Skip to main content

Skills for Harry Potter in Fate

I love Harry Potter! At home we talked about the idea of a Harry Potter game, inspired by Mark Plourde as mentioned on the Cypher Speak Podcast. So here's 2 ways to handle it: as a Fate skill system.

In Fate Core, the game expects 18 skills. Here's a trial of mapping Hogwarts school subjects to skills.
Apparition
Astronomy
Arithmancy
Care of Magical Creatures
Charms
Defense Against the Dark Arts
Divination
Dueling - replace Fight and Shoot
Flying Lessons - replace Drive
Herbology
History of Magic - replace Lore
Muggle Studies
Potions - replace Crafts
Transfiguration
also non-school subjects
Contacts
Provoke
Rapport
Resources

The school subjects cover almost everything I'd want in a Harry Potter game, but I wanted to be able to explain why the Malfoys are so well-known and connected without using school subjects, so Contacts and Resources stayed in from Fate Core. Additionally, Provoke and Rapport seem important for dealing with other wizards (and perhaps House Elves). I think that Care of Magical Creatures, Herbology and Muggle Studies may all be parallels to these skills for specific audiences.

Cypher System skills are easy. Take a subject or another skill and be Trained, Specialized or Inable to use it. All the same skills as Fate apply, but they could also be more flexible and deal with other concepts.
In Cypher, I might consider making students Trained in subjects appropriate to a grade year but Inable in other skills - for example, second years might be Trained in Care of Magical Creatures, Charms, Flying Lessons, Herbology, Potions and Transfiguration but Inable in Apparition and Dueling.
I might also say that first years have only a couple of skills they are Trained in, but that's pretty common in a Cypher System game. This is probably too many separate skills for a Cypher game.

Instead you could have a list like:
Magical Lore (replaces Astronomy, Arithmancy, History of Magic)
Care of Magical Creatures
Charms
Defense Against the Dark Arts
Dueling
Flying Lessons
Herbology
Potions
Transfiguration

Skills for positive and negative social interactions are common in Cypher, so no separate Provoke and Rapport skills.

Apparition (becomes a Magic flavor ability)
Divination (becomes a Magic flavor ability)

For a Cypher System HP game, I would let characters take Magic and Skills and Knowledge flavor abilities. Character Types would reflect their interest in study. To keep the 4 Character Type model, I might use:
Gryffindor for Warrior
Ravenclaw for Adept
Hufflepuff for Explorer
Slytherin for Speaker
UPDATE: I edited the type associations after giving it some thought. I'm exploring this in more depth in a future post.

This House-based model might restrict the characters too much - not sure! I'll have to play with this. But a Clever Gryffindor Who Would Rather Be Reading could be Hermione, while a Brave Gryffindor Who Loves to Fly could be Harry.

More thoughts in time.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Dragon's Pool

Here's a pitch for a new game setting for D&D I'm working on. First, I recommend you read Shadow of the Fox by Julie Kagawa. I'm enjoying it a lot; it's a fantasy Japan with a lot of great characters and fun over-the-top fantasy. The Dragon's Pool is an Asian-inspired setting that focuses on the mystical and magical. Long-term goals are to zoom out and see the lands of China, Korea, Mongolia and southeast Asia (Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia). Short-term, Dragon's Pool will focus on a mythic Japan and the sea that surrounds it. Some of the homebrew topics I'm dealing with are the yokai (monster) races of Kitsune and Tanuki and a lot of mapping D&D Classes and Archetypes to Asian tropes. You can follow along for more and also check out the World Anvil page at https://www.worldanvil.com/w/dragons-pool-hans

Stories Never Told - Learn to Play

Stories Never Told is a role-playing game project in development! The quickest version is the new Google Form-based example that works like a Choose-Your-Own Adventure! https://goo.gl/forms/jVV3hC2FbiUxRrxi1 If you would like to see how the system works, please click the link below to view it in Google Docs. This is a longer example that shows all of the options. Stories Never Told - Learn to Play in Google Docs Did you take a look? Thank you! It would be great to get your feedback. If you're interested, fill out the following Google Form SNT Learn to Play Feedback Form The goal of Stories Never Told is to keep role-playing focused on the stories of the characters being played. Stories Never Told Role-Playing Game by Hans Chun is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License .

Describing difficulty to players

Describing difficulty to players Some RPG games have player mechanisms that affect success. In D&D there's Inspiration, Advantage and a number of race/class abilities that can affect rolls. In Numenera and all the other MCG games you can spend from your Ability Pools to affect success. In Star Trek Adventures you can spend Momentum, use Talents, use Foci, etc. Some games like Apocalypse World tell the players exactly what they need to succeed: 7-9, 10+, etc. But for these other games you need to know what your target for success is to play the game in the best way possible- which to me, means have fun, feel like you have knowledge and agency in game). Explaining the rules to players is a part of the job for anyone inviting others to play a game. You can tell them to read the book, recommend they check out an article, or do anything beforehand, but at the time the game is taking place, if you want to run the game, you have to help players engage with the rules, includin...