when you don't know the sheet right now (like for a pregenerated character for a one shot, or if the GM looks for something in a PC sheet, etc.)
- There's no space for Boost and Situation Aspects
- I did not see anything for tracking free Invokes, which is too bad since it's the biggest hurdle/crunching there is in Fate Core.
- There's no space to easily add one or two new stress tracks for a hack, which is a common Fate hack.
- The Fate Points box takes a lot of pixel real estate, and has a lot of empty space in it. Also, is the Skill Cap and the Power level really, really needed here on the front page?
- The Consequences box on the other hand has no space for common hacks like Conditions.
- On the second tab however, there's ton of space for Stunts. But each stunt is on one line, so if a player was to include a small description of reminder of what that stunt do, it's quite hard to read. Maybe display all of it? Or have a button to expand it?
- Maybe it's because I tried as a GM, but I did not see any Modifier from Invoking an Aspect, or using a stunt, or anything like that.
- Nor did I manage to be able to drag Aspects around to tag or use for Boost or Situation Aspects.
- When a GM double click on a PC Aspect the chat says it compels "x", it doesn't say who is compelled.
- As a player If I drag a Skill unto the dice tower, it doesn't work. Shouldn't it make a secret roll of said skill?
- Same for Aspects, without the roll of course.
- When a Skill Roll is made, I don't think the result is quite clear. There's in big bold black the tallied score added to the roll, but with no label. And there's the final score of the skill test, but in light gray with no label. Maybe the final score (the only one that really matter) could be put front and center, and the result linked to The Ladder (“+5 (Superb result)”)?
- There's quite some boxes for Weapons and Armour, but I couldn't drag an Item into either.
One quick thing outside the character sheet, the Fudge dice is all the way there, instead of next to the Modifier stack.
I've been away from the topic for a while, but flawed or not I'm glad to see this out and official. The thing, of course, is that there a couple more "flavors" of Fate I would love to see covered -- the Freeport version (where the skills are based on D&D attributes) and the light Accelerated Edition version (which I suspect is what a lot of folks will actually be playing as things go on).
There are so many Fate flavors, of course, that GMs can (and will) easily take the smorgasbord approach. If they see several things they like in different iterations, they will grab them and meld them into something their own.
Not to mention the use of the FATE toolkit, which allows FAE-like concept to be brought into the broader scope of things. I do agree with some of Blacky's comments, however, but it's a ruleset that can keep on giving (hopefully). It's the beautiful thing about the FATE system.
Cheers,
SF
There's now a blank skills extension that blank out the default core skills and allow you to enter ones of your own. This can be used to do Fate Accelerated type games. I do plan on converting the SRD documents for the Toolkit and Fate Accelerated at some point.
The skills are in a data_common.lua file in the scripts folder. The majority of the other ruleset text is in the strings folder, with the exception of the condition cycler labels, which are in the campaign/record_char_listitem.xml file, in the char_consequence list item definition. I couldn't get the label and value to work from the text strings or as a default cycler.
There's an example of an extension to Fate Core in my rulesets folder (see the signature), where I've begun a community version for Age of Arthur. This has the alternate form of stress counting (marking each box off as you take damage like an ammo counter). I do plan on converting the Dresden Files ruleset to an extension of Fate Core at some stage, but this works also in its current form so it's not necessarily a top priority.
In time, I will get to improvements in the ruleset and I'll be taking these comments in to account when I do.
Three big things that I found missing, were counting beans, keeping beans in check, and playing with beans.
More specifically :
- Handling Free Invokes. That's the main bean counting done in Fate, and with a little perspective from the Toolkit or other Fate powered game it can easily get out of hand. And since it's counting, that's typically something where a computer is better suited than humans. I think it should be extremely fast (adding, removing, editing each under the second is a good goal imo), and hackable.
- Handling Aspects, fast but with a lot of flexibility. I think the foundation for this is already in the Core ruleset code. One could view Aspects as Items. Some are public, some are private for one or more player (or just the GM). They can be moved around with the mouse, to be either copied or moved to something else (a PC sheet, an NPC sheet, a situation, a place, a group). It should probably tie in with the Handling of Free Invokes in some way.
- Making Fate Points as fun and "playable" (in the sense of playing with tiny shiny real physical tinket) as they are on a real gaming table, face to face. That's probably a pipe dream for now, as it's outside the capabilities of ruleset (things like taunting a player with a shiny moving image of a FP token for a Compel, waiting for him to click on it, etc.). But still, putting it out there might get some smarter people to come up with ideas for that.
Discounting the third one, that's in my opinion the needed core of the Ruleset. To make a comparison, that's more important for Fate than handling Classes in D&D, or something along those lines. It's certainly a bigger job than just i18n strings or some details (even important ones) here and there, it's not as clean & cut than this. But if some work could be done toward those, I think it would benefit greatly a lot of people. Maybe some people with a bigger or better experience of Fate than me, especially various editions and strands and hacks than the basic Fate Core, could come up with some scenarios on how to handle those, some UI or other…
Aspects during combat exchanges, social or physical, are effects. The scene and campaign aspects, I intend to tailor the party sheet towards those, but a shared note works as a workaround until then.
Ah, something I forgot about the PC Sheet, is the Stress values. For newcomers, for some stunts, in case of hacks, or whatever, it could be quite useful to have the value of each stress slot (1, 2, 3, etc.).
Another one, from the NPC Sheet. The NPC rolls go into the Modifier stack, instead of generating a roll. If that's to stay, could the ruleset insert in the Modifier label the name of said NPC, so that the GM know that his first Shoot roll was from the orc and his second Shoot roll was from the guard or whatever?
Instead of having :
GM : RollName [dices]
could it be :
GM : NPC NpcName RollName [dices]
?
Only if generating (directly or via hotkey bar) from a NPC sheet, of course.
FG already has a tool for that: the Savage Worlds bennies handler tool. With minor alterations it could be made to do the "taunting" part of it or at least allow for a dialogue box to show in the chat window similar to the vote widget where you can accept or refuse a compel.Quote:
Originally Posted by Blacky
Never played Savage World, but from what I could find through Google, this bennies handler (or destiny chits in Edges of the Empire) sound like a great idea Mask of Winter.