FATE is a tabletop RPG that specializes itself in mimicking the dramatic tension structures of genre fiction by way of a narrative meta-currency called “Fate Tokens”, which are spent by a player to get bonuses on rolls, or to declare a convenient narrative detail, and are earned by a player by conceding to GM pressure to adhere to their character traits in situations where that’s not necessarily beneficial. You can also get Fate Tokens in situations where a character is suddenly exposed to danger or disadvantage in the course of normal activity. As such, it simulates the cycle of adversity, followed by resurgence, that is often portrayed in fiction for dramatic purposes.
FATE is relatively rules-lite, but contains just a little bit of crunch. You have skill rolls that have numeric values, and various effects that can change those skill rolls conditionally in the form of Stunts, but the main feature of FATE is “Aspects”. Aspects are an arbitrary sentence or phrase that describes a property or status of any given object, character, scenario, location, or so on. Characters have some number of inherent aspects, depending on the variation you’re playing, and things like terrain features, or political conditions, or wartime economic restrictions, are also Aspects. There are things called “Situation Aspects” that are kind of temporary, such as what you would think of as status effects in other RPGs, things like “knocked prone” or “behind cover” or “faster than the human eye can see”. In addition, especially with regards to permanent character aspects, they create “permissions” in the fiction. For example, if the setting states that vampires can levitate, then it’s reasonable for characters with a vampirism-related Aspect to get past an obstacle by levitating over it.
FATE is very expandable, and has a lot of variations. The Worlds of FATE books are anthologies of such rules variations, and there are also conversion variations, such as Dresden Files or Atomic Robo. Atomic Robo, in particular, is often regarded as one of the best FATE variants, and has extra features such as “Mega Stunts”, powerful, super human abilities that come at the cost of giving the GM some extra advantages, Brainstorming, which lets the players collaborate to try to solve a mystery by creating an absolutely correct hypothesis, and Invention, which lets players create new, temporary Mega Stunts in the form of hastily-assembled technology, which depending on the results, may have various flaws. It also simulates a pretty specific level of power that fits well with a lot of campaign types, around like the lower-end of superheroics.
In addition to all this, there is a forked, even lighter variation of FATE called “FATE Accelerated”, which eschews the normal system of Skills for something called “Approaches”, where you roll to do some course of action “Carefully” or “Flashily”, and so on.
Anyway, this is the FATE Thread! It’s a very accessible system, and the entire FATE SRD is available for free online, including variants for Atomic Robo, Venture City Superheroes, and others. Please tell us about your ideas, campaign settings, and so on!