Quote from: Broken-Serenity;470637If the creator would just offer it via drivethrurpg's POD system then i'd buy a copy straight away, the fact they havent stops me from being bothered enough to use the inferior(imo) lulu service...you'd think in this day and age where availability of niche products is scarce it'd be available via as many different alternatives as possible(im guessing they didnt like the way stuff is done with drivethru's POD or something).

I'm very happy with my HC copy.

I ran a Napoleonic Wars game using Strands, which went really well. We'd tried FATE before (SOTC) but the group really disliked it at that time. A year later we tried Strands and it clicked. I have a feeling that it was the lack of Stunts that did it (I know Advantages do the same thing, but that was perfectly workable for them; in fact, when we made characters, everyone was able to look in the book, and find what they wanted, and I think it took us all of an hour to make 4 characters when no one else knew the rules but me).

SOTC took zillions of years in contrast to make a character. So, Strands is really the only version of FATE I'll use (other than Diaspora maybe, but that's only because the rules are so tight).

I'm reading through it now. I'm having a hard time figuring out whether Aspects or Advantages or both are meant to sub for skills, and if so, how they're supposed to do so, respectively.

I think Strands of Fate is a very well-executed design.  The layout's clean, the rules seem well written, and it's one of the most comprehensive "generic" RPGs I've ever seen.

Conceptually, though, I just get this sense that SoF is afraid to take off the training wheels and embrace what makes Fate Fate.  By folding in a lot of mechanics that Fate very specifically excluded, SoF seems to just Not Get It somehow.  To be honest, it feels a lot less like Fate to me than a sophisticated version of Fudge that tacks on Aspects as one of the many mechanics it's cribbing from other games.

Its popularity means that if, indeed, It Does Not Get It, there are a lot of people out there who Do Not Get It in exactly the same way, so it obviously fills an empty niche and more power to Mechalus for doing so.

Quote from: Numa Pompilius;470648SOTC took zillions of years in contrast to make a character.

That's not an unusual problem with the FATE system. SOTC is particularly bad, but making a Starblazer Adventures group is still something that basically takes up an entire session, or the large part of it.

The one exception I've found so far where making characters was a breeze is ICONS, which does this by making 90% of the character creation process random.

So the question is, how the hell does Strands do it? How would they make it faster than SOTC or SA, as I assume they do not use random character creation?

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;488247So the question is, how the hell does Strands do it? How would they make it faster than SOTC or SA, as I assume they do not use random character creation?

*bump*

I'd be curious to know the answer to this as well.

Quote from: RPGPundit;488247That's not an unusual problem with the FATE system. SOTC is particularly bad, but making a Starblazer Adventures group is still something that basically takes up an entire session, or the large part of it.

The one exception I've found so far where making characters was a breeze is ICONS, which does this by making 90% of the character creation process random.

So the question is, how the hell does Strands do it? How would they make it faster than SOTC or SA, as I assume they do not use random character creation?

RPGPundit

Slight detour but for a Fate game so far Bulldogs! seems to have a pretty speedy character generation - on par with D6 of Savage Worlds. The alien races help you with a few starting of Aspect and by ditching the pyramid choosing skills seems to require less soul searching. Also Bulldogs! character creation has phases, flashback, guest starring or other gimmicks. It's much too sensible for that.

Quote from: Soylent Green;490239Slight detour but for a Fate game so far Bulldogs! seems to have a pretty speedy character generation - on par with D6 of Savage Worlds. The alien races help you with a few starting of Aspect and by ditching the pyramid choosing skills seems to require less soul searching.

Saywhat?

I find massaging points around requires way more fiddling and hence takes more time than a pyramid or standard array sort of thing.