Fate Convention Games - Some Thoughts

I was able to play four different variations on Fate at #gencon2014 and I enjoyed myself.  The experience, however, has crystallized some strong opinions on my part about convention games of Fate (although some of these apply more generally). For your amusement, here are my thoughts...

• Spend less than 15 minutes in setting creation.  Yes, setting creation is fun, if you are going to use it to it's fullest over multiple sessions.  But in a convention game, no matter how cool you think your particular setting creation variation is for Fate, it is just getting in the way.  
• Spend less than 15 minutes on character creation.  This means a number of things.  For example, have the players fill out just the first column of the pyramid, and let them do the rest in play.  Or just come up with the High Concept and Trouble aspects, and fill out the rest in play.  
• Stunts are for the most part too complicated to come up with in a convention game of Fate Core. They don't seem like it, I know, but they are.   Especially for players who are inexperience with Fate.  Fate Accelerated can get away with it, because the Approaches take less time than skills, and there is no "Use Skill A in place of Skill B" option.
• Extras are beyond the pale for creation in a convention game.  If your Fate variation makes extensive use of Extras, then you really need to bring pre-gens to the table.  
• Coming up with this stuff (Aspects, which skills to pick, etc.) is hard work for some players, especially people new to Fate.   Some people just need to time to come up with character concepts, aspects, etc., that they are interested in and will enjoy, and making them do it quickly is a recipe for frustration and embarrassment.   You think you are providing a fun experience for those players, but you really aren't.
• Pre-Gens are your friend.  Really they are and you should be using them.  Especially if your Fate version has some complicated extras, or a lot of setting specific stuff, pre-gens are actually much better at demonstrating how cool your setting is.  It's easy as pie to come up with customizable pre-gens for Fate, just fill in the High Concept and Trouble, the first Skill column, and give them three stunts.  People are playing much quicker, and can still make their characters their own.
• Do not spend more than 15 minutes going over rules.  
• That being said, make sure you hit the following explicitly: Invoking Aspects for a +2 or a reroll (and don't forget the reroll!); Compelling Aspects to earn Fate Points (and don't forget to mention self-compels); How to roll the dice and add a skill value; the four action types, and the four outcomes, briefly, but then say that you will explain these in more detail as we play; mention Stress boxes and consequences in passing, but don't bother explaining in detail until someone has actually been attacked.  That should not take more than 15 minutes is you are purposeful and business-like about it.
• Make sure you have a clear cheat sheet for rules handy, and constantly refer people to it during the game.  If your variation has any particular extras that are important, make sure the cheat sheet describes them.
• If your setting is in any way not immediately obvious, have at least a one page handout that describes it's major selling points.  
• Make sure you explain, explicitly, on the first few actions of players, what they are doing.  Say the type of the action out loud ("sounds like you are trying to Create an Advantage, there, that means you are going to create an aspect, or discover one, here is how we do that..."), when the result is figured, say the outcome out loud ("ok, you have a tie on that Create Advantage, that means you don't get an aspect, but you do get a boost").  Use the actual words in the rulebook, and use them consistently.
• Demonstrate by example!  Have your GM characters roll a Create Advantage as their first action. Compel a situation aspect on a player as early as possible.  Invite a compel on a GM character aspect at the earliest opportunity.  Examples in play, explicitly explained, are much better than any amount of rules explanation before play starts.
• If you are not actually role-playing within 40 minutes of the start of the convention game, you are pissing off players.  Really and truly, regardless of how much fun you think they are having, they aren't. At least half of them are just angry that they are still talking about rules stuff and creating characters.  40 minutes is probably still too long.
• For crying out loud, make sure everybody gets the damn spotlight every once in a while!  Jumpin' Jehoshaphat, it makes me so frikkin' angry when I see a player sitting across from me in a convention game and it has been at least 15 minutes since the GM has last asked them what they are doing, or given them a chance for some input.  This is GM'ing 101, my friends, it's an entry-level skill.  If you are worried that you can't keep track, literally play the whole game as one big conflict, going around and around and taking turns, because that is much better than leaving a player out in the cold.  

EDIT: added from comments - here is a rule of thumb for how much time setting and character creation can and should take in any game: no more than 1/8th of the time that will be spent playing.  4 hour game?  No more than 30 minutes.  Four session game?  No more than 1/2 session.  8 session game?  Use a whole session.  Obviously, one session is probably enough for any game, but I could see a long term game of something like Fantasy Hero/Champions needing even more time (although it probably isn't spent in the session).

Everyone at the table should be a candy machine

My first rant post!  It's pretty weak as rants go, but it's preachy, dogmatic, directed at something that annoys me, most of the people who read it will think it is self-evident, and it makes me seem oh so much better than everyone else.  So, a rant, woohoo!

Let's talk about candy.  Candy is the affirmation, the laughter, the attention, that people playing a role-playing game give to each other.  When you say something cool, and someone laughs or gasps, that's candy.  When you describe your character being awesome, and people are raptly listening to you, that's candy.  If you are playing a role-playing game, you almost certainly want candy.  Otherwise I'm not sure why you are playing.

The GM can and should be a candy machine.  Piles and piles of stuff have been written as advice to GM's, and a lot of it is about how to give out candy to players.  That's fine.  But the GM is not the ONLY candy machine.  When I GM and...

• ...someone is talking and all the other players are not paying attention, those other players are treating me as the ONLY candy machine, and it makes me mad.  
• ...a player only ever talks to me, describes everything to me instead of to the other players, even when that player's character is interacting with another player character, that player is treating me as the ONLY candy machine, or worse, the only candy machine whose candy he cares for.  That makes me mad.

The fact is that everyone at the table should be a candy machine!  Everyone should be handing out the candy of joy to their fellow players, not just the GM.

You want to be a candy machine, right?  When I play, I know I want to be.  So let us all join together and vow to be the candy machines we would want others to be for us.  It's the candy machine corollary to the golden rule.  Here are 6 concrete steps you and I can take to give our fellow players some candy.

1. When we are describing what our character's are doing, we consciously look towards the non-GM players; they are our audience, not the GM.
2. If our character is interacting with another player character, we look at that player during the interaction, not the GM.  They are our candy machine, and we are theirs.
3. When someone else is talking, we freaking look at them, be quiet and listen.  This is like the minimal candy; it's the Starburst fruit chew of candy.
4. We put our rule book on the floor under the table.  If we have to look at it, we always put it back under the table.  We cannot give candy while reading a rulebook.
5. We put the *&$#^ smart phone away, at least three meters out of our reach to physically avoid temptation.  Tablets too, unless we are using them as rulebooks, in which case see point 4.  Trying to interact with someone who is looking at a phone is like anti-candy, it's like stinky asparagus (and if you reply that you like asparagus, I'm sorry, but you are just wrong).
6. We pick the person in our group who we least want to give candy to.  We give them some candy at least once per session.

Be the candy machine.

Dungeon World moves as fortune telling

Haven't written here in a while.  I have lots of potential posts, but the energy has subsided.  Not surprising.  But I do have something I want to pontificate on today, Dungeon World moves.  Let's use Hack and Slash as the example.  Remember that the trigger for Hack and Slash is "when you attack an enemy in melee".

Over at a post on the Dungeon World Tavern on Google+, a poster talks about how he has had trouble figuring out how to model granularity in the difficulty of fights.  To summarize his concern, he feels that he cannot judge fine gradations in relative skill between opponents.  This is related to the advice given in the Dungeon World Guide on page 18.  If you are going up to an enormous giant, what you are doing with that giant doesn't count as "melee" for the purpose of the trigger.  Nor does stabbing some poor schlub of a drunken city guard in the back.    But what about conscript city guards versus normal city guards versus elite city guards?  The poster is concerned that the game gives him no, or at least very cryptic and difficult to use, tools to demonstrate these gradations.

I really hadn't felt this problem in my limited experience. But after thinking about why that is, I realized that since the first time I played Dungeon World, I have been treating Moves as fortune telling, not as modelling any process.  Here is what I mean.

Your Fighter (the player character) is going up against some city guards and their leader.  As the GM, I think the guard leader is a better fighter than your Fighter.  But in a very really sense in Dungeon World, I have no idea if this is actually true.  There is no metric (such as Qualities in Fate Core) to make this determination.  Whether this is true or not is contingent on the results of your Hack and Slash (and Defy Danger, and whatever else) Moves, and has a big whack of random chance involved in it.

Therefore, when we play out the fight, the mechanic is forcing us to follow the Agenda "Play to find out what happens".  If you roll a lot of 6's, I guess that guard leader really was a better fighter than you.  If you roll a lot of 10's, guess I was wrong.  The Move is not a model of some action and how difficult it is, the Move is a checking of the fates, like consulting the I Ching.   Granularity just doesn't exist.  You figure out the real skill difference between the fictional participants after the fact, as a consequence of the Moves, not before hand.  

This is a different model of role-playing rules than almost every other game most of us have ever played.  This goes to what Rob Donughue said in this other blog post: Dungeon World may be best if treated "as a diceless game that happens to have dice".  The only game I can think of that explicitly treats the dice mechanic as a kind of fortune telling rather than modelling some kind of process is Four Colors Al Fresco, where dice rolls are interpreted as literally consulting the astrological  influences on a particular situation.  But Dungeon World is doing the same thing stealthily.

Therefore, I avoid any attempt to find or create granularity in difficulty.  Instead, I accept that I am just as uncertain as my players are as to the exact capabilities of the NPC's, monsters, and threats I create.  There really is a whole big grey area between enormous giants and drunken incompetent city guards, and the game doesn't want me to break it down into finer categories.  "Play to find out what happens".

EDIT: Spout Lore is an even better example.  The trigger is "When you consult your accumulated knowledge about something".  Now, like Hack and Slash, there are cases where the move would not trigger; cases where you actually have no accumulated knowledge (e.g. a Barbarian wondering about esoteric magic theory).  But everyone else?  The Move happens.  If you are just a novice in magical theory, or an ancient master...roll the dice.  Roll a 6?  I guess that means there was a gap in your prodigious knowledge, ancient master!

30 years...

That's how long I've been playing role-playing games.  30 years.  


I decided that there are probably a few things I have done over the years that others might find interesting.  Also, I wouldn't mind just having a place to put everything.  So, this is it.

We'll see how long it lasts...