Whoa, I have followers? Also FATE.

Having discovered that people actually looked at this thing I am looking at starting back up.

Today I am going to talk about the FATE rules system.  In a nutshell it is a storytelling game with a higher than average emphasis on player agency.  The rules are simple, but ultimately the statistics behind the game play a small part in why FATE games are fun.  With any skill any player (or npc) can make an aspect, which adds +2 to a skill roll.  to put things in perspective skills are (typically) rated 0-4 and you roll dice that can add -4 to +4 to your base skill.  The dice work on a pretty steep bell curve so -1 to +1 make up about 50% of the results.

What these aspects mean is that your character will likely try to use his best skill in most situations, so your barbarian won't have to roll diplomacy too often.  Extra rules, like magic, or sword skills or mech power arrays are easy to figure into the game and there are built in tools to keep combat (social or physical) from dragging on too long.  It is also important to note that your character has 5 built in character aspects, a high concept, a trouble, and three just to define the character or his/her relationships to places. organizations, or other characters (including other pcs).

The idea in FATE is not to have character optimizing sessions so that your party destroys creatures 4 CR above their level.  Fate is not a particularly good tactical miniatures game.  But it is a system that by the rules encourages role-playing.  Personally my favorite stories from my games have always been because I was invested in the story and outcome, and not my biggest crits.  So check out FATE, I have had a great time running and playing it.