Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Avoiding Fate

The closer I get to having a solid grip on this Fate campaign, the more I notice myself putting it off. I spent 45 minutes this evening padding out the religion section of my reference doc (which I'm planning to give to players as an overview of the world); I've still yet to spec out any of the NPCs from the early encounters.

Part of the problem, I think, is that I don't want to have too little content - but having never played a game before, I have no idea how long what I've got already is going to last. I have basically a "pilot episode" planned out to introduce the world and hopefully the system, but beyond that I'm kind of drawing a blank apart from the major story beats. I don't even know how to get from plot point to plot point.

The plan is mostly to have some kind of open-world thing going, where the party can get missions/quests from various factions in the city, but that means I've got to have a bunch of different mission types for them to do, that I can skin or tweak to change them up a bit. But again, not knowing how long any of them are actually going to take to play, I've got some that are likely to be 30 minutes and under, and one that I'm pretty sure could stretch over a couple of sessions.

It's kind of paralysing. We're heading back home at the start of next month, so I might see if I can rope my wife, my brother and his wife to help playtest a bit. Even if we don't do them in the right order, having some experience wrangling a party through combat and social encounters would do a lot to give me a foundation. I've not even played in a Fate game before; at least when I tried my hand at D&D4e I knew what DM'ing looked like.

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