The Dresden Files > DFRPG

anyone tried....? ideas and other systems to adapt to the Dresdenverse.

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Kristine:
I had to ask if anyone else has adapted a sword and sorcery/fantasy game (AD&D, Warhammer 2000, Steam Punk, Whitewolf) to the Dresdenverse and how that is working out.  I really like the idea of the fate system but you have to have a lot of trust/understanding between the game master and the players - something not a lot of groups have.  Has anyone played the Dresdenverse in another time period besides the here and now?

I thought this one was interesting because it would seem like a natural off-shoot of the White Council and could be adapted to include younger versions of council members or 

http://www.pigames.net/store/product_info.php?cPath=43&products_id=538

--- Quote ---On Her Majesty's Arcane Service   
Published by Better Mousetrap Games
Her Majesty Elizabeth, Queen of England, secretly established in 1560, the second year of her reign, the Arcane Service. The Service is composed of people, usually but not solely of magical bent, who have sworn to protect the realm from magical assault. The head of this service is Dr. John Dee, the Queen’s Astrologer, and noted Savant. He finds agents for his Service by listening to the advice of the angels, who speak to him from a peculiar mirror he has installed in his rooms, which he keeps covered in cloth when not consulting it. He has a long, pointed beard, and wears a skullcap over his thinning hair. The player characters are assumed to be agents of Doctor Dee. They are people passionately devoted to the welfare of England, and of the Queen, and unafraid of dealing with magical creatures and powerful workers of magic. At times they may be performing political missions, perhaps in other lands, perhaps in England. At other times they will be defending the realm from magical assault from foes domestic and foreign. They can function as spies, as diplomats, as magical assault squads, and as investigators - Doctor Dee is not picky about such quibbling differences. A Blood Games II game
--- End quote ---

TheMouse:
I would imagine that you could pretty well run Dresden using Supernatural, which runs off of Cortex. I personally don't think that Cortex is as strong a system as FATE, but it's simple enough and is a little more of a trad game. It could be used to represent a lot of the supernaturals, but I don't believe the game has a magic system robust enough to handle wizards. A quick Google search turned up a conversation on Dresden Files type magic using Cortex on the Cortex wiki.

That said, I have not found that FATE requires an unusual amount of trust between players and GMs. What in particular gives you the impression that this is the case?

Valarian:
CJ Carella's WitchCraft from Eden Studios works as a similar setting. It's not Dresden Files, but it's close.

Kristine:

--- Quote from: TheMouse on September 26, 2009, 08:28:49 PM ---That said, I have not found that FATE requires an unusual amount of trust between players and GMs. What in particular gives you the impression that this is the case?

--- End quote ---
as I understand it, the player picks a character type (ie wizard) and then when they want to cast a spell -or do anything that requires a dice role - the GM decides what kind of score they need to do what they intended or if it fits withing their character 'personality'.  Don't get me wrong, I find the AD&D rule system to be overly complicated but I've seen players and GMs argue over the minutia and it always comes down to the rules in the books - if there are no hard rules written down, but only people's opinions of what a character should and should not have a good chance of doing, then you better have an inordinate amount of trust that your GM or your players aren't going to take advantage. 

Bosh:
Not really. I'd recommend that you'd read through the SRD of the Fate 3.0 rules that the Dresden Files RPG will be (loosely) based on:
http://www.novusimperia.net/FATE_SRD/Fate3SRD.php

Here's how (in a nutshell) you decide if your character succeeds or fails at an action in Fate:
1. Player says what they're going to do.
2. If the player is doing something that is opposed by another character (i.e. a foot race or trying to punch someone in the nose) then basically both sides roll and the highest wins. If the player is going up against the environment (i.e. trying to climb a wall or jump start a crappy car in the rain in five minutes) then the GM makes up a difficulty level, with several guidelines to guide them in this (there's even nifty tables).
3. The player chooses an appropriate skill (how good you are at anything is based on just your skill, not a skill and an attribute, since in Fate what other RPGs call skill and attributes are merged together).
4. The player rolls four Fudge dice (which gives you have value from -4 to +4 with the average value being zero) and adds (or subtracts) the result from their skill. If they hit the difficulty they succeed and if they don't they fail.
5. If the player wants an extra bonus they can tag an aspect, which is some fact about a character or the scene for a bonus, which usually (but not always) costs a fate point.

There's more to it than that, but that's really about it.

Sure there's some judgment calls by the GM here but its all part of a well-defined system and there isn't a lot of hand-waving. Also a lot of the stuff that requires GM judgment calls in Fate would require it in most every other RPG (most RPGs don't give you a set difficulty written out in stone for jump starting a crappy car in the rain in five minutes),

Fate isn't so much rule light (although it can be that) as rule abstract. It focuses on making things happen like they would in a story of the appropriate genre rather than on making happen according to what would realistically happen if magic etc. existed.

If anything I'd say that Fate requires LESS trust in the players than, say, D&D since in D&D its pretty damn easy to create a cheesy character that breaks the game (often in sneaky ways that a lot of DMs won't spot) while this is pretty much impossible to do in Fate because of the way that the system is set up. Its possible to make a boring and uninteresting character in Fate, but its damn hard to make a broken one.

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