thread: 2010-03-01 : Reliable vs Unreliable Currency
On 2010-03-08, Roger wrote:
SotC/FATE3 Aspects, and particularly Scene Aspects, are an interesting sort of case.
Here's what SotC says about personal aspects:
When you have an aspect that's applicable to a situation, it can be invoked to grant a bonus. After you have rolled the dice, you may pick one of your aspects and describe how it applies to this situation. If the GM agrees that it's appropriate, you may spend a fate point and do one of the following...
and in regards to non-personal aspects:
As a rule of thumb, tagging someone or something else's aspects requires a little more justification than invoking one of your own aspects. For scene aspects, it should be some way to really bring in the visual or theme that the aspect suggests.
How this actually ends up working around the game table is something I suspect varies significantly from group to group. In my experience, Fate Points are almost perfectly reliable—if you've got them to spend, you'll find some way of spending them. It's as easy to get a +2 from having the high ground as it is to get +2 because your opponent has the high ground and is therefore an easier target.
Diaspora fixes this up a bit by adding a one-tag-per-category restriction, so you can only get one +2 from Equipment, for example.
All that being said, I've also found that SotC gives me a "the fiction matters and also mechanically" feeling, so it hasn't really struck me as a "post-hoc justification say whatever you want because it makes no difference" system either.
