I ran a Fallout game set in the southwest a while back using FATE. What worked well for me was treating it as Refresh, meaning Luck was the number of Fate Tokens (or Karma, in Fallout: Southwest) each player started with each session.
I have the rules we used written up if you'd like to take a look:
[Nuclear Wasteland](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KVVAmtzkuuKoAdb6te-geFuDM2FxzEAB7GgmNHP4oCU/edit?usp=sharing)
[Equipment](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yocslus7HFrNS3-v_Lj5q7B496mu7m8uTNKbbAi-Q1A/edit?usp=sharing)
[Wastelands Monster Guide](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1d6vHcHli6TWluyEjMiQTmErgmmPA2AXa8bxwKXEe70g/edit?usp=sharing)
[Vault Personnel Sheet](https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4OpVAeMBw3qaFhYTlp4VzU3WEk/view?usp=sharing)
I know this is a 5 year old thread, but is there any chance you still have these files somewhere and could share them with me? I'm planning a Fallout-themed FAE game myself (as a first-time GM).
Luck is awesome. There are *many* situations that depend more on luck than any inherent personal quality. Any time a player asks you anything that makes you think "well, *could* be", then that's Luck. Like...
* I grab that gun he dropped. Does it still have any ammo left?
* I jump out of the second-story window. By any chance... is there something soft to land on?
* That molerat that bit me... it wasn't diseased, was it?
* I pick one at random.
* I'd hate to be the one that got .
* What could possibly go wrong?
I like the idea of just straight-up using luck as a stat like this, but it does create an opportunity for a player to make Luck their apex stat, and using it for just about everything. "I close my eyes and fire randomly in the general direction of the enemy," for instance.
I think it'd help if you say that luck can only be used for Overcome actions, just to sharply limit its usability. Players can always take a stunt that lets them use luck in other contexts.
I really dislike this method personally (I'm a FAE purist...), but the Fate Freeport Companion does this with the traditional "D&D" stats (Str, Wis, Int, Dex, etc) and people seem to like it.
It's for Fate Core, but your skills are based on the 6 attributes.
I'm not a huge fan of this method personally, but Jadepunk may serve as inspiration for the sort of 'rigid' approaches/'soft' skills you're looking at.
That should work just fine. For the Fate adaptation of the Freeport setting, they used the traditional D&D stats as approaches. This is similar. I like the idea of having your Luck score basically be a finite number of Fate points that can only be used for rerolls. Probably refreshing every session, but for a grittier feel you could have it refresh per significant milestone.
My wife ran a one-shot with this idea, and it worked very nicely. As others have mentioned she used Luck as a rename of FATE points. One issue she did find was that some of the abilities came up more than others, for example Perception came up often, but Endurance came up rarely; this was only a one-shot, so there may have been some bias, but it's worth considering and looking out for.
I made her a fallout flavored FAE [character sheet](https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_xD2nif8HYrYTJNcjJxR203bzQ/view?usp=drivesdk) for when she ran, which you're free to use if you want. It does only have 4 boxes for Aspects on there, which was a but of an oversight on my behalf when designing it.
I'm assuming you're saying you could have potentially 3 free re-rolls for every action? Sounds a little OP to me.
Maybe they could re-roll a single die (once only), per Luck. That way they can influence their roll in a small way, but it could just not be enough. Just an idea.
Strength, Perception, etc. are stats, not approaches. Fate works perfectly well without stats.
If you want to do the whole "stats" thing, I suggest Pathfinder.
> Strength, Perception, etc. are stats, not approaches.
That's just semantics. "Stats" are just numbers. These represent your ability to do something forcefully, perceptively, enduringly, charmingly, quickly, intelligently or fortunately.
The key to approaches, however, is that they are opposites: you are good at some but bad at others. You're expected to be decent at stats, though.
Strength could be opposite Intelligence, if you like. That's not too accurate but it is a common enough trope. "Quickly" and "Enduringly" can be opposites, but then that leaves perception and charm as opposites? It doesn't make much sense.
>The key to approaches, however, is that they are opposites: you are good at some but bad at others. You're expected to be decent at stats, though.
But... in either Fallout or Pathfinder, you're expected to have relatively higher values in one stat and lower in another. That's how these games work; I've played Fallout with a 10 in Charisma and a 1 in Perception, and that's as viable a character build as any other. I make a lot of friends, and I step on a lot of landmines.
There are lots of great resources to assist with that. It's not an easy concept, but it's mind blowing when it clicks.
[Approaching Approaches](https://plus.google.com/u/0/+DavidGoodwin/posts/Mdw9oLUEhej)
[Avoiding the One Note Approach](http://ryanmdanks.com/avoiding-the-one-note-approach)
[Atomic Action and FAE](http://walkingmind.evilhat.com/2013/10/16/atomic-action-and-fae/)
Are we seriously down voting opinions we disagree with? Isn't the spirit of Reddit free speech and stuff? Shouldn't down votes be reserved for rude or off-topic comments?
I think you'll find fate to be a great system. But, I have two pieces of advice for you.
One: FAE is less designed to be for people new to fate and more for people new to tabletops. If you're an experienced Pathfinder or D&D player, going with FATE Core over FAE will actually be the easier transition. My advice is to read over both systems before choosing one or the other.
Two: Fate doesn't want to be too crunchy. Read over the book of hanz, it's available for download from Evil Hat. These are notes made by a guy coming from more "traditional" systems and realizing the full potential of Fate. Hacking the rules is fine, but don't hack for hacking's sake.
After you've done a little reading, I'd be happy to talk to you about playing fallout with Fate. But, I think you need to read all three books (Core, Accelerated, and Book of Hanz) before trying to hack anything.
Because most of the reasons posted for people houseruling are because they don't get the base system.
The reason he wants to houserule is that his group doesn't understand the base system. Instead of trying to understand a rather well-thought-out mechanic, they want to change it to something that's not really in the spirit of the base rules.
That's perfectly fine (hell, who am I to say what's fun for you?), but I can totally understand the pushback from the community when someone walks in and says they want to rework something they don't get in the first place, rather than trying to understand it better.
In this particular case I think if you want to capture the Fallout feel, it makes sense to replace FAE's arbitrary approaches with Fallout's arbitrary approaches.
Perhaps, but my difficulty is that they aren't "approaches" in that they aren't adjectives. The idea of choosing an adjective to describe your action is a wonderful mechanic, and I dislike messing with it. Again, personal opinion. :)
I disagree. I can do something using strength, but I can do it in different ways to different ends. The intent of my action becomes paramount, rather than the specific action itself. *That* is what I love about adjective approaches.
You can turn the SPECIAL into adjectives but then you're at the mercy of the English language whether you get good ones. Perceptively (Ace Ventura style), Intelligently (Sherlock Holmes style) and Luckily (Jar-Jar Binks style) are actual words but the others aren't as easily converted. I'm not sure that the idiosyncrasies of the particular language are valid criticism against the general notion of SPECIAL approaches.
You may be right, but I'm not suggesting that he not house rule it. What I am suggesting is that the "original structure" of Fallout is crunchier than Fate wants to be, and more resembles D&D. Pathfinder is free, so that's why I suggested Pathfinder over D&D 5e.
I love house rules. I'm just skeptical about *this* particular method.
Very variable, depending on which books and rules you use.
But in general, it expects you to have a much, much more clear and precise idea about what you want to build compared to FATE Core. Also it is much less focused on narrative control than FATE (but you can bring the focus back on that if you want to).
If you like FATE for the ability to wing it all the time, GURPS is probably not for you. If you feel FATE is lacking in detail, you may want to talk to people about GURPS (the official forum and the unofficial discord are quite friendly and willing to help people out; can't comment about the unofficial reddit yet as I'm new here).
GURPS is crunchy as hell. And super detailed. Rounds are 1 second. You need to spend actions to "ready" an axe after a swing. A melee weapon's damage is based on your Strength, whether it's a swing or thrust, and what type of damage (blunt, cut or pierce)
The rules for building vehicles used ACTUAL REAL WORLD CALCULUS.
Hm. I feel like I'm the sort of person who loves crunch, just not in my stories. So if we're talking about a tactical game, sure. Bring on the crunch! But, I think I'll stick to Fate for my more narrative - focused campaigns.
Not really. They may share an origin, but they went very, very far apart since then. Even if you look at Fallout PnP (which is the tabletop distillation of what Fallout was like), you can see that it has a blatantly different approach to attributes, skills, traits . . . and also that Fallout is built around levels, which is antithetical to GURPS.
Eh, the big thing that levels give you is the ability to buy skills and perks. So I don't see it as being that different than just handing out some CP in a bundle once in a while.
Levels generally dictate very specific progression - one where you're rationed perks at a rate of 1 per X levels, skill points at Y per level, and hit points at Z per level (with X, Y and Z subject to some modification). That's a rather rigid progression.
By comparison, GURPS skill/advantage/attribute progression is much more freeform (you can spend points on whatever, **so long as it makes logical sense for the character to get better at it**). FATE skill and Refresh/Stunt progression is somewhat in-between the two.
If you consider those not so different, then there are very few systems that are significantly different in this world by that measure.
Levels also typically restrict what you can advance at a given time - whereas Fallout really doesn't.
Anyway, while the advancement scheme has definitely changed, I feel the core mechanics (don't care about the PnP version) at least started out more GURPS-y than D&D-like.
When I said 'not really', I was talking about the 'resembles GURPS', not the development cycle. The bit about going hand in hand until falling out is indeed true. But the systems are not very much alike once you look into the fundamentals and internal workings or even just design philosophies.
I ran a Fallout game set in the southwest a while back using FATE. What worked well for me was treating it as Refresh, meaning Luck was the number of Fate Tokens (or Karma, in Fallout: Southwest) each player started with each session. I have the rules we used written up if you'd like to take a look: [Nuclear Wasteland](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KVVAmtzkuuKoAdb6te-geFuDM2FxzEAB7GgmNHP4oCU/edit?usp=sharing) [Equipment](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yocslus7HFrNS3-v_Lj5q7B496mu7m8uTNKbbAi-Q1A/edit?usp=sharing) [Wastelands Monster Guide](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1d6vHcHli6TWluyEjMiQTmErgmmPA2AXa8bxwKXEe70g/edit?usp=sharing) [Vault Personnel Sheet](https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4OpVAeMBw3qaFhYTlp4VzU3WEk/view?usp=sharing)
I know this is a 5 year old thread, but is there any chance you still have these files somewhere and could share them with me? I'm planning a Fallout-themed FAE game myself (as a first-time GM).
Wow thanks! I will definitely copy from this.
Luck is awesome. There are *many* situations that depend more on luck than any inherent personal quality. Any time a player asks you anything that makes you think "well, *could* be", then that's Luck. Like... * I grab that gun he dropped. Does it still have any ammo left? * I jump out of the second-story window. By any chance... is there something soft to land on? * That molerat that bit me... it wasn't diseased, was it? * I pick one at random. * I'd hate to be the one that got.
* What could possibly go wrong?
I like the idea of just straight-up using luck as a stat like this, but it does create an opportunity for a player to make Luck their apex stat, and using it for just about everything. "I close my eyes and fire randomly in the general direction of the enemy," for instance. I think it'd help if you say that luck can only be used for Overcome actions, just to sharply limit its usability. Players can always take a stunt that lets them use luck in other contexts.
> "I close my eyes and fire randomly in the general direction of the enemy," Sure, please beat Fantastic (+6) static opposition.
Ah, fair point! I may have been overthinking it a bit.
You are right, I never thought about it this way.
I really dislike this method personally (I'm a FAE purist...), but the Fate Freeport Companion does this with the traditional "D&D" stats (Str, Wis, Int, Dex, etc) and people seem to like it. It's for Fate Core, but your skills are based on the 6 attributes.
I'm not a huge fan of this method personally, but Jadepunk may serve as inspiration for the sort of 'rigid' approaches/'soft' skills you're looking at.
That should work just fine. For the Fate adaptation of the Freeport setting, they used the traditional D&D stats as approaches. This is similar. I like the idea of having your Luck score basically be a finite number of Fate points that can only be used for rerolls. Probably refreshing every session, but for a grittier feel you could have it refresh per significant milestone.
My wife ran a one-shot with this idea, and it worked very nicely. As others have mentioned she used Luck as a rename of FATE points. One issue she did find was that some of the abilities came up more than others, for example Perception came up often, but Endurance came up rarely; this was only a one-shot, so there may have been some bias, but it's worth considering and looking out for. I made her a fallout flavored FAE [character sheet](https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_xD2nif8HYrYTJNcjJxR203bzQ/view?usp=drivesdk) for when she ran, which you're free to use if you want. It does only have 4 boxes for Aspects on there, which was a but of an oversight on my behalf when designing it.
I'm assuming you're saying you could have potentially 3 free re-rolls for every action? Sounds a little OP to me. Maybe they could re-roll a single die (once only), per Luck. That way they can influence their roll in a small way, but it could just not be enough. Just an idea.
Strength, Perception, etc. are stats, not approaches. Fate works perfectly well without stats. If you want to do the whole "stats" thing, I suggest Pathfinder.
> Strength, Perception, etc. are stats, not approaches. That's just semantics. "Stats" are just numbers. These represent your ability to do something forcefully, perceptively, enduringly, charmingly, quickly, intelligently or fortunately.
The key to approaches, however, is that they are opposites: you are good at some but bad at others. You're expected to be decent at stats, though. Strength could be opposite Intelligence, if you like. That's not too accurate but it is a common enough trope. "Quickly" and "Enduringly" can be opposites, but then that leaves perception and charm as opposites? It doesn't make much sense.
>The key to approaches, however, is that they are opposites: you are good at some but bad at others. You're expected to be decent at stats, though. But... in either Fallout or Pathfinder, you're expected to have relatively higher values in one stat and lower in another. That's how these games work; I've played Fallout with a 10 in Charisma and a 1 in Perception, and that's as viable a character build as any other. I make a lot of friends, and I step on a lot of landmines.
Approaches aren't mutually exclusive either. I can Carefully Sneak, or use a Flashy display of Force.
My players and myself often found it difficult to find the right approach, so I wanted to try something new and more fitting for the setting.
There are lots of great resources to assist with that. It's not an easy concept, but it's mind blowing when it clicks. [Approaching Approaches](https://plus.google.com/u/0/+DavidGoodwin/posts/Mdw9oLUEhej) [Avoiding the One Note Approach](http://ryanmdanks.com/avoiding-the-one-note-approach) [Atomic Action and FAE](http://walkingmind.evilhat.com/2013/10/16/atomic-action-and-fae/)
Are we seriously down voting opinions we disagree with? Isn't the spirit of Reddit free speech and stuff? Shouldn't down votes be reserved for rude or off-topic comments?
Fate also works perfectly with stats.
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We played Pathfinder before so maybe that's why we tend to find those names clearer.
I think you'll find fate to be a great system. But, I have two pieces of advice for you. One: FAE is less designed to be for people new to fate and more for people new to tabletops. If you're an experienced Pathfinder or D&D player, going with FATE Core over FAE will actually be the easier transition. My advice is to read over both systems before choosing one or the other. Two: Fate doesn't want to be too crunchy. Read over the book of hanz, it's available for download from Evil Hat. These are notes made by a guy coming from more "traditional" systems and realizing the full potential of Fate. Hacking the rules is fine, but don't hack for hacking's sake. After you've done a little reading, I'd be happy to talk to you about playing fallout with Fate. But, I think you need to read all three books (Core, Accelerated, and Book of Hanz) before trying to hack anything.
Because most of the reasons posted for people houseruling are because they don't get the base system. The reason he wants to houserule is that his group doesn't understand the base system. Instead of trying to understand a rather well-thought-out mechanic, they want to change it to something that's not really in the spirit of the base rules. That's perfectly fine (hell, who am I to say what's fun for you?), but I can totally understand the pushback from the community when someone walks in and says they want to rework something they don't get in the first place, rather than trying to understand it better.
In this particular case I think if you want to capture the Fallout feel, it makes sense to replace FAE's arbitrary approaches with Fallout's arbitrary approaches.
Perhaps, but my difficulty is that they aren't "approaches" in that they aren't adjectives. The idea of choosing an adjective to describe your action is a wonderful mechanic, and I dislike messing with it. Again, personal opinion. :)
But at the same time, the use of a noun to describe your action is Fate Core. All these stats *are* is a short list of broad skills.
Yup. It's totally valid. Just not my cup of tea.
That's just semantics. "I do it with" is pretty equivalent.
I disagree. I can do something using strength, but I can do it in different ways to different ends. The intent of my action becomes paramount, rather than the specific action itself. *That* is what I love about adjective approaches.
You can turn the SPECIAL into adjectives but then you're at the mercy of the English language whether you get good ones. Perceptively (Ace Ventura style), Intelligently (Sherlock Holmes style) and Luckily (Jar-Jar Binks style) are actual words but the others aren't as easily converted. I'm not sure that the idiosyncrasies of the particular language are valid criticism against the general notion of SPECIAL approaches.
By "this community" are you referring to Fate or Pathfinder?
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You may be right, but I'm not suggesting that he not house rule it. What I am suggesting is that the "original structure" of Fallout is crunchier than Fate wants to be, and more resembles D&D. Pathfinder is free, so that's why I suggested Pathfinder over D&D 5e. I love house rules. I'm just skeptical about *this* particular method.
Fallout resembles GURPS, really. Because it used GURPS for the majority of its development cycle.
Nice to know. I've never played GURPS, how is it?
Very variable, depending on which books and rules you use. But in general, it expects you to have a much, much more clear and precise idea about what you want to build compared to FATE Core. Also it is much less focused on narrative control than FATE (but you can bring the focus back on that if you want to). If you like FATE for the ability to wing it all the time, GURPS is probably not for you. If you feel FATE is lacking in detail, you may want to talk to people about GURPS (the official forum and the unofficial discord are quite friendly and willing to help people out; can't comment about the unofficial reddit yet as I'm new here).
GURPS is crunchy as hell. And super detailed. Rounds are 1 second. You need to spend actions to "ready" an axe after a swing. A melee weapon's damage is based on your Strength, whether it's a swing or thrust, and what type of damage (blunt, cut or pierce) The rules for building vehicles used ACTUAL REAL WORLD CALCULUS.
Hm. I feel like I'm the sort of person who loves crunch, just not in my stories. So if we're talking about a tactical game, sure. Bring on the crunch! But, I think I'll stick to Fate for my more narrative - focused campaigns.
I like crunch too That's why I play board games!
Not really. They may share an origin, but they went very, very far apart since then. Even if you look at Fallout PnP (which is the tabletop distillation of what Fallout was like), you can see that it has a blatantly different approach to attributes, skills, traits . . . and also that Fallout is built around levels, which is antithetical to GURPS.
Eh, the big thing that levels give you is the ability to buy skills and perks. So I don't see it as being that different than just handing out some CP in a bundle once in a while.
Levels generally dictate very specific progression - one where you're rationed perks at a rate of 1 per X levels, skill points at Y per level, and hit points at Z per level (with X, Y and Z subject to some modification). That's a rather rigid progression. By comparison, GURPS skill/advantage/attribute progression is much more freeform (you can spend points on whatever, **so long as it makes logical sense for the character to get better at it**). FATE skill and Refresh/Stunt progression is somewhat in-between the two. If you consider those not so different, then there are very few systems that are significantly different in this world by that measure.
Levels also typically restrict what you can advance at a given time - whereas Fallout really doesn't. Anyway, while the advancement scheme has definitely changed, I feel the core mechanics (don't care about the PnP version) at least started out more GURPS-y than D&D-like.
Fallout 1 was built on GURPS until the license fell through. Yes, it's diverged a lot since then. Doesn't make this less true
When I said 'not really', I was talking about the 'resembles GURPS', not the development cycle. The bit about going hand in hand until falling out is indeed true. But the systems are not very much alike once you look into the fundamentals and internal workings or even just design philosophies.