Dresden Postmortem

There's a reason I haven't been doing any actual play posts of our Dresden Files games, and that's because I haven't been all that pleased with how they've gone. I do want to go into what I think were the reasons behind this, as well as the handful of interesting events, both good and bad.

The first problem was the power level. We decided to go with the highest starting power level because we wanted to play with all the toys, particularly with the spellcasters. This was a mistake on a couple of levels. First, playing with all the toys meant playing with all the rules, which I'll talk about more later. Second, the sheer power of a group of five Dresden level characters is enormous, and the books do little to help you deal with this.

The rules mention the possibility that the books are an account of a solo adventure, and I think our play confirms that. The entries in Our World are all woefully underpowered when it comes to challenging a group like the one we had. It more or less takes a plot level NPC to make the characters break a sweat. With more experience I'm sure I could have dealt with this, but I didn't yet have that experience, so that's why this was a big mistake.

The second problem was the players, in which I include myself. I'm not blaming the players, they were all a great bunch, both the regulars and the ones new to the table. Unfortunately, the couple of guests we had to the first two sessions had playstyles that didn't quite mesh with the existing group. Our group tends to be more narrativist and they were more rules oriented. Specifically, they knew the rules better than I did in most cases, which is something I'm not used to, and was unprepared to deal with.

Combined with my need to confirm things, this led to a great deal of page turning and rules reading when we should have been playing. It had the plus of leaving me much better acquainted with the system by the time the first two sessions were over, but the minus of making those sessions less enjoyable.

A third problem was that I'm just not that big a Dresden fan. I like the books well enough, but they don't generate a great deal of enthusiasm for me. I actually read the books because I'm a fan of the Fate system and knew that the game was coming out rather than having read them first and then gotten the game because I was a fan. This led to a certain level of apathy on my part when it came to preparing for sessions, and that was reflected in how the sessions themselves went.

A factor that wasn't necessarily a problem, but which became apparent in play is that the Laws of Magic are a "Big Deal". Now, the novels say they're a big deal, but in practice they're simply a plot device that either restricts Dresden's actions or triggers important plot twists. They don't work that way in the game. In the game they present a big massive potential for unintended consequences. This can be a cool thing as long as the players are prepared for it, but I don't think that the game books do an adequate job of portraying the potential pitfalls.

The way this came up in our game was in the climax of the first adventure. The players had to stop a ritual that was threatening to waken a great evil. The ritual was taking pace in a field and one of the casters used a fire spell to roll through those casting the ritual in the hopes of disrupting it. What wasn't apparent, because of the high grass in the field, was that there were a number of victims lying bound in the grass awaiting sacrifice. These victims were incinerated in the blaze and the end result was a rather massive breaking of one of the laws.

This could have been a very cool thing to explore, but the important thing is that none of us in any way had intended for it to be a possibility. It didn't dawn on me what was going on until after the action was taken, and I was the only one with a grasp of the overall situation. In fact, it wasn't until after the session was over that I fully grasped the implications. This is largely my fault for not fully grasping the significance of the laws in the game, but it's a mistake that I think could be made by a lot of GMs.

The biggest disappointment with the game was that fate points proved meaningless. The players could simply deal with the stuff I threw at them without needing to use them. The players took them from me because they liked being compelled, but they didn't need to.

Things I'd do differently if I had to do it over again? I'd start by going with the lowest recommended power level. This means fewer rules to deal with, and you can use the stats straight out of Our World to challenge the party with. I'd only go with the highest power level if I was playing with one or two players, or if I had a lot more experience with the system.

The group became disenchanted enough with the game that we ended up deciding to forgo our final planned session and instead made characters for our upcoming Pathfinder Kingmaker scenario/campaign. That probably says more about how enthusiastic we are about Kingmaker, but I'll talk about that in an upcoming post.

The Fate of roleplaying

I'm a sucker for deck plans.

For a while now I've been eyeing the Future Armada set of deck plans. I got one for free as part of a promo a few months ago, and it was beautiful. When the GM's day sale happened on RPGnow I couldn't pass up getting the rest of the series.

I enjoy just looking at them, but I really want to use some of them in a game. The question is which game? The answer, for me, is Fate.

Fate is the system that Spirit of the Century runs on. I want to run a space opera game using some of the Future Armada deck plans. SotC is a pulp adventure game. Space opera is more or less pulp adventure with a sci-fi theme, so SotC should be a good fit.

I can just swap out the Mysteries skill for Computer Use and then pretty much wing the rest. Some stunts need tweaking, but that can be done as they come up in play if necessary.

It didn't take me long to stat up a character described in one of the Future Armada products. A solo scout with an idealistic streak. While I was doing this I happened across a link to Spirit of the Far Future, an adaptation of the Fate system to Traveller. Now, Traveller is too gritty for the kind of game I wanted to run, and so is SotFF, but the latter is full of really good ideas on how to tweak Fate. One of the best is the way they simplify stunts.

Stunts are the one thing about SotC that I have problems with. I like the concept well enough. You take stunts to allow you to bend the rules in a specific way. The problem is in the execution. They're like feats in d20 in that each has its own set of special rules. The result is that a quarter of the SotC book is basically a catalog of stunts. What SotFF does is to look at what most of those stunts actually do, and then group them into a small number of generic stunts rather than a large number of specific stunts tied to individual skills. The result compresses the ninety pages of stunts in SotC into two pages of generic stunts with a further two pages of specific examples. Of course, some stunts are lost along the way, but those are mostly the more fantastic pulpy stunts. Stunts that I'm not sure will fit in my campaign anyways.

Another idea I really liked was the addition of a Wealth track to the standard Health and Composure tracks. When a character does badly on a resource check, they might or might not get what they were looking for, but in either case their Wealth takes a hit. If the players need to buy off a hit with a complication then the GM can tag that complication. So if a player takes "owes a loan shark money" as a temporary complication due to a hit to their Wealth, then the GM can tag that at some point in the adventure to have some thugs show up to collect.

There are a lot of other little tweaks to make the system either more deadly or to give it more of a Traveller feel. A lot of these don't really fit my game concept, but really help to show how the Fate system works.

As an extra bonus, SotFF has some interesting ideas on adapting deck plans to the range system used in Fate, which ties it all back into what got me started on this road in the first place!

So now I've got three options: go with a barely modified SotC, go with SotFF, or use ideas from both SotC and SotFF to create a more space opera oriented system. If I proceed further with this project, then I'll talk about which option I choose, and how I go about using it.