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Fate Accelerated: Caper- Planning for Empty Seats

Planning for Session 1 of Fate Accelerated (FAE) Caper,. I am likely to have 3 players and I have 5 roles. This is a game heavily based upon the TV show Leverage, which I have seen a ton of.
As a review, the 5 roles are: Hitter, Hacker, Thief, Grifter and Mastermind.

Out of these 5 roles, I think the Mastermind is the easiest to remove. I think it makes sense to abstract away the planning of the heist and treat the Mastermind character as an NPC who contributes a Game Aspect of "Planned for this". This allows all the players to benefit from the Mastermind's role without requiring someone to play them.

Since there is still one role left over, I think that the same thing could be done with the remaining role. Hitter, Hacker, Thief and Grifter all have particular things they specialize in. The role not chosen can be represented with a Game Aspect of "Hitter", "Hacker", etc. If I had to choose a role to be represented this way, I would probably choose the Hacker. In Leverage this is often a support position so I think it would offer the least friction to remove the role from play.

So we have 2 Game Aspects that represent important parts of the team that are available to all players. These will probably be the only Game Aspects that I include and reflect the help and teamwork available to the players. Also, in the fun nature of Compels, if something sinister has to happen, these 2 roles give me a way to take shots at the team without directly confronting the players.

I think this is may be a fun way to handle missing players or necessary roles in FAE. Characters become Game Aspects. If you had a missing player for just a week, you could create an Aspect for the session that reflected the team's need to find them; something like "Terry's Missing". That could be both to the benefit and detriment of the players, just like any good Aspect.

Food for thought; something I'll try tonight!

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