Well I’ve had, what, 3 posts on the Dresden Files RPG now, and yet have only mentioned that which drives the whole of the game: Aspects.
Aspects are descriptors for people, places and things. But they are more than adjectives and adverbs: Aspects must be important to the story of the game. And by naming the Aspects, players and the GM ensure that they remain important to the story.
Oh yeah, another thing about Aspects: they must be capitalized. 🙂
Let’s consider an example:
You run into a dark room, pursued by a Troll. You can easily assess that it is Pitch Black in the room, and will probably soon find out that there is Loose Rubble On The Floor.
Now during the character creation phase of DFRPG, you use aspects to describe qualities of your character that are important to his/her own story. One of your character aspects is Something’s Always At Hand — which describes how you’re a very flexible, handy character who seems to always find things when you most need them. As the Troll was a total surprise to you, you didn’t bring your bluderbuss with you, so you have to find something to bash him with.
You tell the GM that you are going to spend a Fate point to invoke your Something’s Always At Hand aspect to declare that while you scramble to find the light switch you happen to find a tire iron on a shelf. Likewise you quickly figure out that the rubble in the room would be useful, so you tell the GM that you’ll use your Athletics skill to toss some marble-like trash underneath the Troll just as it comes in the room, tagging the Loose Rubble aspect for a +2 to your Athletics roll.
Passing your skill roll, you describe how the Troll trips up and lands flat on the ground, which is a Maneuver that places a Prone aspect on the Troll. The Troll tries to get up, but fails the Athletics skill roll that would have removed the aspect.
You state that you take a healthy swing at the Troll, and get a free tag on the Prone aspect, giving you a +2 on your attack roll. It connects and while the blow lands with a great whump, the Troll appears more angry than hurt.
The Troll does manage to pass his Athletics roll to take the Prone aspect off, but you have one final tactic: you describe to the GM that while the Troll gets to his feet, you back into the shadows. At the moment that the Troll turns his head towards you, you swing from the dark, tagging the Pitch Black aspect for another +2 to your attack roll.
The swing is good and lands square on the Troll’s temple, cracking his skull!
And the GM proceeds to tell you that gushing from his head are hundreds of tiny Trolls that scatter to the nooks and crannies of the building to escape. But that’s a Dresdenverse thing, so don’t worry. 🙂
As Aspects are a pivotal part of your character, it is important at the time of character creation that you consider how they can be used to benefit you (so you can invoke them for the +2 skill roll bonus at a cost of one Fate point), and how they may complicate your life (so that your GM can compel them and therefore pay you a Fate point). Additionally it may pay to consider how each character aspect could be used to make a declaration, as detailed in the example above.
Our friend Rick Neal has posted three more lengthy, better written articles about character aspects, and I’ll finish off with links to them.
The first article speaks to the impact of character aspects and how to determine their individual usefulness.
The second article covers the high concept and trouble aspects in detail.
Lastly the third article covers the story aspects of your character.
Thank you Rick! Have fun guys.
milezerorpg 