Anyone who has read this blog will know that i've devoted a considerable number of posts to trialing various methods of represented spacecraft for my Fate Core Rogue Trader game and that, after a lot of consideration, I settled on a fairly narrative style of adjudicating them.
Recently in my Serpents Fall G+ hangout Fate Accelerated fantasy game the players have captured a pinnace (a small ship) from an enemy pirate; inevitably at some point the players will want to make use of this ship (and quite rightly too) so i've started early musings about how to represent the ship (and potentially other vehicles) using the Fate Accelerated system.
These are my early musings:
- Vehicles should have the same basic approaches as players (Careful, Clever, Flashy, Forceful, Quick & Sneaky)
- Vehicles should also have Aspects and Stunts in the same way as players.
- Vehicles should not have stress boxes, only consequence boxes (because it's more interesting when a ship or vehicle is hit to have it cause a noticable effect).
- Players should be able to take vehicle stress on their characters if they choose in order to spare the vehicle damage (and to represent being injured by falling masonry, timbers, etc)
- Players should be able to substitute their characters Approach score for certain of the ships default scores.
- Vehicles should have some indicator of scale and how this affects their interactions with vehicles/individuals or smaller/large scale.
I hope in future posts to expand on this and come up with some quick and easy rules for vehicles in Fate Accelerated :)
You know, at first I was a little distressed at not having clear-cut vehicle rules for Fate games. However, I've come to embrace the whole "Bronze Rule" approach to them, and to start seeing the game representations of vehicles, and the rules governing them, as something that I can expand or contract as my game requires. Sometimes a vehicle just needs to be an aspect and a consequence, and I'm okay with that; at other times, it really, really needs to be more complex and deep than that.
ReplyDeleteAnd so I like what you're doing here. This interpretation of vehicles suggests a game where such devices are important; I'd use this kind of scheme to describe, say, the Millennium Falcon, or KITT (because I COULD, that's why), and so this framework is shaping up to be a useful one for situations like those.
Keep going.
Many thanks :) Yes, you're absolutely right, vehicles in Fate can be as simple or as complex as you want, i've put the next part of the rules here
Deletehttp://wh40krpg.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/fate-accelerated-vehicles-first-draft.html
although I don't think they'll need expanding much more for my purposes, the plan will be to produce some 'templates' for existing vehicles (in the game world i'm running) and then perhaps some sample Stunts, etc