Tag: trouble

All about Aspects: Troubles

angry-man-29453_960_720This is the first post of this series dealing with the Trouble aspect in the Fate RPG. The Fate System Reference Document website defines Trouble as:

In addition to a high concept, every character has some sort of trouble aspect that’s a part of his life and story. If your high concept is what or who your character is, your trouble is the answer to a simple question: what complicates your character’s existence?

Most aspects in Fate generally work best if they are a double-edged sword, they have a positive side that you use to justify invokes and a negative side that is used to add complications to a PCs life in the form of compels, although an enterprising player can find ways to invoke their Trouble this aspect should largely be focussed on bringing complications and mischief into the character’s life. Continue reading “All about Aspects: Troubles”

Hindrances in Grim World

I’ve recently been reading the excellent Grim World game supplement for Dungeon World and the Fate roleplaying system; if you’re a fan of either game then I highly recommend that you have a look at it since there are some excellent classes and new ideas listed that can add a lot to any game. A particular section that caught my eye was titled “Dungeon World/Fate hack” and it suggested porting some elements from the Fate system over into the DW game; essentially the player picks three ‘hindrances’ (similar to the ‘trouble aspect’ in Fate) when generating their character and, whenever the GM uses the hindrance to cause them complications (as with ‘compels’ in Fate) the players receive a luck point that can be used to re-roll dice, gain bonuses or add improvised elements to the setting.
Effectively the hack is porting trouble aspects, GM compels and fate points into the Dungeon World setting and doing so very simply with minimal additional complication (always a positive thing in my view); it got me thinking as well that, aside from the actual effects of spending the luck points, the ideas behind this are pretty much non-system specific. I think that this idea could be used to great effect in other games, encouraging players to think a little about what causes their characters problems in their life and it also allows the players to have a little more input into the game setting, for example, if one of the players takes ‘in debt with the mob’ as a hindrance then you can reasonably infer that they are interesting in seeing some stories involving organised crime.
I’d love to think that people will give this idea a try in some other games, if you do, let me know how it goes 🙂