by Andrew Gronosky
This is a section of text from chapter 6 of the Magonomia® manuscript.
When I first read the Fate Core System book, I had a negative impression. It looked to me like Fate was designed so characters rarely fail. I'd spent most of my gaming years playing RPGs like Call of Cthulhu®, where having your character devoured by a monster is considered one of the better possible outcomes. "Young gamers these days are a bunch of crybabies!" I harrumphed. "Back when I started playing First Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons® (or AD&D® for short), one failed dice roll could get your character disintegrated beyond hope of resurrection!"
It did cross my mind that having a character you've been playing for two years blasted into ash on Round 1 of a battle might be considered a bit anticlimactic. In fact, I remembered, when I was a GM for AD&D®, I fudged dice rolls quite a lot just to prop up some semblance of a plot. The current (Fifth) edition of D&D® is a lot more forgiving, or perhaps I should say, less gratuitously harsh. And more fun.
If you’re coming from an old-school mentality of "make this dice roll or your character dies!" then you’ll probably have an impulse to apply all the narrative tools Fate gives you to avoid failure. You can sustain that for several game sessions, if you’re parsimonious with your Fate Points. I did. You'll be missing out on more than half the fun of Magonomia, because failure, setbacks, and complications add a lot to the experience.
The key insight that made me embrace the Fate system was when I decided, for the first time, not to Invoke an Aspect to prevent failure. I took the "success at a major cost" option instead. That's the anecdote [about the wizard hiding in a tree and dropping the potion they were planning to use, then having to think fast to get out of that tight spot ] . Tell me that's not better than succeeding on the Stealth roll, if you can!
Failure has a different meaning in Magonomia than it does in a game like D&D®. Magonomia becomes fun when you let go of your fear of individual failure. Step outside your character and realize the story won't get derailed if something bad happens to them. In fact, unless they face dangers and trials, there is no story. Internalize that mistakes and bad luck don't punish you, the player. Trust the GM to make failure a springboard to move the plot forward.
Frankly, I think Magonomia is more like real life, where mistakes are recoverable and your friends have your back.
In the end, I concede that the Fate system gives you many tools to avoid failure. I would add that it also gives you every reason not to be afraid of failure. In Magonomia, we mean it when we say "create a positive experience for everyone." One of the ways you can do that is to let your character fail.
