How Spirit of the Century changed my life
I recently started to play Spirit of the Century with some friends of mine, and it is the most fun that I have had playing a role playing game in a long time. It might just be the fact that it’s a new game to play, but it might just be that I’ve been in a bit of a gaming slump lately. The only game that I’ve been playing with any consistency is a weekly D&D 3.5 game. I’m not a fan of the D20 system, but that’s a topic for another post. I find FATE and more specifically Spirit of the Century to be a great system, but here are a few highlights that I have:
On-the-fly character creation In Spirit of the Century, anybody can jump into a session having done no work beforehand. You just need to pick the things that you are best at and go from there. As you play through the game, you fill in the holes on your character sheet. I have found that this is so much more fun than some other systems that I have tried where you have to do a lot of number crunching and thinking about precise placement of skill points before you can begin to play.
Fast and Loose I’ve seen a lot of different games in my day, and a lot of them encourage you to immerse yourself in your character. Most of the games that I have seen, implement this poorly. The rules are simple in Sotc, your role 4 six-sided dice, with each side marked with a plus, minus, or nothing, add the result to the skill and that is how well you did at your task. In this game, you can focus so little on what you can do mechanically and more on what your character would do in that situation.
Freedom, Freedom, Freedom The FATE system has something called aspects built into the system. Each character has ten aspects that they make up. Aspects round out the characters thematically and they guide the game master as to what the characters want to see. Aspects are used to make the characters fun to play. The skills are helpful in knowing what the characters can do, but not who they are. Aspects inform all of the other players who that character is and what they do.
Spirit of the Century provides a much different experience than most other role playing games on the market. At the least, I would give the game a shot, because it will provide a good change up from the standard Dungeons and Dragons game that most people have expected of role playing games.