Legends of Anglerre; First Session
We went ahead with the conversion from Fate 2.0 to Legends of Anglerre - it took about 2.5 hours for a group of four players. Some of them had some familiarity with the rules; one of them had none, but had some experience with Spirit of the Century and plenty of other rulesets. Overall, it went pretty smoothly, and the play experience was very good indeed.
The one sticky spot in converting over was the granularity of skills. In our implementation of Fate 2.0, characters had skills like Spookcraft and Cryptanalysis (separate from Cryptography), and we did feel that some flavour was being lost with the conversion to Investigate and Academics. Indeed, for some, we've straight up decided that we'll rebuild some of our old skills using a sort of pick and mix approach from the existing trappings and stunts in other skills. I'm a little wary of this in game balance terms - it's a bad idea to add skills arbitrarily to, say, D&D, but having thought carefully about it, I can't see that it's going to do much harm here.
Once we got down to playing, I found things to be very smooth. The players were enthused about using the new trappings, stunts and so on, and the "guidelines" provided by having text for each skill was very useful.
There was also an interesting point where... well, let me outline the situation. Earlier in the session, one of the player characters had used the True Sight stunt under Power of Divination to determine that the shadowy creatures they were fighting had an otherwise imperceptible connection to the Plane of Negative Energy, much like an astral cord. Later, he wanted to use Power of Dimensions to cut that off. It was remarkably easy to fit that into game terms; I reckoned that he had found an existing aspect by assessment, and was now tagging it for free, giving his roll a +2. It's a simple thing, but I find it very pleasing when the need to resolve a narrative event falls so neatly into the mechanics.
One thing that has become evident, though, is that I'm going to have some more book-keeping to do. In Fate 2.0, it was sufficient for an NPC to have a few aspects and an apex skill, maybe one more skill. With some skills playing into the Endurance and Composure tracks, and stunts to add in as well, I'm going to have to spend some more time beforehand working out NPCs, particularly opponents. And, of course, I need to know all of the aspects they have, not just a few. That's not a complaint; I like the process of statting NPCs, and indeed, building encounters is one of my favoured parts of running D&D.
I'll be doing some preparatory work tomorrow for the next session, and I'm really looking forward to it. That's a definite factor in favour of Legends of Anglerre.
Posted by Drew Shiel at July 9, 2011 7:55 PM
