FATEwiki - What Is FATE

FATE is the Fantastic Adventures in Tabletop Entertainment system (yeah, I think that's a little goofy, but ...), written by Fred Hicks and Robert Donoghue.

It's built on FUDGE (FUG 72), but while it holds onto that systems flexibility, it gives some good structure on top of it. The base FUDGE rules are flexible to the point of slipping through your fingers when you try to grab them. As one person has put it:[1]

FUDGE is a box of lego bricks.
FATE is the instruction book for one way to assemble all those bricks.
FUDGE says, "assemble them however you want to! Isn't it great to have this freedom?"
FATE says, "this is a good way to assemble the bits. Look at what we get at the end. Nice, eh?"

FATE's story-oriented, making it easier, I think, for character flavor and imagination to assert themselves beyond what the D20 mechanics allow.

There are two basic aspects of the mechanic that you should know:

First, rather than numeric attributes associated with everything (skills, abilities, etc.), FATE uses a variation on FUDGE adjectives. Everything is:

Abysmal - Terrible - Poor - Mediocre - AVERAGE - Fair - Good - Great - Superb - Epic - Legendary

You can think of this in numeric terms (Abysmal = -4, Average = 0, Legendary +6), and sometimes that's useful. This layout is known as The Ladder.

Secondly the default version of FATE uses FUDGE Dice, to produce variations from those skill levels. So if someone is testing their Fair swordplay and roll 4dF, coming up with [-][ ][+][+], they would have a net +1, or Good result (better than their average "Fair").

There's an RPG.net review of the system that gives a decent overview.

It's worth noting that the FATE folks have a new, non-FUDGE version coming out -- but only because they had problems with the FUDGE license. With those problems probably resolved, it's likely that a revised FUDGE version will remain the primary one. At the moment, that's the version I'm sticking with.