Okay, so I'm going to go off on a weird tangent here. I'd love to hear thoughts and feedback.
We all know and love the Fate Fractal. Or at least we should. But a thread on the Yahoo FateRPG group got me thinking.
Basically, the context was using a single die roll to represent an entire battle. I went off with the slightly flippant "we have that, it's called Overcome" remark, after which I got slightly less flippant (it's been a long week) and suggested that perhaps any Conflict, Contest, or Challenge could be represented by a single Overcome.
Now... what if the reverse was true as well? What if we say that any given single roll can be exploded into a Conflict, Contest, or Challenge?
Now we've got a second fractal structure in Fate, mirroring the Aspect fractal (which defines areas of narrative interest). Now we can describe the actions on an ever-increasing scale of detail.
And... if a campaign aspect (like an Impending or Current Issue) is really an Aspect... couldn't it be Overcome? And couldn't we then take that Overcome and turn it into a Challenge, Contest, or Conflict? Each part of which could explode downward?
So, let's say I'm running Brütal Fäte. The Current Issues is We're Out of Beer!
Okay... that could be Overcome, but that would be boring. Since there's no (apparent) opposition yet, we could turn that into something like a Challenge, with three parts:
* Get to Beerhenge
* Get the beer
* Get back to Bladehenge
Okay, so what does this give me? Well, I can now determine how to run each of those things based on the level of narrative importance/interest. Getting to Beerhenge doesn't sound all that interesting, narratively, so we boil that sucker down to a single Overcome. Fail? Maybe we run into some of the remnants of the Hair Metal Militia or something, or I throw some other complication in the way.
Getting the beer will likely be harder (no spoilers!). So that will likely end up a challenge of its own. After all, figuring out why there's no beer, and making sure we get some seems a lot more narratively interesting than just driving over! And each part of getting the beer, if it's interesting enough, can be drilled down into for even more detail. Beer trees have been overrun? Sounds like a Conflict. Getting the keg pipelines working with the beer trees again? Could be a Challenge.
Now, getting back to Badehenge is probably more interesting, so again we'll probably not treat that as a single Overcome, even though it's the same terrain.
But you could go the other way with this, too. A single Attack roll in a fight? Well, if that's really "the" sword blow to change the course of the game, why not drill down on it even further? Treat it as its own challenge. I'm not sure offhand how you'd break that down further, but why not?
So, this seems to make overall sense to me. I've got some open questions, like when zooming between resolution levels if there should be any kind of mechanical effect, or if it should just be handled on a narrative level.
20130412 Okay so I’m going to go off on a weird...
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Pretty cool.
I think I had seen your article before, and there's a very high chance it was percolating through the subconscious when I wrote that :)
I once played an SW game, and the GM had this huge battle at the end that we didn't get to finish. It was the climax of the whole game though. Playing in that game made me try to be more cognizant of time constraints. I told the guy that I'd be fine with the player possessing the most significant skill rolling for the whole encounter (That would have been driving). It wasn't something typical to SW, so instead we left that one shot unfinished. Everyone was bummed out.
I prefer to contract less important conflicts/challenges if I see that time is against me, so that I can make the big moments big, but if I now found myself in that same position (one shot, I'd didn't realize how fast time was passing, and I'm never seeing these folks again), I would just make it one roll, so we could all leave knowing what the resolution was.
I frame it in my mind like this:
I owe nothing to mechanics. Nothing to the story. I owe the players, and their expectations.
If the story seems to deserve more in my mind, and the book has very explicit slow rules, but the players obviously won't be happy without knowing then it's time to pull the camera back for the wide angle shot that shows everything going down at once : )
Doing things one roll means only one cycle thru the engine. So can be enough if you already have enough cool to roll forward to the next step. Don't spend too much time because you can flood the engine (though it isn't easy).
Breaking the plot chunk into bits means more cycles thru the "cool in, more cool out" loop. So if you're currently short on cool, make a single engaging easy step and use it to generate some cool to feed into the next step and get the engine running smoothly again.