Slop Fate spending

My players are getting more Fate than they can use. Not a lot more and not everyone always has too much but the pattern is clear - at least once a session (it feels like) someone spends a Fate because they want to make sure to have spent it for leveling rather than to get any benefit on a roll. I don’t know how to feel about this - it’s their Fate, the rules say they can spend it to e.g. open-end dice on a successful roll where more successes won’t actually do anything - but it always feels like a failure.

Actually I do know how I feel about this - I hate it and want it to change. What could be the issue?

  1. Too much Fate input. Maybe we are rewarding too liberally. Maybe they need to go after Persona explicitly rather than Fate e.g. smaller Goals, playing against Beliefs.
  2. Not enough Fate output. Maybe they don’t have enough chances to use Fate.
    2a. Sessions too short? No real solution to this due to schedule constraints.
    2b. Not enough rolling where Fate can be spent? Possible solutions: call for more rolls with scaled success, have more conflicts, have more rolls where each player rolls separately even though it only takes one turn.

Seems like the easy first thing to try is having more everyone-rolls-separately tests.

Any suggestions on how to have more rolls where Fate matters? Now that I ask out loud, the answer seems fairly clear. Low stakes Ob 3 rare-skill tests.

So the obvious thing to try to incorporate is a couple of low-stake obstacles whose obvious resolutions will be full-party individual-test Ob 3 with a skill that’s not Fighter, Dungeoneering, or Scout.

Thanks for listening. :wink:

How big is your group? How many Fate points do you estimate they each earn per session, on average?

4 players.
Acting on Belief: 2.5-3
Working toward Goal: 0-4, probably like 2.5 average
Benefiting from Instinct: 3.5

So around 8-9.5 handed out per session. 2.2/player. Based on the cold hard stats of the memorical records of my gray matter.

That sounds about right, though I’m usually pretty strict about instincts benefitting the party.

How many conflicts do you generally have per session?

Conflicts: 1-3? But sometimes our magician makes conflicts go by very quickly attacking with eldritch darts, help, and tapping Nature (or Of Course!) on turn 1. In quite a range of fighty conflicts this is unbeatable.

Instincts: Our rubric has been “did you accomplish something useful without spending a turn/check”. The only obvious ways I see to make that more strict is a) to limit it to when camp happens after 3 turns since last grind, or b) to check whether the instinct actually made a difference e.g. if the dwarf built a low stone wall around the camp but the +1 didn’t help and they left the camp and clearly won’t return, maybe that’s not accomplishing something useful? Still seems like it is.

Hmmm. Have you seen the update to Eldritch Darts (and the new Aetherial Swarm spell) in the latest draft of Torchbearer spells? http://www.torchbearerrpg.com/?p=212

Yeah I think we’re switching next session.