Aspects in AFate has the following two default “properties”:
- Frequency (rare, common, frequent)
- Magnitude (minor, significant, major)
The default Aspect has a frequency of common (2 Fate Points to tag/invoke) and a Magnitude of Significant (+2 to dice rolls).
Permanent Aspects or Facts
Some aspects are permanent. They always exist. For example, a wall is hard. That’s a permanent aspect. Tagging a permanent aspect still costs 1 Fate Point – the advantage is that you have to remember that when you tag, it becomes significant. A man can be a drunk and imparied, and normally, he would take a penalty to all his shots. Yet Fate is not a fine-grained system – so the system of tagging Aspects are is used to represent the moment when the fact that the man is drunk is important.
The biggest advantage about permanent Aspect is that they are i) obivous and ii) you don’t need to discover or place them on your targets.
What the GM can change now is how important the aspect is. A +2 or a re-roll is a significant impact; hence if the GM thinks the reason is too contrived, he can instead change it to a minor magnitude (+1 to roll and no re-rolls).
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