That sounds like a fascinating thing to do with Fate. I'll be interested to see where you go with it.

No, not immediately horrible: Ars Magica (Troupes) meets Burning Wheel (Beliefs/Question) with Fate. Cool.

The progression rules may need tweaking but hard to say without playtest.

Like the idea that supporting cast are not owned by any player.

Maybe a way to promote a supporting cast member to a series regular?

Yup, that was point 10

+Robert Hanz d'oh. Early morning reading comprehension fail. :)

It's all good, that could have been my late night writing comprehension fail :)

Sounds like this will be really cool!

I wonder if trying to fit in a post-start phase trio is cleanest way to accomplish connection in an open table game. It might be interesting to take a page from Fiasco, and have a pool of "relationships" that joining players could chose from. Or, to give players more say in the sort of stories that would happen to their characters, perhaps players could establish relationship stems that new entrants could pick up.

"Any player can call a scene" are you imagining players calling flashback scenes or just contemporaneous scenes?

Is progression actually important to such a game? The outcome of including it would seem to be that surviving main characters get progressively more secure and capable relative to new mains and support characters. That seems undesirable. Sure, a character like Arya does the "zero to hero" arc at a cost. But the overall War of Roses thrust of GoT is that people do horrible things to try to make themselves safe, making the world overall more unstable and dangerous, so that they feel they have to do even worse things. Letting people "level up" seems counterproductive.

"Fate Points are owned by characters, not players." Is the intent here to facilitate engagement and play of support characters? Because it might encourage bloody GoT action if players had their own Fate points when playing their main character. I'm imagining something like the person playing Ned Stark conceding and being executed, and the player keeping the tasty Fate points from concession for their next main. Or something like that. Just thinking if you want a story with lots of sudden bloody reversals, making them rewarding them could be an effective design strategy.

Anyway, that's a lot of random questions, inspired because the core idea is so neat.

Great comments, +Mark Sabalauskas!

I wonder if trying to fit in a post-start phase trio is cleanest way to accomplish connection in an open table game.

I doubt it, and that's why I wouldn't do it. My template for adding a character is basically Tyrion meeting Bron. There's clearly not time for a Phase trio there, and that wouldn't work. Just quick-character-create and be on your way.

Phase Trios post-start would be reserved for the equivalent of "Hey, let's start a new set of main characters in a different geographical area".

"Any player can call a scene" are you imagining players calling flashback scenes or just contemporaneous scenes?

Hadn't really considered flashback scenes, to be honest. It's an interesting thought.

Is progression actually important to such a game?

Honestly, I don't know. Leaving it in was more a point of "that's what Core does, so don't muck with it unless I have a strong reason to" than anything. That might be a thing that gets deprecated over time. Of course, Fate doesn't have the level of character advancement that something like D&D does anyway, so I'm less concerned about it. Still, a good thought.

"Fate Points are owned by characters, not players." Is the intent here to facilitate engagement and play of support characters? Because it might encourage bloody GoT action if players had their own Fate points when playing their main character.

This is something I vacillated on, and still do to an extent. Mostly I came down where I did because it removes some level of gaming, and seems to make more narrative sense to me. What I don't want is a situation where character A has all the bad luck and just funnels the Fate Points to character B who has a super easy path.

For the Ned Stark situation (which I'd disagree on it being "sudden", much like the Red Wedding), I'd probably be more likely to go with some kind of "reward" given to another primary character, if anything. I think that'd give what you're looking for with less intentional or accidental abuse potential.

It's a fair observation that Ned's end only seems "sudden" to the extent that one is bought into the traditions of fantasy novels that were being subverted. I don't suppose anyone would have batted an eye if about the outcome if they were reading about intrigue in the court of historical figure.

Also, Ned’s appears sudden because people erroneously believe that he is the story protagonist. There are protagonists in the story, with all of the associated story bits. Ned just isn’t one of them.

Really, once you get that Jon is a protagonist, Ned's death is not only plausible and predictable, but really inevitable.

Sounds pretty cool. I'd love to try it. What exactly does open table mean? And would this be done without a GM? If there's no GM, would all opposition be generated by the NPCs the other players create?

Done with a GM.

Open table means that the people who play for a given session are those who showed up. No presumption of ongoing commitment exists.

Ah, gotcha. The closest thing I've heard of to that is west marches. I'm even more interested now! All of my friends have crazy schedules.

Seems like a fun experiment. Is there gonna be a session 0 to determine setting and so on, or is it basically GoT adjacent?

I'm reminded of an idea I was tossing around with a friend some time ago about running a game where the same Characters were present from session to session but the Players were different - each session the Players who showed up would select the characters from an available Cast and the session would, ideally, focus on them. This is very much aligned to that idea so I'll be interested to see where you take it.

The entire conversation spawned from a discussion about one-shots vs. long-form campaigns - and how to deal with scheduling sessions when you also have "adulting" to do. :) I really desire long-form campaigns but its so hard to find and maintain groups with a consistent meeting schedule - which leads to lots of one-shots and abandoned campaigns.

Keep us posted, +Robert Hanz if you work it through further.

Yeah, "let's meet every week for multiple hours" is pretty hard to keep up for adults.