Recently my Tuesday Star Wars GM wrote an article about what bothers him when running Fate. I wanted to write a counter-point to some of his thoughts, not intended to bring anyone into the Fate fold specifically, but rather a way to think about running adversary NPCs.
Let’s take a Dungeon World playbook, and rewrite it to use Fate mechanics.
I mentioned this to a few other people at the Fate meetup in Seattle, but I wanted to share more broadly. If there is anyone in your group that is doubtful about the uses of Create Advantage in combat, and prefers Attack and attrition, here are two ways to describe it.
Gamers who play MMOs, certain card games, puzzle match games, and many other sorts of games will be familiar with “combo builder” and “finisher” moves. You rack up some number of combo points, then unleash them with a finisher that is highly effective. Create Advantage can act as a combo builder, with Attack as the finisher.
It’s just more advantageous. Say that you have 10 shifts of attack effectiveness you can throw at a guy. You can either split it into 5 blocks of 2 shifts apiece and he gets to defend 5 times, knocking some or all of it away, or you can accumulate it all and he gets to defend 1 time. Which do you think is better?
Hopefully these approaches can help people understand Fate combat tactics. Both explanations have been helpful to me in the past.