Aspects are a parallel system tacked on to the concrete and traditional Skills and Stunts. Unfortunately, it's been so vaguely designed that you can use them to do everything the other parts of the system are supposed to handle, and there are too many people who love using them to excess.

Thus you get the "Aspects can do anything!!11!1!!!" crowd who insist they should supplant everything else in the mechanics and want to turn the whole thing into a nebulous hand-waving fest.

Quote from: Azraele;1055230Figuratively speaking, you used the term "literally" a bajillion more times than strictly necessary. Literally speaking, I did appreciate that you used it to literally mean literally. A lot of times, I see "literally" used to mean "figuratively". That drives me figuratively insane with literal frustration.

I love you.
^_^

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPLaMuHAr1U

So, partly the reason is that Fate as a game/system has kind of continued steadily evolving both mechanically and philosophically both during and since its various branching releases. Not into something I like much at all, mind you, but still it's worth noting just how many things have been considered 'Fate' / 'FATE' over the years.

Aside from that, I've generally found that vastly divergent answers on how to handle something in Fate are because the question can't be succinctly answered and has to be sussed out due to a lack of provided context on the game situation surrounding the question; just as often though it's simply that the person answering flat-out doesn't understand the game system they're talking about enough to provide input or advice that isn't actively harmful to the understanding of people attempting to learn more about the game (which is shockingly common and almost a norm, less so now than five years ago though).

This is all more-or-less by design. Without specificity with regards to circumstances like campaign style, scene type, etc. a game logic-related question is likely to get ten different answers on how to do something with each response, let alone multiple people; this is because Fate is largely designed to be "concept agnostic" in that it handles everything you could want do or plug into it with the same couple of tools, and it expects you to right-size the mechanics to the scene accordingly, in a way that matches your table sensibilities and campaign premise.

Five different potential answers to a single problem, utilizing up to 3, 4, 5 or no mechanical widgets at all is exactly the sort of scenario praised by most Fate GMs as a testament to the system's flexibility (in my opinion, vastly overexaggerated and often highly misconstrued).

It's kind of the "just be yourself, bro" of RPG philosophies.

Quote from: PencilBoy99;1055211Maybe I'm a crazy person, but when I see a question asked about Fate I usually see a ton of different rules interpretations. Also, those interpretations seem to change over time.

I would say that before this week, explanations of Aspect Invocation mostly occurred before the roll - players would pile them up so that their success would be inevitable.

Starting this week, both here and on RPG.net, I've seen the opposite - the explanation now is that you do most of your aspect invocation (driven by Fate point or permission) after the roll in a game of chicken w/ the GM.

Do you mean the FATE rulebook, or the FATE system (which is used in many rulebooks)?  Because this is the reason I can say that I like SOME versions of FATE and not others.