The Sun and The Air

A FATE/Persona TTRPG and the Urge to Homebrew

I've been recently working lightly on a FATE-based TTRPG that incorporates the general meta-structure of a Persona game, while also homebrewing in some other elements from other RPGs that I really like. You can find it here if you're interested, but it's in a very early stage - I'm more interested in talking through my decisions so far and what motivates it.

Why FATE?

FATE is a TTRPG system that revolves entirely around rolls of 4 Fudge Dice (Marked with 2 each +, -, and blank sides) that give a possible roll between -4 and +4. It's a system heavy on collaborative storytelling and the materials strongly encourage the Director (the GM analogue) to skip the numbers where they're not interesting. Combat is built around Zones the player characters can move within freely, rather than any kind of positional grid system.

I've been playing TTRPGs on and off for 15 years now, and I've tried a fair few systems. They all had their advantages, but FATE is a system that clicked for me day one. The binomially distributed diceroll results fit with my vision of "attempting an action", so much so that when I was in university and lacking dedicated fudge dice, I did my first ever self-motivated coding project making a dice-roller.

This is a bit weird because I'm a massive numbers nerd, and I love tactical RPG videogames, and I hate doing the theatre-kid style of TTRPG roleplay. But FATE is designed to be extremely adaptable. If you have an idea for a game/setting/story, you could get it implemented in FATE without much friction. It has a combat system that actively discourages "I hit it with my axe"-style play, and gives support (and even entirely non-combat) characters a powerful way to impact combat through Aspects.

The other advantage is that it's very easy to onboard new players. Lend them some fudge dice (or use D6 with caveats, or an online roller), give them a simple skill pyramid, some Aspects and Stunts, and walk them through the first couple of scenes and they very quickly start to get the idea - I can tell the Director what I want to do and if I've thought of it, it's probably doable. The real key is to get them invested in their character, and the character-creation framework is genuinely the most effective I've ever used at getting newbies excited for a game.

Why Clocks?

So my outline uses Clocks a lot. This is a system I first saw in Blades In The Dark (it may predate that game, but BitD is built around Clocks in a big way) and it completely revolutionised how I think about time in TTRPGs.

Essentially a Clock is just a set number of blocks of time that indicate how long something will take, or progress to a goal, or heightening drama. They pretty much always move forward, and they provide an extremely "fair" tool for moving things along when players inevitably get bogged down in some minutiae.

A heist might have a Clock to track an incoming police car, or an Alertness Clock to show how close security is to figuring out something's up. A clock could be ticking along in the background that causes extra trouble if the players aren't past a certain point by segment 6 of 8.

In BitD Clocks do a lot of heavy lifting, but in my game I'm intending to use them primarily as a means of corralling my players without taking all the blame for it. In most games, I am absolutely the player who storms through a security door when my party argues with the guard for 20 minutes without making progress.

Why Persona?

I played Persona 3 Reload this year.

Oh, you need more? Fine.

When you play any game for 80 hours straight and enjoy it start to finish, you start to think why other games aren't more like it. It's a natural instinct. So I started to think about what a social link system would add to a TTRPG, and I kept thinking of positives:

This was good enough for me to talk about it with my partner, who immediately said "I saw someone write a thread about exactly that, would you like a link?" And I did.

"The Once And Maybe Queen" by tambuli is a creative/collaborative writing project on SpaceBattles that includes a really cool write up of a completely different project, but with a similar design goal - reconciling Social Links with FATE. It has a very different scope than the relatively breezy small-group TTRPG I have in mind, but it's always very fun to see someone else's answer to the same question, and you can see from my outline that I really liked their answers. I've trimmed it down and reworked it to my entirely different setting, but the bones are very much tambuli's work.

Once I saw this I knew the idea had legs, wrote my outline, then... left it sitting for 3 months. Now we're here!

What Next?

I've converted my Google Doc outline to Markdown and written this post, so I should probably think about finishing it and getting a campaign rolling. There are a few pieces that need nailed down before I can do a Session 0:

This all feels fairly achievable.

#design #fate #persona #ttrpg