Card-based Fate Aspects

[avram]

An idea that came to me in a thread on Story Games about card-game design: Fate’s Aspects could be reworked using cards.

I figure each player gets a deck of Aspect cards, with each of that PC’s Aspects written on one card. At the start of the session you shuffle your deck, place it face down, and draw (say) five cards. These are the Aspects you have available to invoke in that scene.

To invoke, you take an Aspect card from your hand, and play it face-up on the table in front of you. (No need to spend a Fate point; this system replaces Fate points.) You then get the usual stuff you get by invoking an Aspect — +2, re-roll, or declare something. But you can’t invoke that Aspect again until it comes back into your hand. Aspects on the table are available for compels. When someone compels your Aspect, you take that card and put it back in your deck. At some point you’d shuffle and redraw, but I don’t have any good ideas about that yet.

In a typical game of Diaspora or Spirit of the Century you’d have ten cards for your ten Aspects. I think maybe in a Dresden Files game, where you only have seven aspects, you’d make three extra copies of your High Concept (or maybe two of your High Concept and one extra of your Trouble?), giving you ten cards.

For tagging environmental and other character’s Aspects, I think you’d get a few extra cards in your deck, saying “Environment” or “Opponent”. Play those to tag those Aspects. When someone uses an Opponent card to tag or compel one of your Aspects, you get to pick up one of your tabled Aspect card and put it in your deck. (This part seems a bit awkward.)

Comments

[avram]

You've just about almost reinvented the median stage between Fate 2 and Fate 3, before Hicks and Donoghue came up with Fate points.

In Fate 2, Aspects had levels and checkboxes, and to use an Aspect you checked it off. When it was all checked off, you couldn't use it anymore. As they were developing Fate 3, they came up with the idea of the compel, which would allow you to uncheck a box. Then they dropped the boxes in favor of Fate points.

One reason I suggested a hand of five or so cards was to reduce the cognitive overhead of having ten Aspects of your own, plus everyone else's, to think about all of the time, and to introduce the challenge of having to make do with what's available.