Fight me!

I posted earlier this week that my next session of Burning Wheel would use the Fight! rules. This is one of the features that people raved about when the game was published. Naturally, I was excited.

We got into it. Two of my players know the rules well so I often lean on them for rules help. They were great! They know the ins and outs of it. They suggested ideas and rules interpretations. We had the fight.

And I hate it.

I fucking hate it.

It took an hour to resolve six volleys. The stakes were resolved nicely but the effort required to get there was far more than was necessary. Because of these rules, my once-a-fortnight game turned into treacle. I couldn't move. I couldn't breathe. The story became a statue. Nothing happened. Two hours of gaming advanced the story almost nowhere.

That makes me sad and angry. I wanted this to be glorious. I wanted it to be active and meaningful. I feel disappointed that it's not the play experience I had expected.

Part of me wants to convert it to DramaSystem, Fate, or even D&D. That's unlikely to win me any friends in the group. I'll probably just never use the Fight! rules again.

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Intermission: I wrote all of that in the 30 minutes after my game finished last night. Then I slept on it before coming back to it.

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I still fucking hate it.

I was ready to sell all my Burning Wheel Revised books, or give them away as a prize at the next Go Play. I just wanted the foul things out of my life for the time I won't ever get back. Instead, I've mellowed a bit to figure out what I've learned from this.

I've learned that I don't like the Rim of Burning Wheel. In the last couple of games I've tried the Duel of Wits and Fight! to add something to our experience. The Rim doesn't suit my comfortable play style at all. After a good night sleep I've come to the conclusion that I like shorter fights, perhaps no more than a few rounds of action. Poison'd fits that category nicely. So does Primetime Adventures, most Fate games, DramaSystem, low-level D&D, and so on. So what does that mean for my game?

Bloody versus linked tests. That's about as complicated as I want to get for a fight in Burning Wheel. If a simple bloody versus test doesn't suit the story then I'll make it a linked test of three to five tests with a mix of fighting styles or agility or whatever it is the scene needs, and be done with it. I'll be able to handle multiple combatants more easily and get to a resolution within five minutes.

Will I ever use the Burning Wheel Rim again? Very unlikely. I'll keep playing the Hub and Spokes of this game, though, but the Rim has suffered a mortal wound and there's no coming back.

Fate Core of Course

My first experience with small press games, indie games, free games was when I stumbled onto FUDGE. My head spun. I wondered whether the system was any good. I mean, it was free, for goodness sake. At the time all the free RPG content I knew was from the Palladium Mailing List and had almost no guarantee of being any good.

I read it, though it was weird, and then found FATE 2.0. And then the bug bit. I bought dice, even before I had a reason to roll them. I made up a strange Matrix-esque scenario just to try it out. Since then I've treasured that free PDF. And I've paid for Fate games. Spirit of the Century and Diaspora are both on my game shelf, and I've had such fun playing them.

It's with joy that today I held in my hands my signed copy of Fate Core. Such a long time after that free PDF, today I have a book. A hardcover book. A book that was refined and polished, with high quality art and editing and layout. A book that is the result of years of hard work from the developers, with countless hours (months? years?) of actual playtime in the wild.

Fate Core is here. My heartfelt congratulations to everyone involved in its production. Thank you for a great game system.

Good Aspect, Bad Aspect

Writing a good aspect for Fate takes practice. They flow easily from the short paragraphs and back story that arise during character creation, but that's not enough. As a GM for Fate games, I see aspects that don't get used. They're on the sheet. The player put them there, but never uses them.

My weakness as a GM is not yet seeing the potential use for them in a story. I remember a couple of convention games where people set down a list of aspects that were like a castle. They were crafted so carefully as to make them invulnerable. Clever. Nimble. Ambidextrous. They may as well have written Awesome.

Some of my current frustration comes from my current game of Diaspora. At the start of every session, everyone refreshes fate points. If they're frugal enough in the previous session they never have to be compelled to earn any more. If they're lucky with the rolls, it's even less likely that they need a compel.

To make the best of it I see a couple of options.

1. Make all challenges absurdly difficult, forcing the players to spend all their points and need more before the end of each session. This seems poor and vindictive. How did everything suddenly become harder? Did all the antagonists suddenly level up?

2. Lower the refresh to three instead of five. Maybe this is a balanced approach, more suited to the three hours sessions we play.

3. Abandon the refresh altogether. Harsh, man. Harsh.

I've some thinking to do about this. I'll do one of them and let you know how hard my players squeal.

What am I to do with 68 aspects?

The last gaming session was the setting and character creation for a game of Diaspora. My group doesn't have much experience with FATE's aspects and that turned out to be the most difficult part of the evening. It'll come with practice, though.

Looking at the summary of the session I can see no less than sixty-eight aspects staring me in the face. Sixty-eight! Between five characters and six systems that's what I have for story seeds. One of the character has a spacecraft too and those aspects are yet to be added into the mix. The astute reader-and-Diaspora-fan will calculate that the total aspect count will soon be above seventy.

With rich pickings like these I expect that we will come nowhere near the depths of the characters and stories open to us. Our first play session is later this week and we are ready for launch.

Spirit of 2013

After a long, long hiatus from the game, tonight I'll run Spirit of the Century. It's an impromptu game that I'm running to demonstrate it. The group is moving to play a supers game and was going to use Mutants and Masterminds, then FU, but now I've suggested Fate I find that I'm the only one who knows it.

I'm going to use the great characters from the book itself as well as get some players to create their characters on the fly. It's a one-shot game and I need to flex its muscles for the group so that they can see how it works.

It brings me back to the days of the first Gen Con Oz. Those indie games on demand tables demanded nothing but SOTC for nearly the whole time. Let's see what comes from tonight, although I expect pulpy fun and laughs.

FATE Core

I'm a FATE Core backer. Woo!

It's no secret that I'm an Evil Hat fanboy. I like their games and own most of them. I'm keen to support the company - and the game - that was my gateway drug into indie games. I remember downloading the PDFs for FUDGE and FATE all those years ago and wondering what to do with them. What on earth was I going to do with a system that used Aspects? And where were the polyhedral dice?

Finally seeing FATE in a beautiful book format will be a great pleasure for me. I'll keep it next to the printed copy of FATE 2 that I have from all those years ago.

As it happens, my regular gaming group is changing to a new campaign and we're deciding the system we're going to use. FATE is a leading contender. The timing is excellent.