The Fate RPG was created to make interesting outcomes even with an improvised situation without needing to prep first whereas the whole idea of blorb is to have prep.
Ergo, when trying to use the Fate rules together with a blorbier prep, something’s got to give. It’s not inherently a good fit. And that can mean giving up on blorb principles and/or house-ruling Fate. Blorb is totally my jam so I tried to go for the latter.
It’s because I want faster, less lethal, still interesting combats. The main appeal was lower lethality. Characters can still die but Fate has a reputation for being way less lethal.
The whole aspects/boost/invocation system stayed, as did stress boxes and consequences.
The number one have-to change from Fate to make it work with the blorb mindset is no more character-relative difficulties. Fate has a lot of “an enemy of this type has a skill two higher than the highest PC skill”. Same goes for lockpicks or all kinds of challenges. This has to change in order to play a blorby game. Bonus: it also solves the flagging dilemma.
Now, Fate zealots calm your calmables, because I’m not saying every Fate game ever has to change this. Fate doesn’t have the chasm-width problem. There is a defined chasm width. Unfortunately, by default, it’s nebulously defined relative to the PCs. That’s not what we’re gonna do in blorb. Again, if you’re playing unblorby Fate, you don’t need to change this, but this is part of what makes it blorb.
Opposition that is world-relative, not character-relative. While prepping, feel free to look at what’s a typical “highest PC skill” for the specific Fate rule set (made easier since most of them use “standard array”) and work out a reskinnable bestiary scaled by dungeon level, not by the current party’s capabilities. And work out a framework for setting difficulties. I like 0 for easy, and then 2 for every thing that makes the situation hard.
Fate, by design, has many rules that are “author stance”, more directed to players above the table than to characters inside the game world. Concessions and compels require meta considerations and table talk, and there are many many abilities that are “once per scene”, “once per session”, “once per scenario”.
This isn’t inherently incompatible with blorb but it is the opposite of my jam and preference for other reasons. I’ve spend years tailoring my DM style to be all actor stance, to put you in the mindset of your character. You’re counting torches when your character would count torches.
Author stance rules like what default Fate has aren’t all bad; one of the many advantages they have is to ameliorate some of the disadvantages of improvised play. Your mindset get shifted from a “how do I the pure new treasure seeker overcome this particular porte-monstre-trésor” to a “how do we the writer’s room create a wild and good story” which is a better more fit for an improvised story creation tool than for the fantasy Vietnam of yore.
But with a blorby prep, we can afford to lean into the actor stance mindset all the time and then all these author stance rules like “this clears after the session” stuff are a mismatch, are something that yanks us out from our right to dream.
So far we changed “scene” to “exploration turn”. Your mind consequences, once they’re set to heal, clear after the next exploration turn. Ten diegetic minutes. We haven’t changed “session” based rules yet but that’s probably coming sooner rather than later.
Our first session we didn’t have any compels or concessions yet, both of whom are also challenging for the more actor stance play we prefer but the “golden rule” helps with both. Decide what your character wants to happen and that might be a concession, or buying off a compel, or giving into a compel, or refusing a concession or a compel with the “bogus” rule.
Also we didn’t even get through character creation before adding in a real inventory list: You can carry ten things (small, medium, big), you can’t have more big things than small things, one medium thing can be a pouch that can carry 250 tiny things. You can add two extra slots for each + of strength you have (we had str, dex, con, int, wis, cha for our skill list).
We don’t like just “roll adventuring gear” or “roll a usage die”. We tried. We tried to just have the stuff mentioned by aspects be enough. But. Enh. Don’t fight human nature and our nature is to have an inventory like Threepwood intended.
Wholly off-topic to the whole issue of blorbiness because really there’s no blorbiness obstacle but I the DM just don’t like popcorn initiative. We use swashbuckling initiative. We got rid of the light, first strike stuff but stuck to group by group.
I’ve tried to run Fate many times with many groups and it never ever worked for me until now. It might’ve seem reckless to try a super modded blorbified Fate when I couldn’t even make the vanilla version work but a couple of other insights made all the difference, and only one of them is tangentially related to blorbiness.
Do not try to force a bunch of advantage-creating, invocation, or compelling into the game. Run a normal RPG. If all you do is overcome, attack, defend, don’t worry, just keep playing. You’re still good. Even if you go long stretches without any rolls at all, just old-school-primer-ing your way through the muck, you’re still good.
“The game only ‘sings’ when everyone’s tagging and being compelled and…” No. Hear me out. Trust in letting the diegesis drive and remember that aspects are just a confusing word for facts and conversely all facts are aspects. Come up with what your characters want to do in the game and if what they wanna do leads to create-an-advantage, that’s when you roll for create an advantage. And it’ll happen often enough. It’ll start happening all the time actually. You don’t need to force it.
Now, the one caveat there is to let them roll for things that in my normal game I’d just let them have for free. In my old D&D house rule set, skills like “investigate” or “persuade” are totally banished. Just tell me where in the room you look, or say to me what your character says to the NPC. But here I do let them roll because that can give them free invokes, or if they fail, we get the free invokes. The rolling isn’t an obstacle, it’s just something that affect the probabilities of future rolls.
One of the ways I was frustrated with Fate before was that I was like “oh no the Fate point econ has rusted and is dried up and people aren’t getting compelled enough and therefore they can’t do anything and all those aspects are just useless”. I wish someone would’ve told me this:
The econ of the game is free invocations and boosts. That will ebb and tide. You don’t even need to create an advantage for it (even though it’s the best way). Even just a good defense can create a boost if you succeed with style.
Fate points are just gravy. They can bring in any aspect, not just the ones you have racked up invocations on, so they really are great, but they aren’t the bread and butter. They are the cloudberry jam.
I used square boxes for the party’s free invocations, circles for the bad guys’ free invocations, and glass stones (smaller than our Fate points) for boosts.
The module we were playing (it’s called The Crypt of Crimson Ice. Players, do not read, because you still have a few rooms left to discover when we left off) was so fun and awesome that I believe the session would’ve been good even with a bad rule set. Now, I don’t think it was a bad rule set. I found boosts especially fun. I loved the fighting system. And no, I didn’t bring all my over-engineered ranks and mêlée groups and lingering injury tables over. Except for swashbuckling initiative instead of popcorn, we used vanilla Fate. It was fun and good. But in between the fights, I wasn’t trying to “force Fate-iness”. Normal exploration, interacting with weird magical traps and contraptions, classing dungeon crawling fun. This especially was good for us who have failed at Fate before and want to get used to the rule set in a less stressful, less having-to-be-creative setting. And an unforced at the Fate-iness was, it did show up all the time.
Players: “We clog those magical gutters”
Normal D&D: “You do that!”
Fate: “Okay, roll strength (to see how many free invokes that’ll give you)”
It’s not a failable task but you still get more rewarded for doing it well. That sounds awful and overly symbolic-layer (at the expense of diegesis) the way I write about it. Not sure if what you get in return in worth the extra roll, but I want to accurately report how we were playing and that we did use the system outside of fights too.
We used the Crashing Beasts & Crumbling Halls rules which are more familiar to D&D with the str/dex/con/int/wis/cha skill list and example weapon stunts and familiar spellcasting schools and a familiar game world. I’ve tried to start Fate games in the past but some players get stuck at writing aspects. (Maybe I should have tried pregens? It’s a bootstrapping problem, you can’t build a Magic deck before you have tried playing Magic. But the D&D trappings here gave us plenty to build on.) Here everyone was stoked to play and put up with rules that we thought were gonna be bad (and some of them turned out to not be so bad after trying and we’re gonna keep those).
The magic system in Crashing Beasts & Crumbling Halls had a problem and that problem was called Ghoul’s Touch. If you choose necromancy as a stunt you get two spells, and this one spell (so, half of the stunt cost basically) is more powerful than any martial stunt. You get +2 not only weapon:2 but actual +2 to hit always, and, you attack against int (even the tanky monsters in the game have high con and wis, not int) and you still deal damage to the physical spell track. It’s like the value of four stunts (+2 to hit, +2 damage, switch what you attack with, switch what they defend with) at the cost of half a stunt. We haven’t looked at the entire spell list, this was just one thing that came up. Maybe it’s time to dust off Wonder & Wickedness (which has utility spells + reflavorable generic blasting akin to Feng Shui and Unknown Armies).