Jun 12, 2013 Fate Core Thought of the Day The Joy...
Fate Core Thought of the Day: The Joy of Create Advantage
While most of my posts are probably GM-centric, this one's a lot more player-centric. Hey, gotta change it up, right?
One of the things that I see with players new to Fate is that they overly-rely on the Attack action in conflicts. My experience has shown that, in many cases, Attack is actually the least effective option, when viewed from an overall perspective. Sure, you can't Create Advantage someone to death (or to Taken Out, as the case may be), but CA has a lot of advantages over Attack overall, and especially as a lead-up to an actual damaging attack.
To most vets, this stuff will be obvious, so I apologize for that... but these might be good points to raise with your players, especially if they're having issues, or over-relying on Attack actions.
Here's a few of the main reasons why Create Advantage should be the majority of the players' actions in a Conflict:
1) It's more efficient.
Both Attack and Create Advantage give you the opportunity to buy shifts of effect. For Create Advantage, these shifts (via free invocations) are delayed, but for a given success threshold, you'll actually get more shifts of effect than Attack for the vast majority of cases...
Margin of success Create Advantage shifts Attack shifts
0 2 (boost) 2 (boost)
1 2 1
2 2 2
3 4 (two free invokes) 3
4 4 4
Admittedly, after a margin of success of four, Attack starts to win out - but you generally won't see that margin of success unless you've got a number of free invokes to boost you there, or burn a bunch of fate points!
2) Create Advantage is flexible.
Attack does one thing - it causes stress and consequences to your opponent. However, the shifts of effect (free invokes) created by Create Advantage can, depending on the advantage, be used for Attack or Defense! And they also have the potential of being used by other members of your group. Or they can be used with an Attack to do straight damage. Create Advantage creates options.
3) Create Advantage lets you choose the skill match-up
In conflicts, and especially with an Attack, absolute skill levels are irrelevant. What's important is the relative skill level between you and your opponent. And one of the main 'strategy' bits in Fate is figuring out, narratively, how to maximize that difference in your favor.
Using your 'best' skill isn't always the best idea. If you've got Fight of 4, and you're facing an opponent with Fight 6, you're at a permanent disadvantage. And it's usually pretty hard to justify why you're using another skill for Attack, or why Fight can't be used to defend (substitute Shoot/Athletics as appropriate).
But Create Advantage lets you get around this. So long as the action you create justifies it, it allows you to set up the skill matchup. So if you've got Fight 4, and the bad guy has Fight 6? No problem... maybe you've got Intimidate 4, and he's got a Will of only 1! Scare him with that! Or use your athletics skill to set up a favorable position, perhaps challenged by his Notice skill.
Once you've internalized this, the big bruiser just looks like a big opportunity, since you know he probably has some pretty weak social skills just waiting to be exploited. (Strangely, against a superior combatant, it's often the combat-focused characters that are the least effective, as they have fewer good skill matchups).
Of course, an especially ninja trick is to use Create Advantage actions that are resisted by the environment, rather than the enemy - these are very likely to be easier to accomplish than something with passive resistance!
4) Create Advantage lets you set up huge hits
While it's not always the case, in Fate it's often true that a single big hit is worth more than two little ones. If you've got three stress, a pair of two-stress hits will just mark off your second and third stress boxes - but a single four-stress hit will force you to take a Consequence.
In general, bigger hits will take down enemies quicker, while smaller hits will be more efficient (require fewer overall successes) at the expense of taking more actual attacks to
accomplish.
And what's the easiest way to set up a big hit? Either burn through your Fate Point supply or... set up a bunch of free invocations of aspects via Create Advantage. You know what happens to bad guys if your whole team concentrates for a round or two on Creating Advantages, and then passes all of those free invocations to your most competent combatant? Pain.
Combine this with the higher efficiency and preferred skill-matchup of Create Advantage, and you have a recipe for Taking Out even the nastiest, ugliest enemy you encounter (or, the most attractive, suave enemy if it's a social conflict!)
5) The Narrative Truth of Aspects
So far, I've just talked about the purely mechanical, math-based benefits of Create Advantage. But that's only part of the story.
In addition to all of the other advantages listed above, Create Advantage creates narrative truth. If you get your opponent Cowering in Fear, then he's doing that. Which should restrict his actions.
Aspects can do all sorts of things, from action permission to denial, to setting up difficulties where none existed, to granting permission for active interference.
They knock people on the ground, disarm them, have them wandering about in a fog.
And this is all on top of the mechanical benefits. Beautiful, I tell you!
So, anyway, I hope this helps in some way. It's based on my observation of new Fate players, and is basically a rundown of the points I make with them to get them out of the "Attack Attack Attack" cycle, and thinking more "like Fate", which often gets them into describing narrative goodness and all the other coolness I've come to associate with Fate.
While most of my posts are probably GM-centric, this one's a lot more player-centric. Hey, gotta change it up, right?
One of the things that I see with players new to Fate is that they overly-rely on the Attack action in conflicts. My experience has shown that, in many cases, Attack is actually the least effective option, when viewed from an overall perspective. Sure, you can't Create Advantage someone to death (or to Taken Out, as the case may be), but CA has a lot of advantages over Attack overall, and especially as a lead-up to an actual damaging attack.
To most vets, this stuff will be obvious, so I apologize for that... but these might be good points to raise with your players, especially if they're having issues, or over-relying on Attack actions.
Here's a few of the main reasons why Create Advantage should be the majority of the players' actions in a Conflict:
1) It's more efficient.
Both Attack and Create Advantage give you the opportunity to buy shifts of effect. For Create Advantage, these shifts (via free invocations) are delayed, but for a given success threshold, you'll actually get more shifts of effect than Attack for the vast majority of cases...
Margin of success Create Advantage shifts Attack shifts
0 2 (boost) 2 (boost)
1 2 1
2 2 2
3 4 (two free invokes) 3
4 4 4
Admittedly, after a margin of success of four, Attack starts to win out - but you generally won't see that margin of success unless you've got a number of free invokes to boost you there, or burn a bunch of fate points!
2) Create Advantage is flexible.
Attack does one thing - it causes stress and consequences to your opponent. However, the shifts of effect (free invokes) created by Create Advantage can, depending on the advantage, be used for Attack or Defense! And they also have the potential of being used by other members of your group. Or they can be used with an Attack to do straight damage. Create Advantage creates options.
3) Create Advantage lets you choose the skill match-up
In conflicts, and especially with an Attack, absolute skill levels are irrelevant. What's important is the relative skill level between you and your opponent. And one of the main 'strategy' bits in Fate is figuring out, narratively, how to maximize that difference in your favor.
Using your 'best' skill isn't always the best idea. If you've got Fight of 4, and you're facing an opponent with Fight 6, you're at a permanent disadvantage. And it's usually pretty hard to justify why you're using another skill for Attack, or why Fight can't be used to defend (substitute Shoot/Athletics as appropriate).
But Create Advantage lets you get around this. So long as the action you create justifies it, it allows you to set up the skill matchup. So if you've got Fight 4, and the bad guy has Fight 6? No problem... maybe you've got Intimidate 4, and he's got a Will of only 1! Scare him with that! Or use your athletics skill to set up a favorable position, perhaps challenged by his Notice skill.
Once you've internalized this, the big bruiser just looks like a big opportunity, since you know he probably has some pretty weak social skills just waiting to be exploited. (Strangely, against a superior combatant, it's often the combat-focused characters that are the least effective, as they have fewer good skill matchups).
Of course, an especially ninja trick is to use Create Advantage actions that are resisted by the environment, rather than the enemy - these are very likely to be easier to accomplish than something with passive resistance!
4) Create Advantage lets you set up huge hits
While it's not always the case, in Fate it's often true that a single big hit is worth more than two little ones. If you've got three stress, a pair of two-stress hits will just mark off your second and third stress boxes - but a single four-stress hit will force you to take a Consequence.
In general, bigger hits will take down enemies quicker, while smaller hits will be more efficient (require fewer overall successes) at the expense of taking more actual attacks to
accomplish.
And what's the easiest way to set up a big hit? Either burn through your Fate Point supply or... set up a bunch of free invocations of aspects via Create Advantage. You know what happens to bad guys if your whole team concentrates for a round or two on Creating Advantages, and then passes all of those free invocations to your most competent combatant? Pain.
Combine this with the higher efficiency and preferred skill-matchup of Create Advantage, and you have a recipe for Taking Out even the nastiest, ugliest enemy you encounter (or, the most attractive, suave enemy if it's a social conflict!)
5) The Narrative Truth of Aspects
So far, I've just talked about the purely mechanical, math-based benefits of Create Advantage. But that's only part of the story.
In addition to all of the other advantages listed above, Create Advantage creates narrative truth. If you get your opponent Cowering in Fear, then he's doing that. Which should restrict his actions.
Aspects can do all sorts of things, from action permission to denial, to setting up difficulties where none existed, to granting permission for active interference.
They knock people on the ground, disarm them, have them wandering about in a fog.
And this is all on top of the mechanical benefits. Beautiful, I tell you!
So, anyway, I hope this helps in some way. It's based on my observation of new Fate players, and is basically a rundown of the points I make with them to get them out of the "Attack Attack Attack" cycle, and thinking more "like Fate", which often gets them into describing narrative goodness and all the other coolness I've come to associate with Fate.
Shared to the community Fate Core - Public
+1'd by: vagueGM, Thomas Giles, Wickus Booyse, Johannes Oppermann, David Ferrell, Jon Freeman, Daniel Keefer (xxKeefer), Christopher Lorando, Ian F White, Scott Puckett, KadzarTathram, Christopher Ruthenbeck, Marcus Morrisey, Frank Serio, BE Knoll, Keenan Scott, Artur Fiedorowicz, Zach Hunt, Sterling Heibeck, James Garr, Charles Nodell, Marko Bosscher, Olav Müller, Oliver Graf, Joshua O'Kelley, Christopher Dyszelski, Carey Evans, Guy Bowring, Blue Tyson, Jim Sandoval, Gary Furash, David Lacerte, Joshua Krage, Ville Makkonen, Josh Culbertson, Nadav Ben Dov, Simon Kind, Brian Rock, Chris Newton, Adam Schwaninger, Ron Frazier, Todd Grotenhuis, Fred Hicks, Adam “Bison Court” D, Dan Behlings
I've generally found that, once you grok Create Advantage, it's the 'mismatched' characters that actually get the most positive movement in a Conflict, while the 'matched' characters are better at impeding progress.
In a battle, the Fight 4 character isn't going to have a bunch of beneficial skill matchups with the Fight 6 enemy. But he'll be the best at slowing the tide of the Attacks from that enemy.
On the other hand, the smarmy little smart guy will be able to absolutely decimate the Fight 6 enemy in terms of noticing weaknesses, etc. Almost every skill that the smarmy guy has will be something that the Fight 6 enemy hasn't focused in.
I really like the fact that the non-combat guy not only is useful in that scenario, but for certain things is actually more effective. That's pretty cool.
I think this is also an artifact of playing more traditional games, where a large part of the game is trying to find ways to get disproportionate results from your actions, whereas that doesn't seem to be a big part of Fate's gameplay - and I think that's a cause of a lot of new player cognitive dissonance with the system.
It's also interesting that I see "what action am I doing" as primarily being determined by the effect that a player is attempting to cause, while 'Attack' can easily be parsed as being about the action. It's not an Attack because you're swinging a sword, it's an Attack because you're trying to Take Them Out. If you're swinging a sword to try to put somebody in a defensive stance, it's Create Advantage, even though the physical action is the same.
As far as alternative names for 'Attack', I'd probably suggest 'Take Out'.
Not sure it's actually written down anywhere, but it exists!
Then attacks could either still be a more basic "Take Out" action, or could be just applying a "Taken Out" aspect if you remove attacks entirely.
It might be worth spelling that out as part of the "action permission" clause above. I think lots of people get worried that skill X isn't an attack skill, so it can't be used in Y situation. But Create Advantage is the go-to for justifying why, all of a sudden, Lore or Crafts or Will is being used to attack.
The complications I've run into with going "No Attack" is that it speed sup combat more than people like, and it can result in a bit less back and forth than desired. There are fixes for this (some specific rules for consequence aspects and taking people out go a long way) but that does introduce extra (sometimes unwelcome) complexity. So, it's still something to sort out.
Thank you greatly for the share!