Today I ran the second session of my Fate Core game. Our heroes got into a lot of trouble. What with the jailbreak, the battle, and the horrible interrogation after. I ran into a few issues during the game so I thought I would talk about them here.
Issue the first, cantrips are either too powerful or not powerful enough in my game. This came up during the interrogation scene, when the Wizard had no spells that could help the conflict. He wished to use a cantrip to justify replacing Intimidation with Arcana. It worked, but that makes the Arcana skill very versatile, in fact why use other skills at all?
We came up with a few ideas on what to do about this. My first instinct was to remove cantrip entirely. Though I still think that this is the best way to go about it, there was disagreement at the table. Some believed that they are core to the experience we are trying to create. Another idea was to decrease the skill check by one or two when using a cantrip. this is fine, provided you have a three or four in your Arcana skill. those with a lesser skill will have difficulty doing cantrips at all. seeing as cantrips are supposed to be very easy magic, that just makes no sense. One other idea was brought forward. Basically you would roll arcana, and if you succeed you gain a +1 on your next non-Arcana roll. I think that this is too close to creating an advantage. I really wish to remove cantrips from the game, but that seems to go against what the players want. Thoughts on this dilemma would be helpful.
Issue part two, conflicts in Fate either go very quickly, or very slowly. I tried to adjust this in my game by switching form conflict to contest and back again. I am unsure how successful that was. basically the players are very good at pinning down and killing the bad guys. I need to work on explaining the stakes of the conflict better. I don't know...
Anyway, if you want to here is the recording of the game, should you wish to watch it:
No comments:
Post a Comment