I love the philosophy behind Fate, but in practice the mechanics left me cold. Writing good character aspects is trickier than it should be: there’s a sweet spo

I love the philosophy behind Fate, but in practice the mechanics left me cold. Writing good character aspects is trickier than it should be: there’s a sweet spot of specific enough to be limited and actionable, but broad enough to be useful in practice, and it’s hard to hit. Then the game can be so interpretive and improvisational that it actually comes out the other side as less immersive than a crunchier game like D&D. Players spend less time role-playing and more time talmudically studying their character sheets for ways they can apply their aspects to a given situation. In contrast, I’m a big fan of old(ish) school Call of Cthulhu (from Chaosium, not the d20 version). The mechanics are concrete, straightforward, and get the hell out of the way when you don’t need them. Character sheets embed a lot of info about who a character is without turning into a script for role-playing. Obviously mileage will vary. Some groups will really grok Fate and love it; mine didn’t. Regardless of whether you even wind up playing the game, it’s a good read for any DM just for its take on things. Edit to add: I’ve also used Fate’s character creation system to help make characters for short stories, and it worked really well. I’d never do that with something like a D&D character sheet.