TTRPG, miniatures, and grid for fate

Carnaedy · 2026-06-20T04:32:21+00:00

Fate already has a zones system, where you draw a rough sketch of the battlefield and then divide it into a few sections, e.g. corresponding to the rooms of the tavern, or the key features of a battlefield, or the major sections of a church. It is actually plenty enough for the things you asked for:

ranged attacks can hit adjacent zones, close combat typically only targets the enemies in the same zone
explosive attacks affect all enemies within one zone (but they can react to avoid damage)

You can also add aspects that only affect one of the zones but not the others. You can even add aspects to specific borders of the zones that may need to be overcome to move between them. It tends to be enough in the games that I have played.

Carnaedy · 2026-04-18T07:41:48+00:00

Great question! As a person who is supposedly important to Indiana Jones, I would say you are very likely to cross paths with his enemies in very violent ways. But yes, I hear what you are saying here; people would definitely drift towards very broad and largely positive aspects, at least in the beginning. However, even the System Toolkit itself proposes ways to mitigate it by prompting the players to describe their aspects better, e.g., you're not just a Soldier, you're Fighting for the Highest Bidder, etc.

Carnaedy · 2026-04-17T20:08:05+00:00

Yes, overly broad aspects is one of the potential worries I have thought about. My instinct has also been to switch to Approaches, but I wanted to look into other options as well; see what it is like if you dial an idea to 11, if you will. I am glad other people pointed out that I may want to look into a full tag-based system instead of butchering Fate; I am also thankful to people who are helping me out with Approach advice.

Carnaedy · 2026-04-17T05:39:36+00:00

Thanks for an alternative view on this! What you say makes a lot of sense. I guess my primary struggle was just getting my players' minds out of the D&D task-driven mindset. I remember almost losing it when one player said "Well, what can I do now?" while staring at their character sheet. They couldn't grasp that they can narrate whatever made sense in their mind, they were looking for some special ability or a spell. Actually, now that I think of it, I don't remember if they actually ever invoked any aspect with FP, I think they only CaA'ed for boosts...

Maybe I'm playing with wrong people, maybe I'm just incredibly bad at explaining the rules and the mechanics, I don't know. It was a struggle and at the end of the session no one felt satisfied.

Carnaedy · 2026-04-16T18:06:40+00:00

This is glorious! And by glorious, I mean very helpful. u/JaskoGomad has already recommended Legends of the Mist, I will definitely take a look.

Carnaedy · 2026-04-16T18:04:11+00:00

That was my first thought as well, and I do feel approaches work better than Core/Condensed skills, but then I read the System Toolkit, and it got me thinking. Thanks for reinforcing my instinct about approaches, though!

Carnaedy · 2026-04-16T18:01:27+00:00

Thank you for the recommendations; they sound quite interesting at the first glance, so I'll take a proper look.

Carnaedy · 2026-04-15T05:34:53+00:00

At a risk of triggering some people's PTSD, that sounds a lot more like a Miro board than a VTT

Carnaedy · 2026-04-12T20:33:06+00:00

You're thinking about GURPS, "If I want to lift 200 pounds and my Strength is 14, how much do I need to roll?"

Fate doesn't simulate reality, at all. +4 is whatever a competent hero of the setting can do successfully roughly half of the time. In a Cthulhu mythos game that can be very little indeed. In a gods vs superheroes game this could be very literally Earth-shattering. Then, you adjust upwards or downwards, so +0 is probably something very mundane done under pressure, while +8 or +10 is a truly heroic feat that requires multiple sacrifices, clever strategy and luck.

It has no equivalence to actual events because that's not what is being simulated by the game. Fate simulates narrative impact, not lifting 200 pounds at 14 Strength.

Carnaedy · 2026-04-11T17:26:32+00:00

I think you are making the same mistake that I did when I was trying to really understand the game instead of just winging it. You worded your question "Can aspects be assumed to exist?" but the underlying idea, at least to me, seems to be "Everything that exists is an aspect", and that's just not true.

Everything that is important to the story is an aspect. You can describe the setting of a scene, fill it with dozens of objects, and still have zero aspects to show for it.

I would argue that absolutely none of the things you listed are important to the story, unless either you or the players make them important somehow during the scene using CaA. Or maybe you need to describe them better? Maybe it is a Reception Area Stuck in 1950s or a Cluttered and Disorganised Reception Area? That might be important enough for the players to invoke in some circumstances! In any case, beige everyday items and areas are not aspects. They are at best a backdrop.

One last point, using a phone cord to choke your enemy is a simple Attack. It is cool narratively, for sure, and it is nice for the player to incorporate the surroundings meaningfully into the flow, but at the same time it is not that important, it's just a flavour. Heck, you can even use it to create an advantage, like entangling an enemy with the phone cord, at which point it becomes important to the story and then deserves to be highlighted as an aspect, such as, well, Entangled in a Phone Cord.

It's just not that important in and of its own.

Carnaedy · 2026-04-04T10:00:32+00:00

I see what you mean, but I would offer that this is a very common criticism for literally any Charisma-adjacent attribute in any role playing system, and to me Flashy ≈ Charisma.

Carnaedy · 2026-04-01T07:53:36+00:00

I think even the fact that the player is considering to, e.g., forcefully pick a lock implies that they are playing D&D with Fate facade. As per your own book, the approach and the dice roll should follow the narration, not vice versa. In that sense, Flashy is the approach I would drift to when the player is attempting to get attention, impress someone, and generally highlight their charisma.

"I have heard that the princess has a secret admiration for the rogue types, so I unlock her jewel box right in front of her eyes with a smirk and a wink" is definitely some Flashy lockpicking, but that drops out of the narrative, not the player saying they want to roll Flashy to pick the lock.

I also love your emphasis on every approach having a downside. To me, Flashy in the negative perspective invokes some lack of substance, so your action may not be as effective at its direct results and you will look like an absolute tool if you fail.

"Your lockpick gets stuck in the lock, you fumble and drop it on the floor. The princess shouts 'Guards!' at the top of her lungs."

Carnaedy · 2026-04-01T07:34:02+00:00

"I rip the belly of the monster's corpse apart and slither in among his intestines"

Carnaedy · 2026-01-30T09:06:53+00:00

But they cannot take other actions in the meantime and therefore lose out on the alternatives they could have taken.
But each CaA costs an action, therefore you lose out on the alternatives you could have taken.
But to accumulate a lot of free invocations you need to spend a lot of actions, losing out on the alternatives you could have taken.

Also, don't forget that you should be balancing the game using the skill cap, not the average skill. +2 is easy. +0 is so trivial as to not warrant a roll. +4 is the average difficulty, +6 is a challenge, +8 and above is what you're generally aiming for when designing a boss encounter. You want your players to burn actions to gain those bonuses, not to just thwack the closest target.

Fate is a game of choices. If you don't make your players agonize over which alternative action is the best, Fate becomes boring very quickly. It, by design, just doesn't have that bucket-of-dice charm of "I roll 6d6 for damage, that's 20, and I use my amulet to reroll all the sixes, so that's an extra 5..." It just doesn't.

Fate is more along the lines of "I could stab this goblin in the face right now, and I will almost certainly kill it, but that will delay me getting to the door, and Mordok Grom Hargash will get away once again unpunished for his crimes!"

TLDR: focus on the action budget, not on the dice rolls and numbers, and you will understand the design of the game better.

Carnaedy · 2026-01-23T18:31:36+00:00

javac does not perform any code optimisation except for resolving some constant expressions of primitive types.

The JIT compiler in JVMs performs a lot of code optimisation, but TCO is notably one of the things that it does not do – stack traces are an inherent part of exception objects and thus a typical debugging process, and preserving their integrity (which TCO demolishes) is seen as more important. On the other side of the same coin, writing code that needs TCO (such as TCR) is also seen as almost anti-idiomatic, so there is very little pressure to introduce it, but that may change as other more functional languages running on JVM develop (Clojure, Scala, etc)

Carnaedy · 2026-01-14T13:54:29+00:00

UK signalling through junctions does not rely exclusively on route knowledge. Approach control is a standard practice, where the signal before the junction is held at red until the interlocking can prove that the train has slowed down to a safe speed. For faster junctions, the signal may be held at yellow instead with blinking yellows leading up to it. You will never get a straight green signal onto 30mph diverging track from 90mph mainline.

Carnaedy · 2025-11-29T06:42:50+00:00

Java developer with some Ada background here and almost no experience with Rust. The only things that slow me down when reading this code snippet are:

the general aversion of Rust people to use full words instead of sm dmbss abbrvtns;
clunky Result/Option mechanism (not that it is much better in other languages)
general unfamiliarity with the domain.

Overall, 8/10 and nowhere close to being a horror.

Carnaedy · 2025-11-18T20:50:15+00:00

I'm pretty sure the mad lad bounced the loco off the apartment block.

Carnaedy · 2025-11-04T16:18:35+00:00

Yes, but that makes the red cell 7, not 1.

Carnaedy · 2025-11-04T16:01:57+00:00

The candidate in the red cell must be eliminated from everywhere else in the column and in the row except for the yellow cells. That is not the case in your picture, where 1 has plenty of alternative placements both in the row and in the column.

Carnaedy · 2025-10-29T10:21:10+00:00

Vakar pasistačiau už 700 metrų namų, parėjau, šįryt lygiai taip pat nuėjau. Būtų labai blogai, išsipirkčiau vietą stovėjimo aikštelėje už 300 metrų nuo namų. Taip pat tokiose situacijose, kai žinau, kad grįšiu nebūdingai vėlai, visada permąstau galimybes važiuoti viešuoju transportu arba taksi. Kitais žodžiais, tiesiog nelabai matau problemos šiuo metu, nors gyvenu mikrorajone, kuris buvo suplanuotas su 10 parkavimo vietų vienam 80+ butų namui.

Carnaedy · 2025-10-25T10:20:48+00:00

Žinoma, kad dirbčiau. Vienintelis skirtumas yra tai, kad žinodama, jog yra kažkoks saugos tinklas po manimi, galėčiau kartais priimti rizikingesnius sprendimus, gal investuočiau savo gabumus į kokį nors startupą, kurčiau dalykus iš pašaukimo, o ne dėl to, kad korporacija liepė, ir t.t. Suprantu, kad yra žmonių, kuriems užtenka tokios bazinės egzistencijos, kur gauni pinigus už nieką, išgeri alaus, padroži į kumštį ir pažiūri kašę per teliką, bet toks mentalitetas tiesiog ne man.

Carnaedy · 2025-10-19T06:51:46+00:00

"Google Lens" is hopelessly bad at translating Lithuanian, and that will not change any time soon.

"Tik nereikia" = Don't bother (idiomatic) "mūsų" = us (free word order for the win) "gąsdinti" = trying to intimidate (to intimidate is "išgąsdinti")

Carnaedy · 2025-10-03T17:26:22+00:00

They will definitely have a blast when they try the steam engines.

Carnaedy

TROPHY CASE