I Ran D&D with Fate, a Post Mortem

I just got back from a weekend excursion to visit faraway friends, and I managed to get some of them down to try Fate Accelerated Edition re-skinned as Dungeons & Dragons—approaches are replaced with the standard ability scores (which is not a new idea but it works), stunts are renamed feats (as they are functionally the same thing anyway), fate points become hero points, and I suggest to make race and class as starting aspects.

We started with the party (made up of a hobbit fighter, a half-elven thief, and a dwarven demon summoner) getting contacted by a envoy with a sensitive problem, the duke’s orphaned niece Serena has gone missing on the very day before she was to be engaged to some barely pubescent second son. The investigation was kicked off with a little demon summoning which lead to the brutal beating of a bard seen with Serena, and who was also a clown (the hobbit took an aspect and stunt related to hating clowns so there was a clown...a sad, sad clown) who gave up another clue, he has been extorted into luring Serena into a trap so she could be kidnapped.

They gained access to the scene of the abduction, a creepy and ill-expanded unused area below the duke’s castle, via the thief picking a lock. I had somehow forgotten that picking locks as a thing in D&D when I wrote the scenario, and the plan was for the group to search Serena’s room and find a journal that reveals a secret exit from the castle they can use to enter the dungeon. Even though the thief rolled a little low—I had the sudden realization that the lock probably wasn’t that good as very few people have any reason to try and open the lock, I couldn’t think of any good options for succeeding with a cost, and I thought derailing my plans was really funny—the lock opened.

Once they get down below, they met up with a mouse with a crown and a sword, the Mouse Prince, beside a pit. After some conversation (we discovered that the thief could talk to animals, which is to say she had an open aspect slot and put speaks with animals into it) they decided that the Mouse Prince is not to be trusted and is probably some sort of the improbable trap monsters. So, they threw a torch down the pit and yes, the Mouse Prince was some sort of improbable trap monsters. In the pit was the Rat King, a large rat with a crown and scepter of skulls whose tail is connected to the Mouse Prince—a variation on the urban legend rat king.

The fight was about three or four rounds long. I gave the PCs the initiative as they had surprised the monsters and I don’t like initiative rules. The fight included: Setting the Rat King on fire, compelling that on fire aspect to destroy the scepter, cutting the pair’s shared tail and instantly killing the Mouse Prince. Though I did forget to mention that even after the two free uses of On Fire, the aspect could still be used with a hero point.

After that, they found the remains of the would-be kidnappers (who had been blasted with fireball), went through a maze (which was just there because mazes are a trope they marked the walls and got through with little trouble), and found Serena disguised as a hermit camped by the exit (where they were supposed the start). They had already figured out that she was a magic user (her mother was a sorcerer from a foreign land), approached her and convinced her to join them after faking her death with the remains of the kidnappers, and taking the reward money after pinning it on the clown bard.

It was a quick, silly game but an enjoyable one with only a little hurriedly rules reference on my part. One of the players prefers a game with more concrete options, and I wonder if including the four basic actions (create an advantage, overcome an obstacle, attack, and defend) on the play-sheet (I made a character sheet with all the required rules for character creation and some of the other rules baked in) would have made things easier for her. I had left them off in an attempt to present the most accessible version of fate possible; though it is possible I went too far.

The players also seem to take to the build your own stunt system better than aspects, though I only omitted stunts that let characters do something without a roll once per day and adding new stunts by reducing refresh.