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Your player loves the setting, but this is blinding them to what the books actually are: casefiles. They're not true, they're what the writer believes is true.
The Dresdenverse is much more complicated than even Harry Dresden knows. If your player truly loves the setting, they should embrace that fact.
On page 26 of Our World, at the end of the chapter ...
51
Player Revolt/Intervention
You must, in an out-of-character context, talk about this with your GM. There is no rule in the world that will solve player favoritism. This conversation needs to include, bluntly
That this behavior is making the game unfun for you
That this behavior is making the game unfun for your table-mates
That the behavior must end
...
42
Yes.
The books never explicitly say that the GM should or must tell the players the difficulty, but that's because it takes it for granted. (It really should say, because – as you point out – keeping players in the dark is just so normal for so many GMs.)
There is circumstantial evidence in the text that the GM is supposed to set difficulties "in the open",...
35
First off, DFRPG is full of "the group should agree" (YS92), "keep in mind the intended play style" (YS31), "make sure your players are okay this" (YS338), "make sure you're on the same page as your players" (341), and "when in doubt, talk it through with your group" (YS99).
In many places throughout this ...
24
They give a very good impression of the setting, and they also give a pretty good background for understanding how the rules work.
The game was designed to very closely emulate the fiction of the books (Evil Hat and the author worked closely together for about a decade, and much of Evil Hat's work on developing and refining Fate over the years and multiple ...
24
Style
DFRPG is rather wordy; the manuals themselves are flavorful enough to give a solid sense of the Dresden Files world and its playful-yet-serious attitudes. Sadly, this occasionally obscures the rules a little, but overall it's very well written.
Also, the book's got a lot of art.
General Rules with Examples (35+ pages)
FATE is a weird system for the ...
24
No, you're not missing anything, as far as the rule goes.
Red Court vampires use the narcotic saliva to manipulate people, not to injure them. That's according to the rule you cited, and that's according to all fictional positioning from the source novels.
The un-asked part of this question is about ways which a Red Court vampire could alter the flow and ...
23
Wraith's answer is absolutely right: Fate is designed to be open and transparent, and revealing aspects is crucial to the players' mechanical viability in the narrative.
Now, DFRPG itself occupies a rather peculiar niche in the Fate paradigm and its narrative style unfortunately led to a lot of engine philosophy being implied rather than stated. So I'm ...
23
My initial suggestion is to attack the problem from a different angle.
You say that in the early part of the encounter/investigation/episode, the players will not invest resources or better yet, garner points by putting themselves in situations to fail. That essentially means that they find the decisions they're making in the beginning of these sessions ...
22
I don't know that this is quite at ultimatum level yet - from your description, it's not clear to me whether you've privately raised this issue with the GM yet in a serious way. It probably should have been clear to her from your joking about it that it bothered you, but if you and she are best friends, you should be able to pull her aside and raise your ...
21
Stress tracks in FATE work as a pacing mechanism. It's not meant to simulate the physiological reaction of a body to punishment; it's there to provide a means of determining whether a character is out of the fight or not and reproduce a narrative aesthetic. Hit points historically have worked this way; the description of what a "hit point" is has often ...
21
It helps to first tell them that in a FATE game, the players are not their characters. Players are not much different than the GM in what they do, only that they usually have a limited jurisdiction (their character) and limited resources (their FATE points). Everybody at the table has control over how the story unfolds regarding their jurisdiction, and can ...
21
DFRPG has more mechanics, which each individually accomplish less.
DFRPG is a lot crunchier. Although it maintains the "players can make up their own setting and features" ethos that is the hallmark of Fate, it has a LOT of subsystems in which to do this. For example, it provides a solid and complicated magic subsystem. You're free to make up your own ...
20
The book does answer this question, but in the margin on page 253. sigh… I love Evil Hat, but hiding this important rule here is rather… Evil. Thanks to the player that was trying to cast the reactive shield for finding it.
Billy, Can you do Block evocations instead of rolling to defend? How about counterspells?
As written, no—although your group could ...
19
Before you got much further, I want you to consider the possibility that you already know the answer. This is possible because you already told us the answer:
If they took the ability to cross over into the NeverNever (the spirit world) then that would tell me they wanted NeverNever shenanigans, if they took Spider Walk then that would tell me they wanted ...
18
Yes. You can choose how an opponent gets taken out. That means you don't have to worry about accidentally violating the First Law.
There are some complications in the moment. One is that any of your aspects that indicate bloodlust can be compelled so that you do kill them. The other is that what the consequences have to match the action you took. If you ...
18
FATE doesn't go for fiddly bits
FATE, as I'm sure you've noticed, has narrative expendiency as its core philosopy. One result of this is that mechanics are pretty simple and don't have a lot of exceptions or fiddly bits hanging off.
So when the book describes one Court as stronger than another, that's primarily a narrative distinction, not something that ...
18
Play a session or two of Roll For Shoes. Like an improv exercise, it will shake out your narrative muscles and make you stretch them a bit in a gaming context where it's ok to do the "wrong" thing or take the game in absurd directions.
This is the game that did the most to transition my old group from a D&D context to a more player-driven context. We ...
18
Baltimore is the most fully realized setting,
The Dresden Files RPG books Your Story and Our World cover Baltimore fairly in-depth, with locations, aspects, NPCs, and plot hooks.
Chicago is the default setting,
But it's more covered in the novels than in the game, so although there's a lot of Chicago in the game manuals there's no proper setting bible ...
18
There's two ways to understand your question: as a request for example spells, or as a plea for help because you don't really know what Spirit does. There's no exhaustive list of example Spirit spells, and besides, working from a list of spells is the opposite of how the DFRPG magic system works. So I'm going to answer the latter interpretation of the ...
17
I think that one thing to refer him to (in the book appropriately titled Your Story) is the section on "Running the Game"YS306 .
In the first part, "What the GM Does", this statement is a good starting place:
Generally speaking, the GM is “where the buck stops” for any decisions
about the game that come up during play—questions of ...
17
First of all, you didn't follow the rules when creating characters. You say:
...he didn't take thaumaturgy, the sight, the soulgaze...
But on p.86 of Your Story it says:
A wizard must have a high concept that declares his nature (e.g., Wizard For Hire or Favorite Son of the White Council). In addition, the character must take the following ...
17
Inhuman Recovery allows the recovery of a single physical mild consequence.
Feeding Dependency inflicts hunger consequences, not physical consequences.
The only way to restore those is going to be to either feed or make a successful discipline check so as to start recovery normally.
16
The answer is going to depend on what role the poison is serving.
Wraith808's answer using the Venomous feature and tazers will work if it's a feature of the opponents and not expected to last a long time.
If it's part of a conflict with a poisoner, you can give the loser the aspect "Unknowingly poisoned with x venom" as a concession or loss. As an aside, ...
16
Yes, you can offer a concession that kills you. From the glossary:
Concession (Playing the Game, page 206): An alternative to being taken out in a conflict, wherein a player accepts defeat for his
character (or the GM, for an NPC) in exchange for being able to
dictate the terms of that defeat.
Going further and checking out page 206:
A concession ...
16
Your first question is about half a GM problem, and half a player/PC problem. I've been on both sides of this issue: GMing for a character who had little reason to participate in the story with the other PCs, and playing a character who had no reason to participate in the story and every reason to run wildly in the other direction. In both situations, the ...
16
Mortals do lose out in combat against the supernatural, but they gain majorly in other aspects, and are excellent to have for storytelling purposes.
We've had a two-year campaign running, starting from a relatively low level and currently at Chest Deep. We have honestly found that there's advantages and disadvantages to both mortal and supernatural ...
15
In an average deadlift, a character with +3 Might and Inhuman Strength have the same level of capability.
However, that is nowhere near the whole story.
First of all, the game doesn't care about the average deadlift. They only care about deadlifts that might advance the story - and in those cases there is going to be a choice about whether or not to spend ...
15
White Court vampires in general stick with a single "flavor" of emotion. There are multiple references to the fact that this is not a true limitation. However, there is a systematic limit, which makes it a bit murkier.
From OW89:
Instead of blood, White Court vampires consume psychic energies—the
pure life force—generated from strong emotions like ...
15
Fate as a system is not a "Lightweight System."
For comparison:
Starblazer Adventures: 630pp. While it includes some setting information, it actually expects one to be quite familiar with the comics.
Strands of Fate: 469, no setting.
Spirit of the Century 426pp. The setting is encoded strongly into the skillls and stunts chapters, and gets only a ...
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