Also, an important thing about the Grid that I guess isn’t obvious: because no one’s in complete control of it, it surprises everyone, all the time. You use it at the beginning to allocate authority, to give those with the most exciting ideas about a particular subject the reins on that subject. It tells who who gets to spin Minutiæ according to their vision. Without a GM role (and this is the reason Shock: doesn’t have one), you wind up with everyone doing the thing they’re most excited about (and often the things they know the most about), and the combination is always weird. FATE has a GM, which means that the Grid will sort of give an idea of what to do, but doesn’t give you the tools for how to do it. Conflicts of interest abound, with the effective Antag player throwing down all the relevant Minutiæ, which again, have only tenuous connection to the situation.

Since no one is audience, there’s no judge of the awesomeness of any idea. The only sense of humor twisting the environment is the GM’s.

I’d like to sit down with you at a con sometime and try this out. I can probably learn something from the process (not least of all, how FATE works), and maybe we’ll be able to effectively scratch your itch, too.

That isn’t to say that antagonists can’t emerge during character creation. With many characters I’d expect them to, in the Fate style, by coming up in the character’s backstory and getting encoded as relevant via the character’s aspects.

A full on Diaspora/Shock: hybrid would likely need to put some effort into making sure that antagonists are explicitly created as a part of the process (like having an explicit Antagonist phase, perhaps replacing character creation’s Moment of Crisis phase in a way). But the lighter weight crossbreeding I’m proposing here is more about letting the issues exist out in the environment, and allowing players and characters to encounter them at what is perhaps a less breakneck speed, less strictly directed.

Has Lulu fixed the issue yet?
I was thinking of putting it on the to buy list next week, but couldn’t locate it at all…

2001: A Space Odyssey has a lot of hard sci fi elements in it: grounded notions of physics and space travel and all that. (It has some fantastical elements in it too, so I’m talking more about the mundane parts of the story.)

Star Wars doesn’t. It’s space opera!

That kind of a contrast.

My experiences with FATE have been where the characters are connected through common threads and feel fairly ‘complete’ before play begins. Play further defines and refines the characters through their actions. Shock: characters seem to have a lot of definition taking place throughout play.

Both games have very different approaches, yet you seem to have found a way to fuse the two processes together very nicely. Nice bit of alchemy.

I would have faith that, having generated the shocks/issues prior to making characters, that players will quickly zero in on character concepts that will engage with those.

Since you’re building systems with the Grid, rather than people, what do you propose as connective tissue?

I’m gonna cheat and say what I’d do: I’d make it so that characters are from one of these systems. They’re personally dealing with the Issues of their home system. Maybe they ran away from one, or maybe they’re there at the beginning of the story. Then I’d sink the Issues’ teeth into the characters’ Aspects.

(Pardon my ignorance, by the way. I don’t have Diaspora and have only read FATE. I might be imagining things working differently than they do.)