Design Desk: My first Fate magic system.

Well, more GM advice will be posted on Thursday, not because I'm out of ideas but because I need time to organise what exactly I'm going to talk about and whether to go for something abstract and related to preparation or something for actually in-game. Once a week is probably all I'll be able to manage once term starts anyway, so giving myself a specific day will make getting them out easier.

So, for a second series of posts, I thought I'd explain my design process and give some homebrew content by design things as I write the article. I do plan to do other posts on some of my bigger projects, especially the science fiction setting/system I'm currently working on, but I've got nothing past early alpha yet. Also, as I'm an engineer and not a particularly good game designer I can't promise that any rules or setting information I publish here will be of high quality, at least for alpha and beta drafts I'm just looking for 'good enough'.

Now that was a long introduction, I promise I'll have a shorter one next time.

Anyway, I thought I might have a go at designing something for one of my favourite roleplaying games, Fate Core. Normally I'd write this in somewhere between half and hour and 2-3 hours and then post it on a forum for feedback, but I'm actually underwhelmed with some of the offerings for magic in Fate Core. While when using FAE I'm fine with just having magic be the fluff surrounding how you're Cleverly Overcoming the problem, refluffing Shoot in a standard Fate Core game just doesn't feel right to me. The Fate System Toolkit does present two great systems for summoning beings, Storm Summoners and Voidcalling, so I'm not going to be covering that in this system, but there's nothing I like in the way of magic as it appears in most roleplaying games. So what do I want? I'm going to be focusing on the below:

1. Magic is just another way of solving problems, a thief might jump across a pit with his Athletics skill while the mage creates a force field across it.
2. Magic should be able to attack and defend against harm, and serve as an alternative to Fight or Shoot.
3. Different traditions should behave differently.
4. Magicians should be able to have abilities beyond the basic.

Now, the first two are easy enough to solve. Fate does not have a set skill list, the theory is that each group will customise the standard one or come up with a new one to fit the setting, so we can just add a Sorcery skill to the list (I could also use an existing skill, but I'm not for personal reasons). The Sorcery skill can use all four basic actions, Overcome, Create an Advantage, Attack, and Defend. This does make it slightly more powerful than some of the other skills, especially Shoot as attacking with magic also allows you to target people in other zones, so we should limit it somewhat.

This is where item number 3 is useful. Each magical tradition is different, so why don't we have each of them working with one type of 'thing'. We might have Suncallers who can only magically control fire, great for burning down the door but rubbish at crossing the pit, while druids use magic that manipulates plants and bodies and traditional clerical magic can only enhance 'people'. Make a character use an aspect to say what kind of magic they can use, and prohibit anybody from knowing multiple types. I don't want any hard rules for this, as it's the kind of thing that will vary from table to table, and while one group may be fine with Nekomancers (they work with undead cats), another might want to stick to serious schools of magic. In a game like D&D I could never stick to having caster types be so freeform, but specifying more than this works really well in Fate, as it allows the magic system to be comparable to the standard crafting and martial arts systems.

But now we come onto 4, and we need to assign the basic capabilities of any caster. We know that each caster can only use one 'thing', whatever it is, but we've not established what they can do with it. So here's the deal: a character can normally only do with magic what a person could do with their hands. This magic doesn't destroy armies, but it can burn down a house, create a weapon, or attack one person with an attack. Now it might occasionally do things faster or more efficiently, but it can't do something that can't be done another way.

But now we get onto the special stuff people have. One of the reasons I decided to go with making magic it's own skill over any of the other options I could have done, like making it an extra set of aspects or a stunt tree, is so I could do this easily. The stunts can be taken for the Sorcery skill and represent two things: advanced training and unique spells. So if you want to be particularly good at burning down doors, you can be. Things like attacking multiple people with one action would also require a stunt.

Finally, people can take unique spells that are outside the normal abilities of their tradition. There's no limit to the number of special spells, but each is a stunt. So your Suncaller might be able to turn coal into diamonds or cool the surrounding area. While these won't have the raw power of 'advanced training' stunts, each is a new option that a smart player could exploit.

So here's how you play a spellcaster in this system:

1. Take an Aspect detailing what you use magic on.
2. Take ranks in the Sorcery skill, and roll it whenever you use magic.
3. Take stunts to represent advanced training or special spells.

I don't think there will be another one of these for a while, it depends on how long it takes me to come up with another thing to homebrew.