Exactly. I'm one of those weirdos who gets more excited the less system there is. For me it's about being able to engage in virtually any kind of awesome story with my table, and do so with a minimum of away from table prep. Fate rocks!

Might not have worded everything the same, but I agree with the core idea. Fate is aimed at giving you the minimum rules necessary and then getting out of the way. Many other systems are aimed at a specific set of ways of doing a specific set of things rather than giving you the tools to do what you want. They are like slot cars to Fate's legos. Sure slot cars are a blast, but if you want to do something else...your out of luck. Legos are kind of dull, on an individual basis, but after tinkering with them a bit you have created ssomething and that is cool. Ure it will never do slot car racing as well as slot cars, but slot cars can never be a monkey riding a dinosaur.

True enough, although you are comparing to a very particular type of game. In all fairness, there are plenty of other games out there that also work like Fate (many have lots of other things in common too). But, I get the nature of Fate.

Great point!  And I agree with you!  My own similar statements, less well developed than this and less well focused on what it means: https://plus.google.com/+JackGulick/posts/bzsaDWbMKbK

On character creation, I enjoy a range from very simple like FAE to complex like HERO. This is partly because fiddling with points sometimes helps me craft a story when I don't have a particularly strong one.  And I can find some amusing complications and GM toys to put in that help me further delineate my character.

Other times, I have a very, very clear image of my character and the problem becomes the fact you would need either a system with something of a steep learning curve like HERO or something very simple like Fate.

In gameplay, however, I prefer my game to take a backseat and let me do my thing.

So yeah, Fate's good for that. And there's always dials to add to make the char gen more or less precise and complex if I want it that way.

And to be clear, those games that call attention to themselves?  They can be awesome too.  They're just a different type of awesome.

Boring?!  ppfftt!  

The more we play, the more we like. It has supplanted d20 as our zombie 'pocalypse ruleset, and for horror/supernatural storylines, too.

uhm, V:TM is boring actually, but it ports easily to FATE. 

^^^ not sure if joking or didn't read the whole thing...

+Jesse Casey didn't you get the memo? Fate doesn't work for horror. Lol. I don't buy that either. And love my hack of fate for horror.

+Lon Prater its not that Fate is unable to do horror. It is more that, right out of the gate Fate is about different things than your standard horror. That said, Fate can do horror. It just takes some work and some intere reorientation of game goals.

Agree +Jacob Possin. Preaching to the choir. I forgot to add the facetious tag to my post.

I'm just happy to hear another success story about fate with horror. I'm probably going to put my full FAE conversion on DRIVETHRU RPG when I finish it and see if I can help overcome this weird notion.

+Lon Prater I'd be very interested in seeing this and hope you make it available when you finish it. 

+Lon Prater I sometimes wonder if the "fate doesn't work or horror" line is more in manner of a well meaning conspiracy aimed at pushing people to discover Don't Rest Your Head, the evil hat horror game.

A lot depends on how you define horror.  If you define horror as being kind of about helplessness and loss of agency, then Fate kind of works against that idea.  That doesn't mean it's impossible, it just means you have to be aware of where the system isn't really working with you, and kind of figure out how to work around that.

If by horror you mean something more like Supernatural or Buffy, then it works great!

I didn't read D&D Next. As I figured it out... I need nothing it can give.

Fate, though, can and already did.

I feel like horror in fate is best defined as an absence of good or easy choices.  The players should have the same options they always do, but success should cost more than they want to pay, concession should demand painful sacrifice, and taken out should be an ever-present, looming fear.  It's really all about the right kind of aspects, possibly a low refresh, and possibly an expansion of the success at cost mechanic beyond overcomes.

Horror in C of C is like Alien, creeping dread of the unknown mixed with the knowledge of your ultimate doom. Horror in Fate is like Aliens, dreading the unknown but loaded for bear however every choice you make is a bad one.

Incidentally, I would say Lovecraftian Horror is entirely possible in fate, because in that narrative space, no amount of information or action on the part of the characters diminishes the horror.  Once you discover Cthulu's "When the Stars are Right I Will Devour the World in a Plague of Madness" aspect, those free invokes are somewhat unsatisfying next to the certainty of humanity's eventual doom.

+Jacob Possin And that's before you start optimizing your character to play a role of Predator from Aliens vs. Predator. ))

I mean, it's scary to go against aliens, of course... But you also know, that scary equals fun, while you're equipped with deadliest tropes human race ever exploited invented.

+Robin Duncan There's even Ryan Macklin's Achtung! Cthulhu Fate conversion.

I've twice run a modern day Mythos investigation scenario with straight FAE. It worked well, if a little on the pulp side.

I simply modeled sanity checks as fixed attacks with the players having to use the defense action to avoid crippling mental consequences.

Yeah, there's +Ryan Macklin's Achtung! Cthulhu conversion, but he even pointed out somewhere that he really only did it because it plays up the pulp aspects, and downplays the horror.

Again, I'm not saying it can't do horror, just that it's not a perfect fit and requires a little thought.  _Aliens_ is pretty much plug 'n' play.  _Alien_ deserves a bit more thought.

I feel like FATE is less a system and more some good notes for an improve challenge. :3 I actually use FATE a lot to inform my NPCs for other systems as well as to just run random ideas to see if they'd be worth developing further. Fate also lends itself well to being developed further. However, I sometimes want to play a bit more game with my story.

I think it's interesting that people extol the ideas of narrative focus or even mechanical focus as if they are mutually exclusive. I really disagree with this sort of idea, I think that you can have both, and I think both are essential to a truly excellent game.

FATE has the capability of doing both because of how readily it lends itself to modification, it's a bit like a kit car in much the same way as say, D&D Modern was. I love it for that.

Seriously? I don't give much of a toss about what rule system I am currently ignoring when I'm storyguiding my game.
The thing I like about Fate is that on the two occasions where I intentionallly decided to mechanise some aspects of the story and use the system, that actually contrbuted to the narrative oomph.
Never had that before, except in the rosy golden Pendragon games of yore...

+1 for the Rolemaster reference.  :D  Well written.

If never looking up rules is wrong, I don't want to be right.

Looking up rules is my best skill.

I'd agree, +Jacob Possin!  That's why I like playing rules light games with you!

I looked for games that got out if my way, thought I'd found what I needed, but always had this nagging sense that nothing was completely right, that pieces I needed were missing. Fate, though, has that perfect balance of being out of the way for those tiny, model all reality details, but being exactly what I need for enhancing what I want to do narratively. So there's some genius behind its minimalism.

Great, now I want to play a setting where the players are butlers trying to clear invisible turtles out of the paths of their employers...

Funny, I read fate and thought there were too many rules... Personally I prefer games powered by the apocalypse for having almost invisible, non intrusive rules that make for awesome characters and cool storytelling.

+Wynand Louw​ It's all relative. Mini Six is way lighter than Fate, yet Fate is worlds lighter than Pathfinder. With Fate, there aren't a lot of rules, so much as how they fit together takes a bit to fully grok.

+Robert Hanz Although your text is somewhat satirical, to say something absolutely opposite you suggested (something like "Zen of Python"'s saying that "clever is not a compliment in programming"), you pointed, maybe unintentionally, one important thing.

Fate rulebook is not good at selling what is Fate about. Ok, if you read it through with right mindset, you'll see there is everything it should be, but... 

Let's say many people who try to read that, don't have that mindset. Its my anecdata mostly, so it shouldn't be generalized, but I noticed many people who simply didn't get it. I didn't too at first glance (being Dresden Files game fan and Fate Core supporter). I simply put too much traditional RPG crap into it. Reading Fate Toolkit didn't help, much more enlightening were Fate Worlds surprisingly. Now I'm still learning... Your texts helped too, but I read it quite not so long ago.

You know what helped more? Cortex Plus games, especially Marvel Heroes. They are much "Fate inspired", with all resources, plot points, compels and consequences, and they sell it slightly better (or it was easier for me specifically).

And finally, "Spark".

+Jiima Arunsone:  Totally agreed on reading it with the right mindset.  Most of my "thought of the day" posts are about unlearning and reading Fate for what it actually says.

And remember, code is twice as difficult to debug as write.  So if you write code more than half as clever as you're capable of, you can't debug it :)

The problem with Fate I had, is it cheated me. I knew Fate 2.0, and 'twas a well-behaving RPG system, somewhat weird Fudge implementation, nothing more. F2 was about skills and pyramids more than about aspects, and aspects were only about characters. In Dresden it changed (I know, SotC was before Dresden, but I never got a copy), although not exactly, it still was more about skills / stunts / powers. Core is more about aspects, and FAE is all about them. I'm not sure it was really original +Fred Hicks idea, or it evolved somewhat during use, but now it is nothing like previous versions.

There is no shame using any Fate implementation.  It took time for me to adapt to each new version. I thing you should use the version you are the more at ease with, and keep an eye on other versions for when they will "click" for you ! :)

+André Le Deist I didn't say that. I like current incarnation of Fate, I'm only saying I needed a time to adapt, because, as I said, Fate Core has some trouble with "selling" its ideas. And these are much more "indie" than in previous versions, which slowly evolved from "fudge with weird limit on buying skills and some even more weird descriptors on characters" to current versions, where these weird descriptors are about whole game, the rest is somewhat optional.

+Jiima Arunsone I recognise what you are saying about the gap between actual Fate play and how the book presents it. I was a long-time Savage Worlds GM and player. The SW book is well-written, but the system only actually "pops" for you when you have played a couple of games. SW is more of a conventional RPG than Fate, but it does a superb job of being so very fluid and simple to administer that it gets out of the way of play.

Fate has a similar problem. It it not until people have actually run through some evokes, compels and had the conversation that surrounds actions, that Fate makes sense. The ongoing character story in the book is a good attempt at simulating this, but I still feel that there should be a Fate starter box that ran a basic adventure for you, like the good 'ol D&D red box....

Earlier versions of Fate carried more traditional RPG baggage. You can regard its evolution from that starting point as generational; each time aspects had a chance to breed with a prior edition, the dominant genetic material there expressed itself more fully, while the recessive traditional stuff, well, receded. It all reads as a natural progression to me.

+Jiima Arunsone
 Sorry for misunderstanding you, or not expressing myself clearly (English is not my primary langage). As said, I always needed  time to adapt to new FATE builds.
I thing it's due to the amount of conceptual and practical work done beetwen versionns, "the evolutionnary gap" to use the same comparaison as . :)
Now I'm used to Fate Core and Accelerated, and my only problem is to choose witch one to use with a particular game/campaign !

+Tim Noyce If I felt more confident with the rules, I'd love to write a Fate Trainer book that's full of tutorials on developing familiarity with both applying the rules and learning the Fate mindset. (Also, I have fond memories of running through that intro solo adventure in the ol' red box.)

I think of an RPG ruleset as something like a computer operating system. I want it to stay out my way while making things easier for me. Fate does this very well for me. However, like OSes, what works for one person might not work so well for another...

"They want things to go a certain way, and heaven help you if you disagree.  And you find that they want to be the center of attention."

Unfortunately, this is what seems to be what's actively keeping me away from Fate.  In other games, I know what the focus is on, it has a structure, a concept of what it is.  The mechanics + GM interaction push you towards that focus, putting you all on the same page.  With Fate, the group is expected to "get on the same page" on your own; come up with and enforce the concept on your own.  And that is just too much work.

+Nick Clinite  I would phrase it differently. I think Fate is about the GM putting a couple strokes on the page, and then having the group finish it all together. The GM has a larger role in that process than the individual players (how much varies by group), but it's still more about the group defining the page together rather than the players getting onto the page created by the GM.

Now, if you prefer having it all laid out for you, then maybe Fate isn't the best game for you (although I'm sure it could be run the way you prefer, with the right GM and other players). The gaming world is so amazing right now. So many more options for everyone than there were when I first got into the hobby. It's amazing that there are whole systems based around the way different people like to play. So, I say, try out whatever catches your eye, and you'll no doubt find the system and group that matches your style.

What's freeing to one, can be constricting to another. Likewise, what's perfect for one might be too restrictive to another.

+Erik Alfkin Right now I'm holding in steady in "I need a GM with experience to show me how it's done" phase.

It's fair to say that Fate isn't a good fit for some groups.  Fate kind of assumes that not everything can be codified, and a lot is up to judgement.  So the failure case for opening a lock in some cases might be "the guards show up before you're done", and in other cases might be "the very delicate lock breaks" and in others might be "the crazy secure lock that you've been working on in your stronghold can't be broken before the midwinter curse."  Or whatever.

If you've got a group that can't accept that this is up to GM judgement, or if you're a GM that can't budge a little bit if players tell you something doesn't match their expectations?  Or if your group, for whatever reason, has to argue about every judgement call made?  Fate will be a pretty terrible fit.

Fate's a great helper.  It's a pretty bad authority.

+Robert Hanz But that sort of thing comes up in my regular games as well (i.e., the failure still equals progress--even if its not progress the player wants--technique).  I'm speaking more of the "physics" of the world; what you expect to see in the world, how you interact with the world; essentially, a grounding of the setting.  With Fate, it seems like anything and everything can happen with a little hand-waving and a half-hearted explanation.

I might be better off with an actual setting book.  I got Secret World of Cats, but even that is pretty vague in parts, and other settings like Spirit of the Century seem to outright implore the hand-waving.

Yeah, +Nick Clinite, I think some level of that is inherent in all roleplaying, but it's even more so in Fate.  But I see what you're saying.

Part of that's because Fate Core is a generic system.  As such, it doesn't make a lot of assumptions about things, until you fill in the blanks.  Something like Atomic Robo or DFRPG or Jadepunk is better at laying that groundwork because they're specific games aimed at specific settings with specific assumptions.

I played in a Cypher game recently, and it struck me as a potential Fate gateway for d20 gamers. The character concept is very Aspect like, except that the possibilities are already defined. Seems like a good way to learn some of the Fate ways of thinking.