Mile High Ways: Wounded and Limping Along

So my Dresden Files game is teetering and tottering to ending. The vagaries of being adults with jobs, families, and life events happening just got to be too much; making it no one's fault. This stuff just happens. We're still discussing what to do, whether to try and add 1-2 new players and figure out how to integrate them (do we just slot them in, do we redo some city creation) or do we just call it a good show and end it here and maybe try something different in time? Still not sure.

However, I wanted to put some lessons learned so far from  running the game:

Fate:

• People will, more than likely, take lots of cool powers. This reduces their refresh rate, and thus Fate Points.
• To get more Fate Points, they need to take compels.
• To take compels they need Aspects that they really do want compelled.
• If this doesn't happen, the fate economy won't work, and the ability to do things to ameliorate bad rolls will fade.
• Without this narrative strength, the system works, but is just sort of bland, because there is minimal descriptions.
• Unfortunately, I never got my feet under me enough to get the feel for the compels - as this was generally a first attempt at the system, things didn't gel easily for the compels. I needed to have more discussions about what a compel would have looked like. There's a good example of this on RPG.NET in a Diaspora Actual Play.
• The examples of ABCDE guide to aspects may have also helped folks come up with better aspects.

Campaign

• Hammer out Themes and Threats better. The lack thereof made it hard to come up with plots with sufficient hooks.
• If you are going to play in the deepest part of the pool, focus on the supernatural threats. A curse we had in generating our city was that most of the threats were mortal concerns with supernatural backers. The backers need to be in more immediate play, or the players will just steam roller over the opposition.

Group Size Dynamic

• Small groups make for closer knit groups. When I talked about group size before, I said the threat was that group was dependent on each member, so the loss of 1-2 members meant that we would need to basically recast and restart the group. Whereas a larger group may not have had as much problem letting go and integrating members.