Decisions, decisions. I still intend to explore FATE as a system for a short campaign wedged into an hiatus from our current one. Like many people, my first exposure to FATE was through Spirit of the Century; I didn’t like all of it, but there was a lot of good, red meat for players interested in a narrativist approach and, importantly, may have enough crunch to satisfy our crunchier players. The power level for SotC was too high for my taste. It was supposed to be: two-fisted adventure has to operate at high power levels, or the PCs just end up dead.
Enter the alternative versions of FATE: the Dresden Files and Diaspora and some other, less thoroughly written-up offerings. Reading them, I was reassured that SotC, not FATE, is built for high-powered play, and you certainly can adjust to your taste, just as the designers intended.
But how to adjust when I myself merely understand the rules, and not the nuts-and-bolts design decisions behind the rules?
To give a concrete example: all FATE systems employ short health meters: take enough hit points of damage, and you’re out of the fight. (At the complete mercy of the victor—the winner gets to declare how the loser is taken out.) You can avoid this horrible fate by stacking up “consequences,†short- to medium-term disadvantages in place of damage, but since these are readily exploited by your foe for even bigger combat effects, you may merely be delaying the inevitable. You may also choose to negotiate a surrender, losing the fight but preserving yourself from your opponent’s wicked imagination. (This negotiation happens out of character, so your PC might fight on unflinchingly even though you the player agree he’ll be knocked unconscious and left mistakenly for dead.)
So much all the systems have in common. They vary sharply, however, on how long the hit point track should be, how many consequences you can take, how many consequences you can take at a time, and how far consequences mitigate raw damage, with major implications for combat, both in game (How risky? How brutal? How much difference do skill ranks make?) and out of game (How much time does a fight take to play out?). I haven’t witnessed these differences first hand, but I’ve received repeated assertions that it’s so, which confirms everything I’d expect.
So I certainly have license to set such parameters as health bars and consequence size to reflect my own desired campaign’s tropes, but I may not have the understanding to set them properly. Go too far, and my players could be the mismatched equivalent of Superman in a world geared to Aquaman… or Aquaman in a world geared to Superman. Simply taking the rules as written from any of the systems I have at hand is no help: I don’t really know how any of them play out, and even if I did, I would know only that they aren’t quite what I want for my game. Some degree of guessing is inevitable, and that’s okay; I guess well when it comes to math. Shooting blind, though, is a little worrying.
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