Tag Archives: FATE

Alien vs. Jedi: Another Method for Fate Jedi

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After an interesting discussion on G+ about how to model Jedi powers in Fate, I came up with another way to do it, one I like a bit better than my Wild Blue method.

There are two costs for being Force sensitive: first, you reduce your refresh by 1 (in a Jedi game, you’d probably want to increase base refresh to 5 or 6 in order to give players enough points to spend on cool Jedi powers). Then, you choose a high concept that reflects your Force sensitive nature: Impulsive Padawan, Grizzled Jedi Knight, Force Sensitive Mercenary, and so on.

Being Force sensitive gives you a few baseline benefits:

  • You can use Will to move small objects telekinetically, in your zone or an adjacent zone. This allows you to overcome obstacles and create advantages, but isn’t powerful enough to attack or defend with.
  • You can use Notice to detect other Force sensitive beings in the immediate area.
  • You can communicate short telepathic messages to people in the immediate area or, for a fate point, communicate a short telepathic message to anyone anywhere, as long as it’s someone you know well.
  • You can invoke your high concept on nearly anything, provided it’s something the Force could help you with.
  • You can call upon the Dark Side for power.

The Dark Side is modeled by its own stress track, which has a 1, 2, and 3 box. There’s no way to increase it. You can call upon the Dark Side deliberately, taking a 1-stress hit to gain the benefits of having invoked an aspect (a +2 or a reroll). You can do this as many times on a single roll as you want to; each invocation increases the size of the hit by 1.

You can also take Dark Side stress by performing evil acts, and by abusing the Force (using it for direct attack or pure personal gain at the expense of another person). When this happens, the GM decides the severity of the act (between Average (+1) and Great (+4)), which sets the difficulty for your defense roll using Will. Take stress as usual.

Dark Side stress doesn’t go away at the end of the scene like other stress does, and Dark Side consequences can be a bit stickier. Instead, when you perform an act of significant attonement, you can do one of the following:

  • Clear the highest box on your Dark Side stress track.
  • Reword a Dark Side consequence to imply recovery.
  • Reduce the severity of a Dark Side consequence in recovery.
  • Erase a minor Dark Side consequence in recovery.

If you’re taken out by a Dark Side hit, you fall to the Dark Side. Rewrite your high concept. Also, if you have any Dark Side consequences, those become permanent aspects, replacing some of your existing aspects. The Dark Side has remade you in its image. Clear out those consequence slots and clear out your Dark Side stress track. If you’re taken out by the Dark Side again, it consumes you body and soul. You’re a shell of what you once were, and no longer a playable character.

Finally, a Force sensitive character can take Force stunts. All Force stunts have a baseline use and an extra-special use that costs a fate point. An example:

Force Mobility: You can move 1 extra zone for free on your turn, and you get a +1 bonus to Athletics rolls made to run and jump. If you spend a fate point on your turn, you can reposition yourself to any zone in the conflict without taking an action to do so. This doesn’t allow you to move through walls or other physical barriers, but it does allow you to jump over them if such a thing is possible.

Some of these stunts are labeled as Dark Side stunts; simply using them is considered a Dark Side transgression (with a severity determined by the GM). An example:

Force Choke: You can make physical attacks with Will against your target’s Physique. These attacks are Weapon: 2, and you can make them against any target in your zone or an adjacent zone. If you spend a fate point, you can automatically kill a mob of up to 6 nameless NPCs; against other targets your attack is Weapon: 4.

Alien vs. Jedi: Wild Blue Jedi

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So for a while now I’ve wanted to take my Alien vs. Jedi idea and port it over to Fate Core, but the sticking point since the first iteration of the hack has always been, “How do you model the Dark Side?” In my initial draft of the hack, the Dark Side was basically a way to get free invokes at the cost of being compelled a lot (without getting a fate point for your trouble). It mucked with the fate point economy a bit too much and, in a con game, there wasn’t much incentive to restrain yourself from pulling as many free invocations as possible from your darker nature. So I need a new solution.

I was thinking about it today after a brief twitter conversation and all of the sudden I got the idea to model the Force and the Dark Side with a modified version of the rules for Gifts and Costs that I put in Wild Blue. A Force-using character would choose from a specific list of Powers: one for Light Side and one for Dark Side. A Jedi or Sith might get three of these Powers (or maybe they cost refresh, like normal stunts); the down side is that they’d also get three Costs (or a Cost for each Power), also specific to Light Side or Dark Side and chosen from a list. Powers and Costs work as their counterparts in Wild Blue work; they give you auto-success against passive opposition and nameless NPCs and they provide a stunt-like bonus when you actually have to roll a skill (though I’d probably tone down the bonus of each Power because you’re getting three of them, making them slightly better than a normal stunt but not as good as two stunts). Some examples:

The Force allows me to . . .

. . . move at great speeds and leap great distances.
Benefit: You get a +3 bonus to Athletics rolls made to run and jump.

. . . sense the presence of other Force users.
Benefit: You know when other Force users are near, and can make a Notice roll to determine a specific Force user’s identity, if you’ve felt their presence before.

. . . deflect and redirect energy-based attacks with my lightsaber.
Benefit: While you’re wielding your lightsaber, you can defend against energy-based ranged attacks (like a blaster shot) with Fighting. If your defend roll beats your opponent’s attack roll by 2 or more shifts, you can use the shifts you gain as an attack against a target in your zone or an adjacent zone. The target can defend as usual.

But . . .

. . . the Dark Side always tempts me with power.

. . . I rely too much on the Force, and am helpless without it.

. . . a Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and defense, never for attack.

A Dark Side user might look like this:

The Dark Side gives me the power to . . .

. . . hurl bolts of dark lighting at my foes.
Benefit: You can hurl Force Lightning, allowing you to attack an opponent in your zone with Will. If you attack a single opponent, you deal +2 stress on a successful attack. You can choose instead to attack multiple opponents in your zone by dividing your attack up, but you do not deal the extra stress.

. . . fill myself with the strength of hatred and rage.
Benefit: You can choose to get a +2 to Fighting rolls made to attack and a +2 to Physique rolls made create advantages through brute force, but you take a 1-stress mental hit during each exchange in which you use this Power.

. . . choke the life out of others with the power of the Force.
Benefit: You can use Will to attack a character in your zone or an adjacent zone. You deal +3 stress on a successful attack, but any defense rolls you make while using this Power are made at Mediocre (+0).

But . . .

. . . I am a slave to its will, and it compels me to ever greater acts of depravity.

. . . one day it will consume me.

. . . others can sense its presence within me, and they recoil from it.

Wild Blue Excerpt: The Citadel

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The Citadel

Issue: A Place Apart

The Citadel’s where you’ll be going when your training’s done, when you’re a Warden. See, we train here in Ressen but the main force of the Wardens proper live and operate out of the Citadel in Cobalt. It’s our offices, our base of operations, our home. When you become a Warden, you give up your old life; you’re not the person you were and you can’t live that life anymore. The life of a Warden is a hard one, and sometimes a lonely one, but we stand between these lands and those who’d destroy us.

The Citadel itself is a . . . unique building. It’s a fortress, a tower, but it sits atop a piece of floating rock, tethered to the ground by great chains. It floats a couple hundred feet above the Queen’s Sound, casting its shadow down onto entire neighborhoods of the city.

Inside the Citadel you’ve got living quarters, training grounds, meeting rooms, stores, places to eat, and just about anything else a growing team of Powers needs to stay fully functional and keep protecting the Blue Lands.

The whole thing is run by the Lord Warden Windhammer. He’s one part steward, one part military captain, one part lawman, and one part bear. Seriously, the guy’s huge. Stands about a head taller than any other man I’ve ever met, stacked thick with muscle, huge bristling beard, and hands like great rock hammers. With all that power you’d think he’d be slow, but that’s where his gift comes in. See, Windhammer’s fast, fast like you wouldn’t believe. That’s what makes him dangerous. The muscle, the girth . . . that’s all smoke and mirrors, misdirection. His enemies get an idea of what he’s like in a fight from what he looks like, and that’s usually the one and only time they make that mistake, one way or another.

Hacking D&D

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A little while back, during the Meetup of Doom, my friend Nick and I were talking about D&D and the kinds of things you can do to it to make it run more smoothly at the table, and to make it more improv-friendly. It got me to thinking about various ways that I’d like to hack the game before running it again. I figured I’d share them here, if for no other reason than to get some feedback on them.

Hacking Monsters
I like the way monsters work in 4e quite a bit. However, making encounters can be a real bear sometimes, and you have to spend a lot of time doing it if you want to fill a session. The problem with all this front-loaded prep work is that you wind up creating a fairly linear path for the PCs to move down.

I’d like to go for more of a sandbox-style game, running pretty much everything off of the Page 42 Table (or whatever the more modern version of that is). To that end, I’d probably wind up creating a few sets of generic monster stats and just making up monsters on the fly, adding abilities to them as I feel appropriate.

In addition, rather than tracking individual hit points, I’d like to use a series of check boxes. That is, a monster can take X hits before it dies, where X is probably around four or 5 for a standard monster, 6 for a brute, 8 for an elite, and 10 for a solo. Each time a player hits a monster, check off a box. If the player does a large amount of damage (as strikers are capable of doing), check off two or even three boxes. Easy book-keeping, and I’d probably feel better about just declaring a monster dead if a PC did something really cool to finish it off.

Hacking Powers and the Action Point Economy
I like powers. I like that they give everyone cool stuff to do. I also like action points, but I feel like they don’t do enough. There’s the start of an economy there with action points, but I feel like it could be pushed further. So, here are some ways I’d like to change action points, and how they interact with powers.

  • At the beginning of the day, players start with action points equal to their level, or possibly half their level (not sure yet).
  • They get the same number at each milestone.
  • The various pillars of character creation–race, class, theme, and background–are treated sort of like Fate aspects. They can be invoked for a benefit by spending an action point, and they can be compelled in order to give players action points.
  • Action points are used to power Encounter and Daily powers. These powers can’t be used on their own. Instead you spend X action points to use one of them, where X is probably somewhere around 4 for an Encounter power and 8 for a Daily. Powers of a level lower than your character level get a discount, allowing you to use them more often. As long as you can pay the price, you can use these powers.
  • Doing awesome things allows your friends to award you action points!
  • I’d also like to reduce the number of powers that PCs actually get. Instead of getting tons and tons of Encounters and Dailies, I’d like to have Encounters eventually replace At-Wills, and Dailies eventually replace Encounters. Because powers can be used multiple times, I’d probably try to stick to having two of each type of power: two At-Wills, two Encoutners, and two Dailies–at the most. This might have to be altered a bit for some of the Essentials classes that don’t use the standard power structure.
  • Finally, and this isn’t necessarily related to the above stuff, I’d probably want to cap the game at level 10, but start telling epic-style stories around level 8 and paragon-style stories around level 5.

Hacking Conditions
Conditions eat up a lot of time and brain-space at the table. However, I like them and think they’re necessary to the game. Rather than getting rid of them, I’d like to just get rid of the explicit mechanical effects of conditions. Instead I’d run them sort of like aspects or consequences in Fate. So, if you’re Blinded, that doesn’t impose any kind of explicit penalty. However, any time you do something that being Blinded would affect, the DM can compel the condition to complicate your life. This winds up being an additional source of action points, and also allows for situations where players can use their conditions creatively to actually invoke them for a benefit.

Hacking Magic Items
This might be controversial: I want to get rid of magic items. Well, not entirely. I want to get rid of all of the pre-created magic items in the various books and replace the mathematical necessity of them with inherent bonuses. Magic items, themselves, would be pretty rare and, again, would be a bit more Fate-like. For example, you might find a sword that has magical properties like Flaming, Bloodthirsty, and Protective of its Wielder. These can then be invoked or compelled with action points.

Going along with this, I’d probably do away with the gold piece economy altogether and instead add a more abstract wealth system, similar to what’s found in Fate, World of Darkness, or d20 Modern.

So, that’s what I’d do. Thoughts?

What I want from D&D’s next edition

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Recently it was announced that Monte Cook was returning to work on D&D, an announcement that got the Internet in a tizzy. Speculation abounds, with many people asking the question: does this mean that 5th Edition is on its way? Certainly there have been hints of this, in Mike Mearls’ Legends and Lore articles. I’ve made it no secret that I’m a little burnt out on the current edition of D&D. I still like it, I still think it’s great; I play Encounters at my FLGS whenever I can. However, I’m finding more of what I enjoy playing in various indie RPGs, so that’s where my interests currently lie.

However, I’d be interested in seeing what Mearls and Cook do in a 5th edition of the game. I might not adopt it as readily as I did 4th Edition; I saw 4th as a vast improvement over 3.x, so I had immediate and intense enthusiasm for it, which lasted several years. That said, 4th Edition is not perfect. It is largely a combat engine, and I find that I want more than that in an RPG. With that in mind, I’m going to discuss some things I’d like to see in a 5th edition of the game.

A few disclaimers first. Some of these ideas are extrapolated from, or even shamelessly stolen from, a Twitter conversation between Sarah Darkmagic, Fred Hicks, and the Newbie DM. Credit where it’s due. Also, note my bias: I’m really into a variety of indie RPGs right now; most notably, FATE has been on my mind a lot due to a number of reasons, such as Bulldogs! and The Demolished Ones.

Mechanics that Support Roleplay
Back when D&D was my bread and butter, I would have scoffed at this notion. Why do you need mechanics to support roleplay? It’s roleplay; the players should be doing it, and there don’t need to be rules codifying it. I’ve since read a number of games in which such mechanics are employed, and I’ve changed my tune about them. A well-developed roleplay mechanic can stay out of the way when it’s not needed, but can reward and incentivize good characterization when it is.

The main issue, as I see it, is that everything on a D&D character sheet describes what your character does, what he or she is good at. Most of this is also combat-oriented; what does he or she do in a fight? There’s little to nothing on that character sheet that describes why the character does what he or she does. What are your characters goals? Motivations? Relationships? Fears? These things matter if you want to play a convincing person rather than a set of stats. While it’s true that there’s nothing preventing you from coming up with this stuff on your own, there’s nothing supporting it either. There’s nothing making it easier, or making it worth your time, within the game. Some groups will do it because that’s the kind of game they like; others won’t because it won’t even occur to them. I’d like to see rules space devoted to this kind of thing; not just advice for players, but real, concrete rules that encourage you to play a person in the game, with all the baggage that goes along with being an individual.

More Power to Skills
Skills are an underutilized commodity within D&D. Everybody has them, to some degree or another, but there are too many arbitrary limitations, and their utility is far too situational. In some games, skills will get a lot of use; people will jump across chasms, swing from chandeliers, run up walls, charm the guards, create cunning distractions, and so forth. That’s awesome. In other games, skills will be numbers on your sheet that mean very little. What I want to see is more mechanical benefit for taking those skills, and fewer restrictions on which skills you can take. Why, for example, can’t my fighter take Bluff without spending a feat on it? Are fighters incapable of lying without special training or effort? These sorts of things play to stereotypes, which can be a useful shorthand, but has the mechanical effect of limiting character concept potential.

And speaking of feats, I’d like to see feats directly tied to skills. I’m thinking specifically of a system similar to FATE’s, with feats taking a role similar to those of stunts. Rather than a bunch of conditional combat bonuses, I’d like to see feats used as ways to do additional things with your skills. Some of these things might be combat bonus-related; for example, maybe an Arcana feat can be taken to imbue a weapon with magical power for +1d6 fire damage for a short period of time. The key is that they’re tied to skills, making the choice of skills more important and the payoff for taking a particular skill greater.

Finally, I’d like to see the explicit link between skills and ability scores go away. In some cases, this makes sense; Endurance and Constitution make sense together. But I’d much rather see a system in which the bonuses are separate, and your description of how you use the skill determines which ability score bonus is added to it. For example, a fighter flexing his muscles menacingly could use Strength + Intimidation, while a ranger employing his knowledge of how to survive in a hostile environment could use Wisdom or Intelligence + Endurance to survive a desert’s heat. The description is a requisite for this; you can’t just say “I use Intelligence + Endurance”; you have to explain why the two go together.

Less Explicit Combat Focus for Powers
I like powers; I like the variety they can add to the game. However, they can also cause monotony, when players simply tell you what power they’re using, rather than describing their actions. I think that part of this is due to the fact that so many powers are simply attacks. I played a game of Old School Hack a while ago, which uses things called Talents, which are similar to D&D’s powers. However, many Talents are not simply attacks, and are not purely combat-focused. The magic-user for example, rather than taking a spell that might make her more powerful in combat, took a spell that allowed her to talk to doors, and unlock and lock them at will. It turned out to be a great choice, not just mechanically (though it was very helpful during the game), but for fleshing out her character and informing her decisions and descriptions during play. I’d like to see fewer powers per character, and I’d like to see them do something other than just damage + condition + effect. I’d like to see powers that you have to work a little bit in order to use, powers that require descriptions in order to make useful.

The Rest
There are a lot of things that I still like about D&D. I like the simplicity of hit points and defenses, and I like the way monsters work quite a bit. I like experience points and levels, and I like action points. The class system is simple, evocative, and fun, and I like the different races and how they work. I like a lot about D&D, but I think it can be more than it is. I hope it will be.

The Demolished Ones: Kickstarter

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The Kickstarter for The Demolished Ones is now up! If you’re interested in seeing this Lovecraft-inspired dystopian steampunk mystery game/adventure come to fruition, please go and back it. Donate $10 and you’ll get a PDF and your name in the credits. At $40, you’ll get a copy of the book. At $75 you get to start having input into the development of the game. At $500+, I will personally run a game of The Demolished Ones for you at GenCon 2012. What are you waiting for? Get to it!

The Demolished Ones

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A little while ago, I was contacted by Steve Russell of Rite Publishing to work on a project for him. After speaking to him about it, it sounded like the kind of thing I’d really enjoy working on, so I agreed. I’d like to share a couple of things about this project with you.

First, this project uses FATE 3.0. The rules are available for free online, so we won’t be reprinting them (the page count isn’t high enough to warrant that). I will, however, be making some modifications to core FATE to accommodate some of the story elements within the game. I don’t want to get into specifics, but I’m going to be playing around with how characters are created, and how aspects are handled.

Second, this is a patronage project. This means that we’ll be soliciting patrons at some point in the near future, asking people to contribute funds to the project. What you get in exchange for your contribution is creative control. I will be soliciting feedback from patrons at various points along development, and I will be incorporating patron feedback into the final product. If you decide that it sounds like the kind of project that you’re interested in, support it. Supporting it gets you input, and helps ensure that the final product sees the light of day. It’s a win-win!

Third, this being a patronage project, it’s not yet green-lit. As I’ve said, we’ll be soliciting patrons soon, and trying to hit a specific goal that we need to hit in order to publish. Until we hit that goal, the project is not green-lit. I really hope that it becomes green-lit, because I think this thing’s going to be awesome.

Finally, I’d like to leave you guys with a little teaser, something to get you interested. This teaser doesn’t necessarily represent the final product, but it’s the direction that I’m going in at the moment. We’re not soliciting patrons yet, but keep your eye on this blog; I’ll let you know when we are, and point you in the right direction.

—

Tom awoke on a cold floor, the taste of cotton in the back of his mouth. His tongue felt heavy, thick; his arms refused to push him up. He floundered for a few minutes there, trying to get his bearings, trying to gain stability, control. He took a breath and was hit with something metallic mixed with the scent of sweat and fear. He opened his eyes, cautiously, and pushed himself up.

The room was small, bare concrete walls and hard stone floor. That was the first thing he saw; the second was the body. It lay in the center of the room, face-down, sprawled, a crimson pool congealed around it. The man was dressed in formal attire, though the clothes were shabby and worn. His hair was dark, mussed, matted with blood.

Tom pushed himself back, away from the corpse, and looked around the room wildly, alert for danger. That was when he saw the others. Four of them, two men and two women, all around the room. Three were unconscious, prone, as he had been, unceremoniously left on the floor to wake. The Fourth, one of the women, was huddled in the corner, her eyes shut tight, rocking gently and muttering to herself.

Who were these people? Was one of them the killer? Were they all potential victims? What was this place, and why was he here?

Tome searched his memory for the answers, but found nothing. Nothing at all. That struck him as slightly odd at first, but the more he searched the more terrified he became. He knew his name. He knew how old he was. The more he searched, though, the more he became aware that nothing else was there. He could remember nothing of his life, nothing of the events that had led him here.

Something was very wrong.

Bulldogs! Kickstarter

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I just wanted to talk a little bit about the Bulldogs! kickstarter, which is going really, really well. Brennan Taylor, the primary author of the book, originally set his sites at $3000, the bare minimum he needed to fund publication. Now, because of the generosity and excitement of more than two hundred awesome people, he’s raised more than $9000, and there’s still eleven days left.

That’s just fantastic. If you’re one of the backers on this project, thank you. Seriously, I’m extraordinarily excited to be a part of a project that so many people are enthusiastic enough to give money to, sight unseen. And Brennan has been thanking his backers by providing extra rewards when he hits certain thresholds.

The backers have already earned one reward: an exclusive adventure for hitting $7000. Every backer will get this, and it won’t be seen anywhere else. If the project hits $10,000, another exclusive reward will be given to all of the backers: a supplement containing a new planet and a new playable species, again, not seen anywhere else. That’s pretty awesome, and we’re only about $600 away from that goal.

So, at the risk of turning this blog post into a telethon, I want to suggest something: if you’re planning on picking up the book anyway, back the project. Here’s why. If you contribute $50 to the kickstarter project (I don’t know off hand how much the book will retail for, but I imagine it’ll be somewhere in the $30-$40 range), you get a signed and numbered copy of the book. You also get a PDF of the book, and you’ll be listed in the credits of the book you just funded as an engineer. That’s all in addition to the free adventure, and the free supplement if we hit our next goal. Seems like a pretty darned good deal to me.

Dresden Files Philadelphia: A Threat Emerges

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Part One, Part Two

The Story

Later, in a cafe around the corner from Independence Mall called Neutral Grounds, PJ and Percy compared notes after a tacit truce (there was tension between them stemming from PJ’s romantic feelings toward Debra and Percy’s protective feelings toward her). Between the two of them, they had found out that more than twenty people had disappeared from in and around the Mall, and six of those had been found again, as corpses. In addition, of those twenty plus, four of them had been police officers, one of them a member of the Thin Blue Line, the mayor’s unofficial task force for dealing with supernatural threats.

Percy also asked PJ for information on the biker war going on in the city; PJ told him that the best place (though not the safest place) to look would be a bar outside the city in New Hope called the Alomeda Bomb Range, the hangout for the Warlocks biker gang.

Meanwhile, Boop-Boop went back to Bartram Gardens and met with her mistress Lily, the Summer Lady. Boop-Boop informed Lily that something was killing people in the city, and that it was likely vampires of the Black Court. Lily agreed, and told Boop-Boop that they were likely after something in the park.

Boop-Boop then called upon a contact of hers, Grendel, a shape-shifting raven. Grendel told her that there were actually more people missing as a result of the Black Court than anyone realized, and that he suspected what they were after. He agreeed to take Boop-Boop inside the building in Independence Mall, which he did shape-shifted as a police officer. Inside, he took her to the Liberty Bell, which he explained was a powerful magical artifact. Its power was held in check by the fact that it was broken, but if it were repaired, it could grant vast supernatural power to the one who did it.

Later that night, Percy and Debra met for dinner and discussed the day’s goings on, as well as whether or not Debra had any feelings toward PJ.

Meanwhile, PJ girded himself against the Black Court and when to Independence Mall to stake it out. Boop-Boop, at the same time, was scrying around the city, trying to find the Black Court hideout. She found a vampire walking down the street; it became mist a block away from the park and glided gently in, reforming out of sight of the police. Boop-Boop also saw PJ there. She immediately flew as fast as she could toward Independence Mall.

PJ watched as the Black Court vampire approached a homeless man sleeping on a bench, bent over to him for a moment, then straightened. The homeless man stood up and started walking out of the park. PJ decided to follow him.

Boop-Boop also saw this as she arrived. The vampire, she saw, was now heading toward a policeman on patrol. Acting quickly, she flew down to the police officer, lowered her veils, and shouted, “RUN!” The police man ran, Boop-Boop on his tail, and the vampire following quickly behind. Boop-Boop told the man to get to a public place, then to radio to the others in the park and tell them to be on guard, and to stay together. Once the police officer was safely out of the park, she flew up into a tree and, exhausted, fell asleep.

At midnight, Percy met a contact of his, Maximillian, at Babylon, the night club center of power for the vampires of the White Court in the city. Maximillian appeared as a tall, thin black man with vertically-slitted pupils; this was not his true form, however. In his true form, he appeared as a black cat.

Percy asked Maximillian what he knew about the Black Court in town, and Maximillian told him that they were building strength for an attack on Independence Mall, likely to perform some sort of ritual on the Bell. That, he told Percy, would not be good.

The Game

My preparation for DFRPG was considerably different from what I was used to. In D&D, you prepare discrete encounters, usually focusing on combat. This can sometimes make combat the focus of the actual game, as you don’t want to let all that time you spent prepping encounters go to waste.

In DFRPG, I used a different tactic. I statted up all of the NPCs that were likely to come into play, as well as some faceless mooks, and I came up with three situations that were going on in the city. Then I let the players discover what was going on, and allowed them to guide the story in the direction they found most interesting. That happened to be my Black Court storyline, though some focus was also given to the war between the Warlocks and the Pagans.

I deliberately left these storylines entirely skeletal, so that the the players and I could fill in the blanks through play. I knew that I could probably have come up with some pretty cool stuff ahead of time, but I also knew that the players would likely come up with a lot of awesome stuff, too, and I decided to capitalize on that. It worked out pretty well.