It’s more than halfway through 2017—quite a few years after Fate Core came out—and Lenny & I still occasionally have thoughts about how to tinker under Fate’s hood. Here’s the result of our texting one another last week.
Let’s take one of the weakest parts of Fate and turn it into a strength. To be totally honest, the mechanics around refusing compels is meh—by design. The Fate compel directives push for a yes-and or yes-but play ethos, where the GM can propose an interesting complication for players to have fun with. But to keep people from being strongarmed into situations they don’t want to be in, we have the refusal mechanic.
But the refusal mechanic delivers a hard no to a yes-and/but vibe, so we make it cost a fate point so refusal isn’t casual or automatic.
You may notice that we have a mechanic that exists to patch an issue, and a mechanic that exists to patch an issue within that issue. That’s not inherently bad design, but that does certainly flag a “hmm, can we be more awesome?” line of self-inquiry.
We sidestep this in Fate with the third option that doesn’t get the billing it deserves: negotiation. Given how compels are introduced, with the right to negotiate is buried in preamble rather than given equal visual weight with the two bullet points, it’s no wonder we kept saying “but also negotiate!” in advice in the years since.
Point is, refusing compels as outlined in the text is designed to make you not want to do them. The secret sauce of refusal is that it’s a moment of drama where you get to draw a line in the sand about your character, which is awesome. But because they exist as a release valve for bad compels, and because they cost a non-trivial resource to use, and there’s no inherent directive to use that output in the story, people don’t tend to see refusal as a beneficial thing.
Let’s unfuck that. Let’s make compel refusal fun.
Draft of this new rule:
Buying out of a compel should create story, just as accepting and negotiation does. Refusing a compel could mean your character shows fortitude in the face of temptation, struggles with a dramatic choice, etc.
When you buy out of a compel with a Fate point, the act of spending that Fate point does one of two things: it either creates a situational aspect relating to the refusal (which has a free invoke), or it puts a free invoke on an existing aspect. That aspect naturally relates to a relevant story element. That way, you still get a die roll benefit from the fate point expenditure; you’re just pushed into a situation where you had to spend your fate point now rather than later.
If you’re buying out of a compel because the GM is presenting something uninteresting, talk about that instead. That falls under “negotiate.”
Why do this? Because the best compel refusals are those where a fate point is slammed down in an act of defiance shown in character, that highlights the drama of the moment. To morph the rule into “you still get to roleplay, and you still get the mechanical benefit from your fate point,” we think those compel refusals are more likely to happen.
Or, at least, more people may learn that’s the optimal output of compel refusals.
—Ryan
