I want to write a game based off the Type-Moon property Fate, created by Kinoko Nasu. I've been a fan for a while, and I think the concept itself is more than appropriate for an RPG, as a sort of battle-royale between 7 scheming mages and their servants, great heroes from history summoned to do battle. There are, however, a lot of challenges to pulling it off. They've been floating in my head for a while now, so I figure that I should write them down. This is one post where I'm dying for ideas and perspectives: Hit me up @Khajeet on Discord or in whatever discord you found this post in if you got some ideas to share. Also, there might be Fate spoilers, be warned.

Fate centers around Holy Grail Wars, or at least the mainline Fate VNs (and Fate/Zero, which is technically only semi-canon but whatever). 7 mages summon 7 servants to do battle for the Holy Grail, which is ostensibly a device used to grant wishes. It's an affair that takes about two weeks and is supposed to end when there is one pair left. During this time, the competitors attempt to scout each other out and whittle down their opponents 1 by 1, giving themselves as much advantage as possible. They hide their servant’s true identity, find their opponents’ hideouts, ally together to deal with challenging foes and then turn once the threat is vanquished. It's awesome!

It also doesn't really follow the typical collaborative format of a TTRPG. There are usually other factors at play in the VNs that cause participants to work together for the greater good, but most mages are cruel and greedy at heart. How do you make it work at the table, then?

There are formats from other Fate series that probably work better. Apocrypha has a blue team / red team dynamic, Fate Go has... well, something that involves a lot of servants and mages all at once, I assume. But I don't think they're as cool or as satisfying. Something about morally gray people at each other's throats in the hopes of making their dreams come true in a free-for-all format gets my goat.

For smaller groups, this might not be a problem. 2 players can just be a mage and a servant, and a 3rd could be an ally mage. 4 players might could be 2 mage-servant pairs who are allies and won't betray one another until the end. After that, it seems like it would become hard to run for what essentially comes down to smaller, separate parties.

Besides that, information would be a huge issue. A lot of Fate is about having a trump card and holding onto it for as long as possible. Even knowing the true identity of a servant or the exact spells of a mage can be a big advantage. One solution is just trust, with players being trusted to hold their player knowledge back when playing their character. This is challenging, not because of untrustworthy players, but because complexity makes the line much harder to respect.

I think another possibility would be turning towards a map-based system that works sort of like Diplomacy or En Garde. Players (probably as pairs) submit their actions for the night in secret, and the GM’s job is to carefully resolve them and decide which actions and scenes need to be played out. There'd still be some knowledge leakage, but at the very least there's an air of mystery. I think it would also be useful to include some sort of organization on the character sheet, where players write down what their characters know about others.

I've gone back and forth on what basic system I would use here. I like starting off design with some structure, even if by the time it hits the table the game only resembles the system it's based on in passing. I've got 3 in mind: classic D&D, Basic Roleplaying Game, and whatever the hell Ron Edwards’ Sorcerer uses when it comes to a dice pool system.

I've got a good chunk of ideas for hacking together a D&D style base for this, but honestly it all just comes from familiarity. I'm familiar with these games and I've spent most of my time playing them. I've read enough games to have a bucket full of ideas I could pull and steal from. My concern here would be that players would come in with all of the expectations of D&D, a game about crawling dungeons and stealing treasure. Would they rebel against a mechanic that feels different from what they're used to? I'd also run into the issue of running skills and unique abilities, especially as someone who enjoys roll under or set TN systems. I think in general a Fate game would have to have very open class structures, and would probably benefit from being level-less. This is in the lead for what I'm going to do, but I'm still hesitant on pulling the trigger.

BRP is a d100 system, and one that I've been dancing around but never pulled the trigger. I really just like the simplicity of a 100% scale, it's so easy to understand your odds. I think I would build off of Hack100, a very light hack of BRP that basically combines skills and attributes. These games have a lot of versatility, and a game can be well defined just by figuring out what skills/attributes are going to be used for your game and why. They also have a lot of versatility in combat systems, which I haven't decided on whether or not will be on the lighter or heavier side. Something that puts me off is that in admittedly uncommitted research, most of the magic systems/power systems I've seen are roll-to-cast. A spell or Noble Phantasm (I'll get into this later) just not working because of an unlucky roll is unfulfilling. I think it's certainly workable, but my lack of practice with these games does put me off.

Okay, I looked at this dice mechanic and honestly I think it's sweet.

Oppositional rolls are great! I also dig how this dice pool mechanic is very simple, fairly bounded (Even with a far bigger dice pool, you’re still more likely to only get one or two extra victories) and works well with fairly low numbers of dice. This could certainly generate a more narrative-feeling game, and I can envision players trying to eek out minor dice bonuses to barely win a close engagement. This is probably the one I'm least likely to choose, but eventually I'll get around to playing Sorcerer myself and maybe with experience will come confidence.

Magecraft (different thing from Magic in the Type-Moon verse, but that distinction is both wildly interesting and not really applicable here) is 1 part formulaic programming, 1 part unique innate superpowers, 1 part interesting gimmicks and 4 parts mage selective breeding. No really, here's the wiki for it, and here's a 75 episode Youtube series explaining the topic. TLDR: to do miraculous things (though because this is not True Magic, things that mundane humans could theoretically do with enough resources), mages use pseudo-nervous systems called magic circuits which both converts life force to magical energy and act as biological spell books (thaumaturgical foundations). This explanation is so simplified that it's wrong, and I could have learned Basque with all the time I have spent trying to understand what is obviously a convoluted mess. Let’s just try and pin down what I like about it and what I want the system to represent.

All of this presents a problem of class complexity. In reality, this game should only have 2 classes: mage and servant. However, there's SO MUCH that can fit into both of these classes that differentiate one from another, especially with mages. I think I have to bite the bullet and have a fairly complex character creation, or at least one with a lot of options. This is a lot of work, though. Right now I'm looking at the Pie System in NGR as a possible route to take.

The stats themselves can be fairly simplistic in how they're generated, but each character takes different abilities as 'pieces'. In NGR, these are pretty much just really well done D&D archetypes broken up into important trappings. Each piece one has conveys more powers from that archetype. I could see doing something similar to that, and having all of the different aspects of magecraft represented.

I also saw this table in a cyberpunk game I picked up recently called Neon Blood:

This little table allows you to quickly decide where your priorities are in character creation. Do you want to be more skilled, but less combat oriented? There could be an option for it. I could see adding a category called 'random bullshit' which can be put into things like mystic eyes and magic crests, which are not necessarily required for a mage but can be a big boon, in exchange for some skill in normal magecraft or in being less competent outside of magecraft.

Servants are awesome. This is the list of servants from the 5th Holy Grail War, the main event in Fate/Zero: King Arthur (but gender bent), Lancelot (but insane), Gilgamesh, Diarmuid Ua Duibhne, a hundred shadowy people with masks that are all actually the same guy, Gilles De Rais, and Alexander the fuckin' Great. The Fate/Stay games get even weirder, and Fate/Go has shit like Paul Bunyan and Sherlock Holmes. They don't actually have to be real people, because they're actually copies pulled from the collective unconsciousness of humanity (okay, this is also massively oversimplified to the point of being incorrect) that represent their own legends and myths. It's just cool. I'll again list out things that I feel like a proper game would need to capture to do this concept justice.

Now that I've gotten everything written down, I'm sitting back and realizing that I have a large task ahead of me. The big problem I have is trying to find the right level of complexity here. Anyone could run a Fate game by grabbing... Fate, the game, and using its fairly open and fairly narrative rules. It would work, but I think I want something with a lot more meat. There's so much here that I definitely have to limit the options a player has on their character sheet at any one time. The goal should perhaps be simple resolutions with a lot of ability to improvise the more free-form aspects of the game.

The one big relief I have is that I will most definitely be the only person who ever runs the game... so I got that going for me.