Fate- the Nasuverse Tabletop RPG

[LunarLegend]

Hello, everyone! I'm new here, and come bearing gifts!

I discovered that this tabletop RPG existed, and gave it a look. So far, it looks interesting, but I'm curious as to what the fandom thinks of it.

Does this guy model the setting well? Is it too simplistic? Too complicated?

Please, tell me what you think!

[Pata Hikari]

It's... not very good.

[Five_X]

You got some 'splainin to do, Pata!

Skimming through, I don't see much wrong with it besides the absurdly large file size. Somebody doesn't know how to compress a .pdf file...

[Pata Hikari]

The rules are kind of a mess, I read through the entire book and I still can't tell you how to play.

[LunarLegend]

I felt the same way, in as much as the designer had a LOT of good ideas, but wasn't sure how to present them to a layperson. Plus, the designer took a bit too much inspiration from the Buffy RPG to accurately explain things to a newb.

Being a bit of an RPG buff, I could understand a lot of how the stats were derived and got an idea of what they were supposed to do; yet it took a LOT of digging through the document to figure out to exactly I was suposed to implement them. I only REALLY understood what the guy was doing when I read the Buffy RPG rulebook, which is kind of problematic when this game is supposed to be a standalone product.

The basics of unisystem are this. When you're doing something that could fail (attacking a zombie with a sword, making a popsicle picture frame, trying to Nasu to give us a Sacchin route), you add together the relevant Stat and Skill, then roll a 10-sided dice. Combining the Stat + Skill + Dice Roll, the sum total is then checked up against a table (conveniently forgotten from this PDF) and the level of success determines whether the player succeeds at the task. 9-10 is an adequate success, 11-12 is decent, 13-14 is good, all the way up to 33-35 as GODLIKE! if the action is resisted (i.e. the zombie doesn't want to take a broadsowrd to the face), then the zombie get to roll against a contrary skill to avoid a sad Fate.

Thus, for my examples, to hit the zombie you'd use Dexterity + Melee to see if you whack the ghoulie on the noggin, you'd use Intelligence + Repair to make a pretty picture frame, and you'd use Intelligence + Influence to see if you can finally stop the ongoing joke about Satsuki being sad. In the case of the picture frame, you'd either succeed or fail; in the case of the other two, the zombie and the Nasu both get a chance to roll to resist (Dexterity+ Dodge and Will, respectively).

The biggest thing which keeps this from being a Buffy RPG clone (At least from what I've gathered) is the Magic system and tweaking of the Luck rules. A character starts out with a fixed pool of Luck points, which are determined by the dividing the sum of the Will, Intelligence and Perception by 5.3. (Why the author needs to do such wanky precise calculations is beyond me.) With the Luck points, a player can soften a lethal blow to a merely injurious one, make a convenient coincidence happen, etc with the Game Master's permission - it makes things a little less lethal if your Ordinary High School Student finds herself squaring off against a Dead Apostle and she can't turn on her Inversion Impulse to save her bacon. Borrowing the Nature/Demeanor from the Old World of Darkness games, a character can regain Luck points by roleplaying either their Demeanor (the Public Face which they show to others) or Nature (their true selves). It encourages the drama club crowd to get in on the action while still being rewarded in-game.


The magic is the most complex thing here, using the Mana stat, which is determined by the number of ranks in the Magic Circuit perk a character has. Spells (listed here in the so-called 'grimoire') have a given mana cost. The more mana you use, the crappier your PC feels and the less spells you can cast. Mana recovers at about 8 points per day, unless you use the 'certain techniques' as outlined in the SEAFOOD-METAPHORICAL detail of the games.

And that's pretty much all I can clarify for right now. Long story short: I find it a fun setup, and I'd like to try it sometimes, but the author needs an editor STAT to help clarify these things.

Did I clarify things clearly? Is this a good game or am I allowing my RPG nerdery to blind me to obvious truths? Finally: How the hell DO you compress a PDF. This prick takes FOREVER for me to load, and I'd love to be able to browse pages without waiting 5 seconds for the damned thing to process.

[Pata Hikari]

That luck rule sounds pointlessly complicated. Just give each character a baseline luck, maybe roll a dice to get some "bonus" luck afterwords.

[Egophobia]

Hm, well, I've has this PDF and its supplements sitting around for a while, and I never really got around to implementing them because of just how messy the different systems involved seem to get; it was like a bit of an original system, the unisystem, and a few chunks of Old World of Darkness got meshed together. I'm probably going to fall along the same lines as LunarLegend here because Hunter: The Reckoning and then the New World of Darkness games were how I got into tabletop, but parts of this PDF, particularly the jammed-together blurb on "Servants" just make character generation extremely tedious.

...and they forgot the Rider class at one point, so...yeah.

One of the big troubles with the calculation system comes simply in the way stats are derived based on the letter rankings given by Nasu - no, seriously, go look up the derived statistics for Heracles, Lancelot, and Arturia. Heracles ends up hilariously weak to the point that just about ANY Servant/Master pair could probably find nine different objects lying around and just smack him to death with them. So...truth be told, if you wanted a good tabletop system, Twelveseal has an amazing system he made for a forum roleplay that runs off of raw statistics, but I believe I recall him saying that he had made a version that implemented a die - or that he had at least thought about the possibility of one.

Maybe I'm just being delusional and partial to the White Wolf systems because our local GM went on a Mage: The Awakening bender earlier this summer, but meh, xD. I don't hate this RPG - I think it's pretty awesome that someone put so much work into it - but...I don't see it being all that playable; it's convoluted, and there is no sense of balance as far as I can tell.

[LunarLegend]

I'm afraid I'm not as familiar with the Fate franchise, as I'm a little more drawn towards the psychological horror stuff a-la Kara no Kyoukai and Tsukihime. I do aim to give Fate/Zero a shot, but I find Servants and Masters have such ridiculously high powerlevels that I feel like I'm re-watching Dragon ball Z sometimes.

From what I saw about the Dead Apostle/Demon Hybrid/True Ancestor stuff, the system seemed workable enough. That being said, I've yet to playtest it, so its entirely possible I'm being deluded. Is the situation with Fate servants fixable, or am I being overly optimistic? Like Egophobia here, I'm quite chuffed that someone put so much effort into making an RPG flavored to the Nasuverse's tastes, but the excitement is tempered by an unfamiliarity with the system and a fear of a writer being blinded by his own ambitions. I don't want to say unplayable or overly complex character generation (I tried my hand at Eclipse Phase once.... holy CRAP that was a mess), but I do have some reservations about being so anally precise about the number values you get (Just multiply by a natural number, dammit! Fractions are for suckers!). To be fair, though: Nasu's conception of how his universe works is equally wanky at times, so I'm not overly worried about balance. (I mean, come on. Ciel isn't able to take on Caster? That being able to solo the Grail War is impossible for Ryougi Shiki's [SPOILER] third personality ?)

Also, like Pata Hikari, I found the Luck rules a little obtuse, but nothing a simple "Calculate your luck score by summing your mental stats and dividing by 5 (round down, knucklehead!)" couldn't fix. The functional vs derived luck distinction seemed arbitrary, but easily repaired: you just have one luck rating - determined as above - and Extra Lucky buffs it up some. Perhaps I'm being overly optimistic, but I don't see this as an unworkable solution.Besides, the simple port of the "Roleplay to get back plot token points" isn't too much of a stretch, is it?

I heard an interesting was to model the Grail Wars is to take World of Darkness' Mage games (either Ascension or Awakening, as your tastes prefer) as the Master character templates, and then using low level Solar Exalted to fill the role of servants. Having never played either system (I JUST got into nWoD Storyteller Core, and even then I don't know it flawlessly), I can't speak for it, but it sounded like an excellent setup. Any thoughts on this matter?

[Pata Hikari]

Frankly the main problem with making a Nasuverse RPG is the huge difference in power levels. While one might excuse some elements. (For instance, the super powered characters like Arcuied and ORT can simply be included as unbeatable bbackground elements. "Fighting ORT: You Lose" etc.) It's rather inevitable that one might want to play a Holy Grail War, since, after all, Fate/Stay Night is the most popular Nasuverse work. How do you handle mostly ordinary humans, maybe with some magic skills, and at the same time have epic heroes from legend fighting insane epic battles?

[Egophobia]

If you're a fan of White Wolf, might I recommend "Scion" rather than "Exalted"? "Hero" does have a few odds and ends that are particularly nice, and the "Legend" system makes for some interesting uses of the Noble Phantasm idea, while the idea of "Fatebinding" does allow for some of the more delightfully ironic deaths, like Darmuid's. You could feasibly manage normal humans as well as Dead Apstles through Scion as well; I think the magic system in Mage is, at least in my experience, a bit too daunting for most people just getting into WoD.

[daniel_gudman]

Modeling the Grail War in GURPS wouldn't be too difficult. "Servant" is a template on some heroic character, and the Classes would be "Lenses" for the templates. Mages would be built in the 200-300 point range, Servants in 500+. Hm... tactical movement basically didn't matter in FSN, so actually, keeping the combat rules ultra-simple would be best, because getting bogged down in run speeds and range calculations would be messy, and missing the point to boot. The most attention would actually have to go into rectifying the specifics of Nasuverse magecraft with the general GURPS rules, but I don't think that would be exceptionally hard.

...now I kinda want to build this, and GM a Grail War in it.

[Five_X]

I've tried making GURPS Servants. It gets a little ridiculous. To make it balanced (so that normal people couldn't beat up Servants) I had to make, for example, a 1000+ point Saber. Berserker was even worse...

It's fun to make their NPs, though. Gate of Babylon, for example, is just a beefed up Snatcher power.

[daniel_gudman]

Snatcher, huh...?

"Modular Abilities: Cosmic" with the Limitation "Only Allies: Treasure-class items", plus a couple other thematic things. Then you go and build NP like vehicles, as non-intelligent characters, rather than trying to work from money cost for enchanted weapons or whatever. I think that's more elegant; the limitation is "total specialness exhibited", not "size" or "mass", so something like a rain of individually-not-exceptional swords or his flying saucer don't drive the cost through the stratosphere; a couple hundred points of Snatcher spent right can create whole entire planets (Permanent + like a dozen mass increases + cosmic).

Servants should get expensive because their physical ability scores have to be really high, but the ROI on abilities higher than about 17 (pinnacle of human ability) or so drops off really, really quick.

Modeling Bersercules' "12 labors" is probably the most point-expensive NP, except maybe Avalon.

For creating the Masters, I would probably enforce a strict point limit, and allow players to optimize, like a more agreeable munchkin. But, for Servants, I would tend to be ruthless on the "matches legend", and let the point cost be whatever that implies.

Probably... Command Seals would be Super Luck with a mess of Limitations granted by an Affliction that the Greater Grail theoretically has.

[Five_X]

God Hand is easy for the most part, just give him adaptive damage resistance, and eleven Extra Lives.

[warellis]

Considering its success regarding the Dresden Files RPG, how well would the FATE system be for use in a Nasuverse tabletop game?

[LunarLegend]

Hmmm... interesting point.

I figured FATE gives the players a little too much control to really fit the horror vibes, IIRC. I'm used to Spirit of the Century, which is awesome fun (and could definitely pull off some of the weirder aspects of the Nasuverse - see Merem Solomon and his Four magical Limbs), but SotC allows for players to get away with utterly BS crazy things.

I've not palyed Dresden, but I don't know how well the FATE rules would gel with such a frighteningly complex and amoral world such as the Nasuverse

[Ergast]

but SotC allows for players to get away with utterly BS crazy things.

You mean like how the Nasuverse allows the same for main characters?

I mean, we have a main that cut at the speed of plot has battle continuation EX and has sexed the most powerful character in the setting, another one that doesn't die when he is killed, has an insane amount of legendary weapons inside him and whose discharges are able to feed up to three excaliblasts, another one that is the reincarnation of Akasha...

And now I'll have to watch SoC. I'm curious about it.

[ltfrankie]

So, is it any different from before?

Has anyone here even run a game using the Nasuverse RPG system?

Has anyone run *any* Fate/Stay Night RPG?

[SeiKeo]

There are plenty of Fate RPs on the forum, but they aren't really the same kind of tabletop thing that I suspect you're thinking of.

[ltfrankie]

Yeah, I meant tabletop/PnP one. Would be nice to play in, run or even spectate/read about such a game.

I don't know whyI can't make new threads in the RP forum, but I may as well bring this up.

A friend of mine will be running a Fate game using nWoD. Servants will be using a mix of Endowments, homebrew and Spirit rules. Masters will likely use Mage/Hunter rules. Basically, the ST is going to be very flexible. Caster would likely use atleast some Mage rules.

If you're interested, join #holygrailwar on irc.rizon.net

Edit: Nevermind. Seems we're full. We're switching to Mutants&Masterminds though.

MASTERS : PL7, built on 160 points. Around 60 of those points should be spent on Magic Powers and alternates, knowledge skills, and appropriate magical devices.

SERVANTS : PL10. Can have one power at PL14 representing their noble phantasm.
All servants get following power for free :
Insubstantial, Rank 4. Action: Uses a standard action to switch between material and immaterial. Limitation: may not be used to pass through organic matter, or magical/magically reinforced barriers.