Fate Accelerated Edition is Magic

I’ve been playing around with ideas for Fate Accelerated Edition(FAE), an offshoot of Fate that came out as part of the Fate Core kickstarter, and I discovered something delightful about it. The game supports character to use magic, psychic powers, or any other extra-normal abilities out of the box without any additional rules.

FAE trades in the discrete skills Fate Core uses for generalized approaches. Rather than being good at specific things FAE characters are good at ways of doing things such as being forceful or clever or deceptive.

Due to the way approaches work, a character can use magic or psychic powers or what have you without needing any special rules. The only thing the character might need is an Aspect (1) to establish the character is capable of using the power if that is something that most people can’t do (2).

On the other hand, I also find this trait a little annoying as I like the activity of cobbling together subsystems and the Fate base makes doing so fairly straight forwards due to the bronze rule(3). Just a few hours ago, I was working on a bolt-on magic system but I think that I in writing this post, I’ve talked myself out of using the idea.

1 A piece of freeform character definition where sentence fragments such as outlaw psychic are given mechanical teeth including establishing that the character is a psychic as well as an outlaw.

2 Though if the rest of the group isn’t interested in a game with that sort of character, then that is a horse of a different color.

3 You can use the basic building blocks for characters to build other things.