Gameplay Thoughts

I haven’t written up the gameplay chapter in any detail yet, but this what I’m a summary of what I’m planning to do to streamline FATE, which was originally designed for tabletop play, for an asynchronous Play-by-Post environment.

Again, this assumes some knowledge of FATE-speak – I do intent to describe manoeuvres, consequences and so on!

• Combat (and other conflicts) is round-based rather than turn based. Players can post declaring their characters’ actions in any order. One every player has posted, or a pre-determined period of time has passed, the GM wraps up the round and starts the next one.
• Combat resolution uses simultaneous combat rounds (as in FATE 2.0) rather than alternative rounds. A single skill roll covers both attack and defence, highest roll wins and inflicts damage.
• There are no stress tracks; all damage goes straight through to consequences. I’m currently toying with the idea of using those Skills which would normally affect the length of the stress track to affect the number of shifts required for different levels of consequence and/or to take out opponents instead.
• Players invoke or tag aspects for a +2 before any real or virtual die rolling; i.e rerolls. To avoid cluttering up gameplay threads with mechanical details, aspect use should be implied rather than explicit. This has implications on how you name aspects.
• I’m toying with the idea of changing the way maneuvres work; when you free-tag the resulting aspect, rather than a flat +2, the bonus is the number of shifts you got. This probably needs playtesting to see if that’s unbalancing.