Thinking FU

I ran a game of Spirit of the Century the other week after finishing a six month campaign of May the FU Be With You. I run FU much like I run Spirit and that's hardly surprising. In many ways FU is Fate on a strict vegan diet. It's lighter, faster and can be blown around by hand waving. It's that hand waving that helps out so much. The link from what the players speak (that is, creating the fiction) and what the dice do (that is, forcing the fiction one way or the other) is solid and intuitive.

There are a couple of things that FU doesn't do and I don't think it pretends to do them. There will always be an element of matching the right system to the right setting and the right kind of story.

It's hard for me to criticise FU, partly because I've greatly enjoyed it and partly because I know Nathan. I wish it handled character development in some way. I hacked a house rule to let players spend a FU point to change gear or a descriptor, as long as the change was accompanied by an appropriate plot development. And I wish it didn't drive players towards being one-trick ponies. I've paid the price for having a character who couldn't use everything all at once, leaving me with a small dice pool. Defining descriptors and gear that work together is the means to munchkin the FU (awful grammar, I know). With the right combination a player can bring a pool of five dice before penalties. That kind of character, though, tends to use the same solution for every problem. It works well for characters like Wolverine (I stab it with my claws) but not so well for Batman (I investigate, I fight, I have money, I...). It can be dissatisfying to play that character except when they succeed so often.

I hadn't intended this to be a review of FU, just some thoughts that were percolating around in my mind.

Iconic and Dramatic

It took me too long to figure this one out.

I'm running a game of Star Wars using the FU RPG system. It's almost a no-brainer to run. The system is easily brought to bear on the universe and all I need to do as GM is continually develop an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Star Wars universe. No problem, right?

As it turns out, that's not what I had to do at all. I have two or three players, depending on personal schedules, and they've got their own styles of play. I tried several different categories to help me understand them and bring a good game to the table. At first I thought it was FU that was letting me down. I think what I wanted from FU was a Burning Wheel experience with character development and challenged beliefs. FU doesn't do that. It can approximate it, but it'll never be Burning Wheel.

No, the actual problem was not understanding my players. Robin Laws put it best (as is often the case) with his astute categories of iconic and dramatic characters[1]. In my words, the iconic character doesn't change but is perceived to change by virtue of their exposure to different environments and encounters, whereas the dramatic character changes regardless of whether they are in the same environment or a series of different ones.

What I have in my group is at least one player who wants the experience of the iconic character and one player who wants the experience of the dramatic character. I'm not sure what the third player wants, but I'll figure it out after another game session. When this penny dropped I immediately knew how to make the games more fun for all. I need to include elements of both in each game session, in order to let the players get enough of the experience that they want from the game.

And in the last game that's precisely what I did. And it worked.


Notes
1. I choose to believe that it was Robin who invented these categories, despite all evidence you may offer.