Tabletop Roleplaying Games · Fate
Fate Core
English
Evil Hat Productions
Fate Core is a generic tabletop roleplaying game system for character-driven stories in any genre, written by Fred Hicks, Rob Donoghue and Leonard Balsera among others and published by Evil Hat Productions in 2013. It is the fourth edition of Fate, a system that Hicks and Donoghue first released through a Yahoo! group in early 2003 and that Evil Hat published that summer, as a derivative of Fudge. The third edition (2006) powered Spirit of the Century and The Dresden Files Roleplaying Game. Fate Core was funded on Kickstarter, where it raised $433,365 against a $3,000 goal, and it was released under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence (CC BY 3.0) and the Open Game License (OGL), so anyone can publish a Fate game without asking permission. The system has won multiple ENnie Awards and Indie RPG Awards.
The system directly evolved from Fudge, and it has two published variants in Fate Accelerated Edition and Fate Condensed.
Description
Players take on competent protagonists defined by a few phrases about who they are, and the Game Master (GM) frames scenes in which those phrases get tested. Fate has no fixed setting, so the group first decides what kind of story it is telling, from pulp adventure to a modern urban fantasy, and builds characters to suit it.
The game asks a table to talk about the fiction as much as roll for it. Players must be willing to let their own characters' flaws make trouble for them, in exchange for a resource they will spend later, and the system works best when everyone pitches in ideas. It tends to be less satisfying for groups who want a tactical simulation of weapons and gear.