FATAL: A Campaign Journal

[Yuki Akuma]

It takes forty-three million, six-hundred and ninety-eight thousand, nine-hundred and sixteen years and eight months of full-time service for a clerk to reach level 20.

Hell, it's eighty-three years until he hits level 2 and can decide "screw this, I'm retraining as a herbalist".

[The Glyphstone]

It takes forty-three million, six-hundred and ninety-eight thousand, nine-hundred and sixteen years and eight months of full-time service for a clerk to reach level 20.

Hell, it's eighty-three years until he hits level 2 and can decide "screw this, I'm retraining as a herbalist".

WMG theory: The Exalted Games of Divinity are actually a game of FATAL, and all the Incarnae had the bad luck of rolling Clerks as their class.

[Yuki Akuma]

It's pretty hard to randomly roll a Clerk. See, first they have to be at least serfs (that is, middle class, because Mr. Hall is a moron), have to have high enough Intelligence and Math...

[RdMarquis]

So, what do you get for reaching level 20 as a clerk? Ye Olde Store Manager?

[Yuki Akuma]

So, what do you get for reaching level 20 as a clerk? Ye Olde Store Manager?

Lots of skill points. That's all leveling up does in FATAL.

Unless you're a spellcaster, in which leveling up also gives you a random chance of increasing your maximum spell level known, as well as increasing your maximum MP.

Also, multiclassing. When you change professions, you keep all of your statistics and skill points, and reset to level one.

You read that right. You could be a level 14 Mage, and then multiclass to Priest and only require 1,000 AP to increase your skill points.

Skill points are based on race, not class, so you can repeat this until you've joined every class and acquired an obscene number of skill points, which determine absolutely everything in the game.

[RdMarquis]

But can't you get that with any other "class"? I mean, is there anything to make it stand out besides whatever menial task you have to perform for EXP?

[CoffeeIncluded]

Good sir, I salute you.

[Yuki Akuma]

But can't you get that with any other "class"? I mean, is there anything to make it stand out besides whatever menial task you have to perform for EXP?

Classes get a few paltry bonuses to skills in most cases. Some get special powers, like the Sorcerer's access to magic or the Assassin's special attacks.

But usually you get all the bonuses from your class at level 1. There are only a very few classes that make advancing in levels worthwhile - the spellcasting classes, mainly.

[RdMarquis]

Ugh. I'm still not convinced Hall didn't design this monstrosity to make sure people had a bad time playing it.

[Dairun Cates]

That seems perfectly reasonable. [/tongueincheek]

I always wondered which barber they were talking about when they told that riddle about "the barber shaves every man that doesn't shave himself". Guess they really meant EVERY MAN, huh?

Edit:

Ugh. I'm still not convinced Hall didn't design this monstrosity to make sure people had a bad time playing it.

Usually when someone does that, there's usually a dead giveaway to it. At times you think you've found that in FATAL, but then it's taken to such an extreme level.

Think about it this way. If it IS basically just a trolling. This was likely at least 1,000 hours of work (pretty low for a 900 page work, but this thing is BARELY edited) to troll the small portion of table top gamers that have actually heard about it. In reality, there probably are less than a thousand people that have actually read the pdf and opened it despite its infamy, and even then, most people have heard of it because of an RPGnet review. There's no way Byron Hall could've seen that coming. So, he may have intended to originally troll a maximum of how many people? A hundred, two hundred at most.

Now, I don't know about you, but I actually find something more disturbing about someone wasting the time to type this bunk out for the sole purpose of just being a troll, that defies even the "good taste" that most regular trolls have, just to really irk and upset a handful of people than a person who is honestly the Ed Wood of Tabletop games. Don't get me wrong, the second option is pretty horrible. But said person is merely disturbed and needs help while the person that did this as a troll is quite frankly anti-social on a level that you shouldn't be able to comprehend as a human being capable of any emotion other than hate.

So yeah. Basically:
1. I get the gut feeling that this guy was serious from what I've read. It lacks the classic marks of a trolling.

2. I REALLY don't want to think someone is capable of this out of spite.

[Mike_G]

I think it was an honest, but bad, attempt at designing a gritty game.

The "history" and "realism" are pretty poor, honestly. The attempt at incorporating gritty, unpleasant details is understandable, if you like that sort of thing, but I think it probably took on a life of its own. I mean, racism, sexism, blatant classism were all common throughout history, and lots of wandering band of armed men did rape an awful lot of camp followers, citizens of conquered towns, and villagers who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I can see somebody looking at the typical, politically correct, cleaned up faux medieval game settings and wanting a Dark Ages setting with the warts included.

But, dude, nobody needs to calculate circumferences for bodily orifices to help with the rape simulation charts.

And, the bad design kinda makes sense since it was probably not extensively playtested.

I mean, I read maybe twenty pages, went from interest to morbid curiosity to shock to disgust and gave up. A friend had heard about it being "the most realistic and gritty" system or something like that and downloaded it.

If it were less concerned with wallowing in sexual misconduct, maybe it would have been played, and changes made, and it might have made some sense.

[Inhuman Bot]

I haven't read the whole thread, so a mod or someone may have mentioned this already, but...

Every other time there's been a FATAL thread, it's been locked.

Just saying.

[Saintjebus]

Based on how long this one has gone on, I think that it is probable that the original poster received permission from the mods before posting.

[Optimystik]

Or he just managed to avoid all the {scrubbed} and {scrubbed} that usually goes on in FATAL, to focus solely on the bad mechanics.

[Maerok]

I mean, I read maybe twenty pages, went from interest to morbid curiosity to shock to disgust and gave up. A friend had heard about it being "the most realistic and gritty" system or something like that and downloaded it.

Just because you have stats for everything don't make it "realistic". But it does make the actual system itself pretty "gritty" (hopefully enough to sand down a d100 into a shiv and stab your eyes out).

[Saintjebus]

Or he just managed to avoid all the {scrubbed} and {scrubbed} that usually goes on in FATAL, to focus solely on the bad mechanics.

That, too. For a FATAL thread, this one is remarkably clean and well-behaved.

[Sliver]

I donno... Making barbers, soap-makers or clerks work most of their lives to advance into something meaningful makes sense. It's just not something anybody would fine fun to play.

It's like the man said "Oh, you complain about class balance in 3.5e? I'll show you problems with class balance!"

[Connington]

Classes get a few paltry bonuses to skills in most cases. Some get special powers, like the Sorcerer's access to magic or the Assassin's special attacks.

But usually you get all the bonuses from your class at level 1. There are only a very few classes that make advancing in levels worthwhile - the spellcasting classes, mainly.

I'm sorry, but have you actually devoted time to figuring out how to optimize FATAL? I mean, even if all of that is fairly obvious just from having a basic understanding of the rules, it seems like a strange investment.

[averagejoe]

I'm sorry, but have you actually devoted time to figuring out how to optimize FATAL? I mean, even if all of that is fairly obvious just from having a basic understanding of the rules, it seems like a strange investment.

Heck, I probably could have told you that just from reading the review. Realizing the brokenness of FATAL's leveling system requires little to no time investment. As soon as people start talking specific, mapped out builds you have room to talk.

[The Cat Goddess]

I'm sorry, but have you actually devoted time to figuring out how to optimize FATAL? I mean, even if all of that is fairly obvious just from having a basic understanding of the rules, it seems like a strange investment.

For some people, things like optimization and the like happen automatically.

[Connington]

As soon as people start talking specific, mapped out builds you have room to talk.

How do you map out a build when your starting character is almost entirely randomly generated?

Okay, it's possible I suppose, but my GM tends to frown when I bring a box of dice sorted by what face they'll fall on.

[DragoonWraith]

I believe, in theory, you get to choose which class you're gaining at each level. You don't really get to choose what that class does for you, so really all your choosing is your experience-gaining-gimmick (unless you choose a spellcaster or Assassin or something), but there is that.

[Delta]

I donno... Making barbers, soap-makers or clerks work most of their lives to advance into something meaningful makes sense. It's just not something anybody would fine fun to play.

But that is exactly the problem, they don't have to work most of their lives to advance into "something meaningful", the clerk has to work for ALL his life just to get from level 1 to 2, in a 20-level system. That doesn't make sense, that's just ridiculous.

[Delta]

I'm sorry, but have you actually devoted time to figuring out how to optimize FATAL? I mean, even if all of that is fairly obvious just from having a basic understanding of the rules, it seems like a strange investment.

Sometimes, ways to optimize a game are that obvious that it's really hard to miss them even when just skimming through a game.

[Sliver]

The best way to optimize in FATAL is not to play it.

It's like The Game.

[potatocubed]

Also, a barber must shave 5 billion beards to hit level 20.

Assuming 15 minutes to shave a beard and 8-hour working days, that's... about 430 years of shaving.

[Sliver]

Assuming 15 minutes to shave a beard and 8-hour working days, that's... about 430 years of shaving.

Only if you always have a beard to shave. Which I doubt.

[Dairun Cates]

Only if you always have a beard to shave. Which I doubt.

I'm sure there's an obscure spell that the poor mage that can't gain exp because his spells are worthless in combat (and are required to be cast in combat to give exp) that can give you beards to shave and the ability to speed it up or do more than once.

That's called party synergy.

[potatocubed]

Only if you always have a beard to shave. Which I doubt.

Science!

Assume 50% of the population are men, and 50% of men desire to remain more-or-less clean-shaven. Assume again that a man requires a shave once every 7 days. These assumptions are in line with FATAL's general level of realism, which is to say they're completely arbitrary.

A barber needs 32 men per day to fill his 8-hour work schedule. That's 224 men per week, which means to sustain his QUEST FOR BEARD XP he needs a population of 896 people.

Now! Because all professions in FATAL are randomly generated, we can work out exactly what proportion of the population are barbers (or at least, someone with the pdf handy can) by looking it up on the table. If that proportion is less than 1/896, then it's plain sailing all the way to level 20!

If you've got a 500-year lifespan, anyway.

[Coidzor]

That, too. For a FATAL thread, this one is remarkably clean and well-behaved.

Well, there's only so many times we can chant "{Scrubbed}, Murder, Kill, More {Scrubbed}, some bad mechanics, a pinch of sociopathy, leave to fester in the subconsciousness of Anonymous, and add sexual deviancy to taste," before it gets boring. Or we need to stop to take a drink.

FATAL, while a bad system, isn't getting any worse with time and desensitization to it.

And, well, it was born on the internet, if you can call it birth. ...Or Living.