I got asked elswheres about Diaspora Anabasis and why not Fate. What follows is an expansion of my response. Now keep in mind this is me finally trying to serialize my gut on the matter. It’s not the original analysis — there isn’t one. I just felt like it was an unproductive move for me and only now tried to turn that instinct into words. So tread lightly on me here, I’m not trying to drag on anyone’s tastes or anyone elses work. This is just my animal brain trying to talk to my writing brain.

Well, obviously I’ve thought about this a lot and am also able to bring to bear my experiences writing Elysium Flare (a Fate derivation) and our two Soft Horizon Games (a custom system).

With the formalization of Fate as “Fate Core” and “Fate Accelerate Edition” I wind up pinned between several rocks and consequent hard places. I don’t want to write a Fate world book, a setting document — I want to write a coherent game that reflects my own interests in both play and design. So I would have to adapt Fate as formalized, likely drifting it a great deal to suit my needs. Fate is now very well established, though, and so if I choose that path I wind up with Fate fans, expecting The Real Thing, disappointed because it’s not core and I also lose the substantial audience that just dislikes Fate on principle. Making a Fate Core supplement doesn’t satisfy my creative needs. Making another Fate-like Bradthing doesn’t make a lot of not-Brad people happy.

I did take a stab at a Fate derived version based on core but frankly I hated it. It was no fun to write and no fun for me to play. It also was immediately obvious that anyone could do it. Get your old copy of Diaspora and use Fate Core for the system. There are a couple of other tweaks but really that’s it. You don’t need to pay me to do that for you.

So if it’s going to flop or succeed, I want it to be on its own strengths and not based on positive or negative reactions to Fate. I didn’t have this problem with the original because it wasn’t really a Fate game — there was no formalization of Fate at the time. It was a hybrid of Spirit of the Century, streamlined and modularized according to my needs and to fix the flaws I perceived in that game. And so it was at least mine in that sense. Fate is not something you can approach that way anymore though. It’s not in an interesting process of evolution now that it has a Constitution document and a fan base that expects adherence. And detractors that will reject it with reasonable expectation of what a Fate game must be. Everyone who cares already knows what Fate is now, whichever way they’ve decided they care.

Basically there’s no creative mileage for me in a Fate game and it comes with a guarantee of alienating both lovers and haters of the system. I’d rather move on and apply what I’ve learned in the last ten years to build something that lives or dies on its own and is tailored to the material.

Keep in mind that the original Diaspora started as an elaborate joke: it was obvious that Fate and Traveller were misaligned if not perfect opposites, and so it was a sort of absurdist creative project to try and fuse them together. To my shock it worked. We still play it ten years later and I can’t think of any other game that’s true for. But that also means that now the pairing is not a joke and so there’s little creative motivation in just doing the same thing again. I would if it was newly funny with Fate Core. If people want Diaspora with Fate it will always be there in the first edition, pretty much exactly as we intended and as we still play it.