applauds 

Very nice.

I've talked a little bit about "baselining" Fate before, and you hit on the heart of many of the issues related to that here.

Fate has no baseline of what +1 is except the word "Average".

Average what?  Average 21st century American individual?  Average Babylonian Empire peasant?  Average merman?  Average nigh-immortal pan-reality family member (recall those Amber roots... and note that Amber Diceless also has extremely vague baselines)?

By not defining the baseline, we're free to make it what our game wants.  And that's VERY cool.

Because now we have all kinds of options to decide that we're really Average people or really Average super-spies or really Average action movie protagonists or really Average superheroes.

And yet we can all use the same game mechanics while doing that.

I'm the sort of person who will play 'optimized' characters in some games, meaning a character that specializes in one or two fields and is built to be the pinnacle of their field. Shadowrun, for instance, is a game wherein mediocre characters are not really going to be viable for very long. 
FATE is not one of those games. It's not built for it, and I get that. As long as the group understands what each game is built to accomplish, it shouldn't be a problem. Expectations should be explicitly laid out before the game begins.

That's a very succinct way of putting my point in recent threads on getting new players into Fate, +Aaron Gordon.  I haven't had much of an issue so long as I've been very clear in expectations.

Fate is a game that encourages and rewards that level of honesty.

I agree with you in theory, but then you run into a situation where the Eleveners start looking at how many aspects they can stack to effect a certain roll. This is a reason I'm rather keen on scopes to help define the genre. Space marines might get to use a gun aspect, cowboys generally might not, just because of their arbitrary genre importance. 

I don't worry so much about aspects, because the limitation on fate points tends to be a pretty big limiter in most cases.

I've run into very few cases where someone is really hosed in an area they shouldn't be hosed in due to lack of aspects to spend fate points on.  I'm not saying it can't happen, just that  I haven't seen it.  I also have to question if that's an issue with the aspects of the characters in question, rather than a system issue.

I'm also not sure of your example, since it sounds like you're talking about cowboys and space marines in the same game.  Which sounds unusual... but could be awesome ;)

As GM, I'll sometimes offer a relatively gentle compel to a player who fumbled into a lack of fate points at a crucial moment.

But no one is ever without aspects unless they choose to be.  It's far too easy to just make one, after all.  And, per p,78, an aspect can be added at any point if the table agrees it belongs there and no one wants any free invocations of it.

I agree with your view(except for the part about This is Spinal Tap, as the eleven part of that has a deeper meaning...perhaps I will write on it later). People in toolbox games have for years had to figure the optimal character, and Fate looks like a standard toolkit game and they want to engage with as they had engaged with Savage worlds or GURPS previously.

Nice piece by the way. My point about cowboys and space marines is that Space Marines tend to be on the technology porn end of the spectrum, Cowboys tend to not make much weapon differentiation (how fast the cowboy can draw seems important, however). Thus "Weapon" as a scope fits one genre, the other not so much.

Thanks, +Thomas Jesse Morris!  I just tend to think that for a cowboy, he'd have a High Concept that would certainly be invokable, possibly a weapon aspect (less from the gun-porn view, and more from the "my trusty..." angle), and possibly some others involving motivational aspects that can be pretty broad.  And, as you've said, aspects about being a fast gun ("The Hundred And Forty Second Fastest Gun In the West") are way on genre.  Add in Situation Aspects, aspects on the target, and aspects generated from Create An Advantage, and I don't really see a whole ton of situations where lack of aspects to spend fate points on is going to be a huge issue.

At least, it hasn't in any actual play I've done.  Is this an actual issue you've encountered, or theorycrafting?  And I'm not one to pick on theorycrafting, I've certainly done more than my fair share!

You are also limited through the ammount of fatepoints you have. You also have to announce how the aspect is relevant. 

That's exactly my point, +Tim Franzke.  In games I've played, availability of Fate Points is the limiting factor, not availability of aspects.

"I don't worry so much about aspects, because the limitation on fate points tends to be a pretty big limiter in most cases."

I think you have it backwards. Everything in FATE screams Aspect! Every single game mechanic, deep down, wants to be an aspect. This is of course obvious for stunts, but true also for skills, because skills explicitly describe the character (pyramid, apex skill...). In FAE this is even spelled out in archetypes based on peak approaches. The way to think about skills is that they are aspects that you don't pay for to invoke and that provide a graduated rather than fixed (+2) effect. I would not hesitate to use compel/invoke rules on significant skills ("Your apex skill is investigations, are you sure you can keep your nose out of this?" and flaunt a FP...)

+Manfred Gabriel I think you're misreading Robert.

He's not worried about there being too many aspects because, in practice, too few fate points is far, far more common an issue.  And too few fate points serves as an excellent limiter to prevent invoking too many aspects on any one action.

+Jack Gulick Hmm. I think it's right to think functionally about skills (and everything!) in FATE - so the right question to ask is, what does it do, how does it impact the story? But to think of skills as not going to 11 misses the point because skills are just aspects of the character, just like Aspects. To see whether something goes to 11 in FATE you have to look at skills+aspects+stunts... which means ultimately that everything is functionally aspects.

+Robert Hanz says: <Fate doesn't do that.  Fate just says, "You can have +4.  And a few stunts to let you do a bit better in specific situations.  You can't have more.  Have a nice day."> Which is switching back from the functional view that he just espoused (what does the cyber-arm do?) to an absolutist view (what is it?). If you look at the skills+aspects+stunts functionally, the statement "you can't have more" doesn't make sense. At least not to me. ;)

"because skills are just aspects of the character, just like Aspects."  Well, for one, I don't think that everyone agrees that skills are in fact aspects.

My point with this is that skill ranges set a range of ability:  +0 is the least a PC will have, +4 is the most (for most builds, unless you change from the default skill pyramid).

If you want to be the strongest a PC can be, you take Physique +4.  You don't take Physique +5.  You don't find some way to emulate Physique +5. +4 is the most you get.  You don't get to go to +5. You don't get to go to 11.

The example deliberately skimmed over the topic of stunts and aspects for a few reasons:

1) To simplify things a bit.
2) Because everyone has access to stunts and aspects.

Universal access to stunts and aspects means that essentially, everyone is on the same footing.  If you want to be "really strong", you're going to take Physique at +4.  You're going to take an aspect or two related to your strength (Strongman works just as well as Cybernetic Arm), and you're probably going to take a stunt or two allowing you to use your strength in some interesting way.

Which is great.  And everyone can do that.  And you can be just as effective in describing why you're so strong as just having trained a lot as you can by having a cybernetic arm.  The limits the system puts on you, in terms of stunts, aspects, skill levels, and fate point economy, are the limits.  They're there, and they're really not intended to be circumvented.  This is a very different view than many games, where stacking bonuses is a fully intentional part of the game.

So if your point is that someone with +4 Physique, an aspect or two related to strength, and a few strength-related stunts is more effective in strengthiness than someone with just a +4 Physique, I totally agree with you.  But I don't agree that the game is really about going past those inherent limitations in the system.  If you want to be Superman, you don't find a way to get a +8 strength - you just say that +4 means Superman, and get on with the game.

Let's imagine a character.

He has Shoot +4.

Can you compel him to pull a gun on someone who's upset him because he's good with a gun?

I say no.

Because he might be (to quote a wise man on the subject) The Shepherd and he might be The Tyranny Of Evil Men.

And you just don't know that from his skill choice.

I was actually going to use an example of an Investigation - can you use that to compel?  Not in my thinking - the character could be a bounty hunter that's just very, very good at his job, and could give a crap about anything else.

+Jack Gulick and +Robert Hanz this is interesting because I just gave that example in the other post about the fractal. 

May answer is, yes: I would compel a character to pull a gun on someone who's upset him because he's good with a gun. BUT this assumes that I don't have other aspects to work with. If the character has relevant aspects, like The Shepherd or The Tyranny Of Evil Men, of if his high concept is Dog in the Vineyard - then that aspect takes precedence naturally. But if everything else is neutral in this situation, so that what we have to work with is the apex skill choices the character made, then I wouldn't hesitate to compel the apex skill. It says who the character is. If you only have a hammer, every problem is a nail. 

Remember the movie Shane? He was a character with apex skill guns, and the whole movie is about how that defines him. He wants to get away from being man with a gun but he can't because it's who he is. The whole story compels him into drawing on bad guy. 

For investigations it's even easier to imagine, I think.

As further support I cite FAE: "Your approaches can say a lot about who you are." And then they lay out examples, like the brute, the trickster, the guardian, the thief...

Now I admit that this is not spelled out in the rules of any FATE game I know, but if flows naturally and organically from the idea of aspect-driven play. 

I have run into something like this, but with older iterations of  Fate, which had a lot more aspects, and a lot more Fate points, which kind of threw the curve off quite a bit. I thought Diaspora did a nice job by creating "scopes" - limiting categories of aspects you can use (say, scene, equipment, character, etc). I have limited play experience with Core, and  it has not been a problem. Keeping the characters consistently and even-handedly compelled has been, and I've tried to figure out something to simplify that. 

I think we're going to have to agree to disagree, +Manfred Gabriel.  I understand what you're saying, but I don't really think that it's "not spelled out," as you say, but rather it's just not there.  I don't see anything anywhere in any rule that says that skills or stunts can be invoked or compelled.

That doesn't mean badwrongfun, of course, just that it's more of a house rule.

In reality, most characters will have a High Concept that in some way reflects their skill loadout, so this is probably a non-issue, realistically.

For Shane, I think that he'd have an aspect reflecting that part of his character - likely his Trouble.  So I think the existing mechanics work perfectly great for that, and that there's no need to make a statement that skills are in fact aspects - which has all sorts of questions as well, like at what level does the skill have to be there to be usable as an aspect, anyway?

"But if everything else is neutral in this situation, so that what we have to work with is the apex skill choices the character made, then I wouldn't hesitate to compel the apex skill."  This is kind of strange to me.  Compels aren't about driving the play the direction you want it to go - they're about driving the story the way that the players decide they want it to go, via their aspects.  If someone doesn't have an appropriate aspect, then they haven't told you they want a certain thing to be part of their character's story... so why go there?  I find that most compels I offer are taken - not because of any mechanical issue, but because I'm in tune (via the communication of aspects) with how the player wants their story to go.  I'm hesitant to break that by compelling on things that aren't put forward as aspects.

+Robert Hanz - I don't want to flog this to death, and I freely admit that compelling apex skills isn't a mechanic provided in the rules. You say: "Compels aren't about driving the play the direction you want it to go - they're about driving the story the way that the players decide they want it to go, via their aspects.  If someone doesn't have an appropriate aspect, then they haven't told you they want a certain thing to be part of their character's story... so why go there?" --- and I guess my point is precisely that the player has told me something meaningful about their character by choosing their particular apex skills. Ultimately that is what I am interested in---and not the mechanics. Apex skills and stunts say just as much about who the character is as Aspects. They are all aspects of the character. 

Thanks for the interesting discussion!

Excuse my necroing this thread.
I've read this article about a half dozen times, and there's one part about it that bothers me.

While I agree in principle with scaling the ladder to the game your playing there are three problems.  
Problem 1 - The distribution scales as well.  This may work for some things, but less well for others.  If you imagined, for example, that the scale is exponential, the +/- 4 is going to feel 'off' in terms of how the game actually plays. 
Problem 2 - Diverse Scaling.  A lot of stories can involve radically different scales interacting with eachother. So, in that respect, again, the 1-8 can be pretty limiting.
Problem 3 - Long games or games with fast character advancement. If you make advancement happen faster and play for long enough, eventually you end up with very high skills.  You could agitate for 'rescaling' but that's not going to feel right because of the dice mechanics, nor would toning down the rate of advancement by toning up the narrative.

However, this isn't a problem unique to Fate.  D20 (and most other games) also scale to 2x the dice range.  I think 2x dice range is actually a mistake, but it's an entirely forgivable one given the other things Fate does well.
So, I actually agree that "Fate doesn't go to 11", with the exception of "Unless you really need it to, and then it offers that possibility".  However, the "unless you need it to" is not like the situations you mentioned above.

Skill rating as matter of influence on the scene reminded me "Sorcerer" and it's stat descriptions.

I think baselining makes sense for a lot of games. You mentioned GURPS, before so I thought I'd relate an example from a campaign I played in. Yes, GURPS defines your stats absolutely, but it doesn't really weigh in the same way with advantages and disadvantages. There's the concept that if a disadvantage isn't really a disadvantage then you can't take it. For example, being illiterate in a campaign setting with no writing wouldn't be a disadvantage. Flipping this around, a disadvantage (or advantage for that matter) that everyone in the world has isn't really a disadvantage, it's meant to be what makes your particular character disadvantaged compared to the rest of the people in the world.

Now let's look at the specific example. We were playing in a zombie apocalypse world as part of a military reclamation effort. Logically, you could make the case that extremely hazardous duty would be a valid disadvantage to take. But, every character in the group, and just about every non-zombie NPC was part of the same military structure; it was just the nature of the world. It doesn't make sense for every PC to tie up a good chunk of their allotted disadvantages for something that everyone has and can't opt out of.

Similarly for the military rank advantage. We were all members of the military so it really didn't make sense for all of the lowest ranking PCs to take the lowest military rank advantage. All that really mattered was our relative rank to each other, so we baselined things to be that everyone was in the military and only members who were higher rank had to take the advantage, so that they could outrank other people.

I know I've rambled on for ages about GURPS rather than Fate but I wanted to show how the baselining concept can apply in a broader way for any generic system.

Absolutely, and that's even the advice in GURPS, right?  Only one of Literacy/Illiteracy is even available, based on the overall literacy status of the campaign.

You can also handle a lot of that baselining in GURPS by handing out extra points to get up to the baseline, etc., and increase the disad pool as appropriate.  But that's going even further into GURPS discussion, which probably isn't too appropriate here. 

But yeah, baselining is a pretty useful concept in just about any game.  In a 4e game I helped run, we put out level equivalents to real world analogies to help people get a feel for where they placed in the world and to set expectations.

I still think that Fate is relatively unique in that everything is relative, and that there are no fixed points.  At least, I'm not aware of any other system where a particular strength or strength equivalent doesn't directly inform a carrying capacity type stat.

At any rate, this particular article isn't really about baselining so much as it is about the lack of permanent static bonuses.  But there is another article I wrote about baselining :)

To make that more clear, using GURPS as an example, your baseline (that is, non-situational) ability to be effective in a fight is dependent on a number of things - your skill, your strength, the weapon you're using, your armor, any advantages and disadvantages you have, etc.

In Fate, it's based on your Fight score.  Stunts can provide situational advantages, but they're explicitly shouldn't be applicable to every roll of the dice.

This makes it really easy to do things.  If you want to be a good fighter, buy Fight 4.  *Why* you're a good fighter is up to you, whether you're really strong, or super-fast, or just really skilled.  On a system-level, it's irrelevant.

"Tricky" builds in other systems also become incredibly simple to make.  Wanna make Zatoichi?  Take a "blind" aspect, and Fight 4.  Done.  No messing around with a blind disadvantage that has certain penalties, and then a Blind Fighting advantage to counter-act those, etc...

Of course, this also works because Fate doesn't put a ton of emphasis on the tactical combat portion of the game, so the amount of differentiation in that aspect of the game is a lot, lot less.