Dear Deadly: Peak Experience

Dear Deadly continues! You can read the series on the “dear deadly” tag.

Dear Deadly,

Some FATE games have PC skills form a perfect pyramid (i.e., one skill at the apex, two at the nest level down, etc.), some don’t. Is there any advantage to one way or the other? Mostly, I love the pyramid (focus!), and wonder why a designer would choose not to use it.

– buzz

Buzz, for me, the pyramid is ultimately all about serving up a heaping helping niche protection with a modest side of making sure the character has a good distribution of other skills. It’s both about the focus (what’s at the apex of the pyramid), which defines the niche, and about the base of the pyramid, which supports the apex but also makes sure you’ve got a spread of other stuff you can pitch in with if needed.

Not every implementation is going to need or want that kind of protection. Ultimately the “skill shape” you can achieve is a story effect, describing broadly the template for what makes a capable hero in your world. I’ll talk about a few examples.

The first is the Dresden Files RPG, where we keep to the spirit of the pyramid, but loosen up the structure a bit. There, we went for a column instead of a pyramid (equal quantities all the way down). In all the various shapes that can result from that, you still get a good sense of what the character’s niche is (top three skills), even if it’s not a perfect pyramidal peak. It also allows for the “generalist”, the guy who just doesn’t have any skills at the max, but has a very wide stack of them, and ends up being generally competent in a very wide set of circumstances. The motive there was to support the variety of characters found in the series. Harry D always struck me as a minmaxer, so his skills tend to be a narrow column focused on boosting his spell power as high as possible. Others are well-rounded, intentionally designed for a support role in a team. It felt right, whereas we could get away with the “everyone is some kind of hero chiseled out of the pyramid mold” philosophy of Spirit of the Century.

Then there’s something like Rob Donoghue’s Fate (Psychic) Spies game that he’s running for us locally. There, there’s no reason to use the pyramid because he’s using  a very short list of very wide skills, eight in all I believe. Similar goals pursued here, though: we each have one skill we suck at, one skill we’re world class in, two more we’re badass with, and the rest live in the middle.  That “one skill we suck at” is important; it’s just as hero-defining as the world-class choice.

Last, I’ll point you at an adaptation I did of Sorcerer for Fate by way of the Dictionary of Mu. There, I was pursuing a sort of larger, “What are your areas of focus?” question, hinging on the stats from Sorcerer. Points got allocated amongst the four, and skills hung off of each of those. It’s a little bit like Five Point Fudge, in that regard. Here, you can get a high level sense of what a character’s about simply by looking at those high-level point allocations, which is a useful shorthanding for the GM, while letting the players dig in with some differentiating details further on down in the individual skill allocations. It also drives at the themes from Sorcerer that hook into that system’s attributes, making sure each character touches on each of those themes, at least a little.