• Please note: In an effort to ensure that all of our users feel welcome on our forums, we’ve updated our forum rules. You can review the updated rules here: http://forums.wolflair.com/showthread.php?t=5528.

    If a fellow Community member is not following the forum rules, please report the post by clicking the Report button (the red yield sign on the left) located on every post. This will notify the moderators directly. If you have any questions about these new rules, please contact support@wolflair.com.

    - The Lone Wolf Development Team

Fate Core Beta Thread

Status
Not open for further replies.

Colen

Ex-Staff
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. :)


------


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!
 
Last edited:
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).
 
Last edited:
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!
 
** 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.

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

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
 
Last edited:
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.

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!
 
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.

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.

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.
 
Last edited:
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.
 
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.
 
* Not sure what you mean by that; can you give more information?

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.
 

Attachments

  • HL_FateConsq.png
    HL_FateConsq.png
    11.4 KB · Views: 17
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top