Agents of FATE: Groundwork

So I've been watching Archer¹, and it has once again given me that itch to run a spy game that I tend to get after any series focusing on international cloak-n-daggerery (Cf. The Sandbaggers, Burn Notice, Queen and Country, The Prisoner), but which inevitably seems to fade once the inherent challenges of crafting a properly back-stabby scenario rear their ugly head. A ways back I picked up thirteen books worth of first-edition Spycraft, which is a pretty decent implementation of d20's better bastards (complete with ACTION POINTS!!!! and a vitality/wound system cribbed from d20 Modern and Star Wars respectively) but which nevertheless suffers from d20's general problem with specialization and situational advantages. It can be best summarized with a single feat: Rocket Launcher Mastery. Aside from niggling simulationist questions about how you get enough field experience with a highly situational weapon to be considered to have mastered it, and the pain in the ass of remembering every little bonus the feat gives you when you use it, there's the point of how to please the player who has taken this feat (and the other feats before it in the tree) and made it a part of his character. Working situations that can only be solved by rocketry into the plot is simple enough, even if bringing in a helicopter or a tank every week smacks of FPS or Metal Gear - The real trouble is when, having focused on this element of the character, the player attempts to solve all problems with high-speed explosives, turning every climactic encounter into the one from Invasion USA. Add to this the remarkably 'spergy system for creating villainous organizations, and it's clear that Spycraft's a little too close to its parent for comfort. I would, however, love to use it as inspiration - the Shadowforce Archer² setting is pretty nifty, though I may just be saying that because it appeals to my love of Magic Nazis and goofy gadget stuff like fake money that can be chewed up and turned into an adhesive.

So instead, let's take my much-beloved FATE system and toss some tweaks in there to make it sing. A lot of what follows assumes a familiarity with 2nd and 3rd-edition FATE, available for free from Evil Hat Games, but should be simple enough to follow along - Call it FATE 2.5, or FATE Un-Stunted. Other sources include John Wick's Wilderness of Mirrors, Greg Stolze's A Dirty World and my eternally recurring inspiration, Ron Edwards' Sorcerer.

So, let's start with Aspects. These would be pretty much as in FATE 3, as the limit on uses-per-session from FATE 2 always seemed weirdly arbitrary and reminded me of the most annoying part of GUMSHOE.  Fuelling Aspect invocations with Fate points makes considerably more sense. The full ten aspects seems a bit much, though - Maybe a mere seven, to have characters that are broadly capable but not as omnicapable as the standard Spirit of the Century characters. Of these, two would be required, or at least given a skill point benny: One a belief or motivation that a character considers vitally important, be it commitment to country, agency, democracy, no killing women, etc. - And the other, something for which the character would be willing to betray that belief. Hey, trust's a bitch in spy fiction.

As far as skills go, I'd want characters to be highly skilled, meaning a relatively small and expansive skill list. I'd probably port the FATE 2 skill system directly, including the pyramid, although tying the skills directly to the aspects might be overdoing it. As in FATE 2, if you're willing to take a hit on skills, you can buy plot-important objects with skill points, allowing you to have the fancy car or the favoured gun or what have you. You can also spend Fate points for these in-game, of course, but then they're set dressing - Improbably explosive set dressing, in many cases.

No stunts. I don't care for them. The idea of a cool move that you can do all the time, at will, just seems dumb and ironically uncool. You want a neat trick, invoke an aspect and justify it and we're off to the races.

As for actual resolution, this is where the Sorcerer bit comes in, kinda. Under normal circumstances, without description, characters only roll 3 dice instead of the FATE-standard 4, making for a slightly smaller range of possible results. But, if they describe the action well, they get an extra die. If the description is really good, they get two. If it's absolutely amazing, they get three, but that should only happen once per session, if that. Now, clever readers familiar with FATE will note that, unlike Sorcerer or Exalted or Wushu or other systems that give bonus dice for description, this doesn't make you more likely to succeed - It just makes the range of possible outcomes wider. This is intentional. Playing Wushu, I was frustrated by loquacious players filibustering absolutely every move they made regardless of actual narrative importance, just to get the dice. Describing a scene under this system doesn't make you better at it, it makes the scene more important and more pivotal, for good or bad. Since players are going to have a lot of Fate points, they can probably turn a failure into a success (with, yes, even more description), and a regular success into an overwhelming, suitably awesome victory (a +5 result is pretty badass, and +6 is worthy of Bond at his best) - but mere description isn't going to guarantee it, and a really well-described action could result a failure so massive that even Fate points couldn't fix it. If that did happen (say a player tosses a -4 or worse on a five-dice roll), I'd definitely consider giving the poor schlub a a Fate point or two just so his grand description didn't go to waste. And then, of course, I'd work out the worst possible way for such a big, important action to go wrong. The GM is also well within his rights to simply declare an action climactic even if the player is trying to play it safe by not describing it, so the player might as well go all out and get the benny if he fails.

Okay, now for the other two gaming sources. From Wilderness of Mirrors, there's the notions of planning, timing and betrayal. In WoM, the GM just details the basic goal of the mission and players fill in details like security arrangements, opposition, locations etc, getting points from the GM for every detail they provide and extra ones for particularly diabolical scene-setups. This seems directly portable to FATE - The opening loadout of Fate points is dependent on the scenario the players set up, and allows them to more or less describe the mission they want. Of course, no plan survives contact with the enemy, etc. and so we move on to timing. For every, let's say, ten minutes of real time that pass, the GM gets a point to mess with the players, change some element of their planned arrangement, etc. I'm not sure yet if these would be additions to the NPC Fate point pool or separate - Certainly it seems most logical, since it keeps down the number of variables.

Finally, there's betrayal, and here's where WoM crosses over with A Dirty World. PCs in ADW can get points both for being cruel to each other and having cruelty done to them. A similar arrangement here would mean that a character who screws over another in-character (Remember that inspiration-for-betrayal Aspect? Yeah, that came back) gets Fate points both for himself and the player they're dumping in the soup - Probably two or more, just to make it extra appealing. Along those lines, perhaps I should add the option to leave an Aspect undefined, so that the player can just reveal his perfidy at the moment rather than having DOUBLE AGENT on his character sheet the whole game.

There's the start of it - If any of you six people who check my blog have suggestions as to how to make it even more convoluted, or of obvious flaws I should patch, feel free to weigh in. And if anyone's got a suggestion for a good spy-agency backronym from FATE, so much the better.

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1. Seriously, I could sit and listen to H. Jon Benjamin yell all day.
2. What is it with the name Archer and spy fiction? The eponymous jackass agent in the aforementioned Archer, this setting, Cate Archer from No One Lives Forever; is it a reference I don't get, or just a coincidence?