2: Aspects

Aspects

Aspects are what make Fate go. They’re the clearest, most interesting method for describing who your character is, and they form the basis of the fate point economy. Invoking an aspect gives you a certain amount of control over your destiny, a way to mitigate the caprice of the dice. Compels are the GM’s best friend when it comes to creating story and situation, injecting drama into a scene, or just plain throwing a wrench into the players’ plans.

Fate Core gives you the basic ways to use aspects and, for most groups, those will be enough. If you’re looking to squeeze a little more out of your aspects, crank up the complexity, or just do something different, read on.

Invoking for Effect

Fate Core talks a little bit about this concept, explaining that what was previously known as “invoking for effect” is just a fancy compel. That’s true, but maybe that’s not all it means to invoke for effect.

When you invoke for effect, you’re spending a fate point—or a free invocation—to create a specifically defined mechanical effect, something other than what a typical aspect is capable of. When you create an aspect, look at it and decide whether or not it needs a special effect attached to it. Maybe your earth mage can invoke One with the Earth to avoid falling down or being moved against his will, or maybe your psychic detective can invoke Mental Eavesdropper to read someone’s surface thoughts.

Mechanically, an aspect effect should be worth the fate point you’re spending—the equivalent to two shifts’ worth of potency, just like any other effect of invoking an aspect. Aspect effects should do something, like in the examples above, rather than provide a static bonus. A regular aspect invocation already provides a bonus, so you don’t need a special effect that does that, too. An aspect effect is a bit like having an extra rules-exception stunt that you always have to pay for, both in terms of what the effect can accomplish and the amount of complexity it adds to your character.

HOW MANY EFFECTS?

Speaking of character complexity, gms need to decide how many of these effects each player character gets. the simplest way to use this rule is to allow each player to add a special effect to her high concept, since that’s the aspect that’s most likely to be big and character-defining. you can give pcs more aspect effects, but give them too many and it’s like having too many stunts—they’re not all going to get used and the volume of choices can lead to analysis paralysis.

NPCs can have aspect effects too, but it’s best to give them only to your main NPCs and maybe a really important supporting npc. in both cases, it’s best to limit the number of aspect effects per character to one or two at most.

In both cases, it’s best to limit the number of aspect effects per character to one or two at most.

In terms of cost, it’s okay for PCs to have one or even two of these effects for free. They’re on par with a normal invocation in terms of power, and they’re more situational so they’re less likely to be used often. GMs, more than that and you’re within your rights to ask PCs to spend refresh on additional effects.

Aspect: Always Armed

Effect: Spend a fate point to reveal a small, concealable weapon—like a knife or a holdout pistol—secreted away on your person somewhere, even if you’ve recently been disarmed.

Aspect: Ninja of the Serpent Clan

Effect: Spend a fate point to vanish from sight, even if people are looking at you. This gives you justification to make a Stealth roll to hide.

Aspect: Sharp-Eyed Elvish Scout

Effect: Spend a fate point to be able to see distant things—up to a mile away—clearly and in great detail, even at night.

Scaled Invocation

When you invoke an aspect, it provides you with a +2 bonus or a reroll. This is fine most of the time, but it provides no mechanical advantage for invoking aspects that apply particularly well to a situation, nor does it provide any disincentive for invoking aspects that apply only tenuously. Another option is scaled invocation.

Scaled invocation divides aspects into three categories—tenuous invocations, relevant invocations, and perfect invocations.

Tenuous invocations only barely apply to the situation at hand, like invoking Strong Like Bull in a drinking contest or using a Pile of Garbage to break your fall from a second-story window. If an invocation is tenuous, you can only use it for a reroll. This means you’ll never get to use it to increase your roll beyond what you’d be able to roll on the dice, but you can use it to mitigate a truly disastrous roll. It also means that multiple tenuous invocations aren’t usually all that useful.

When you make a relevant invocation, you’re invoking something that clearly applies to the current situation without requiring too much justification. Maybe you’re using Fastest Gun in the West in a gunfight, or maybe you’re hiding behind a Concrete Wall for cover. It gives you exactly what an invocation normally would—a +2 or a reroll.

A perfect invocation is one that makes everyone say “Awesome!” or smile and nod enthusiastically when you announce it. It’s perfectly suited to the situation, clearly the right choice in that instance. There’s little else that might motivate your character as strongly as invoking Udru Khai Killed My Family when you’re trying to tackle him as he’s getting away. When you invoke a perfect aspect, you automatically succeed on your action, no roll necessary. If you invoke after the roll, just ignore your roll. If you need to know how many shifts you generated, assume you generated 1. This does mean you can invoke a second aspect to succeed with style, if it’s relevant.

The exception here is an attack. When you invoke a perfect aspect on an attack, you don’t have to roll. Instead, your attack is set at your skill rating plus 3. Thus, if you were attacking with your Good (+3) Fight and invoked a perfect aspect, your effort would be a Fantastic (+6), which your opponent can then defend against. If you’ve already rolled, and invoking a perfect aspect would get you a better result, take your result and add 1 to it.

Detonating Situation Aspects

Some situation aspects imply destructibility or finite use, such as Pallet of Propane Tanks or Rotted Support Columns. They can have an effect on the narrative but not necessarily a mechanical effect. If you’d like such aspects to be mechanically distinct from aspects like Inky Darkness or Cover Everywhere, you can allow PCs to detonate these situation aspects.

When a player detonates a situation aspect, he declares his intent to do so and explains how he’s using that aspect such that no one will be able to use it again. If he can do this to everyone’s satisfaction, he gets to invoke the aspect once for free.

Once he’s done invoking the aspect, it goes away and the situation changes for the worse—or at least the more dangerous. Detonating an aspect creates a new situation aspect, which represents how the old aspect was destroyed, and how it wrecked things. That last bit is the key—it has to wreck things, to complicate things. It’s no fair to detonate that Pallet of Propane Tanks and replace it with something boring like Scorch Marks. Replace it with something big and flashy and destructive, like The Building Is on Fire! or The Ceiling Is Collapsing!. The new situation aspect must always make things more tenuous for everyone, and should always be an imminent threat.

Genre Aspects

There are times you might want to reinforce something about your game’s genre. Creating issues that underscore the genre’s themes is a good way, and you can get a lot of mileage out of encouraging your players to create characters tied to the genre. Sometimes you want something mechanically unique, though.

When you use genre aspects, you’re making a change to the way aspects work in order to reinforce your chosen genre. Sometimes you’ll apply these changes to all aspects in the game, while other times you’ll want to restrict these changes to a specific subset of aspects, or even a single specific aspect. The ways in which you can change aspects are too varied to simply list here, so instead we’ll provide a few examples.

Low-Powered Aspects

This is a sweeping change to all aspects in the game, and it’s good for emulating genres where the PCs are weaker than the forces arrayed against them, such as in horror or noir. The change is simple: when you invoke an aspect, you can reroll the dice you rolled or you can get a +2 to the roll, but you cannot choose the +2 option more than once per roll if you invoke multiple aspects. This means that an aspect only increases by a small number the maximum effort a PC can exert. This is going to cause failure to be more common, which means that failure needs to always be interesting, and it needs to move the action forward just as much as success does.

If you want to allow the PCs to get multiple aspect bonuses in certain situations, consider tying such things to a stunt, such as:

Keen Senses: When you invoke aspects on a Notice roll, you can invoke any number of aspects, provided you have the fate points to cover the cost.

Quest Aspects

This is a small change, but one that can reinforce the PCs’ shared goals. It works well in fantasy settings, or any other setting where the PCs act as a group toward some sort of large goal, such as slaying the dragon or rescuing the village from bandits.

Whenever the PCs accept a quest, the group works together to create a good aspect representing that quest. For example, if the PCs are trying to save the village from a bandit king, the group might create the quest aspect Martin Half-Heart Must Be Stopped!. Any PC in the party can invoke this aspect, and it can be compelled as if it were on each PC’s character sheet, earning everyone a fate point.

If the PCs resolve a quest aspect, it’s a milestone. The scope of the milestone depends on the difficulty and length of the quest. Check out page 256 of Fate Core for more info on milestones.

Gear Aspects

In Fate, gear is in the background. Your skills take center stage when it comes to what you can do; gear is simply there to enable you to use your skills. Do you have a high Shoot? Then you’ve got a gun! Did you prioritize Drive? You’ve probably got a car. These things are assumed, and have no mechanical effect. The Extras chapter in Fate Core tells you how you can give gear mechanical teeth, adding Weapon ratings or giving a piece of gear its own aspects or skills. There’s a middle ground, though, one that doesn’t require any reduction in refresh and that allows all significant gear to be significant.

If you want to tread that middle ground, keeping gear simple and in the background but increasing its mechanical weight, you can use gear aspects. In this method, most gear behaves like it does in default Fate—it enables skill use and provides justification for actions. However, if a piece of gear has the potential to be significant to the story at some point, it becomes an aspect.

A gear aspect can be as generic or as descriptive as you desire. If you’re the sort for whom guns are important but interchangeable, maybe you just have a Revolver or a Sniper Rifle. If you want to get a little more specific, maybe it’s a Pristine Colt .45 or a Silenced XM21. Want to drill down even more? Give yourself My Father’s Service Revolver or My Well-Used, Modified XM21. The point is that, if it’s important, it gets an aspect. Things like your jacket and shoes, your sunglasses, your car keys—maybe even your car—don’t need aspects, unless they become important to the story.

A gear aspect functions like any other aspect: you can invoke it, and other people can compel it—or invoke it—against you. You can invoke a gear aspect any time it would be useful: invoke your 25 Karat Watch when you want to flash a little bling and impress someone, or invoke your Press Pass to get a little closer to that crime scene.

There’s one final rule when it comes to gear aspects, GMs—you can take them away. If a PC is starting to rely a little too much on a piece of gear, or if it just feels like time to shake things up, find a reason for that aspect to go away. Doing this is a compel, so the player can refuse it—and that’s fine—you don’t want to take away your players’ favorite parts of the game. Also, getting rid of the aspect doesn’t necessarily mean that the player loses that piece of gear permanently. A Press Pass can lose its aspect when the PC gets suspended, and a Revolver can be shut down when it runs out of ammo. In both cases, there’s a narrative way to get the aspect back, and sometimes that can kick-start an adventure on its own!

TOO MANY ASPECTS?

If each PC has five aspects and maybe four or five gear aspects, plus there are scene aspects and consequences and what have you, isn’t that too many aspects? It sure can be! Here’s a secret: gear aspects are basically portable situation aspects. As such, they can do a lot of the heavy lifting that situation aspects can, if you feel like there’s too much going on in a scene. You don’t want to eliminate situation aspects altogether, but if each PC has a number of gear aspects, start with fewer situation aspects.

It’s also a good idea to limit the number of gear aspects each PC has. Not every piece of gear needs its own aspect, so limiting PCs to three, two, or even one signature piece of gear is perfectly fine.

Finally, in a game focused on gear rather than PC relationships or previous adventures, gear aspects might replace the “phase trio” aspects (page 38 of Fate Core).

Conditions

Consequences are a great way to handle injuries, emotional scarring, and other persistent conditions within the fiction of your game. They’re not for everyone, though. Some people have trouble coming up with good consequences on the fly, while others want something more defined and concrete. Still others just want something different.

Conditions are like consequences, except that they’re pre-defined, like this:

[Diagram showing Fleeting conditions Angry and Frightened; Sticky conditions Exhausted and Hungry; Lasting conditions Broken and Wounded]

There are three kinds of conditions: fleeting, sticky, and lasting. A fleeting condition goes away when you get a chance to catch your breath and calm down. In the example above, Angry and Frightened are fleeting conditions. A sticky condition stays checked off until a specific event happens. If you’re Exhausted, you’re Exhausted until you get some sleep. If you’re Hungry, you’re Hungry until you get a good meal. Wounded and Broken are both lasting conditions. These stick around for at least one whole session, and require someone to overcome an obstacle with a passive opposition of at least Great (+4) before you can start to recover from them. Lasting conditions have two check boxes next to them, and you check them both off when you take the condition. When recovery begins, erase one check box. Erase the second one (and recover from it fully) after one more full session. You can take a lasting condition only if both of its check boxes are empty.

You suffer from a condition when the GM says you suffer from a condition—usually as a result of your narrative situation—but you can also use them to soak stress. When you take stress, you can reduce that stress by 1 if you check off a fleeting condition, by 2 stress if you check off a sticky condition, or by 4 stress if you check off a lasting condition. You can check off as many conditions as you’d like for a single hit.

Once you’re suffering from a condition, that condition is an aspect on your character sheet like any other. In this way, conditions are a lot like consequences—you can invoke them, and they can be invoked or compelled against you. As with a consequence, when you take a condition, someone else can invoke it against you for free once.

If you’re going to use conditions in your game, one thing you can do to reinforce the theme or style of your game is to come up with your own conditions. You don’t have to stick to the same spread of two fleeting/two sticky/two lasting as presented here, but you should stick to the same total number of shifts of stress-soaking: 14. Also make sure to follow the guidelines for the different types of conditions—fleeting conditions go away quickly, sticky conditions require a narrative trigger, and lasting conditions require treatment. The conditions above are non-specific enough to be used in a wide variety of settings, but tailoring conditions to your setting can be an effective way to make the characters feel more like a part of that setting.

As an example, here are alternate conditions from Jason Morningstar’s Fight Fire (found in Fate Worlds: Worlds on Fire):

[Fleeting conditions: Winded, Panicked, Bruised, Disoriented; Sticky conditoins: Dehydrated; Lasting conditions: Injured, Broken]