Yesterday I ran a game of The Sharn Codex for my regular group. Overall there was a lot of intrigue and investigation. Everyone seemed to have a good time. At least, that's what they say.
When I am running Fate Core I have this issue. I am not even sure if it is an issue, really. It could be my imagination. Mountains and molehills and all that. When I am running the game, I find a few things slightly off.
My player's characters rarely take consequences. I find this happens for a couple of reasons, they use fate points to increase there defense, they tend to stay in situations where there highest three skills apply, and they tend to take the bad guys out rather quickly. Now the last problem, I know how to fix. I will just alter the stats and give that a go. It is the two former issues where I run into my disconnect. I especially find the use of fate points to defend troublesome. Fate points are there to make the actions more dramatic and interesting, whenever they would normally take stress(which is exciting and interesting) they use faitpoints to negate it by adding to defense.
I have not talked mush on my blog about my gaming beliefs, but one of the key beliefs I have is that defense is inherently boring. In my mind Ties should go to the attacker, not the defender. This is because defense negates action, whereas attack adds action. Defense is necessary, don't get me wrong. It s just not really adding to the action. Now, Fate Core deals with this in a creative way, with boosts and the like. However when the player is going to take one stress(basically they rolled one less then the antagonist on their defense roll) adding a +2 doesn't give any interesting results. It just negates the hit. And that is boring, or it can be boring. There have been instances where it was described well.
I think I am going to have to ramp up my GMing chops for the next few games. It is not that I feel anything in the game is going wrong. More that I think I should be doing better. I definitely have room to improve. Sorry if I got a little ranty therefor a bit. Here is the recording of the session, if you want to watch it.
Defense is an opportunity for a PC to look cool, competent, and in control. That's not inherently boring; it CAN be, but that's not intrinsic to it.
ReplyDeleteConsider, tho, maybe attacking them less and putting more variety out in front of them. Give them a hard obstacle to Overcome Obstacle on. (Core gives specific advice for where to set the difficulties for that: +2 above the best relevant skill.) Give them a big bad who's hard as hell to take down.
If they're hoarding those FPs to protect themselves, tho, they're voting in favor of that. Maybe you could hammer on them harder, such that they'd have to spend *all* the FPs on defenses.
Consequences can seem pretty scary. I wouldn't worry too much about players using an available mechanism built to avoid them to avoid them. :)