What follows are questions both philosophical and mechanical for the gamers designers among us.

I am rereading Fate - I backed it's Kickstarter program - and have been considering what it offers in terms of game design. It presents some ideas and terminology I am considering employing once it is really designated "Open." This includes such things as the Fate Points, Aspects and the system for building conflicts and combat. These appear to nicely resolve some issues I have been grappling with as I build my system.

However, the adjudicating mechanic I am developing is different from the one employed in the Fate rules set. Hicks and company employ a novel variation on dice rolling while the system I am developing uses card games. As such my game will be more different than similar to Fate.

Which raises the question, will using terms like Fate Points, Aspects and the system for building conflicts and combat be useful or be a problem? Those terms are carefully used in Fate and my use of them would only "sorta" match their definition and use in Fate. People familiar with Fate will have certain expectations for the use Fate Points, Aspects and the system for building conflicts and combat while my use of these terms will be different because my game is using card games, not dice rolls.

So they might be confusing and distracting rather than clarifying and useful?

Not a fate expert by any means, but I'll guess 'distracting, use different terms'?

I'm not sure how big a problem this will be. There are already Fate-based games that use different game mechanics; d6-d6 possibly being the most common alternative. And there are also games that use aspects differently; Houses of the Blooded defines them in much more detail.

So, it depends on how different your mechanic is going to be. Simply using cards isn't necessarily going to be a huge change.

Quote from: Ladybird;619481I'm not sure how big a problem this will be. There are already Fate-based games that use different game mechanics; d6-d6 possibly being the most common alternative. And there are also games that use aspects differently; Houses of the Blooded defines them in much more detail.
 
So, it depends on how different your mechanic is going to be. Simply using cards isn't necessarily going to be a huge change.

I wonder if that just mean that some of these games have already used defective labelling - if they should have asked what Grumpy Reviews did here, and didn't.
If you need to re-learn the rules relating to a thing anyway, giving it the same term as something familiar isn't saving the learner any effort; it can only cause confusion.
 
EDIT: in other words, if the word like "aspect" can already have different associations to different people, its a bad word to use - get something else.

Quote from: GrumpyReviews;619416So they might be confusing and distracting rather than clarifying and useful?

If they are very similar, but not quite... You might want to use a slightly different term or some derivation of the term to name the mechanic.  This way it doesn't draw a direct comparison in someone's mind who is knowledgeable of the FATE system and cause confusion.

But, some terms are already common place and used in many different ways... everywhere.  So, people are probably going to be ready to learn the definition within the game's context anyway.  This is especially true for single word terms those are often used as the common nomenclature in RPGs.  E.g. Merits, Flaws, Edges, Aspects, Benefits, Attributes, Skills, and etc....

Something that should be a good post-playtest question:  Did the terms used to name the various mechanics of the game confuse you or make you mistakenly think of mechanics from another game?

I am going to risk it – there is too much about FATE which is solid and exactly what I need to reject it over fears of confusion. I will take the blame if this fails. But I think it is FATEd to succeed.