The Fate Card system in Freebooter’s Fate is one of those mechanics that I simultaneously love and struggle to explain to people. While folks can grasp the concept easily enough when it’s in front of them, trying to understand it in an abstract fashion is always a bit of a struggle, especially because the amount of information that you have during a round is key to playing well.

Let’s start with the basics of attacking and defending using the hit location cards. I’ve had some success explaining to folks that it’s like the game Moonstone, except it was designed a lot earlier than that, you always have access to the six hit locations, damage is determined in a separate step after a successful attack, and there’s (typically) no follow-ups. There are also a few fundamental rules around how combat is designed that make is such an in-depth system:

1. Defense can never be greater than 5.
2. Attack can never be greater than 4.
3. Critical hits reduce a model’s abilities.

The first point is one of the most important: since there are 6 hit locations, there is no such thing as an unbeatable defense. Sure, you can generally cover most of the odds, but there’s a chance no matter who is fighting. The sole exception is somehow getting a model to D5 and having the Parry trait, but that would be unfun for both parties and not in the spirit of the game that it’s an edge case on top of an edge case. I’m also not sure it’s even possible to create this nightmare profile, but it bears mentioning here so I can prove I’m one of those people who spends too much time thinking about things like this.

Similarly, attack generally being lower than defense means that the attacker has to think strategically about what their opponent will be defending. While it’s entirely possible to choose randomly, some locations are more important to cover than others for different models. That, of course, brings us to our third point on critical hits.

The possibility of critical hits reducing a model’s ability is part of what informs the attack/defense interaction. As a defender, I think about what hit locations would be most disadvantageous if I’m hit there. As the attacker, I want to get a hit in, but I also consider what patterns I’m showing in offense and what locations would be best to get a critical on if I actually manage to get a hit through. It’s a game about the models on the board and your opponent’s psychology, which I think is one of its best aspects.

The Fate Deck Probabilities

Fair warning, the probabilities only get weirder from here on out. Freebooter’s Fate also uses a custom deck of cards for random number determination, to go with the hit location combat. It consists of 40 cards total: 20 with light backgrounds and 20 with dark backgrounds, with values ranging from 1 to 10. These values are not evenly distributed, however, and so we have the following probabilities from a fresh deck:

Card Value	Percentage
1	7.5%
2	7.5%
3	10%
4	12.5%
5	15%
6	12.5%
7	12.5%
8	10%
9	7.5%
10	5%

The probabilities are close to a bell curve, with slightly fewer high-value cards in total, so you can assume that the average value of a Fate card drawn from a fresh deck is a bit more than 5.

However, the probabilities will change with every bit of known information – if, for example, the initiative cards drawn were both 10, then both players now know that those cards are unavailable until the Fate deck’s discard pile has been shuffled together. Since players cannot look through the discard pile, this means that remembering which cards have already come up during the turn is important to understanding what the odds of something succeeding would be. Your movement options change quite a bit if you realize that the Fate deck has already cycled through every card that you can succeed with.

We also have another probability table to consider: what are the odds of a specific symbol being on a card?

Symbol	Odds
Pistol	25%
Skull	17.5%
Doubloon	32.5%
Voodoo Doll	10%
Treasure Chest	17.5%

Note that since these symbols are on specific cards (whose value I will not give because you should buy a deck if you need that and support the company making the game I am spilling a ridiculous amount of digital ink on), these are only the raw numbers if the symbols are all you care about.

So, what does this all mean?

It means that the math is really interesting. There’s a surprising strategic depth that comes from using a custom deck of cards like this, because you have to pay attention to the Fate as much as you do the Freebooters on the game board.

Okay, yeah, I just wanted to make that joke.

Hobby Progress

Lot of painting today, mostly making basecoat progress on models and practicing my skin recipes. My pile of primed stuff is pretty gigantic, after all, and I’m a slow painter.