|
FATE
Home Page |
Fred Hicks on rolling for Aspect as if it were (or in lieu of) Skills: [1]
Folks shouldn't have to scrap their character and rewrite it when they discover they left out a skill they shouldn't have. Falling back to the aspect's rating in such a case gives you a method for insulating those circumstanes, and should be well familiar to folks from standard Fudge who might fall back to an Attribute when a Skill was otherwise nonpresent or unavailable.
[...] In general, unless you're applying careful containment & balance to your aspect levels (skill levels get this already via The Pyramid), this method doesn't stand up real good because aspect ratings can at various points outstrip what skills can be rated at, which can seem unbalancing. So it should be used judiciously or, to put it another way, "rarely". There are a few ways to make your situation a little safer though.
The first is to follow our recommendation that you don't allow someone to promote a single aspect to a level that is greater than half the number of phases-so-far (so you shouldn't be taking an Aspect above 2 levels until you're at Phase 6, etc). This approach has a loose "pyramidding" effect on aspects. Your alternate approach is to keep in mind what your ultimate number of phases is going to be, and size that accordingly -- so if you're doing a 6-phase character generation, someone could have an Aspect of 3 levels by phase 3, but would not be allowed to take it beyond that. Either way, the cap serves you well in creating a feeling of balance if you're going to roll against aspect levels occasionally.
The second way is something you suggested already -- charge an aspect check-off to roll against an aspect instead of a default-or-nonexistent skill. This is pretty elegant in a number of ways. Consider if you had someone with a Superb (level 4) Aspect of Strength, but their combat skills only topped out at Good. Throughout an adventure, they could spend a box of Strength during a fight, to:
* Reroll their Good combat skill roll, or * Roll against their Superb Strength rating instead of their combat skill to strike a powerful blow (which could then be improved with more box expenditures for rerolls and die flips, too!). That's nicely limiting on how often they can "exceed their normal bounds". The only "flaw" I can see with this is that it would encourage people to take a smaller number of aspects at higher levels, rather than spreading things all around -- but with a "capping" method in place like the first one too, you may have yourself a working solution there.
Character Rules |