It was probably Fate

Played in a great session at the Fate Steampunk  campaign yesterday.  My character came very close to dying, repeatedly. Surprisingly, I took hardly any damage, just a single "clipped" result, but to get by with so little injury took activating all six of my aspects, spending all three of my fate points, and getting three different assists from other players (using the optional rule where they can spent two fate points to give me a +1 bonus).  I boarded two enemy vessels, one in the traditional "boarding party melee" fashion, the other more sneakily to plant a bomb. Trying to sneak back off the enemy battleship, I was accosted by guards, and had some bad luck trying to escape. I barely got off the ship before it blew up, and was left adrift on the luminiferous aether. Luckily, one of my fellow PCs was able to fly over and save me. Had it not been for the assistance of my team-mates, I would have gone down in a blaze of glory. Instead, I waded through the carnage virtually unscathed, as though I were protected from on high.

Of particular personal pride was that I used my "Phlogiston of the Sierra Madre" Aspect and my Fireman (+1), Mining(+1), and Midshipman(+0) skills to destroy the enemy ship. These were some of the wackier elements of my character, the sorts of things you take that give flavor and a sense of history. At the same time they make you worry that perhaps your wasting your points because they're rarely going to come up, and they're really outside the purview of the what your character was built to do.  Yesterday, however, they were absolutely vital to me having the tools and training to get into weird places on board the enemy vessel, and deploy the dynamite.

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This seems as good a time as any to discuss the probabilities behind the mechanics of Fudge (which is the basis of Fate, and several Fate-derived games, as well as being the basis of F#). All three systems use Fudge dice (though, you can also play Fate or Fudge using two d6 instead, and just subtracting one from the other). The dice rolls end up having quite a pronounced bell curve, with around 20% of all rolls netting a +0 result, and the odds dropping off pretty fast as you approach the outer ends of the curves. Here's a graph comparing the three die mechanics I've played with for Fudge-based games.

Nothing terribly surprising in that chart. Four Fudge Dice provide more variance and a gentler curve than 3 Fudge Dice. The steeper curves emphasize your Skills, the gentler curves emphasize the random element. So F#, which (ironically?) abstracts and downplays skills, actually makes skill level matter more definitively than it does in vanilla Fudge, simply by using one less die.

You can compare these odds to the d20 system by extending the chart out to about +/- 10 and just drawing a horizontal line at the 5% level. Fudge characters have very narrow results windows that are very skill-dependent, unlike d20's haphazard and wide-ranging variations.

One more note: Your odds of rolling a -3 or -4 on 4dF are about 6%, but we always seem to get them more often than that at the table top. :)  I actually rolled -3 on three consecutive rolls last session!

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The real point in making these curves was so that I could figure out when to use Aspects in Fate. In Fate 2.0, an Aspect can be invoked for either of two major dice-related effects. You can turn 1 Fudge die to it's "+" side, from a blank side or a "-" side. Alternately, you can invoke the Aspect to reroll all four dice.  At the tabletop yesterday, I had a hard time deciding which to use when my dice came up "+---". Flipping a die to it's best side was a guaranteed boost of two ranks, but since that would only generate a +0 result, it felt like maybe the odds favored rerolling instead. Looking at the 4dF bell curve, it becomes obvious that the reroll option is okay at -2, but really shines at -3 and -4.

• If your roll is +4 or +3, obviously you don't want to (and really can't) use an Aspect at all. Be happy with your good luck, and don't get greedy.
• If your roll is +1 or +2, you may consider using an Aspect to turn a "-" into a "+". Doing so would get you a lovely roll that's likely to be a success even if your skills are only fair or average. Personally, though, I'd only do that if this were a critical roll, with a life on the line. Otherwise, I'd hold on to my Aspects to save my bacon further down the road. You definitely don't want to reroll, as that has more than an 80% chance of being a wasted effort, and is very likely to backfire.
• If your roll is -1 to +0, then it's definitely time to swap a "-" into a "+". Fudge-based systems tend to have a very unforgiving results ladder. The step from "nearly impossible" to "stupidly easy" is just about two or three points away. The sweet spot from the GM's point of view is difficulties just 1 above the PCs skills, as that gives them a less than 50% chance of success on rolling alone, but is still easily within the reach of a single Aspect of Fate Point to correct. If you're playing with a GM who's challenging but fair, there's going to be a lot of cases where the difficulty is 1 above your skill, so boosting your roll from +0 to +2 is frequently going to pay off. (At least when I'm GMing, my goal is for the players to win, but only after a hard-fought battle.) On a roll like this, never use an Aspect for a reroll - rerolls have a less than 40% chance of improving your position, and are just as likely to make things worse.
• If your roll is -2, you'll want to reroll if your action is offensive (an attack roll, or a skill check that will advance the plot but not ruin you if it's failed).  If your current result is -2 on 4dF, the reroll has an 80% chance of improving my situation, and only a 6.17% chance of making things worse. If you reroll an attack, you can afford to be risky, as it's not usually the end of the world if the reroll fails. Your only real downside is that you've spent a resource (the Aspect) and wasted a turn. There's big benefits to be gained if your attack roll rockets up from -2 to +4, as not only does your chance of hitting go up, but the damage you do on a successful hit goes up as well. On an attack, a high roll always means more impact.
  However, if your roll is something defensive, you're actually better off flipping a die instead of rerolling all of them. Turning the die is a guaranteed +2 boost, which means it will always reduce the type of damage you suffer by category. Getting a bad reroll means not just depleting a resource, it usually means taking even more damage. A defensive reroll when you're sitting at -2 has only a 40% chance of saving you more damage then the single die flip would, and equal odds of being less effective. On a defense, a high roll is often no more effective than a medium roll, as either cancels all the damage - it's more important to assure you don't have the crummy below average roll that would amplify your injuries.
• At -3 and -4, reroll, reroll, reroll. It doesn't matter if your roll is offensive or defensive in nature, you've got a better than 90% chance of improving your situation, and your average improvement is nearly double what you'd get if you just flipped a single die.

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And now a brief rant about a house-rule that's been used at the game I'm playing in. This house rule, which apparently originates in Spirit of the Century (and I've been told appears in Starblazer Adventures, Dresden Files, and other Fate-based games), goes like this: "Spending a Fate chip gives +2 on a roll instead of +1." Man, I think that rule is awful. I don't think I would never use it in a game I was running.

Aspects are cool character-specific things you can invoke to boost your rolls. They help differentiate between characters, because not everyone will always be able to invoke all their aspects in every situation. Finding a good use for your "Phlogiston of the Sierra Madre" Aspect is, as previously mentioned, a spotlight moment where your character stands in stark relief from the rest of the party. So it's very cool that the Aspects have a little bit of complexity, a great deal of variance, and some serious power potential. Aspects are hugely potent, but not very reliable - they're great for saving your bacon in a tight spot or fumbled roll, but don't tend to be helpful on average medium rolls and are useless if the dice are deliver their top natural results.

Fate points, per the default Fate 2.0 rules, can be spent on any roll to get a flat +1 boost. This can help take the sting out of a failure, but it can just as easily turn a home run into a grand slam.  While a Fate point's over all power is less than an Aspect, they're simpler to invoke and much more reliable. They also don't add to character flavor or differentiation at all. An Fate point says to the world "I'm a Hero", where as an Aspect says "This is the type of Hero I am." Fate points make any hero a little more capable of doing the same things everyone else can do. They make the other stats on your sheet matter less, and make the characters less unique.

Given the steep bell curve of the system, I completely understand why Fate points are needed, as the odds can be pretty harsh if the players lack the most relevant skill. But I think the balance between the two mechanics in Fate 2.0 is very deliberate and intentional. Aspects are meant to be more powerful, but narrower in scope and less reliable. Aspects make you an expert. Fate points make you a generalist. If you had to choose between getting an extra Aspect point or getting an extra Fate point, it'd be a tough call.

Once you've applied that house-rule, however, that balance is upset. Suddenly Fate points grossly outstrip Aspects, because they're now just as potent as an Aspect 98.77% of the time and yet still much easier to utilize. This really degrades character niche and uniqueness. I'll admit that's a personal hobgoblin of mine - I really like it when characters act and play differently, and I'm known for playing some oddball characters.

I just feel that if a game like Fate or Spirit of the Century is going to have a long involved character creation process (where you chart out the PCs life and assign skills using complex little tree diagrams, and dream up these catchy flavorful Aspects), it's really counter-productive to have some mechanism overshadow all that. If Fate points give +2 to a roll, making them better than Aspects, and more beneficial than most of the skill ratings on the typical character sheet, then they really do threaten to dwarf and trivialize all other mechanics. I think that's a shame.

If someone else is playing the Mad Scientist and I'm not, I really don't want my character to be able to build steam mechs and reanimate corpses. That's their "thing", their niche, and I'd rather they get to keep that spotlight for themselves. But a double-strength Fate chip means I've got a decent shot of duplicating their efforts. It filled in the conceptual gap between our characters.

I despise that house rule, but not to such an extent that it's a game-breaker. I'm still really enjoying the campaign I'm playing in, and yesterday's session was incredible. A big chunk of that is because our GM is really good at improvising and putting us in difficult positions with no obvious solution. I enjoy having to squirm out of the situations he creates for us. But honestly, I took some ridiculous risks in that last session, and I probably should have at least been badly injured. Fate points are what saved me, and they're what allowed me to pull of three stupidly high-risk rolls that I really had no business succeeding at. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.

Cyberpunk F#

Last night I ran a sequel to the old Cyberpunk "MOC" campaign, using F# instead of the clunky old rules for CP2020. I really like F#, it scores highly in the flexibility, elegance, and collaborative story-telling arenas.

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Tone and Themes:
The setting aspects were:

• "Dark Comedy" would be the prevailing theme.
• Cold, harsh world where life ain't fair, the rich abuse the poor, and cybernetics is cheap and dirty.
• The PCs are crazy enough, or desperate enough, to join a gang that indulges in random mayhem.

It was a lot of fun, but didn't quite capture the feeling of the old campaign. I think that is because the GM doesn't have any real fangs in F#. The GM can give out negative aspects as a form of damage, but the rules strongly encourage only doing that once per session per PC, and you really can't kill off a PC at all. There's no fear of death, which for many settings is actually a good thing, but probably isn't in keeping with the tone of Cyberpunk. In the old campaign, when the big fight broke out at the end, the PCs would have run and probably scattered - heroism in CP2020 gets you killed. Instead, the PCs stood toe-to-toe with the badguys, and there was nothing I could do to really make them sweat. They had fun, and got to be courageous, so perhaps I shouldn't complain.

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Plot, such as there was:
Despite that tonal difference, the game was a lot of fun. The PCs were loser punks in a bizarre little gang that gets together for random mayhem rolled up on Morton's List. The List told them that this week's adventure would be to commit a major act of vandalism in another gang's territory. There were hijinks (involving the night city transit authority officers) on the bus-ride into enemy territory, a dead body in the park-and-ride, and then a big gang-vs-gang conflict at the soup kitchen.

The enemy gang was the Kennedy's Posergang. They faced off against cybernetically-enhanced duplicates of JFK, RFK, MLK, Jackie O (in pink), old Teddy Kennedy and Mayor Quimby. Okay, Quimby I probably never would have done in straight-up CP2020, but the improvisational nature of these light systems just takes me over the edge.

JFK had retractable head armor that (once deployed) was described as dinged up and chipped such that you could tell people liked to play Oswald on him. He was the gang leader, and eventually unleashed a very anime-style attack, where he shouted "CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS!" and launched a dozen micro-missiles. Jackie O had souped up Cyberlegs and did a ballerina attack. The "Vote Quimby" sash had a built-in monowire. Teddy's weight problem was actually enhanced Skin Weave. Etc. Governor Connolly was driving the get-away convertible. It was pretty stupid, but quite enjoyable at the time.

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Character Sheets:
F# gives PCs 6 Aspects, which I've found is probably more than you need. Most PCs end up with some that overlap, and since Aspects don't stack, there's not much benefit to be gained with it. I tried to mitigate this a bit, by restricting the Aspects into categories to encourage diversity on each PC. It also let me ensure all the PCs were properly CyberPunk. The blank character sheet looked something like this:

Rating	Aspect	Category
+2	This space left blank for the player to fill in.	Useful piece of cyberware, cool gadget, or bio-implant.
+2	This space left blank for the player to fill in.	Bizarre useless cyberware, or just something that defines the look of your character.
+1	This space left blank for the player to fill in.	What type of hoodlum, criminal, ganger or loser are you?
+1	This space left blank for the player to fill in.	Other background element or character backstory
+1	This space left blank for the player to fill in.	Catch phrase
+1	This space left blank for the player to fill in.	Your choice, this can be anything.

Most characters had one major piece of cybergear, some managed to squeak a second out of the bizarre / fashion category, and everyone had the option of using the last category for one more major tech bit if they wanted.

F#iref#ly

Having had some time to reflect on F#, I think it's the system I'll use should I ever end up running a Firefly campaign (which I've wanted to do for years). F# is very flexible (good for all that multi-genre-ism), handles tech extremely lightly (just like the show does) and it features the right amount of danger to characters that the series has. Yes, F# doesn't do the "characters die like flies" thing that the Serenity movie did, but that's okay - I wouldn't be likely to use Reavers as Orcs, either.

I'm tempted to run F#iref#ly at the Thursday night group sometime, to try it out. I'm also intimidated/scared to do so, because the coffeehouse we play at on Thursdays is the Seattle Browncoats HQ, and I'd feel like some stranger (or the barista) might wander over and correct me if I break cannon.

Looking back at Yesterday's Posts

I realize that in all the long-windedness of my literary meanderings, the real message might not have been obvious. Here's the points I should have made:

1. F# is a really good system.
   
2. It's very elegant, and easy to remember and run. I took about 10 minutes explaining the rules at the start of our first session, and ended up with only two rules questions coming up all night - both of which were resolved without having to look any further than the one page summary sheet.
   
3. The rules never once got in the way of the story or characterization, even with the weirdass setting I was using. Neither did the lightness of the rules ever leave us clueless on how to proceed. It's not very crunchy, or tactical, but it doesn't try to be, either. It's narrative, and free-wheeling, and flexible, and it succeeds admirably in those arenas.
   
4. Most importantly, it was fun. I like it.

That's not to say F# is the game to end all games. Some folks will just prefer a more tactical system, or more crunchy PC stats, or to keep all the narrative control in the GMs hands, and for those folks F# is a poor fit.

It's also not completely flawless. The section on GM-imposed mostly-negative aspects could probably use one or two more examples. Having the steepness of the bell curve emphasized in the rules would better prepare the new GM. But none of those minor gripes in any diminished the fun for me or my group. (I'll of course be forwarding my feedback on to the author in hopes that version 1.2 might be a little tighter in those areas).

In the interest of full disclosure, I should also mention that I used to game with the author/designer of F#. Don't want anyone to think I'm mindlessly shilling for him. Had his game sucked, I would have burst his little bubble with glee. Then I even would have rubbed his face in it. That's just the kind of friends we are.

Math in F#

Most RPGs have a learning curve that comes from the rules being complicated, or from there being lots of weird modifiers a character can invoke. In D&D, for example, you've got all those +1's and Feats that apply.

F# is a really elegant system, downright minimalist, yet it still has a little bit of a learning curve. I ran it for the first time last night, and I found it kinda tricky setting difficulty numbers right. The rules document offers this scale:

0 Easy
1 Average
2 Tricky
3 Hard
4 Flawless
5 Masterpiece
6 Nigh Impossible

That's it. It doesn't go into any deeper examples, and probably for good reason. The system is very flexible, and what is "tricky" will vary from situation to situation, and campaign to campaign. In a very over-the-top setting, an entire squad of mooks might be a single Easy roll, in a grittier game each henchman in the squad might be a seperate Tricky roll. You throw some Tokens into the mix, and such generalizations mean nothing. It's a strength of the game that it's so flexible and can handle a great deal of variation.

Last night, however, that meant my difficulty settings were largely arbitrary, and I wasn't completely happy with that. I feel like, in hindsight, I didn't do enough homework. So today I want to analyze the math just a bit.

At the start of the first session, all Aspects are rated at 1. New Aspects added mid-session are rated at zero. Once per session, you can advance one Aspect by +1. As a result, the information relevant to your first session (all the sessions in a one-shot) is pretty simple to calculate.

Difficulty	Chance with Aspect 0	Chance with Aspect 1	Chance with Aspect 2
0 (Easy)	63%	85%	96%
1 (Average)	37%	63%	85%
2 (Tricky)	15%	37%	63%
3 (Hard)	4%	15%	37%
4 (Flawless)	0%	4%	15%
5 (Masterpiece)	0%	0%	4%
6 (Nigh Impossible)	0%	0%	0%

Observations:

• In the first session of a campaign, Nigh Impossible really is Impossible. No problem there, and no big surprise either.
• Average tasks are very likely to be a success if it's inside one of your character's specialties, but more than likely a failure if it's an improvised level 0 trait.
• Now I understand why raising a trait from 0 to 1 costs 3 Tokens, but raising it from 1 to 2 only costs 2 Tokens. The power jump from level 0 to level 1 is pretty huge.
  
• I like that starting characters have very good odds at succeeding at things they're good at. (That same notion is probably the thing I like most about Savage Worlds, as well.) I want to be able to play a Hero right out the gate - I'm not a big fan of "1st level" in D&D (versions 0 to 3.5), for example.
  
• I am not so fond of the notion that you'll fail at an average task if it's outside your original purview. Little worried this could encourage players to never try anything new. On the other hand, the consequences of failure are rarely very hideous in this system, so maybe that balances out. I'll have to run and play it more to say for certain.
• All the more incentive to take advantage of the way character creation rewards being a Jack-of-All-Trades.
• I hadn't realized last night just how steep the bell curve was, and neither did my players. They were spending Tokens much more slowly than I was handing them out, and I suspect if they'd seen this chart (which didn't exist then) they would have been a bit more active with the chips. We were all assuming that it was always worth taking an action if the difficulty is 1 above your aspect. Considering the math, it's way better to spend another Token or two. You really want to be rolling against difficulties 1 below your Aspect whenever possible.

Last night, I'd felt like I was giving out too many Tokens, and at the end of the session everyone still had a handful. Now I know that I was giving out the right amount of Tokens, I just wasn't setting my pre-Token difficulties high enough. I think once everyone has grown comfortable with the system, F# will be almost diceless. There'll be a lot of back-and-forth as Tokens change hands and cool ideas get rewarded, and the characters will finally roll when the odds are really in their favor. You want (or at least I want) the Tokens flowing like water.

Will I use F# again?
Yes, definitely, and those future games of it will be better balanced than the awesome one-shot I just ran. Will F# replace all other RPGs for me? No, but I will be more likely to run F# than Risus, InSpectres, d6 System, or probably Savage Worlds. F# is really good at doing stylish narrative games, and lends itself well to games cerebral, pulpish, or humorous. It's an excellent system for any setting where character death is rare, provided you're okay with the hefty amounts of narrative control the players will have (and I generally am okay with that). I think I'll be hauling the fudge dice and poker chips to one-shot night fairly often.

F# Fiend Folio Characters

Last night's F#FF one-shot featured:

• an Aarakocra (a bird person whose arms are shaped kinda like a pterodactyls)
• a Blindheim (a four-foot frog whose eyes are blinding spotlights)
• a Fire Mephit (a winged implike fire elemental)
• a Nilbog (like a Goblin, but backwards - due to a temporospatial disease, damage heals a Nilbog)
• and a Euphoric Imp (a drug-dealing hallucinogen-producing devil from the 3.5 Fiend Folio - I'll explain how that came about below)

I have three of the five character sheets in front of me, so I'll share the aspects that I know:

Erik's PC:

Snarl Bite Howl III
Background: Nilbog
Background: Gentleman Adventurer
Background: Great Lover
Catch Phrase: "I shall compose as I fight!"
Catch Phrase: "I laugh at danger, ha ha!"
Catch Phrase: "No one expects Snarl Bite Howl III!"
and he eventually added Catch Phrase: "Weee!!!!" because he kept getting dropped from great heights.

Sarah's PC:

High Priestess Winnefred
Background: Blindheim
Background: High Priestess of Ssendam (Slaad Lord of Insanity, Madness spelled backwards)
Background: Learned ('cause normally Blindheims have animal intelligence)
Catch Phrase: "Now I shall consult the Holy text of the Fiend Folio."
Catch Phrase: "By the golden light of Ssendam"
Catch Phrase: "Do my ears decieve me, or..."

Mark's PC:

Ossible
Background: Euphoric Imp
Background: The Pusher
Background: Spawn of hellfire and brimstone
Catch Phrase: "Dude, I'm like totally baked"
Catch Phrase: "I got what you need right here"
Catch Phrase: "Dude, that was like, totally uncool"

I learned a few things about F# from these characters. It's clear to me that if you really want to focus on a very narrow character you can do so, but there's no real benefit to it.

Look at Ossible. He was a very fun character, but he wasn't terribly deep. 5 of his 6 aspects are essentially redundant, or at least interchangeable. Partially, that's the result of my dictating that one aspect should be a Fiend Folio race. Euphoric Imp covers the same ground as his other two Backgrounds and overlaps a little with 2 of his three catch phrases. Despite all that overlap, there's no real benefit. In four hours of play, we had one situation where "spawn of hellfire" was applicable but "Euphoric Imp" wouldn't have been. If we'd all had a little more experience with the system, I'm pretty sure Ossible would have been a much more broad character. For example, we probably should have gone with a background of "Walking Blasphemy" or at least "Not In The Holy Book".

About that: Earlier in the day, I'd emailed the group and asked who wanted to play what races, so I'd have a little advance notice for finalizing my scenario idea. Mark replied with a whole character write up for the Euphoric Imp named Ossible (and his brother Robable, and his sister Lausible) and how he'd ended up in the Prime Material Plane because of falling through a Magic Portal that he'd (in a drugged stupor) mistaken for a taco stand.

This, of course, didn't work within the limits of my proposed setting. The Euphoric Imp is from the 3.5 edition of the FF, and the game was supposed to be "If it ain't in the 1st Ed Fiend Folio, it's just a myth". One of the other taglines of the setting was that "There are no other planes, only this bastardized version of the Astral". I'd have been completely within my rights to deny this character and insist he come up with something more fitting to the setting. But gaming is about having fun, and Mark was definitely excited to play this character he'd come up with. I hate to discourage someone from prepping for the game (even if he didn't read my post of the game's Taglines), and it's not like there was some long term balance issues to worry about. So I said yes.

I even modified one of the taglines of the game to accommodate him. It was changed to "The Fiend Folio is the Bible" which opened up lots of cool avenues in the game, but I digress... That'll have to wait till a later post.

On a related note, I don't think most characters will need anywhere near 6 aspects. The 3 catchphrases, in particular, are likely to end up under-used, or to duplicate one or more of your backgrounds. I think there's just a touch of a learning curve to the system in that regards: your first character will be suboptimal, but you'll learn from the mistakes pretty quickly.

I'm still glad the game allows for so many aspects, as that means you can have a really diverse and complex characters.

The game definitely rewards Jack-Of-All-Trades characters over specialists. I don't think that's a problem, as long as the players understand it when they're making their characters. When next I GM F#, I'll be sure to emphasize to the players that it's better to leave one or more aspect "slots" undefined than to be redundant.

Aspects for F#FF

Here's the setting tag lines for the F# one-shot I'm running this Thursday at the Emerald City Game Feast:

1. All Fiend Folio, All The Time. Bizarre and Mundane are inverted. If it's stats aren't in the 1st Edition of the weirdest monster book of them all, then it's only a myth. Such things as orcs, humans, and rutabegas are spoken of in hushed reverent tones, or lambasted contemptuously, depending on who's speaking.
2. There are no other Planes, just this bastardized version of the Astral. The PCs hail from a city state on an asteroid floating in the great off-white void.
   
3. Life is hard, harsh and unfair. The ecosystem rests upon the backs of a handful of plants, all of which are carnivorous. Giant "Fortress Farms" keep the food from eating the cities. The priesthood is corrupt and evil (afterall, they worship Lolth, the Elemental Princes of Evil, and the Slaad Gods), and charge a huge margin on create food and water spells. The various races live in the same city, but are not created equal.
   • Corollary to Tag Lines 2 & 3. Many other such rocks and city states float in the void, and when they pass close enough for contact it results in wars, adventures, and cataclysmic cultural shifts.

As is typical for F#, the PCs will each have up to 3 catch phrases and up to 3 backgrounds. I am putting one restriction on them, however: Each player must pick a race from the Fiend Folio. Their character is a member of that race, and they must work it into (or use it as) one of their aspects. So "Drow" would be perfectly acceptable background, but so would "hen-pecked Drow husband/slave" or "I was an ordinary Fire Toad, until the day I was granted intelligence by a perverse whim of Ssendam". Heck, I'd even accept "The first Carbunkle to graduate from Business School" (though first carbunkle to graduate from the Seminary of Lolth might be more in keeping with the setting).

They'll roll and use that aspect per the normal F# rules, but it also grants whatever powers the race has according to the Fiend Folio. In some cases, like Crab Men or Hook Horrors, that's really not anything, but should someone choose to play one of the four Death Slaadi, for example, it'll come with some magic and baggage.

I intend to fill in the details of the City-State and Asteroid the game starts on based on the races the players choose to play. I'll probably let the players decide whether that race is common or rare within the city. If we've got flying PCs, the City will be on the surface. If we're all Sverfneblin and Terithrans, then it'll be a subterranean city with surface given over to farming.

1 page version of F#

I'm running F# later this week, and so I expect to reference it on my blog a few times. So that you don't have to go download it to know what I'm talking about, I'm reproducing the 1-page summary of the rules here.

F#: a very simple tabletop roleplaying game system.
by R. Hunter Gough, v1.1

The GM and the players are all working together to create a fun and exciting story.

Each game setting has three tag lines. These establish the theme of the game.

Each PC starts with up to three catch phrases, and up to three backgrounds.

Tag lines, catch phrases, and backgrounds are collectively called “aspects”. Every aspect has a value, and these initial aspects all start with a value of 1. Mechanically, all aspects are identical; the names “tag line”, “catch phrase”, and “background” are only there to give an idea of how those aspects should be thematically structured. The values of aspects are ONLY important during die rolls.

Each player starts each session with three tokens. Tokens do the following things:

• A player can give the GM a token to make something unexpected but not unreasonable happen.
• The GM or another player can give a player a token to compel that player to do something unexpected but not unreasonable in line with one of his aspects.
• The GM or another player can give a player a token as a reward for going out of his way to do something cool in line with one of his aspects or one of the setting’s aspects.

Die rolls occur when a player is trying to do something where success and failure both have dramatic potential, or when a player is trying to do something that their character could conceivably do, but would be a major effort or minor miracle for them to do successfully. Die rolls work like this:

1. The player tells the GM what aspect he's using for the roll. If he has no applicable aspect, he must make one up on the spot, with a value of zero.
2. The GM tells the player the difficulty of the action, between 0 and 6, but usually around 1.
3. The player rolls three FUDGE dice, adds them together, and adds the aspect’s value.
4. If the result of the roll plus the aspect value is equal to or greater than the difficulty, the player succeeds. Otherwise, he fails. The severity of the result (positive or negative) roughly depends on how far the roll was from the difficulty.

When a player makes a roll using a new aspect made up on the spot with a zero value (regardless of whether or not the roll succeeds), he has the option of buying it as a permanent aspect with a value of one for 3 tokens. When a player makes a roll using an aspect he already has (also regardless of whether or not the roll succeeds), or receives a token for using one of his aspects in a clever way, he has the option of increasing its value by one by spending a number of tokens equal to the new value.

A player shouldn’t buy more than one new aspect per session, and shouldn’t improve more than one aspect per session.

The GM can also force new aspects on players -- usually a mostly-negative aspect as the result of a badly failed roll. These new aspects also start out with a value of one. As above, though, the GM shouldn’t force more than one new aspect on each character per session.

Aspects (especially the mostly-negative ones imposed by the GM) can change or even go away with enough time, explanation from the player, and/or expenditure of tokens. Of course, players can also figure out ways to turn mostly-negative aspects into advantages, and even increase their values.

That’s everything you need to play, all in only one page!

I have not asked permission to reproduce that page, so there's a chance the original author will make demands that I take this down, apologize, compose epic poetry celebrating his greatness, wear my underwear on my head for a month, or something reasonable like that.

Go check out F#

An ol' buddy of mine recently wrote a super-short RPG system called F# (pronounced "Eff Sharp"). [download link] It's based on Fate, which in turn is based on Fudge, and it trims both down quite nicely into an extremely elegant core. The rules fit on 1 page, and he includes about a dozen extra pages of in-depth explanations (and one optional rule). I'd like to encourage you to check it out - it's a fun read, and looks like a very flexible system. It's easy and light enough for con games and a variety of one-shots, and has decent character-development rules that tempt me to try running a campaign of it.