FATE Fixes the Caster-Martial Divide

Your class is an aspect. Want to shoot fireballs? Roll your Lore (or Magic) skill and invoke your "caster class" aspect for a reroll or a more powerful spell.

The martial vs. caster divide is fixed here since everything is mostly the same, and flavor is the only difference between character types. Are you a paladin who smites and casts heals? Use the Lore skill, announce the effect, and cast. Power is all relative and similar. Want to be a half-caster versus a full? Don't buy the Lore skill as high and specialize in other areas. Let true mages and priests buy it at +4, while half-caster classes need to buy it at a lower level.

Yes, I get it, "but it is all the same!" And, "There are no flavorful abilities!" And "There is no class identity!" These are generic "generic game" complaints, and valid. But take a step back. D&D has repeatedly proven it can't balance casters versus martial classes, and it often stumbles in the dark and throws caster subclasses at martial classes to fix the problem. By falling all the way back to "generic power sets," we can see what a completely balanced system looks like.

Yes, we don't have the fiddly powers and rules here, and everyone has infinite casting unless you define some limits. But again, D&D 4 is pretty much infinite-cast now with all the resting exploits, especially at higher levels. Again, this is a step back: my mage and paladin are relatively balanced against each other, and there are no complaints that "one is more powerful than the other" because the concepts are so basic and stripped down.

As a result, we can look inside a fantasy world with relative class balance and parity. The rogue is as powerful as the mage. The ranger is as powerful as the monk. The fighter is as powerful as the warlock. I am not picking bard because it has the most class cheese; I am picking bard because I want to play a bard. I will balance it against the cleric.

To be fair, Pathfinder 2 likely has the best class balance in gaming. I need to give all the testing and design this team did props. To get there, they needed a huge framework, and the game feels heavy. I never got into this, despite trying, so this remains one of my biggest misses. Not the game's fault, but it is personal and just me. There are still issues with caster DPS and a few other nitpicks I see brought up from time to time, but they all feel minor.

And, let's face it, I have played enough D&D to know what the "typical bard powers" are, and in FATE, the system lets me invent new ones on the fly, as long as they get GM approval. I am not limited by the spell list here, and even many of today's newer narrative games fall into this trap. To keep you on the recurring revenue stream, today's games carefully define what you can and can't do, then slowly drip-feed new must-have powers in the next book you are forced to buy.

Want a "wall of sound" power? Sure, tell me what it does and make a roll. We will work it out from there. And all of a sudden, magic feels special and unpredictable again. Oops. Take that, carefully designed, limited power set, narrative gaming. When they remove your imagination from the game, they will replace it with your wallet.

We get so lost in the weeds with 5E these days that we can't see the design box the game and its systems shove us into. If you change the game, you will start to see the system's weaknesses and the revenue streams they purposefully built into it. We don't know what a game with a balanced class model looks like because most companies can't design it, or refuse to give it to us since "caster-focused books sell better."

And it is far too easy to slip into the D&D YouTube trap of comparing new subclass designs and theory-crafting, getting lost in those weeds and not realizing what is really happening here: subclasses that feel like patches duct-taped onto the game, or new power-gaming gimmies to sell the book (and later to get banned from people's tables because they break the game).

Once a game is designed as a recurring-revenue model, it becomes inferior to the ones we already have.

The Flood, Glut, and Crash

It feels strange to be bombarded by this many crowdfunding projects, and every day over on Facebook, it feels like a new game, with hardcovers hundreds of pages long, is coming out and being announced. The game glut has started, and AI tools are accelerating us toward a tipping point for gaming.

I get the feeling a 1982-style Atari-level extinction-event crash is coming in gaming.

The market can't support all these narrative, cozy, specific niche, and boutique games. Especially with multiple versions of "5E something" coming out all at the same time. Universes Beyond doesn't help; it only piles on to the sea of mediocrity and glut of things to distract us from fantasy gaming and fracture the market worse than it did when TSR went bankrupt. They will most likely be one-shot games, with no product line or future. Another option, another universe, and we will all end up playing something different.

The glut will come, 5E will be oversaturated, and the only way out will be 6E.

It feels like planned obsolescence, the end of an era, the final last gasp of the 5E market.

I have had enough of the 5E rules, and I am battening down the hatches and supporting only one edition. Right now, the current leader is the D&D 4E-like Level Up A5E, which brings back memories of my 4E days and a better time in gaming, when things didn't suck. Mind you, 4E sucked, but gaming was still cool. Those days, 2008-2014, were good times.

The books I have will be it for 5E.

A5E and its smaller library feel supportable for me, and the design is solid.

I am circling the wagons, standardizing on my favorite version of 5E as my "long-term support" version, and going back to games that I loved before the 5E mess happened. Palladium. Rifts. FATE. Maybe Rolemaster. Aftermath. Space Opera. Cepheus Engine. GURPS. BX in some version or another, but not going back to the TSR books. I'm also trying a few other games I haven't paid much attention to, like Blades in the Dark. DCC still had a few shelves, and I love the vibe around that game. Shadowdark is still a good game: small and focused, with strong support.

I'm heading toward a flight to quality and memories.

These days, gaming is a cold and jaded place, where designers use games as a platform to exclude others and push tribalism. Burn it all down. There isn't much left anyway. Take it; I have my memories. The new stuff isn't worth the hassle, or trying to fight a system to get an old-school style out of a game that refuses the concept.

Going back to older games that I loved feels right for me. There is also a glut of these cozy, narrative heartbreakers coming out, and they typically come on strong and fade quickly. It is easy to get excited and spend money, but often that is all there is. What I seek is not new games, but older memories. I want games that take me back. I know that, for those coming into the market, these will be the days, and you can never really get back what you lost.

But there are games where I open the book, and it all comes back.

I open books to remember, smile, and enjoy the yellowed, hazy, faded memories of an autumn season of gaming.

Off the Shelf: Lamentations of the Flame Princess

Lamentations of the Flame Princess has a specific job. It hands you a tight B/X kit — characters, gear, magic, combat, the usual action rules — and then it gets out of the way. The adventures do the rest. They supply the rooms you should not have entered, the things that do not belong in a Monster Manual, and the treasures that might save you or end you. The adventures do the rest. There is no bestiary. Those belong to the adventure writer’s twisted imagination, and they stay there on purpose. If the players could study the opposition in advance, this would be a different game.

I keep that game on one shelf. Rules & Magic sits at the end. Everything else is a night or a place: Carcosa, the Virginia Disastrum books, A Red & Pleasant Land, Frostbitten & Mutilated, Broodmother Skyfortress, the anthologies, Blood in the Chocolate, World of the Lost, Earth Incubation Crisis. The Swords & Wizardry box on the same board is just storage. OSRIC is only there if something needs a number before it eats someone. The shelf's identity is the modules.

It is a stack of horror films that happen to use dice.

The 18+ contract is not a sticker on the wrap. This is Lamentations of the Flame Princess. You know what you sat down for. Taking the character sheet is pressing play on Terrifier, Friday the 13th, Hellraiser, or Event Horizon. The film does not stop to ask if you are comfortable. Neither does this kit. If the game pre-defines the envelope of the horror, it sands down the thing you came for. It tempers the worst thing the module is willing to put in the room. If that is too much, get up and walk away. That is allowed. The game is not designed to run a comfort layer on top of the night. That runs counter to the horror this shelf is for.

What I love about this game is the default stage. Not generic medieval. Seventeenth-century Europe. The dawn of the colonization push: Pilgrim ships, trade empires stuffing holds and calling it God’s work. For a horror game with Puritan bones — all sinners shall be punished — that is ripe territory. The people writing ledgers and raising forts in the New World are the campers. The woods, the coast, the thing in the chapel, and the cargo that should not have been opened are the movie. The point is to inflict that on the expedition. You do not need orcs in a hole. You need a world that still believes in damnation and has just enough maps to walk into it. That is why the Virginia books on the shelf matter more than another dungeon pamphlet. 1633 is not flavor text. It is the year the contract is set.

How does a night run? The players sit there with character sheets and no frame of reference. No known bestiary. No magic-item list to drool over. No “fair encounter” math to hide behind. The referee puts a strange, unsettling situation on the table — a chapel that smells wrong, a hold that should not be that cold, a town that will not look at you — and the players react. There are no feat lists, subclass powers, death saves, or short rests to save you. What you see is what is there. Very little stands between you and a horrific fate except what you do, or what you fail to do.

The kit is small on purpose, and it does the job a B/X kit is supposed to do: it defines the niches and then protects them. The Fighter is the only one who gets better at hitting things. The Specialist is the skill kit. Magic is a loaded gun that might be pointed at the room. Nobody at the table is a toolbox of feats. You are your role, and the situation does not care.

As a referee, you have to love horror and be willing to let the night go where it goes. This is not a game for fudging dice so player narratives survive. Think Night of the Living Dead. They may fall one by one. They may all go in one ugly TPK. You can run the old tricks: peel one of them off, let the woods lie to them, make every sound a question. Like The Thing, they may stop trusting the person across the table because something in the room might already be wearing that face. You are Stephen King or John Carpenter. Part of the fun is the ride — the characters, and the terrible fates that may happen to them.

The still-unpublished Referee’s Guide puts a warning in front of all of this, and it is worth hearing in plain language. Enjoying a vicious movie is not the same as acting one out with other people in the room. LotFP art is flavor. It is there to tell you this is not the other fantasy game. It is not a shot list you are required to stage.

Know who sat down. Talk outside the game. Find the line before the night starts. The job is not to shock, scare, or scandalize the actual human across from you. If you truly offend them, they will not come back, and you will have earned that. Respect for the person comes before the idea you had for the scene. That is not a comfort layer bolted onto Friday the 13th. That is how you get a table that will press play at all.

The game has a reputation it really doesn't deserve, and the above could be considered one of the first "safety tools" printed in an OSR game. The game is an interactive horror movie. A lot of people cannot handle that. The people who can love this game like nothing else. But, as the game reminds you, talk to each other about it.

Depending on my mood, the first spine off the board is A True Relation of the Great Virginia Disastrum 1633, Volume I. I love history, and I love horror, and this is the peanut-butter-and-chocolate moment. The punishment is not a speech. It is the colony. They have arrived in a land they do not understand, with ledgers, sermons, and a fence that will not help them. There is the settlement they think they are building. Something else is out there, too.

The fun is watching the characters take roles in that new place and then turning the screws the way Blair Witch turns them. A problem. A mystery. Someone who does not come back. Sounds in the woods that the colony's charter does not cover. Do not dump the truth on page one. Let the settlement invent explanations.

The beat I cannot resist: one or more of them are Magic-Users, locked in the stocks for witchcraft, while the colony manager has to stand in the mud and plead for their help. The sky is wrong. The woods are wrong. Everyone else is sure it is Satan. Nobody in charge understands it, and the only people who might are the ones they already chained up. That is the night. That is why this book comes off the shelf first.

Carcosa, Broodmother, the anthologies — those are not a punchline. They are the other situation. Virginia casts the player characters as colonists. The rest of the shelf casts them as stereotypical adventurers: swords, packs, a map, the old hunger for the next room. Same original sin. They opened the door. They unlocked the box. They walked into a place that was not theirs and expected the universe to grade on a curve. It does not. A pulp frame like Carcosa can still terrify an adventurer as badly as 1633 terrifies a colonist. The clothes change. The bill does not.

That is also when the OSRIC book on the end of the shelf earns its keep. In a night where “adventurer” is the default costume, you can let the table think they recognize the furniture. That looks like an owlbear. That looks like a +1 shield. No, it is not. The familiar stat line is bait. The module’s thing is what is actually in the room. OSRIC hands you the lie. LotFP is the punch that follows.

When I want the movie I actually described, I start in Virginia. The shelf stays because nothing else I own does this mix: 1633, Puritan panic, pulp nights that still punish the expedition, and a kit that will not let the Monster Manual save you.

D&D 4E and Level Up

 My brother and I collected 4E, and we loved it. That was a rough stretch, and the game got us out of the house and off the floor for the week. Most people hated the edition. It did not matter. We had figures, a battle map, and those tight dungeon fights that felt like chess you could bleed on. We were there for a tabletop-first game. We were not there to win an argument about whether it counted.

It held for the first ten levels. After that, the edges came apart. Monsters carried so many hit points that the fight became hours that dragged on forever. We started looking at each other like nobody had run this game at a table before they printed it.

It got so bad that our monsters wished out loud for it to be over, too.

I get why a 5E referee stops tracking the number. The game feels like it is coming apart in your hands. You can fake a fight that still feels like a night, or you can play it honest and watch people check out because high level is too easy. We did our version of that in 4E. Cut the monster’s hit points in half, doubled the damage- anything to make the mess end. By the end, we could not stand what that edition had turned into. With 5E, if a DM doesn't prep right or doesn't know their players' power, the end boss can turn into tissue paper and the whole night is ruined.

There was a D&D YouTube video recently about how lying to players like this and faking fights is terrible. But if the game is that broken, I don't blame DMs who cheat the system to make things feel more exciting. Especially if your players won't play anything else. What are you supposed to do? At that point, it is either lie to your players or quit a game you can't stand anymore.

At least if you lie, you are all playing together.

That is where we ended up with D&D 4E. In the end, it came down to lying to each other and rolling the dice.

But still, D&D 4E sits in a special place. The last good long campaign I played with my brother. At the start, it felt like it could go on forever. That part of my life still feels that way when I think about the maps, the minis, and the two of us at the table.

We walked to the bookstore to buy the books.

We spent those Saturdays together.

We would play with the new books all Sunday.

Leveling up to 10 in D&D 4E was fun. After that, it was a slow, long letdown.

That is why I hold A5E so tightly, even though Tales of the Valiant is the better-supported game and has more of everything. Level Up feels like a 5E that remembered 4E without asking me to play a broken game. A fighter with a tradition. A road that can go wrong. The commander class returns. Nerrath is still a place you can walk toward. The math is dry and scales well to level 20. It plays like a fixed 4E should feel, without being 4E.

Today’s 5E is at the end of the edition, casters having all the fun while the rest of the table watches. A5E is the last flicker of that 4E candle. I cannot put A5E away. It stays on the shelves I actually play from. I have better games. The memories are stronger than today’s promises.

Off the Shelf: FATE

I still love this game, mostly because of the dice. This is also still a better pick-up-and-play narrative package that is far easier to get into than many of today's overly complicated narrative swamp games that end up coming off like 5E with pools and special dice tacked on. I could have to sort through 400-500 pages of a full-sized game with multiple volumes and a few hundred pages of who-cares character options, or play an easy-to-teach single-book narrative powerhouse game like FATE.

I know Accelerated is out there, but I like Core better, even with the streamlining and improvements of the latter. I feel too much was taken out of Accelerated, and I prefer the classic, expansive, full-featured game toolkit over the Lite framework version. I can do more with Core; it slots into any setting quickly, and it gets the job done. Yes, it is an older game, but that doesn't make it any less powerful or flexible.

Accelerated stripped too much out, and I appreciate Core's "game building" toolkit approach. This works, and I don't need the changes in the smaller book. Sure, Accelerated is a tiny book and very easy to hand out to new players, but the OG Core book is my jam and the one I started with. Plus, I like Core's traditional Skills approach over Accelerated's generic (and too easy to cheese) Approaches system.

In Accelerated, I can pick a high "Flashy" and "Flashy" the entire adventure by overusing the Approach. In Core, I am using traditional skills (the book's list or my own list), and "what can be done with what" is far better defined and clearer. New players will "lean on Flashy" in Accelerated far too much, but they will understand the uses for Core's Stealth and Lore skills easily. Defined choices with clear uses are easier for me, and the players I play with, than catch-all approaches.

Core is the book for me.

Accelerated is too simple and vague, to the point of being the harder game to play.

One thing my brother and I did with this game was binge a TV show and play through the episodes with FATE. We didn't need the fully realized, hour-plus character designs of GURPS, the pool-based power frameworks of Cypher, or any other generic system. FATE described any television show character quickly and cleanly, and you could start playing in five minutes.

Best of all, you could turn any "episode situation" into an aspect for the game, such as "Sienfield gets an important package for another apartment," and run with it. Kramer could have a "winning lottery ticket he is always losing," and that plays into the episode, too. The game is a collection of dice rolls, creating aspects, invoking them, managing your fate points, and laughing your way through a situation. We laughed for hours playing this, and it got sillier and sillier as the night went on. This does everything from Seinfeld, Scooby-Doo, Baywatch, Looney Tunes, CHIPs, A-Team, or any other episodic situation  TV show quickly and cleanly, with minimal fuss.

FATE has a wide dramatic range, too, from slapstick silly to gritty and serious. It can get deadly and grim, like The Walking Dead. It can do romantic comedies better than any system I've seen, and it isn't even a "romance game" filled with that typical heartsy AI art you see in many 5E crowdfunding books these days. You could run "Anchorman: The Roleplaying Game" with this system more easily than with any generic system, and the rules work and create chaos on their own. You could even do something as silly as "KISS: The RPG" and simulate your favorite 80s rock band through medieval adventures, doing things no other game could easily manage.

FATE does superheroes, too. Video games. Lara Croft. Ratchet and Clank. Sonic. Mario. Link. Double Dragon or Streets of Rage. TMNT or Thundercats. Transformers or GI JOE. All with minimal fuss and effort. And if you know the characters or have a guide, anything converts easily, and you don't need a huge character guide to convert a character into the system.

Even classic movies are easily played with FATE. The Maltese Falcon. American Graffiti. Star Wars. Jaws. ET. Indiana Jones. The Thing. Star Trek. Blade Runner. Books, too. Dune. LotR. John Carter. Conan. For some of these films and novels, FATE does a better job, faster, and easier than the "official RPG" for the game. For movies and books without a game, FATE does them very well.

While the collector in me would love a "Jaws 5E" game with a few hundred pages of authentic 1970s New England oil-painting art, what am I doing here? Why am I wasting my money? Just to have something I will likely never play? Why do I need a hundred pages of subclass options for sheriffs, marine biologists, and fishermen again? Honestly? I would rather have the New England art book and no dated and little-tested 5E rules that will likely never be used at a table.

Oh, and martial classes in Jaws 5E still suck; play a caster.

In FATE, you write down aspects, which combine character concept, trouble, and history. You pick skills. You pick a few signature stunts. If you know your characters, like a GI JOE character, then this stuff is trivially easy. It is less of a character sheet and more of a description and collection of signature style moves and phrases. Snake Eyes? Silent but Deadly. There we go, no need for an expensive VTT character creation tool or looking up the feat in a 600-page rulebook, or waiting for the inevitable hundred-dollar minimum crowdfunding expansion to get the character you want.

You just have it.

A one-book game.

Four dice.

GURPS forces you to design the power or know the skill and advantage lists. Cypher forces you to search the archetypes. In 5E, you need to read a few hundred pages of subclasses to see if the designers gave you something you can use, or wait like a good consumer for the next book. In FATE? You just say it and write it down. I'm done with this designer hubris junk! I can do better, and FATE gives me the tools if I have an imagination to use them.

Sometimes I am in the mood for that level of depth. If I am digging in and savoring a simulation-heavy, survive-this-system, it is going to be GURPS. But for a one-book toolkit game? Something pick-up-and-play with cool dice?

FATE still has it.

Magic is Not the Answer to Every Game Design Problem

I am on the 2024 fighter page again. Level three. Four names. Two of them cast. The rogue book is the same habit in a leather jerkin: if the class feels thin, somebody opens the spell chapter and bolts a few slots onto the sheet, and that's where the fun went.

I keep looking at that and thinking they did not write the job. They wrote the thing they already had.

DCC does not do that with the warrior. Mighty Deeds is one die. You say you are kicking the lantern, pinning the spear, putting the shield in someone’s teeth, and the judge answers you. That is the whole engine. No pamphlet. No list you have to finish before you are allowed to be interesting. The move can be stupid and it can still be the fighter’s move.

A5E is sitting on the other shelf, and it is not the same answer, which is the point. Combat maneuvers, traditions, exertion you actually spend. You train the thing. You pick it. It costs you. It is not a cantrip with extra steps, and it is not a tag hanging off the longsword that you swap after a long rest. They built a little machine for people who hit things, and it does not pretend to be Vancian magic with a better armor class.

2024 still wanders off into the subclass pamphlet, or it shrugs and makes them a caster. Weapon tricks, a rider on the steel, a recommendation thread that points at the Eldritch Knight because at least that one has verbs with names. The Deed die and the maneuver tradition sit there. Different tools. Neither one needed the spell list to make the turn belong to somebody.

The spell chapter is the chapter every game comes with and never answers the question.

It is not D&D, the art, or the worlds that really bug me about D&D these days. It is the pedestrian habit of answering the hole in a class by adding a spell list and calling it a day.

Mail Room: Blades in the Dark

This was the go-to narrative game about 5-6 years ago, and I held off because I already had a few other narrative games and my plate was full. The Cypher System was my favorite for a while, but I have cooled off a bit with the new edition; the art and layout are a bit too busy and distracting for my eyes. Blades in the Dark is also one of the games many new games copy from and borrow ideas from; one is Daggerheart, which is commonly mentioned as downstream from Blades in many concepts.

So, here I am, back again, taking a look. People compare it to FATE, but Blades is far more structured and procedural, which keeps the game from the narrative softness of either FATE or Cypher. Narrative games do rely on "out-of-game" structure, but Blades keeps the narrative action closer to the metal and avoids many of the "head jumps" that turn people off narrative gaming.

For example, in FATE, you need to jump out of character, consider what action type you are taking, apply out-of-character mechanics, and roll. You also consider various aspects and other OOC considerations, then need to "jump back into the head of the character" to keep the narrative flowing. This is why many prefer D&D to narrative gaming: there is very little head-jumping out of character, but even 5E begins to fray at the seams when you start managing its sloppy action economy.

The OSR is almost no head-jumping, and you stay in character constantly. The goblin runs up; you hit it with a sword. You see a lock; the thief picks it. You search for a trap; you find one. X does Y, and you follow the constant stream of decisions all the way to the goal.

Blades keeps you in headspace and narrative for most of the action, which feels nice for a narrative game. The only downside is the constant "yes, but..." of the 4-5 partial-success rolls, and the fatigue that comes from deciding what a "yes, but..." means on almost every roll. This is the same issue that Genesys or Daggerheart have, or any narrative game that incorporates partial success mechanics. This is the sort of thing that strikes some initially as "the best thing since sliced bread," but it can go stale just as quickly if you overuse it or make it too important, and you are "yes, butting..." every roll with bigger and bigger stakes.

People end up back in d20, and "X does Y" feels refreshing because failure is pass/fail and doesn't require interpretation. There is no interpretative fatigue. You fail. You see the next thing. You do the next thing. You succeed. And so on.

But like Genesys, the answer is almost always to reduce the importance of "yes, but..." and turn it into a quick ruling or next-turn modifier, then move on as quickly as possible. Save the big "yes, but..." for the most important moments, and don't drag the game through the mud by over-interpreting every roll.

Make a quick judgment and move on. Tick a clock. Raise the stakes. Remove a die. Break an item. Introduce a twist. Or add a wrinkle to the scene, like a crowd gathering, that is neither good nor bad, but could potentially complicate matters. A smart player could use the crowd as an asset to blend in and get away. A not-so-smart player now has a group of witnesses.

The "yes, but..." doesn't always mean "quantifiable negate game mechanic penalty measured by a number," as it does in an "X does Y" game. If you are trying to account for every point and level of negative effect, you are probably overthinking it, and that is leading to burnout.

If it takes you more than 30 seconds to think of the consequence, just pick something at random and keep playing. The first thing that comes to mind. Or ignore it because you are stuck in the narrative weeds. If it is not clear and apparent, it isn't that important, so drop it and move on.

Sometimes a "yes, but..." is just a normal success, and you don't need to overthink it. The whole thing could be a "yes, but you feel terrible about doing it that way," and move on. Let the player decide what to do with that. Make it up to the contact who took the brunt of the negative effect later? Your choice.

Blades in the Dark is a milestone game that changed a lot, and it still has plenty of fans at the table. I am looking forward to digging into this one.