Quote from: Ghost Whistler;423458What a giant load of shite.

Yeah, more or less.

The GM is under no obligation to use compels just because you spent all your fate points. The pattern of Gs and Bs may be the same after a while, but causation only goes from B to G, not the other way around. You G now does not and will not lead to a B later. That's just not how things work in FATE.

Also, players can't compel themselves. Even if relationship trouble happens, it will only happen later if the GM chooses for it to happen, and even then only if the character has a suitable aspect to compel related to that relationship. Without the aspect to compel, the trouble may still happen, but it won't generate a fate point for the character.

As a player, in FATE at least, you have no idea what "bad stuff" the GM will attempt to levy against you later, or if it will be aspect-related and point-granting. And when the GM does so, he's hopefully following the practice of invoking compels in dramatically appropriate situations anyway, not just using them flippantly to fill up your empty fate point pool.

You can't really stop him from doing so. He is the GM. But that's not how they're intended to be used.

Quote from: GeekEclectic;423525The GM is under no obligation to use compels just because you spent all your fate points. The pattern of Gs and Bs may be the same after a while, but causation only goes from B to G, not the other way around. You G now does not and will not lead to a B later. That's just not how things work in FATE.

In most versions of Fate you can use compels on yourself to get Fate points back with GM permission (or suggest them to the GM, which is exactly the same thing). And you will. After every B, there is a G. After every G there is a B. And it does not actually matter which order they come in. Indeed, in Dresden Files, the Gs come before the Bs, because you have a Refresh Rate that starts you with Fate Points before any Bs happen to you.

So any time you roll exceptionally poorly and need to spend fate points, more unrelated bad stuff will happen to you. And we know that it will be unrelated, because you actually spent the fate points to avoid the bad stuff related to the roll. If you roll unexpectedly well and get to save Fate points, that means that your future will have less bad stuff in it.

You can go ahead and think of the events as being unrelated, and indeed there is no in-game reason for them to be connected even thematically. But the reality is that bad rolls cause subsequent bad events that are not compelled or even encouraged to have anything to do with the task at hand. Good rolls prevent subsequent bad events.

If you roll poorly while climbing a wall, the cake you're making to impress your girlfriend will have water spilled on it when your dog bumps the table. If you roll well while picking a lock, you won't get run off the road by a drunk driver. That's how the system works. And you can rationalize it all you want, but that's essentially how all narrative karmic systems work. Even relatively simple ones like Action Points mean that if you roll poorly to pick the lock, you won't have an Action Point to spend boosting your diplomancy roll to seduce the princess.

-Frank

Its true, and it is a "management of harm" economy.  In most of these systems, players aren't FORCED to take the bad consequence and gain a fate point, instead they can SPEND a fate point in order to avoid the tagging of their disadvantage.

So, what this means in practice is that players will not only try to balance out their fate point economy by spending fate points to try to make sure they succeed where it really matters, but will also use fate points to avoid any consequence that they think will matter, if its at all possible for them to do so.  They are constantly trying to calculate what is the maximum benefit for minimum risk.

In fact, the only way to make the "disadvantage" of compelling their flaws have any meaning at all is to either force it on them when they're at very low or no fate points (and then decide that taking a serious hit now is worth it for having a fate point later), or by somehow "tricking" them, making them think that the compel is for something not that bad, and that they may as well go for it, and then you pull a switcheroo and it turns out to be something much more grave than it at first appears.

Of course, the Swine would probably claim the latter is somehow "illegal" behaviour...

RPGPundit

THis thread isn't about slagging off FATE because you might be able to create effects from see mingly disconnected causes, thanks for playing.

No, but the particular issue about "how to create tension" is directly related to the question of "management of harm". If you have it, if you have anything other than suffering of direct consequences for failed actions, there will be NO tension.  Again, proving that the only way to create tension is to let the risk of death be real.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;423914No, but the particular issue about "how to create tension" is directly related to the question of "management of harm". If you have it, if you have anything other than suffering of direct consequences for failed actions, there will be NO tension.  Again, proving that the only way to create tension is to let the risk of death be real.

RPGPundit

Not necessarily. I wouldn't say that an attack that will drop most of your hit points if it hits has "no" tension just because it can't actually take your character out. In some ways, having a Sword of Damocles hanging over your head can be more "tension" than actually suffering a consequence.

You are 100% correct that the addition of narrative affecting points of any kind shifts the results of a bad roll in a critical situation to something that is virtually by definition wholly unrelated at some point in the future. The Fate Fappers on this thread are typing continuous bad analysis and fallacy in responding to that accusation. However, I don't agree that doing that is necessarily bad. And I completely reject the idea that you can't create real tension with a system where a character's forcefield (literal or figurative) is chipped away by bad rolls rather than turning a character directly into red mist. Of course you can.

In the scenario where the character is jumping on the rooftops and has Fate Points (or "Edge" or "Karma" or "Action Points" or whatever) left, no roll can result in the character falling to his death. But the roll could easily be tense, if the player wanted to keep those points around for other things. Not every attack has to kill your character if it hits, losing hit points is also bad.

-Frank

Quote from: RPGPundit;423914No, but the particular issue about "how to create tension" is directly related to the question of "management of harm". If you have it, if you have anything other than suffering of direct consequences for failed actions, there will be NO tension.  Again, proving that the only way to create tension is to let the risk of death be real.

I may disagree with him about Fate, but I totally agree with Frank's response to you here. If there are consequences -- even deferred consequences -- there will be tension.

There is tension in not knowing when you spend your points what's coming up later and how much you might need them when you don't have them. There is tension in PDQ when you realize that your delay is going to cost you somewhere else in your life(as delays in real life often do). Countless things happen IRL that don't involve risk of dismemberment or death that are quite tense all the time(we call that tension "stress," though, since it's not so much fun when the tension is occurring to real people). Those same things can be applied to characters for tension as well.

Quote from: FrankTrollman;423957Not necessarily. I wouldn't say that an attack that will drop most of your hit points if it hits has "no" tension just because it can't actually take your character out. In some ways, having a Sword of Damocles hanging over your head can be more "tension" than actually suffering a consequence.

You are 100% correct that the addition of narrative affecting points of any kind shifts the results of a bad roll in a critical situation to something that is virtually by definition wholly unrelated at some point in the future. The Fate Fappers on this thread are typing continuous bad analysis and fallacy in responding to that accusation. However, I don't agree that doing that is necessarily bad. And I completely reject the idea that you can't create real tension with a system where a character's forcefield (literal or figurative) is chipped away by bad rolls rather than turning a character directly into red mist. Of course you can.

In the scenario where the character is jumping on the rooftops and has Fate Points (or "Edge" or "Karma" or "Action Points" or whatever) left, no roll can result in the character falling to his death. But the roll could easily be tense, if the player wanted to keep those points around for other things. Not every attack has to kill your character if it hits, losing hit points is also bad.

-Frank

Oh sure. I wasn't implying something different than that. But my point with regard to the OP is that the risk itself is the tension.  If the question is "how can I create tension without any actual risk of consequences for the action failing?" the answer in my opinion is "you can't".

RPGpundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;423994Oh sure. I wasn't implying something different than that. But my point with regard to the OP is that the risk itself is the tension.  If the question is "how can I create tension without any actual risk of consequences for the action failing?" the answer in my opinion is "you can't".

RPGpundit

And my answer is that even if your action is guaranteed to succeed, if the cost of that success is variable there can still be tension. If you have an expert locksmith on hand, he can get you through the door. The question is merely how much time it takes him to do it. If the total amount of time you have to accomplish the mission is limited, then lockpicking can still be tense even though you know for a fact that it will succeed.

-Frank

Quote from: RPGPundit;423994Oh sure. I wasn't implying something different than that. But my point with regard to the OP is that the risk itself is the tension.  If the question is "how can I create tension without any actual risk of consequences for the action failing?" the answer in my opinion is "you can't".

RPGpundit

I'm not suggesting there shouldn't be consequences, I was just saying that character death isn't at all the best type of consequence in a roleplaying game. Character death is just a pointless inconvenience unless you play in a game where, if your character dies, you don't ever get to play again, which would be phenomenally stupid and guaranteed to piss players off.