Most of this game's rules apply to everyone, but if you're the GM, there's a few additional ones you need to know about that cover your additional responsibilities.

If you're already comfortable running fiction-first RPGs and don't feel like going through one amateur designer's extended manifesto, then just read this chapter and then be off on your merry way to your game table. Most of this game's rules are player-facing, but there's still a few things in there that you'll need to internalize if you want the intended experience.

If you're an inexperienced or first-time GM looking for advice on running RPGs in general, you like the design of this game enough that you want to see more of the philosophy that informed it, or you're just morbidly curious, you'll also want to read next chapter,, 7 General GM Guidance.

Running This Game

Setting Opposition

When improvising an opposition target, DEFAULT TO ADEQUATE (1) unless there's a strong reason not to. Don't go above Great (3) unless it's a truly exceptional circumstance (or a truly stupid idea that really is that close to impossible). This may sound low as a default, but remember that it only affects passive opposition. This game's most intense moments usually involve characters actively opposing each other, which will naturally produce opposition numbers all over the ladder.

Masterful (4) and Superhuman (5) results are designed to require the players to use stunts, invokes, or both to achieve with anything close to reliability. The dice can still spike high on their own, but the players will need to position themselves well, set up leverage, and use resources before they can reasonably expect to hit those targets. That's why most of the things that Fate usually assigns +2 bonuses to have been cut down to +1, and it's why it's so important to strictly enforce the rule that +2 stunt conditions are highly specific and come at a price: a +2 bonus kicks you almost halfway up the entire adjective ladder.

Calibrating Costs

COSTS ARE NOT PUNISHMENTS. They are the fuel you use to keep the engine of your game running. Without them, failure can grind the game to a halt and leave your players standing around asking "sooo... now what?" Costs ensure that, even if failure is still undesirable for the players, it doesn't have to be boring. In the same vein, COSTS DO NOT NEGATE whatever the players were trying to do. Failure gets to negate things; costs only get to complicate them in some way and inject drama into the scene.

Remember that costs can also apply to NPCs. The players should sometimes be the beneficiaries of an NPC's stroke of ill fortune, and even shape that fortune occasionally through clever narration and deep engagement with the fiction - see Alex's Defend action in 5 Putting It All Together for what this might look like. If a particular NPC rolling a catastrophic failure in the moment really bothers you, remember you have your own pool of fate points for a reason.

Don't Default To Harm

Because strain clears so quickly, harm isn't a good choice of cost unless the scene has other likely sources of more harm. If a character takes harm as a cost once and then is never at risk of harm again until the scene changes, then the cost wasn't a cost at all - and, if there's no other source of harm in the scene, then harm as a cost doesn't make much sense anyway. For example, consider two different high-stakes conversations. If a character's trying to impress a recruiter to get hired and infiltrate a megacorp, it's not clear how things could go wrong in a way that results in multiple instances of harm taken. On the other hand, if that same character is interrogating Hannibal Lecter, harm is absolutely on the table as he picks apart the interrogator's psyche piece by piece - so harm as the cost of an action, perhaps the character accidentally saying more than they should and giving Lecter an opening, makes sense, and the scene has levers that can build on that harm and make it a real consideration that the player has to adjust for.

Severe costs that impose automatic consequences are another story entirely. Consequences are much harder to get rid of, so you should still use this rarely, but for the opposite reason as harm - consequences are likely to snowball faster than you expect if things start going really wrong. I recommend reserving these for when the player takes an offer to succeed with a guaranteed severe cost.

Running NPCs

The beating heart of any fictional world is the people who live in it. Mechanically, this game uses four types of NPCs: Throwaway, Minor, Major, and Weird. The first three scale up their mechanical specificity to match how important they are to the fiction; the last covers actors that, for whatever reason might be narratively appropriate, get to break the rules.

If you want advice on performing your NPCs, see #The Seven Dwarfs Method and Optional: 3-Axis Acting in the universal guidance section later on.

Throwaway NPCs

No name, no face, no stats. These are the people who briefly emerge from the ranks of your background extras when they make themselves a problem or the PCs need something from them, and then probably vanish right back into the crowd. Make them up as you need them, then feel free to never think about them again as soon as they've served their purpose.

NPCs that don't matter enough to have any stats also don't matter enough to have differently-ranked approaches. If you find yourself needing to roll an action for such an NPC, choose the appropriate rank for the relevant skill, then double that rank to form the dice pool. This caps at Masterful (4) for 8 dice in the pool, and even that should be extremely rare - typically, throwaway NPCs should just be Adequate (1) or Good (2) at what they do, with Great (3) reserved for especially tough and/or numerous opposition. Any NPC important enough to have a Superhuman (5) skill is important enough to have actual stats.

This method also allows for representing a group of NPCs as a single mechanical block. For example, if a PC is trying to hide from an entire patrol of guards, you can use the above rules to improvise a Notice rank for the group as a whole and roll it only once, rather than rolling for every single guard in the unit. If harm to a throwaway group becomes a possibility and you want them able to take more than a single hit to represent their numbers, you can give them up to 6 strain boxes with no consequence slots.

If a throwaway NPC turns out to be more relevant to the ongoing fiction than you expected, or if you find that you liked what you came up with and want to make them more relevant, take a minute to upgrade them to a Minor NPC as appropriate. If they become especially important down the line, consider upgrading them again to Major.

Minor NPCs

NPCs who aren't expected to be major recurring characters, but are worth enough attention to have a name and some amount of actual definition. The process of statting out minor NPCs is similar to Lightning Round Character Creation, in that you start with only a few critical pieces of information (one aspect, best skill, best approach) and fill in more of the NPC's details as you discover who they are through play, but with two key differences:

1. Lightning Round for players sets their initial best skill and approach at 3, while for NPCs, that number can be higher or lower as best reflects their role and the needs of the fiction.
2. Minor NPCs get up to 4 strain boxes (if they get any at all; 0 boxes is a valid option), with no consequence slots. If they take more harm than they can absorb, they're simply taken out. Minor NPCs aren't meant to stick around - but if they somehow do, it's worth considering whether to promote them to Major.

Major NPCs

NPCs who become especially important to the story, typically by showing up repeatedly or being at the center of something critical to the PC's goals, should be statted out just like a PC. Sometimes, they should have better stats than your PCs - if someone's meant to be a boss-level threat or some other kind of major obstacle, give them higher skill and approach ranks, more stunts, and whatever else it takes to make them appropriately dangerous.

A word of caution: friendly NPCs should never outshine the PCs. This isn't to say they can't be stronger, smarter, more influential or otherwise more important in the world, but they should never be more important to the story that emerges at the table - don't let them take over situations and solve the PCs' problems for them. Your players are at your table, at least in part, because they want to be the ones to solve those problems and make those choices; letting an NPC do it for them cheats them out of that fun. Remember, the PCs are the stars of the show and the people the game is actually about; an NPC, no matter how big a deal they are, is ultimately part of the supporting cast.

Weird "NPCs"

In Fate, things that aren't characters can still behave like characters mechanically. The Weird bucket includes everything from unfathomably powerful monsters who exist outside the normal character-building restrictions to a horde containing hundreds of armored shock troops to a rapidly-spreading fire to a painstakingly restored '57 Pontiac named Celia and more. If it's important to the fiction, can act on it or be affected by it in some way, and deserves to exist in more mechanical detail than being an aspect in the scene or on another character's sheet allows, then it's worth writing out as a Weird NPC in its own right.

Threats can have whatever combination of aspects, skills, approaches, stunts, strain, and consequences you feel it takes to make them appropriately relevant (typically this translates to "dangerous", but not always). Break the rules. When you determine their stats, focus your attention more on how this "NPC" might create interesting decisions for the PCs than on strict conceptual accuracy.

Advancing The PCs

Unlike some games that use experience points or other systems to track the player's progress, power increases in Fate are entirely at the GM's discretion. That means it's your responsibility to make sure they happen often enough to satisfy the players, but not so often that the characters get too powerful too fast.

The 2 Character Creation#Advancement rules say that approaches and refresh only go up "If the GM feels a major story development has concluded and it's time for the characters to power up." I can be more direct here: you should feel a "major story development" has concluded roughly EVERY THREE SCENARIOS. This is partly about keeping your player characters on a steady power curve, partly about giving the players that sweet sweet dopamine hit of seeing their numbers go up, and partly a matter of narrative pacing - frankly, if you're regularly going more than three scenarios without something major changing in the fiction, either directly because of something the PCs have done or because the world is pushing back against them, then you should probably step on the gas.

Story Details

The 1 Core Rules#Declaring a Story Detail section of Core Rules outlines the guidance for when to allow the use of that option and when to veto it. Below, you'll find a more detailed extended example that didn't fit into what was supposed to be the go-to mid-session lookup document.