Did a test-play of the system for my NaGaDeMon game yesterday, and it went surprisingly well.

It was also a test-play of a one-shot scenario, and that went well too – the players had some notes about having a variety of antagonists in the final scene, and pointed out that “Days Since A Lost Time Incident”, while it’s a common enough term in many places I’ve worked, sounds like an awesome Dr. Who/X Files plot seed to everyone else.

It’s a normal office workplace.
The door is jerked open, and one of the team races in, swipes their card on the ID system to unlock the cover on the emergency button, then hits it, causing the “Days Since A Lost Time Incident” counter to flip to zero.
Everyone groans, picks up their coffee, and heads towards the situation room.

So that might become part of a game at some point.

The main thing I was testing, system-wise, was whether an aspects-only variant of Fate would work as I wanted it to, and let players define a character using descriptions & nothing else. It seems to have worked, and got me around the conceptual problem I was having with Fate Accelerated for this game, in that the approaches just didn’t have the right feel.

I hate to go with “It’s the vibe” as a reason, but that’s what it was.

I figured out sometime during the process that my NaGaDeMon game, which is currently called CVR, and a scenario/game I’m working on for The Gutter Skypes, which I’m referring to as Depot 17, were both addressing the same sort of problem – How to easily have a system cover a wide range of character types, in both cases, machines.

• In CVR, the player characters are robots; Specifically, Costumed Vigilante Robots.
  They could range from Garbage Trucks to Delivery Drones, from ER Medical Triage Bots to Police Records Department Bots, so the range of sizes & capacities is enormous.
• In Depot 17, they’re construction robots, and one of the PCs is described as being the flatbed version of the APC from ‘Aliens’, so the range there is also enormous.

Describing them using QAGS was … Disastrous. Made no sense to me to be assigning the ‘Body’ of a Load Hauler & the ‘Body’ of a Technical Bot on the same scale.
FAE was tricky, as I ran into the issue of approaches which simply don’t seem to apply. How sneaky is a load hauler? How forceful is a 3D Printer?

The system I ended up with has aspects which look like this;

Design – Features of the Bot; How it’s built, what it looks like
Downside – Bots aren’t perfect. The same features they were built with can also be really irritating
Job – What does it do?
Knack – Something unexpected they can do
Quirk – Outside of it’s job, what is the Bot like? What, aside from their servomotor system, moves them?

And, by way of example, here are the characters which ended up being played in the playtest;

Technical Bot

Design – A Spider Wearing Plate-Mail & A Ridiculous Number Of Tool Bandoliers
Downside – Do A Bodge Job!? Betray My Robot Heritage!?  (perfectionist)
Role – Technical Expert
Knack – A Born, Or Rather Built, Swashbuckler
Quirk – Movie Buff. OK, Media Junkie

Constructer

Design – A Bulldozer With A Range Of Digging Attachments, A Nailgun Chambered For Reinforcing Bar, And A Squirtgun Of Concrete
Downside – As Subtle As A Bulldozer
Role – All-In-One Foundation Builder
Knack – Expert Shot
Quirk – Has Always Wanted To Discover A Fossil