Thinking about slightly revamping phases:
I generally think of Fate as being the TV Show RPG, and say that the first session usually lands somewhere around episode 6. So maybe it's worth re-framing the three phases as being individual episodes that occur prior to episode 6? So instead of some nebulous backstory, it's focused more concretely on the things that this group has done together after they've met, or at least in the process of meeting. It would likely also do away with some of the time-ordering issues that I see come up in the phases a lot.
This is probably something that's how most people already think of it, but there it is :)
20140109 Thinking about slightly revamping phase...
Shared to the community Fate Core - Public
+1'd by: Christopher Ruthenbeck
But I'm not sure I agree Fate's Trio is quite that different. All the Trio says is "we aren't starting at their first meeting"; it doesn't actually say anything we would all consider an "episode" has happened yet.
In other words, let's assume a 5 player group, A, B, C, D, and E.
A has previously met B and C.
B has previously met A and D.
C has previously met A and E.
D has previously me B and E.
E has previously met C and D.
Phase Trio complete, but the group hasn't actually met yet! They've crossed paths, but not combined into what the story wants of them.
Your experience may be less neat, of course. More clumping around one character, that sort of thing.
I see this as a tool to avoid the "you meet in a tavern" clumsy open rather than a restriction on where you have to start your story.
Of course, you can always follow the FAE style and start play without those 3 aspects and create them during the "pilot".
I don't see it as a restriction on "where you start your story" either. It just seems like the first six or so episodes of any TV series are about establishing characters and relationships, and that the show really takes off after that.
And I'm wondering if framing the stories in terms of "early episodes" might have some value in terms of helping both define kind of a shape for those stories, make them have more potentially relevant information, help bring about more table consensus on the direction of the game, etc.
I also think it's probably a bit closer to the SotC "first novel" idea in some ways than many of the stories I've gotten in practice, many of which are just vignettes, and really have no 'story structure' whatsoever - which is fine, but those often don't really give much in the way of ongoing threads.
And there's no reason an "episode" couldn't be a flashback, either :)
It's not a drastic change that I'm talking about here so much as a slightly different framing.
It's more traditional "we all meet up" pilot still had part of its characters already well met, two coming in as a pair, and one a total stranger.
It's original pilot started us off with a VERY complex and unstable balance of friends and strangers and let us try to find a handhold.
And yes, they then went back in a later episode and gave us the meet-ups of the "all linked up" characters.
The Phase Trio can't quite get that unless we cheat it a bit (and assume Book's player missed the character creation session), but it's a worth-while structure to have.
I see the Trio as "if you want to start off already linked up and ready to go, do this." And FAE's structure is more "you've got just enough of an idea of your character to start, let's play!".
There's a world of room between those two, and many of the spaces in that range are very workable in practice.