I’ll never forget one of my first campaigns, where a few sessions in, the one “edgy” character in our crew of demented murderhobos decided that he didn’t want to go in a cave that the rest of the party were going in. Nothing could move him on this.
Every 15 minutes or so through a multi-hour session while the rest of us explored the cave and fought beasties, the DM would ask him what he wanted to do, as a kindness that turned into a running joke by the end. His character was determined to use his abysmal crafting skills to try and make caltrops from stones outside the cave. I think that when the average rolls were calculated out over the time it took, he crafted something like three poor quality caltrops.
The player insisted that he was fine with all of it, seemed to have fun just hanging out, and it did technically fit his character. Still, it really cemented the importance of being flexible with your RP to not kill game flow.
A session or two later the DM gave each of us a “joke” magic item of questionable utility. Edgy got a pouch of infinite stone caltrops. The DM then learned a hard lesson about the cheese potential of “joke” magic items.
Infinite anything in a dnd game is always a risky move haha.
Session 1 - revealing would break character, so I don’t need to hammer out the details yet.
Session 40 - well shit. I knew I was forgetting something.
Full credit to the guy for managing to play 40 sessions like that, though.
Characters rarely, if ever, turn out exactly as they’re envisioned- that’s part of the beauty of them. As long as you play someone that works well with the team and keeps the party together so everyone can enjoy the adventure, then you’ve done well. Sure, this guy probably turned out to just feel like a haunted, cold person travelling with the party for no clear reason, but that can still contribute to having a solid party dynamic.
One thing I’m curious about is whether player-initiated exposition is a good idea.
Normally, the DM has to take the initiative to explore your character’s backstory. For example, he might say “You recognize the leader of the bandits - he was with the man who killed your father.”
What if instead, when the DM has a generic group of bandits attack, you remain in character and just confront the leader of the bandits. “You! You were with him! Where is the man that killed my father?”
On the one hand, this forces the DM to suddenly improvise when he already has a lot to do since he’s running the entire adventure. The DM might not like that. On the other hand, it also takes some of the work off of the DM, since it’s no longer his job to make sure that your characters’s backstory is being revealed the way you want it to be and he gets a memorable NPC for free.
If the DM doesn’t want to roleplay a dramatic dialog right there and then, he can say something like
The man was just a hired thug. All he knows is that the murderer and his elite guards left in the direction of [city the players were going to visit later anyway].
The man was killed during the fighting, but you find half of a strange icon, the holy symbol of a god you don’t recognize, hanging from a golden chain around his neck.
This way the DM can decide what the clue means when he gets around to it. Even if the bandit is just dead and the DM gives you no clues, you can roleplay your frustration. In any case, now everyone in the party knows something you (as the player) want them to know, even if it’s not something you’d tell them in character.
What if instead, when the DM has a generic group of bandits attack, you remain in character and just confront the leader of the bandits. “You! You were with him! Where is the man that killed my father?”
You’ve sort of reinvented Fate. In Fate, you can spend a fairly renewable resource to “Declare a story detail”. You typically need to justify what you’re trying to do with something on your character or the scene. So if your character has the property “Everything I do is to avenge my father”, it would be likely be an easy sell to the group to be like “That bandit! I saw him the night my father died!”
https://fate-srd.com/fate-core/fate-points#declaring-a-story-detail
Fate has a lot of good ideas that are more in line with how I think people would intuitively play RPGs. I think a lot of people playing D&D and its close relatives would enjoy Fate more. D&D is by comparison extremely limited in how creative you can be, rules-as-written.
The GM in Fate is also encouraged to invoke your character’s backstory. If your character has like “Cultists want your blood” Trouble, the GM can offer you fate points to make that come up. That’s a core part of the game’s resource economy. So when you finish dealing with the bandits and settle in to the inn, the GM can be like “As you’re sipping the host’s tea, you catch him grinning at you slyly. You hear footsteps outside. For a Fate point, how about this guy is in on the cult and signaled for his friends.”
This puts a lot more narrative control in the hands of the players. Some people really like this. Extremely controlling GMs probably won’t. Players who just “want to be told a story” but aren’t watching a movie for some reason also probably won’t. But when it works, it really makes the game’s story collaborative.
By comparison, D&D feels absolutely barebones, especially for character and narrative. It’s just missing whole systems
I really enjoyed the few times we got to play with fate. It was definitely a head scratching moment for all of us, as we’d played nothing but d&d until then.
That was a really interesting explanation. Thanks for typing it up.
This is why I am only play narrative games any more. Fate variants, Powered-by-the-Apocalypse engine, and so on. For my tastes anymore the rules have to be about how to tell a story around a table.
Sounds really cool. Wonder if there’s any way to shove it into other game systems?
Inspiration in D&D is like 60% of the way there. I tried to get my old D&D group to use it, but they were too D&D-mindset to really embrace it. By that I mean kind of passive, and very zoomed in on their character rather than the more “writer’s room” view Fate favors.
But, if you have a good group, you could stitch it onto D&D 5e without much problem. I’d do it like this:
- Replace inspiration with Fate points.
- Remove the inspiration cap. You can have more than one.
- Begin each session with 3 fate points. (Adjust to taste, but 3 is the default fate points in Fate, so.)
- Fate points can be spent per Fate
- When making a check, if you don’t like the roll, you may spend a fate point for a flat bonus or reroll if you can sell the group on how it ties into your character or the scene. For example, if your character has a pirate background and you’re trying to run across a ship’s deck in a storm, you could spend a fate point to be like “…sure it looks like I’m going to faceplant, but I’ve been in rougher seas before as a pirate”
- I’m unclear on the math but I think a +4 flat bonus would be fine.
- You may spend a fate point to declare a story detail if you can convince the group this is a good idea. This should tie into an aspect of the scene or your character, but ultimately the table must accept an idea. For example, if your character concept is “The 2nd Best Wizard from Tarant”, and you find all the scrolls in town are sold out, you could suggest your nemesis is responsible
- When making a check, if you don’t like the roll, you may spend a fate point for a flat bonus or reroll if you can sell the group on how it ties into your character or the scene. For example, if your character has a pirate background and you’re trying to run across a ship’s deck in a storm, you could spend a fate point to be like “…sure it looks like I’m going to faceplant, but I’ve been in rougher seas before as a pirate”
- Import Aspects into the game. Read about them in Fate’s SRD
- Require every important character (that’s the PCs and key NPCs) to have a High Concept. That’s a tag line. Read about it in fate. It might be “Salty Sea Wizard”, “Lucarian Royal Assassin”, “Intrepid Delivery Girl”, or whatever. Don’t try to power game this
- Require every important character to have a Trouble. Read about that in Fate, too. “Sucker for a smile”, “Unlucky Gambler”, “Memorably Weird Looking”, or whatever. These should suggest interesting ways they can come up
- Encourage players to do the phase trio (see fate srd) to generate more background aspects. For example, they made decide that two characters met when one accidentally summoned a demon in the library, and the other helped banish it. That’s a “Will read any book” and a “First name basis with at least one demon” pair of aspects, maybe.
- Add aspects to scenes. Slap them on an index card, your dry erase board, or your virtual tabletop. These are your “Stacks of unmarked boxes”, “Roaring Thunderstorm”, “There’s blood everywhere oh gods” short phrases that describe part of the scene. You want the players to interact with these. Get your players to suggest some
- Award fate points when players’ troubles make interesting things happen. When the “Unlucky gambler” puts his family sword up for ante in the back alley dice game, that’s a fate point
- Bribe players with fate points to let interesting things happen. When the player is being boring and doesn’t want to explore the old tomb, invoke their “Lover of History” aspect to encourage them.
- Consider letting players gain or improve aspects on level up. You want a player to be able to change from “Junior Wizard” to “Archmage of Elleife’s Court” over the course of the game.
Ok. Lots of text. Bear with me.
The big thing that comes with importing all of this is the creative burden on your players explodes. Players need to be thinking about their character’s backgrounds, the scene’s aspects, and how they can use them for bonuses or compel themselves for fate points. You cannot just phone it in like you can with D&D. Because let’s be honest, a lot of D&D players are not being their most creative selves. They slap down “Dave the fighter” and are good to move 30’ and attack. If that is the kind of game mode you want to play, have at it, but none of this stuff will work well with it. But if you do have players that are creative, and are willing to engage with the system, this all can really sing.
Most of the stuff there exists at the narrative level, so it would be easy to import into other systems that don’t have much stuff operating on that level. That’s most close relatives of D&D, but not most PbtA games, probably. If there’s already metacurrency, it might clash.
The second thing is that it does provide a power bump to the players. They gain a new resource they can use to bump their rolls. You can address this by slightly increasing the strength of encounters. You can also just let the players be more awesome. You can also spend fate points on your NPCs (the important ones have aspects and troubles, right?). The “Duelist of Legend” pirate captain can spend a fate point to bump his miss up to a hit when sword fighting the PC. (But they couldn’t invoke that aspect to run away, because that’s not very Duelist of Legend, is it?)
This can partly replace legendary resistance in 5e. Your lich has “Defies Death Itself” as an aspect, so he can spend a fate point to bump his save versus whatever. (You probably want one fate point per player in your GM pool in a scene, but adjust to taste.)
Anyway. I think about this a lot because I was playing D&D weekly for the past ~3 years, and I got really sick of it. As you can see, I’m happy to go on and on about it.
Woo! That was an unexpected but interesting read. I’m currently doing PF2, but I don’t see an obstacle to merging it in. Will have to read through the Fate SRD to get some idea of the topics you brought up, I suppose
Let me know how it goes!
I’ve never played PF2e but I’m told it solves many of 5e’s common complaints, and doesn’t have as much 3e baggage. I haven’t been in the mood for PF’s “here’s a big list of stuff to pick from” style of play lately, so I haven’t given it a thorough read. Fate is very much on the other end of the spectrum where you can just write down like “Priest of the Fist God” instead of having to do like cleric 2 / monk 2 / paladin 4 to get your build “online”
Also I had a typo and wrote ‘phase trip’ when it should be “phase trio”. It’s a good character creation process that other games could learn from, even without the fate specific stuff: https://fate-srd.com/fate-core/phase-trio . I’ve had too many tables where the players make their characters in isolation and then don’t have any reason to like each other or work together.
Various Powered by the Apocalypse games do include player initiated exposition
Feels like every would-be Double Vergil Sephiroth player fails to land step one drafting the “loner with a dark past”. There still has to be a reason to gaf about the party. Now, what’s fun is ‘naturally thawing the ice prince’ over the course of the first arc of his interaction with the party.
I call it the Law of Zuko: it shouldn’t take more than like five sessions for an ice prince/lone wolf/edgemancer archetype to either start visibly, but plausibly-deniably caring for the party they’re in; or to start accidentally leaving blatant hooks to the tune of trust for other players to grab onto as far as inter-personal stories are concerned. Ten if the ice prince you’re running is especially crotchety; but it’s hard for me to keep that kind of energy going that long. The only thing better than an edgy badass action hero is when the hero stops feeling the need to project edgy badassery.
One of my recent characters was your classic racist greedy dwarf. But it was her greed that knew no bounds so the racism part rarely came up because why would they be an asshole to a bunch of adventurers helping them get rich beyond imagining? Why would they be an asshole to the people giving them a ton of money for running around to save the world? It mostly manifested when we’d get minor encounters and I’d suggest we have better things to do than help out these elf randos, or during combat I’d be on top of healing any dwarves but drag my feet just a little for other people. It’s important that your character flaws still function within a group and that you’re not using them as an excuse to force solo play or excuse being a dick irl
I’m playing a Star Wars Saga Edition game right now where my character is a former privateer fighting in the Jedi Civil War for the Sith. He was fairly honest with his party members about his former criminal affiliations, that’s how he met them in the first place. The fact he was on the wrong side of the war only came out when a conversation about the war came up and he was directly asked about it. The Jedi in the party took it surprisingly well, but that’s probably more due to the conversation being completely unserious other than his admission.
Lesson learned: you can probably trust your party with your dark past.
I’ve always wanted to make a rogue with a super edgy back story and they are wearing black and all that with a mask but as soon as you talk to him he is just super enthusiastic about helping people and is super friendly with an NZ accent.
I’m in a campaign (with rotating GMs) where I’m playing a character who is literally an alien infiltrator that has infiltrated the party. Except he’s really bad at it and it’s obvious he’s an alien infiltrator, and because he’s bad at it he has no idea that it’s obvious. The party’s superiors told them to play along for now and try to find out what my character is up to.
It’s been about four years now, going on five, and I practically had to spoon-feed them useful tidbits about his mission. I’ve finally just kidnapped them all and took them back to my homeworld, we’re now running through the adventure where they escape. I had to put an alien diplomat in their cell to monologue information about them.
Still, I’ve been having fun so I don’t mind. Just amusing how much PCs are willing to trust other PCs simply because they’re PCs. :)
Sometimes it’s different for NPCs, but not always - in another campaign just now the party encountered an Aboleth who told them that he was a good Aboleth that wasn’t interested in mind control or manipulating anyone. And by the way, there’s this list of quests he’s working on and he’d appreciate some help. They jumped right in. He actually is on the level, but come on - Aboleth. If there’s anyone to be instantly suspicious of it’s someone like that.
Had this happen in a Savage Worlds campaign set in the old west. My gunslinger Mark Reid was only 5’ 6”, slight of build, and appearance half hidden by their slightly oversized debt hat and tinted glasses.
They were actually Maryrose Caroline O’Shannon, from a semi-wealthy Irish family. She’d ran away to US to avoid an arranged marriage.
I’d dropped a few vague hints, but we were playing online, so they were easy to miss. I thing the GM was planning on her old life catching up with her at some point but the group broke up before anything was ever revealed.
(Mary/Mark Read was a real life female pirate who posed a man until she ran into Anne Bonnie & Calico Jack Rackam. The character was kind of a combination of Mary & Anne, visually leaning towards the pretty boy appearance of Leo from Quick & the Dead.)
