Powered by the Fate-pocalypse: Initial Ideas

After reading a very amusing blog post by Ryan Macklin (http://ryanmacklin.com/2014/07/fateworld/) regarding the recent RPGGeeks best of RPGs tournament in which Fate and Dungeon World faced off against each other in the final (with Dungeon World winning) I started thinking seriously about how feasible it would be to create a game that incorporated elements from both Fate and Dungeon World since I love both of the systems.

Over the next couple of weeks i'm going to be attempting to kludge together a system that brings together the elements that I am most fond of from both of the system; please keep in mind that there are no doubt numerous ways to combine the systems, I will not be looking to create a definitive system, but rather one that I consider to be simple and fun and that (above all) is playable.

* * *

The Ethos of both Games

I decided first of all to decide what the concepts were from both games that I wanted to include in this combination:

from Fate:

• Aspects - These little story tags are an inherent part of Fate, but have caused some confusion for some RPers, if possible i'd love to keep the idea of having story tags but simplify them somehow.
• Versatility - a very simple rules system that allows scope for lots of different genres and types of game.
• Guidelines for creating customised Stunts - the ability to create your own Stunts using the guidelines is, for me one of the great things about Fate.
• A simplicity of actions - Fate only has four different types of actions making it very simple to grasp.

from Dungeon World:

• A unified dice mechanic - Dungeon World has a very simple dice mechanic involving rolling 2D6 and adding a modifier, a result of less than 6 means that the GM effectively determines what happens, 7-9 means the player succeeds with a cost and 10+ means they succeed with no cost. I love the way this mechanic works in play, keeping the dice rolling (when used very simple).
• Encouraging players to contribute to the campaign world - Dungeon World has numerous moves that allow the players to contribute (or find out about elements of the campaign world history of events), I definitely want to keep this.

Mapping Across the Elements

As my second step I decided to have a look at the elements in the systems and see if they could be mapped across to elements in the other.

Fate - Dungeon World

• Aspects => ??? (possibly tags)
• Approaches => Attributes (will prob use the DW att mod spread but remove the original stats and just stick with the modifiers, as Fate does)
• Stunts => advanced moves
• Actions => basic/advanced moves
• 4DF + approach => 2d6 + mod (i'm more than likely going to stick with the DW style of rolling since I want to use the game's dice mechanic)
• Stress/Consequences => HP/conditions (probably going to go with DW's HP/conditions for now and see how this works)

* * *

I'm pretty happy with the start i've made, i'll continue to work on the combined system and make blog posts detailing my progress.