Fate Core Beta Thread
 

Edited: Thanks for your feedback, everyone! I have a few questions about what you've all been asking for, which you can find in this followup thread:

http://forums.wolflair.com/showthread.php?t=48333

Looking forward to hearing from you there! You can also continue posting any other feature requests or suggestions you have in the new thread. :)


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Hello Fate Core beta testers,

This thread is for feedback on the Fate Core beta. Please let us know your thoughts and feedback on Fate Core support for Hero Lab here.

If you'd like to join the beta, you can sign up here, and we'll contact you when we're ready to bring in new users: http://www.wolflair.com/blog/2013/12/04/fate-core-beta/

Thanks for your help!

My first character sheet was surprisingly smooth sailing. The advantage of the setup that's in there is that drag-and-drop skills seems the easiest way to build the pyramid I've seen.

I was able to make the character straight from the core app, but my initial thought is that one of the things Fate games typically do is alter the list of available skills, generally by replacing something that doesn't fit the campaign in question with something that does. I don't know if it's possible, but it would be really nice to go into the Skills section and rename things without a.) messing with the working core or b.) having to mess around in the Developer Kit every time you want to do a different sort of campaign.

I did see the right-click option to rename a skill, but it's grayed out. What I'm hoping is that you can do it only within a particular character or portfolio ( have yet to figure out multiple-character portfolios, though that's on my list) and the core list is left intact for next time (where you may need to alter it in a completely different fashion).

I love it!

Just messing around with it:

** One thing I noticed is that there is no choice for EXTREME Consequences, at least for what I can tell.

** I was entering in the characters from my current campaign, who have already advanced many times. I don't like that I need to build the original character, lock it, then add stuff. I'd want the option to just add the traits to the sheet.

** The names of things on the standard output character sheet seem a little big. The main aspects needed to use two lines (and it'd be nice if the adjusted there size to fit to one line). Also, one name of a stunt was just long enough that it didn't fit on the sheet.

Again, I'm so excited for this! Thanks!
I'm gonna try to the Editor tomorrow.

Agreed. I LOVE the drag-and-drop for building a skill pyramid. Very nice and easy to use. However, I use a lot of different skills in my games, including replacing skills with Approaches (as in FAE, but deemed a legal substitution in Core in the Toolkit) I'm hoping that functionality will be in the final version, because the malleability of the skillset is an important part of Fate Core. Being able to save custom skillsets without altering the default set would be very helpful.

sak: remember that Extreme Consequences directly overwrite an Aspect. Therefore, there wouldn't be a Consequence slot on the character sheet for it. You simply replace an Aspect with the Extreme Consequence.

Just started using the Beta and so far it's pretty sweet. I had a few questions:
• Are Extras going to be implemented in the final release?
• Will Fate Accelerated also be part of the initial release?
• On the character sheet, is it possible to have it print the Consequence types like the Fate Core character sheet?
Thanks!

Speaking of which, building and printing out the sort of quicky NPCs required all the time -- how easy will that be to do?

In order:

* Extras are something we're looking at, but we'll likely want to prioritize them based on demand from users. Some are also a lot more work than others - I'm looking at you, magic systems. :)

* We don't have any plans for Fate Accelerated support at the moment; I kinda feel like, if you're going that simple, do you even want to have to worry about using a computer? Support for that would have to be stacked up against adding extras from Fate Core and our other projects.

* Not sure what you mean by that; can you give more information?

What sort of capabilities are you looking for when building NPCs?

Let's see if I can explain it (which will also let me see if I understand it): NPCs are usually not given the same design treatment as PCs. Just giving them the relevant aspects, a few skills, and whatever stunts they need to do what you want them to, and you're pretty much done.

The only reason I would want these in the generator is so that they can be printed out or displayed in a group sheet with all the other NPC Encounters. It goes back to doing multi-character portfolios, which is a skill I have yet to master, keeping all the adversaries of the PCs in a single portfolio file, adding new ones and altering existing ones as needed.

Another thought that may be a bit much to ask on a free license: in the prototypical Fate game, players aren't just building their own characters in the world the GM makes. They're actually helping him create that world. Player input determines a lot in terms of what happens and what exists in the campaign. It would be nice if the group could get together and, with Hero Lab running on the GMs laptop, put in one portfolio all the things that have come up in character creation that affect the world the PCs inhabit. If one of the PCs is looking for his long lost brother, open a sheet for that brother. If they're all going to be on a ship, put details about the ship in the portfolio. And so on. Use the PC as a collaboration tool in campaign design. It's one of the things that makes Fate Core unique.

I'll first say I've only had a few minutes to play with the generator, so if some of these are indeed covered, I apologize in advance. It's been a crazy week and the weekend is probably not going to be any slower. :)

Things I need for a Fate Core generator to really work for my games:

Extras (Yup, it's a must). I need to be able to create Custom abilities that may have a number rating, or simply a stunt-like description, and set the cost in Refresh, Stunt, and/or Skill Points. I can kind of do this now, but in some of my campaigns we establish a difference between Stunts and Extras, and Extras often require more than one stunt slot as cost. Some extras replace a Skill (Say "Flight" replacing "Athletics" for example).

The ability to easily set Refresh and Number of Skills- without this, I can't customize my game settings to allow players to build characters in different genres. Skill points and Pyramids of differing heights are probably the two easiest ways to handle skills.

The ability to choose between spending Skill points, restricted to columns or not, and the pyramid scheme. We also need to be able to let players "Break the Columns" rule when advancing their characters with Milestones.

A Custom skill that could be added multiple times, renaming it as necessary (like the Custom advantage in M&M)

The Fate Fractal- Using fate attributes to make sidekicks, vehicles, special weapons, and so forth. Without this, I'm probably going to need to default to a word processor for many of my NPCs.


Things that would help even more:

A quick "Minor NPC creator" that uses the various levels of mook/NPC from Fate Core pages 215 to 217 as a basis, and a toggle for "Mob" and the number of members in the mob. This will be especially helpful in using the software to track fight scenes.

Campaign Creation tool that sets rules for characters made for that campaign. In other words, a "World" character sheet that is then referenced by other characters when you build them. So you could have a "Default" world for the basic rules, and then change the rules and save them as a new world that would then be selectable when making characters. It would be great if you could keep track of how many Milestones a campaign had hit by recording it on the World character sheet... to make it easy to create new PCs when someone new joins up.

Putting the "Ladder" into the World Character sheet so you could re-name steps on the ladder (for different scales of campaigns) would make it easy for the skill descriptions to match to the various rungs on the ladder. For instance, if you're running a superhero game where +3 is "Superhuman" you put that on the character sheet and all characters referencing that sheet would reflect that instead of "Good" on the skills summary.

Dropping new skills into the World so they'd be accessible to players made for it would also be incredibly useful.

Adding Fate Accelerated Support as a toggle where you could have either Skills or Approaches, or both. Renaming Approaches would also be pretty important.

Hope these are helpful ideas! I invite others to make counter-suggestions or show how I could do any or all of them with the tools already in the software.

-James

Agreed, but it's also a consequence slot that cannot be filled again until the previous extreme consequence is dealt with...

So, if it is not to be listed as an extreme consequence, then something needs to be added to signify its importance. A star, or boldface, or different color, or simply a heading.

I was suggesting an Extreme Consequence slot, that when filled, will give a validation error (or a warning) that says "you need to replace one of your main aspects."

Cheers!

These two are both things I discovered in my first five minutes using it. The Fractal is practically a must. I need to be able to have sub-"characters" tied to my main character.

And since I started out making an NPC, I discovered that authentication wouldn't let me move on with undeclared skills.

However, in answer to some of Shadowchaser's other questions, I found it quite easy to set up the choices for a campaign. Open up an editor, add a new campaign, and you basically have the game creation worksheet from the Core book in front of you. Skill are likewise pretty easy to handle. I could see a need for a 'choice' option on skill pyramid/columns, though. I'd also like to see the "Stress Tracks" option--creation of new stress tracks other than Physical and Mental. Social, Wealth, Hunger, etc. could all be added. Even better if they could have individual default boxes.

Regarding extras--I think they need to be in there. I'd love to see them as an extra tab in the editor. I can understand some of them would be hard to implement (multi-zone monsters, magic systems, etc.), but if you could at least let the Campaign creator attempt it, that would be awesome.

More thoughts:
I have a stunt on one NPC I have in play that changes his '1' physical stress to a '2', and his '2' to an additional '3'. (Two shifts, folks!) As best as I can tell, you have the stress boxes forced to be equivalent to their position in the list. I'd like to see this changed somehow...because this could have an effect on mobs, too. A mob can have a stress meter of (say) 3 1-shift boxes.

Just discovered:
I created a campaign, and altered the skill list for the campaign. When I create a character using that campaign, no skills show up. It appears that the three 'default' campaigns have skills hard coded in some manner, as none of them have any skills listed in the editor, but they show up when working on characters.

I've been playing around, and I like what I see. :)

I can think of a couple of things I'd like to see.

I think most important to me at the moment would be the ability to define a Variable field that I can adjust either with a script or a tracker, depending on my needs. For example, I'm creating a campaign based on Mortal Kombat and I'd like each character to have a Fighting Rank value to measure their overall power level. This could be only increased through having a certain number of Stunts or Extras.

Second, I'd like to be able to add an additional stress track I can define. I've seen a lot of instances where something like Wealth or Social Standing would be treated as a Stress track.

Continuing to play around with getting my campaign skills to show up, I noticed something.

In "Fate Core" campaign, the campaign skills are tags. When I select skills in my campaign, they're put in the bootstrap category. When I add a skill to the Tags (but leaving it selected), it shows up twice.

I followed the tutorial included with the package (C:/ProgramData/Hero Lab/data/fatecore/docs/editor.htm on my setup), I created the Skill, Stunt and Campaign. I restarted Hero Lab with a new portfolio and chose my tutorial campaign from the dropdown.

The skill pyramid grew just as it should however there are no skills showing up and the only stunts that show up are the 3 to create custom stunts.

I've never tried this before but it seems that it really is a basic necessity to set up any Fate Core game.

Anyone have any thoughts on what might be wrong or where I can look for help with this?

Anyone interested in sharing portfolios for mutual assistance and to see if we can give each other insights on things?

So far, I'm a fan. It looks like most of the things I need to create a Dresden Files conversion are available in the editor, which is good.

That being said, I would like to have the starting refresh, and skill level, and possibly pyramid vs. ladder options available at character creation time, rather than creating a custom file for those.

Having the ability to add extras in the main sheet itself would also be pretty nice.

The other (super nitpicky thing), is there are a couple of typos in the add Stunt screen. The custom Stunt 1/Scene explanation text says once per session, instead of scene. The Custom Stunt 1/Session text says it can be "uses" once per session, instead of used.

If it hasn't already been mentioned, perhaps something to signify that a consequence is healing?

Thanks for the answers, Colen. For Fate Accelerated, I ask only because it'd be nice to have the sheets full printed and managed. I'd much rather have Extras if I had to choose. ;)

As for the Consequences, I've attached a part of the official Fate sheet to clarify what I mean.

Another suggestion: an option to print out just the aspects of the PCs and NPCs for the Narrator to refer to...

Update: I was able to get around the Lock/Unlock advancement problems by using the "permanent adjustments" in the Personal Tab.
Which makes me wonder, do we need both?

Custom Output
 

Hi anyone who can help:

I'm messing around with the custom output, but I do not know the xsl tags for aspects, stunts, etc.

When I look at the XML file, I see that only skills are "pushed," but nothing else.
Am I just a n00b?

Here's the character concept I came up with for my first effort (and also a test of the Text Output system). for non-D&D players, the Hexblade is a much-maligned variant class in 3.5 who combines magic, combat skills, and probability manipulation -- the class has story potential but is very poorly designed (and, unfortunately, Closed Content):

Name: Gorian Kell
Age: 30

Aspects: High Concept: Fugitive Hexblade, Trouble: I dare trust nobody, Don't Make Me Admit I Give a Damn, My Powers Don't Work on Everybody, Nobody can Capture Me

Skills: Lore (+4); Deceive (+3); Fight (+3); Notice (+2); Shoot (+2); Stealth (+2); Burglary (+1); Contacts (+1); Investigate (+1); Resources (+1)

Stunts: Backup Weapon, Mind Games, Turn Your Luck Against You

===== Histories =====
1. The Wrong Assassin: A hexblade killed the King a year ago. As soon as they figured out I was one of the Hexbaldes it was assumed I did it. I didn't. I wanted to, but I didn't. How I escaped the kingdom is an epic tale in itself....
2. The Revenger Foiled: I thought I'd made a clean getaway, but I soon found a girl trying to fight off a group of bandits by herself. I killed the bandits, but then she pulled a flintlock pistol on me and told me she was the King's daughter out for revenge. I used my powers to make the gun misfire and went looking for slavers to sell her to. But it didn't work out that way and now I'm stuck with her hanging around, waiting for an opportunity to strike. I really should kill her, or sell her out, or something, but I just can't do it.
3. Knight in Armor: The Princess is pretty, I'll give her that. And soon a band of knights from her kingdom showed up to rescue her and kill me. I killed all the knights but one -- a knight who seemed to be resistant to my fortune powers. I couldn't let him report our wherabouts, so I put him to work and told him I'd slit his throat if he shirked the tasks I gave him.

It's been some time now. I haven't had to slit his throat yet, and to my amazement he has actually fought by my side against threats to all of us. I don't know why the guy doesn't simply try to run away, or to cut my throat in my sleep. That's what I would do....

Hero Lab and the Hero Lab logo are Registered Trademarks of LWD Technology, Inc. Free download at http://www.wolflair.com
Fate Core System © 2013-2014 by Evil Hat Productions, LLC.

Characters for my Convention Game
 

I'm using the Fate Core Beta Test pack to make the characters and npcs for my game for OrcCon 2014 called, "Blood Trails." So far making the characters has been very smooth sailing, and the character sheets while spartan and plane are very clear and easy to read with one caveat.

The way skills are presented is a little hard to follow on the character sheet if you're used to seeing the layout on the standard Fate Core character sheet. It's not a big issue, but one of the comments a play tester made to me was that it was a little less appealing.

Also, stunts could use to have a mechanical explanation attached to them if one exists.

Just my first impressions, so far very impressed and pleased with what I'm seeing.

JiB

They export with explanations on the character sheet. Check the print preview, they should be on the second page.

Thank you for letting me join the betatest! My gaming group had it’s “FATE-Babylon 5” kickoff session last weekend, so I have actual stuff to test with.
So here are the things that came to my attention after playing with it for a few minutes that would allow me to fully use HeroLab in my Fate campaign. Apologies if someone already brought up that topic.

1. We need a campaign editor!
When reading through the FATE Core rules I came to the conclusion that there will only me a small percentage of campaigns that are run by “vanilla” Fate. My campaign adds 10 new skills and renames half of the existing skills. I also have one more average and fair skills in the pyramid. Not to mention that bulk load of stunts.
HeroLab should offer a way that we can create our own campaigns like the three that are provided with the datafile. Otherwise it is quite useless for anything than vanilla Fate. The editor should allow the modification of existing stuff and the addition of new custom skills, stunts and campaign setting parameters. (like SkillCap, number of aspects, Pyramid or Column,…)

2. Extras from the char sheet is missing
Where can I add the “Extras”?

3. Condition Aspects from the char sheet are missing
Where can I add the Conditions?

4. Where can I add custom “skills” to the campaign/character?
Sometimes you want to add a skill that’s not on the list. I guess that this point would be covered by the fate fractal.

5. How can I break the columns when advancing a character?

6. Advancing by Milestones
It would be great if the journal would track the milestones. Those milestones should then activate the possible advances.

7. NPC Creation
The NPC Hero Type is only useful for the main NPC’s. And even then the “crosing paths” aspects are not needed. What about the minor and named NPC’s as shown in the rulebook. Those have less aspects, no skill tree,… And lets not forget “the mob”

8. “Fate Fractals” is missing
The ability to define everything as a “character” is also one of the core concepts. Without it I will have to use a text editor to keep track of those.

I just installed the beta test pack yesterday and I've been entering all of the characters from the Star Trek game I just started recently. I was able to pretty much build all of the characters without any major hitches, but there are some things that I really wish I could tweak in Hero Lab or in how it prints out characters.

1) I wish the option to rename skills and stunts was working. I'm using all but two of the standard skills in the game, but I've renamed a number of them (for example, Engineering for Crafts, Piloting for Drive, etc.). Likewise, it would be nice to be able to rename some of the stunts. At least I can easily create custom stunts though, that's one workaround that works well.

2) There should be a way to toggle on/off the addition of stunt descriptions to the character sheet and stat block outputs. In fact, stunt descriptions should be "on" by default... especially given how common custom stunts are.

3) It would be nice if you could toggle between the Ladder names or values (or both) in the skill section. For example, being able to switch between "Athletics (+3)" and "Good Athletics (+3)" and "Good Athletics" or something like that. And have the ability to print it the way you want it to as well, of course.

4) I -strongly- support the suggestion of creating a custom campaign wizard or interface. The current way to do it through the editor looks clunky at best (and from what other people are posting, it sounds like it doesn't actually work at the moment). As others have mentioned, most people will be running custom Fate games, so the ability to easily and readily customize your campaign, complete with its own issues/aspects, custom skill list, custom stunt list, NPCs, etc. seems like a must to me. Hopefully this is high on Lone Wolf's "to-do" list.

I agree with a lot of the other suggestions I've seen here (such as Extras / Fate Fractals) but I haven't personally run into needing them yet.

Despite all of my requests & gripes above, I really do love what I see so far, and it IS very useable in its current form. After all, I did get all four characters fully entered and they technically useable as-is. I look forward to seeing how this develops.

First posting of questions and stuff
 

Hello folks.

I'm trying to do a bit of hackery on the Fate Core template, in order to shoehorn in a campaign that I'm running. It seemed like an ideal use-case, since it's already a way in which I'd be using it if I had it previously.

It calls for, among other things, a higher refresh rate, more stunts to start with, and an optional aspect which not everybody needs to use to reflect cyberware effects. I got the campaign set up with the additional stunts and refresh, but I'm still trying to puzzle out how to add in an optional aspect.

While looking for that, I stumbled upon the canonical list of Things, and I notice there are some repeats on the list of source things. I wanted to make sure these were intentional. Some I could see being different facets of the same grande Thing, but some were close enough together I wanted to make sure they weren't mistakes.

• Animal Companion (cmpAnimCom & stAnimComp)
• Best Foot Forward (stBestFoot & stBestForw)
• Big Sucker (cmpBigSuck & stBigSucke)
• Companion (compCustom & compSpecif)
• Danger Sense (stDanSNot & stDangSens)
• Gambling Buddy (cmpGambBud & stGambBudd)
• Independant (cmpIndepen & impIndepen) (which should be Independent)
• Lieutenant (cmpLieuten & stLieutena)
• Mental (strMental & typMental)
• Money Talks (stMonTalk & stMoneTalk)
• Physical (strPhys & typPhysic)
• Skill Ranks (adjSklRank & resSkillRn)
• Spirit Companion (cmpSpiComp & stSpirComp)
• Sucker (cmpSucker & stSucker)
• Talk the Talk (stTalkBurg & stTalkTalk)
• Weight of Reputation (stWeigRepu & stWeighRep)

Editor Problem
 

I've started a campaign in the editor.

http://i59.tinypic.com/j11w0g.jpg

All I've done after creating this campaign is:
Hit Save
Hit Test Now
Ctrl-R to reload the data files.

Enable Debugging is checked.
None of the changes are showing up (i.e., Refresh <> 10, no extra phases)
What did I not do?

(sorry the image is so big, I tried to resize it and it became unreadable.)

Hi guys, maybe I missed this in the responses so far, but how do you change your refresh rate? It's stuck at 3 and the base level of the game we're running is 6.

Well, there are three ways I can see, and the number of characters being used will probably define the approach used.

1) In the Personal tab, use Add Permanent Adjustments. You can then add three refresh there.
2) After creating the character, shift to Advancement Mode and take the Increase Refresh Rate advancement three times.
3) In the Editor, create a new campaign (If it's otherwise identical to the Fate Core rules, just use New (Copy)), and change the base refresh rate there. Then save the campaign. Then, when you create the character, set them to that campaign, and the refresh rate will be consistent for all characters created in that campaign.

The character is probably still set as a Fate Core character. The new campaign can be selected by going to "Configure your hero" in the Character menu.

OK, my opinion and $5 will buy you a coffee in my home town, so here's my suggestions on what features need to be added, which order they need to be done in, and my thoughts as to why.

(Incidentally, the bug about the campaign skill selector adding to Bootstrap instead of Tags needs to be addressed before these others)

1) The ability to create custom stress tracks. The definition (as I see it) would be to define the base skill it links to for improvement (If applicable), and the name of the track, and to draw it's base number of boxes from the campaign definition. (The primary example of this would be the Wealth stress track on page 285 of the Fate Core book)

2) The ability to define character types within a campaign. At the moment, if PCs use the skill pyramid, the only "clean" workaround I can see for creating an NPC properly (custom skill progression, etc) is to create a second campaign which is a copy of the first using Skill Columns instead of a Skill Pyramid. That then leaves you having two campaigns to update if you need to change things. This also ties back to point 1 (In combination, this will allow creation of Fires a la Fight Fire from Worlds of Fate 1).

3) The ability to add Complex Extras. Some extras make sense to be in the primary character sheet (superpowers, some magic systems, etc). Others should probably have their own character sheets (Vehicles, Holdings, Allies, etc). This work, in my opinion, would require 1 and 2 above to be completed first.

It would be nice to be able to edit skills, add skills, change campaign parameters, etc. without having to go into the editor.

I honestly haven't been able to figure out how to use the Editor on my own. If we had to do that to adjust character starting values, I probably would just go to a word processor.

Ha, found it! :) And after 2 hours tinkering around I have a campaign entry with skills and adjustments for my B5 campaign!!

Consequences should be enough for us.

Thanks so much Elindor, that worked perfectly. Just used option 1 seemed easiest.

-kodama1-

Thanks for your feedback, everyone! I have a few questions about what you've all been asking for, which you can find in this followup thread:

http://forums.wolflair.com/showthread.php?t=48333

Looking forward to hearing from you there! You can also continue posting any other feature requests or suggestions you have in the new thread. :)