First Experience with Fate Accelerated Star Wars



Last night we had our first experience at using Fate Accelerated Edition (FAE) to run a Star Wars game. This was my third attempt at running a game using some variant of Fate. An Atomic Robo game went ok while an attempt at a homebrew urban fantasy game using FAE didn't really work out.

It will require a few more game sessions before I declare absolute victory but this session definitely did go far better than previous attempts. The session itself was a little rough on the technical side - one player was having sound issues (times like this I miss having an in-person group) so had to drop out and another had to leave a bit early. Real world stinks.

I'll do a writeup of the session itself at a later point, this is more focused on my experiences running the game. The game is a pre-Episode IV Star Wars game, set a vague amount of time prior to Episode IV (close to it, but we've not fully nailed down if it is a few months or years). They are Rebels going on missions for Senator Bail Organa of Alderaan. The fact their home base is Alderaan might make keeping the exact date fuzzy a feature as opposed to a bug... We've a demolitions droid, an ex-Clone Trooper, a former Imperial Army Officer, and a Clone Wars fighter pilot who went AWOL after his brother was killed by Order 66 (he apparently has some minor Force sensitivity, but not enough to have been taken in by the Jedi Order - and nothing he can consciously control). The first session dealt with them tracking down a Separatist Admiral who had managed a secret shipyard in the Minos Cluster - the Empire wanted him for war crimes, the Rebellion wanted him in the hopes of getting access to the lost shipyard.

This time around I made it a point to do a lot of compelling of Aspects and encouraged the players to spend Fate points and create advantages like crazy. One player was a Fate veteran (more than me actually) which helped but also making all the Aspects on the table very clear. As you can see from the screenshot above, I wrote down all the Aspects - scene aspects and NPC aspects.

One thing that I hadn't anticipated is a fairly competent character in Fate is pretty tough and difficult to take out - a battle with bounty hunters searching for the Admiral took a bit longer than I had anticipated, but Jodo Kast and IG-79 were dealt with. One thing which pleased me is we managed to not make the game a constant stream of "I use my best approach" declarations. The compat was actually quite a bit more tactical than I've experienced in other games - for example, the ex-Clone Trooper managed to do a Forceful defend from a flamethrower fired at him by throwing a large tavern table between him and IG-79. It felt like something one might see in a grittier Star Wars film such as Rogue One.

What will I improve upon in further sessions? First, I now have a better idea how tough a character is in Fate and I know a bit better when to dial things down or up. Second, I did notice we didn't make too much use of scene Aspects - I might have the NPCs leverage them a bit next game to draw better attention to them.

Overall, I have to say I'm rather pleased with how this went.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Jules Verne Translations That Don't Stink

Image
Shortly after I graduated from college R. Talsorian published their fantasy steampunk RPG,  Castle Falkenstein. Having missed out on Space: 1889  when it first came out this was my first steampunk RPG, though I had been exposed to the genre by Gibson and Sterling's novel The Difference Engine (a novel which, though I though I found the setting compelling, I did not particularly care for - must reread some day). Jules Verne was one of the authors in the inspirational reading section of Castle Falkenstein.  Heck, the game also made him into France's scientific advisor, having him responsible for their massive Verne Cannons  which formed a sort of nuclear deterrent.  With that in mind, one Sunday afternoon I was at a Barnes & Noble bookstore my new girlfriend (now my wife of nearly 16 years!).  On a whim I decided to pick up a Jules Verne novel. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea . That night I started reading it, never having read any of his works before but having vagu
Keep reading

Stepping Away and a New Beginning

Image
After maintaining this blog for nearly seven years (an eternity in internet time), I've decided to step away from it. When I first began I wasn't 100% certain what it would be about. For a while I thought it would be a blog related to OSR type RPGs but I found my own tastes not firmly rooted there. Looking at the history of the blog, I see a lot of Call of Cthulhu which is hardly surprising. However, some lack of consistency definitely made it tough for me find a defined niche and over the past few months I've been giving some thought to starting a new, more narrowly focused blog. The imminent end of Google+ played a part in these thoughts, with much of my traffic coming from that site. I write because I enjoy writing, but I do enjoy growing an audience. My plan to start a narrowly-focused blog took a turn when I had the opportunity to join the  Rolling Boxcars  blog. Talking with the contributors (one of whom I game with on Discord already) and going through thei
Keep reading

RPG Review: Fate Accelerated

Image
Fate is a difficult system for me to grok. I like it conceptually, but I have a difficult time when it comes to running it.  Fate is what's considered a narrative game. Instead of modeling a simulation of the reality of the RPG setting, it is designed at supporting a story. I've seen arguments as to whether or not this makes it a "real" RPG. I think the whole debate is a bit silly, dealing with issues of "bad wrong fun". Truthfully the challenges I have with it are largely a function of me being a grizzled gaming grognard, gaming since the early 1980's. To paraphrase Yoda, I must unlearn what I have learned. I've a hunch that I'd actually have an easier time grokking Fate were I to know less.  Overview With that prelude behind us, let's take a look at the Fate Accelerated game. It is a variant of the Fate Core game. Fate Core looks a lot like what one would expect from an RPG book - pretty thick, lots of skills, stunts, etc. F
Keep reading

Using the Force in D6 Star Wars

Image
Defending yourself with just 1D in Sense is not easy, as Luke discovers when training with a remote. My previous post discussed the proto-D6 System as found in the Ghostbusters RPG. For those unfamiliar with the D6 System and the way it does the Force (or for a brief review) the essentials are: You roll a bunch of six sided dice against a target number, typically ranging from 5-ish (easy) to 20 or even higher. Your rating is listed as something like 2D+2 which means roll 2d6+2. By default, most normal/non-heroic people have 2D in most stats.  Starting heroes will might have their best skill be at 5D or a touch higher. You can take as many actions as you want in a round. However, taking two actions in a round reduces all dice codes by 1D, taking three reduces all by 2D, etc. Starting with Force skills will lower a characters starting attributes. Unlike most skills they start off at 1D. There are three Force skills - control, sense, and alter. Control lets you control t
Keep reading

Developing Boston for 1920s Call of Cthulhu

Image
While Chaosium has produced sourcebooks for many locations in Lovecraft Country (Kingsport, Arkham, and Innsmouth) as well as non-fictional cities of the 1920s (such as New York City and New Orleans), the nearby city of Boston, while being featured in many adventures, has never received its own full sourcebook. The most common era for my Call of Cthulhu  games has been in the 1920s - some campaigns have been in New York City while others have been in Lovecraft country. For those in Lovecraft Country, many adventures have been in nearby Boston. Over the years I've slowly been building up some expertise in the area and I thought it might be of interest to others gaming in the same setting - whether with Mythos horrors or a purely mundane game. First, let us investigate those official sources. While Boston has found its way into many adventures, I can think of two sources where it has been given a fair amount of detail. First, The Unspeakable Oath  double issue 16/17 has a ref
Keep reading