[Shadowchaser]

Originally Posted by Colen

Greetings Fate Core players,

Thanks for your feedback in the Fate Core Beta Thread! I spent a while reading through everyone's posts there, and picked out a few of the more popular requests that I have questions about. I'd like to know more about the following:

1. We had several requests for support of Fate Accelerated Edition in the thread. My original assumption was that it wouldn't be useful to support FAE because the game is so simple, but apparently a bunch of you think otherwise. What do you see the big benefit of FAE support in Hero Lab is?
   
2. A number of people asked about custom campaigns. You can currently implement custom campaigns in one of two ways. The Easy Way is to go to the Personal tab and add permanent adjustments to adjust the campaign to your liking. The Slightly Less Easy Way is to use Hero Lab's integrated editor (find it on the Tools menu) for building your campaign exactly to your liking, which you can then distribute to your friends.
   
3. One thing I saw a couple of requests for is "Break columns while advancing a character". Does that mean when advancing you want to ignore the column restrictions entirely? Or something else?
   
4. Several people asked for "Extras". For everyone who wanted Extras, it sounds like some of you meant that you wanted a table to which you could add anything you want, and track a numeric value along with it. Would that satisfy what you need, or would you need something more complex?
   
5. Another common request was "The Fate Fractal - Using fate attributes to make sidekicks, vehicles, special weapons, and so forth". How exactly would this work?

Thanks for your feedback, everyone! If you have more suggestions or ideas, feel free to share them here also.

Good questions! I'll take a stab at them here:

1) Fate Accelerated replaces the Skills concept with the Approaches concept in order to streamline the presentation. In doing so, they created a much faster way to create characters and also a new paradigm in how characters can be represented "Personality first" instead of "Capabilities first." A lot of people find this approach (nyuck!) appealing and useful. I personally have used a hybrid method combining approaches with skills, and find that also useful. An Approaches tab that you could turn on or off at the Configure Character screen would be pretty useful.

2) Campaigns in Fate are represented by their own sheet for a reason. They have Aspects which represent Themes, and these aspects are called upon during gameplay and can be *changed* by Milestones. Being able to create a Fate Campaign sheet and linking that to my players would be SUPER useful, as I would be able to build the campaign sheet, set the rules for that particular campaign, and then forward that to them to automatically configure their characters. Failing that, a Campaign Sheet tab on the character would be a way to start it off. I could fill out that part of the character sheet, save it as a "Template" character portfolio, and forward *that* to the players to use for character creation.

3) It's impossible to advance a skill by one skill rank without "breaking" the skill columns rule unless you start from the very bottom of your skill pyramid. This isn't very useful for progression. The ability to have one or two skills "unsupported" by a column has become pretty much necessary in our campaigns in order to allow players an organic skill progression. The Skill Cap for the campaign, the uppermost tier of a skill, still can't be changed without spending a Major Milestone, however.

4) I think that works as a kludge. For instance, if I wanted to add Armor: 2 to a character, I'd need the ability to put in that Armor description and the number 2. The ability to add a note explaining how the number is applied is important. A variable cost in Refresh would also help, as most Extras cost Refresh. In my upcoming Superhero game, we're using a set of "Super Points" to represent Refresh-that-is-only-for-buying-Super-Powers so characters don't burn through their Refresh in character creation... so something that let us customize that without a lot of trouble would help, but probably isn't super necessary. Another example would be for our Fate campaign: Tianixa: Blood, Silk & Jade. In that setting, you gain a number of specialized stunts to represent your Kung Fu. We keep those Kung Fu forms and such set aside in their own category because they are thematically different from the standard Stunts in Fate Core.

5) The Fate Fractal is part of what makes Fate pretty amazing. Basically, any element you want to add into a campaign can be described using the same concepts as a player character. For example, a magic sword that is important enough could be called out on its own, given a set of Aspects (one or more), a Skill, an Extra or Stunt, and so on. A Boy Wonder sidekick could be a more fleshed-out character with a full set of skills and such, but designed with a different set of Stress checkboxes and no Consequences, and no refresh (he's essentially a "Feature" of the parent character). You can also create character-like traits for a game element run by the GM, such as a murder mystery. The mystery itself can be represented by aspects and skills, as it "actively" resists the attempts by the players to solve it.

Hope that was helpful!