Wtf Am I Reading?!
Why, the obligatory "what is a roleplaying game" section, of course!
A role-playing game (RPG) is make-believe guided by rules. You and your friends play the roles of imaginary characters in an imaginary world, and decide what those characters do about the exciting and interesting situations they find themselves in. Together, those decisions cause a story about the characters to emerge from everyone's shared imagination.
The rules of the game mostly exist to determine the outcome when there's doubt about what should happen next. If it's not clear whether a character should succeed or fail at what they're doing, or if something should go wrong with the attempt that complicates their lives, they roll dice and use the results to see how well they do.
Glossary
- PLAYER Everyone at the table is a player in the game. Most of them are responsible for a single PC (Player Character) at a time; if the rules talk about "players", they're talking about one of these. Usually, players only change characters when their current one dies or otherwise permanently exits the story, but some groups using "troupe style" play assemble a large group of PCs and switch between them as needed.
- GM Game Master, by long tradition. Ideally I'd prefer to call this "Facilitator" or "Game Manager" but I'm under no illusions about either of those ever catching on. The GM is a player with different duties than the rest. Most players are responsible for only a single character; the GM is responsible for playing everyone else, referred to as NPCs (Non-Player Characters), as well as the parts of the world the PCs interact with that aren't characters. The GM is not responsible for telling the story - their job is to set up interesting decisions for the PCs, then respond appropriately to the choices the players make. A story about the PCs naturally emerges from those decisions.
- D10 A 10-sided die. Nearly all roleplaying games use the same notation to handle their die rolls: "roll X d Y" means "roll a die with Y sides, X times." Typically, you'll want to pick up that many dice and roll them all at once instead of rolling one at a time; it's much faster and with how frequently dice are rolled in most games, that time adds up.
- FICTION The imagined reality of the game, existing as a shared understanding in the minds of everyone at the table. This term is all-encompassing. When you play the game, you look to the fiction first to see what's going on, then decide what your character does about the problems the fiction says they're dealing with, using the resources and abilities the fiction says they have available. The fiction is in a constant state of flux, changing every time the players and GM act. Whenever there's significant uncertainty over how the fiction should change based on what's happening, the rules of the game engage to help determine the answer.
There will be more terms you'll need to know as you work your way through the rules, but they'll be defined as they become relevant. For now, the above is enough to get you started here, and will transfer to almost any other RPG.
What You Need
Physical Supplies
This game is fairly light on physical supplies to bring to the table, but it does still require some. Every player will need between six and ten 10-SIDED DICE, which are widely available in sets of 10 at friendly local game stores around the world. If you can't find a local business to support (or your local game store isn't actually very friendly; that unfortunately does happen from time to time), you can also look online at any of the fine creators making an incredible variety of beautiful and artistic sets. And if you somehow can't find any you like at an acceptable price point, then I guess there's also Amazon as a last resort.
You'll also need CHARACTER SHEETS to record the information about your character and update it with temporary as the game goes on. You can do this with PENCILS AND PAPER, in which case you'll need to print a blank copy of the Character Sheet to write on, or digitally via a laptop or tablet - see the instructions for digital setup below for that version. I do not recommend using your phone as a character sheet viewer at the game table.
You'll need INDEX CARDS OR SCRAP PAPER to track aspects and, occasionally, sketch out zones. We'll talk more about aspects in 1 Core Rules and Zones in 4 Challenges, Conflicts, & Contests.
Last but not least, you'll need some type of TOKENS - lots of them, with something to put them in at the center of the table. Around 40 is a good amount. Poker chips, pennies, flat glass marbles, torn-up bits of paper, or anything else you can get in large quantities, can pass around easily, and won't mistake for anything else. You'll use these to track fate points, which we'll talk about more in 1 Core Rules and use extensively in play.
Digital Setup
If you play primarily or exclusively online, some things will get easier, but some will get harder.
At the time of this writing, this game has no dedicated virtual tabletop support - I'm not aware of any VTT implementation of Fate that allows for all the changes I've made to the system's basic chassis, and I'm too hopeless with javascript to develop one myself. If you're better at web dev than I am (meaning even remotely competent) and feel inclined to build such an implementation, contact me at #TODO (email goes here) so we can work something out.
In the meantime, my recommended setup for online play is to use GOOGLE SHEETS with each player editing a different tab of the same file at once. There's a template available at #TODO (link goes here) that you can make an editable copy of in your own drive, or you can make one yourself based on the sample sheet included in this document. Make a new sheet tab for each PC, one more that the GM can use to see every PC's aspects in one place, and a final sheet you can fill with "virtual index cards" to track temporary aspects and free invokes as they enter and exit play.