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Aug. 11th, 2018 12:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
omorkaSo in staring down the barrel of a school year that is likely to be intensely stressful, at least in terms of planning and grading load, what did I do? I volunteered to reboot an old TTRPG game I was running with three players, one of whom has since gone off the deep end (and now won't go anywhere unarmed; I refused to allow her to bring her piece into my house, so that was the end of that), in a new system (FATE Core, which I have played in but not run before) with a new group of seven people (several of whom are even less familiar with this system than I am).
We had the first session last Friday (the 3rd). It went . . . extremely poorly. FATE, as a system, really requires that the players be proactive and on the same page as the GM regarding tone. Four of my seven players were playing extremely reactively, three of them to the point that they nearly failed to be noticed by the two characters carried over from the previous version of the game. And of my three active players, one of them kept trying to do things I had not yet written the rules for, because it had not occurred to me that someone would just flatly break Masquerade like that. (FATE doesn't have a default magic system, and this is a modern urban paranormal game; this person is playing a mage, and just - started casting spells in front of a 200-person crowd.) One of the remaining two was doing something extremely stupid, but at least they were doing something!
Part of this is that FATE Core is a system where mechanics follow action, rather than the other way around - part of the point of playing through the opening scenario is to see which skills and aspects the players find that their characters need. Most of us, though, are used to either D&D, where a lot of character generation is traditionally random, or GURPS, where you build your characters from your initial point pool first and then figure out what you can do with the numbers you have. In either case, action follows mechanics. And it was like pulling teeth to get the players to attempt things that weren't already on their character sheets.
It's going to be a very different experience, and I suspect I'm going to have to give up a lot more control over the ultimate arc of the storyline than I'm used to. But at least they seemed to want to stick around for the next session.
We had the first session last Friday (the 3rd). It went . . . extremely poorly. FATE, as a system, really requires that the players be proactive and on the same page as the GM regarding tone. Four of my seven players were playing extremely reactively, three of them to the point that they nearly failed to be noticed by the two characters carried over from the previous version of the game. And of my three active players, one of them kept trying to do things I had not yet written the rules for, because it had not occurred to me that someone would just flatly break Masquerade like that. (FATE doesn't have a default magic system, and this is a modern urban paranormal game; this person is playing a mage, and just - started casting spells in front of a 200-person crowd.) One of the remaining two was doing something extremely stupid, but at least they were doing something!
Part of this is that FATE Core is a system where mechanics follow action, rather than the other way around - part of the point of playing through the opening scenario is to see which skills and aspects the players find that their characters need. Most of us, though, are used to either D&D, where a lot of character generation is traditionally random, or GURPS, where you build your characters from your initial point pool first and then figure out what you can do with the numbers you have. In either case, action follows mechanics. And it was like pulling teeth to get the players to attempt things that weren't already on their character sheets.
It's going to be a very different experience, and I suspect I'm going to have to give up a lot more control over the ultimate arc of the storyline than I'm used to. But at least they seemed to want to stick around for the next session.
