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FATAL: Difference between revisions
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Most people who are familiar with '''FATAL''' became so through the review of it posted on RPGnet by Darren MacLennan and Jason Sartin. The review has its own page on this very wiki: [[McLennan and Sartin's Review of F.A.T.A.L.]]
For those who are not faint of heart (and the [[Bile Fascination|morbidly curious]], and the weird people...) [http://www.donatebytes.com/fatal.pdf the game itself], and the official [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TLlbVW-VA0&feature=player_embedded theme song]. Reading the rules as a vicious parody can be highly amusing, provided you know the originals - so many of the clunkiest elements of many once-popular RPGs are collected together: endless random tables for everything, superfluous math, pretentious idiosyncratic names for common concepts, and so on. Actually ''playing'' it is going to be another matter entirely (in part, for this very reason), but why in the world would anyone want to do ''that''?
Although this game is prime [[Snark Bait]], as are its creators, ''please follow the [[Rule of Cautious Editing Judgment]]''.
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* [[Amazonian Beauty]]: [[Averted Trope|Averted]]. Females get penalties to their charisma stats as their strength increases, making [[Hot Amazon]] characters by definition less hot than they would be if they ''weren't'' Amazons.
* [[Animorphism]]: Dwarves and Elves have natural shapeshifting abilities, allowing them to transform into certain animals.
* [[Apocalypse How]]: Class 5, with the
* [[Armor Is Useless]]: You randomly determine an armor's defense bonus. Roll low and it actually ''subtracts'' from your defense. Oh, and if it's magical you have a 7% chance of being killed by its magical effect.
* [[You Fail Biology Forever]]: There's...quite a few issues here. For example, a slash to the abdomen that misses all "critical" organs has a 70% chance of causing your small intestine to spill out. [[Only a Flesh Wound|This isn't considered a particularly life-threatening wound.]]▼
** The cardiac notch is a small dent in the left lung wherein the heart rests. The author took this to mean that "the left lung is smaller than the right", and made it so a lung crit is twice as likely to hit the right lung as to hit the left.▼
* [[You Fail Statistics Forever]]: Some events in FATAL are "(1d100)% likely" to happen. This means you roll a d100 to get the odds, and another d100 to see if it makes the odds. That is, you roll two d10 dice <ref>(technically "a d100" is two dice already, unless you have one of those huge golfball-like novelty dice, but the principle is the same)</ref> and see which one is higher. You can see why the results are less complex than intended.<ref>(For the record, it's 50.5% to get a second d100 roll equal to or less than the first.)</ref>▼
* [[Blatant Lies]]: The intro says you only need to know a little algebra, "and even that is relatively rare." It also says you only need two d10. Both of these facts are '''filthy lies'''.
** Ability scores are derived from averaging 'sub-abilities' rolled as 4d100/4-1<ref>Four 100-sided dice, totaled up, divided by 4, minus 1</ref> and modified by one of three different types of percentages, and conditions during the game may change your sub-abilities which means you need to recalculate your ability scores on-the-fly. Also, ability score checks are 3d10.
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* [[Boobs Of Steel]]: An enforced inversion in the case of the female characters.
* [[Brawn Hilda]]: Any lady with physical strength.
* [[Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick]]: The entire rulebook reads like this. For example, while listing wrestling moves and explaining how each works, it [[
* [[But It Really Happened!]]: The authors cited a book on prostitution in Medieval France as evidence that all of their sexual content is historically based.▼
* [[Character Alignment]]: Two axes, "ethical" and "moral", which are exactly the same as D&D's [[Chaotic Neutral|chaotic]] and [[Neutral Evil|evil]] respectively, just with different names.
* [[Chunky Salsa Rule]]: The rulebook encourages the [[Insistent Terminology|<s>Game Master
** [[Call a Hit Point a Smeerp]]▼
▲* [[Chunky Salsa Rule]]: The rulebook encourages the [[Game Master|Aodile]] to re-roll randomly determined results if the original result didn't make sense.
* [[Class and Level System]]: The Professions system, essentially. There's well over 100 professions with possibilities for multi-classing, but the multi-class system is broken. Each level taken doubles the experience point cost of the next level, but only for that one class. At level ten, you can level up a new class to level 5 in less time it takes you to level up your current class to level 11.
* [[Conservation of Detail]]: Averted. There's a lot of unnecessary detail here, cluttering up the game.
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* [[Dead Baby Comedy]]: A lot of it was intended. In one grisly example, if a certain artifact is destroyed it "showers the surrounding area in baby parts".
* [[Death by Childbirth]]: Possibly because you were ''raped by a sword and gave birth to a spear''. This is an actual magical weapon quality. Plus the obvious, that the rules state that anything passing through the vagina that exceeds its circumference (like, say, a baby's head) has a chance of causing fatal rupture.
* [[Depraved Homosexual]]:
* [[Disability Superpower]]
** You can get "Retard Strength", strength bonuses due to low intelligence.
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* [[Empty Levels]]: The only benefit to advancing in most professions is additional skill points to spend on class skills, which means (due to the fact that experience required for each successive level ''doubles'' every level), one is best off advancing in several closely-related classes, rather than focusing on one and trying to max it out.
* [[Everybody Hates Mathematics]]: The most advanced mathematics any character can understand is "Geometry".
* [[Evil Is Sexy]]: Averted [[
* [[Experience Points]]: You gain very small amounts of experience for jobs associated with that profession. They're all mostly mundane activities, so gaining experience can be very tedious.
** Warriors gain 10-20 [[Insistent Terminology|<s>EXP</s> AP]] ''per swing'' of their sword, while basket-weavers gain maybe 1 EXP per ''basket''.
** XP is also counted ''per class'', meaning that if you have three classes that gain damage XP, you can be getting ''60 XP'' per swing.
* [[Eye of Newt]]: Welcome to ''Appendix 5: Ingredients''. Newts, though? Ha-ha, you wish. It starts with specifications on sacrificial victims, so you know there will be no mucking around - and then goes piecemeal. "Nasal hair" is one of the mildest.
* [[Fantastic Racism]]: There are extensive lists and tables of things regarding relations between races.
* [[Fantastic Slurs]]: A long list of them is includes as part of the above-mentioned race-relations section.
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*:"The anakim may fart as loud as thunder. All creatures within a 10-feet radius of this anakim, except the anakim, automatically take 1d4 sonic damage and are stunned for 1 round, which can be avoided by passing a Drive check at TH 17. This can be utilized only once per week."
* [[Functional Magic]]: Device Magic.
* [[Game Favored Gender]]: Initially, Hall tried to claim that there ''was'' no game-favored gender because female and male characters got "small but equivalent"
* [[Gratuitous Rape]]: Certainly gives players plenty of opportunities, since rape is a non-issue in this game (except for the constant mentions).
* [[Grotesque Gallery]]: One of the playable races, the "Anakim", are [[Half Human Hybrid|the children of demons and mortal women]]. As a result they gain random attributes like smelling of rotten meat, and causing everyone around them to have anal sex orgies in addition to more mundane (but still nasty) effects.
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* [[Implausible Fencing Powers]]: It's possible to get a critical hit on specific internal organs without damaging the surrounding anatomy, or to critical-hit someone's ''navel'', ''eyelid'', or ''clitoris''.
* [[Indecisive Parody]]: The comments of the game's creators leave us unsure as to whether it's supposed to be a work of "[[Blatant Lies|historically and mythologically accurate scholarship]]" or "[[Dead Baby Comedy|controversial humour]]".
* [[Insistent Terminology]]: Loads of ubiquitous terms are treated this way. Among others:
** The constant euphemisms for reproductive organs, most notably "fuckstick", "cuntpipe", and "Manhood".
** They insist that the [[Game Master|GM]] be referred to as the Aodile, the Aedile, or the MM (Maim Master). Experience Points are "Advancement Points".
▲** [[Call a Hit Point a Smeerp]]: ...Hit Points are "Life Points"...
** That isn't the character sheet, it's the character ''sheets''. [[Loads and Loads of Rules|Which it is.]]
* [[Jackass Genie]]: The "Wish" spell allows the player to wish for anything, which the GM then provides. The manual encourages the GM to interpret the wish in the worst possible way.
* [[Jesus Taboo]]: The alleged setting is "like medieval Europe,<ref>("Neveria", the official setting, is described in a supplemental PDF)</ref> only with no Christianity" ...which is the cultural equivalent of "the Atlantic Ocean, only without water".
*
* [[Kill'Em All]]: The [[Title Drop|"Fatal"]] spell, when cast, kills everything on whatever horrid world the game takes place on, including the user. All things considered, it's probably [[Mercy Kill|the most merciful action you can perform in this game]].
* [[Lamarck Was Right]]: The stats of a child are determined by applying a percentage modification to the average of their parents' stats.
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* [[Mood Whiplash]]: What claims [[Blatant Lies|(falsely)]] to be historically accurate scholarship is stuck next to things like the aforementioned racist armor and a spell failure table that among other things summons randy gay ogres, which Byron Hall admitted were only included [[For The Lulz]].
* [[No Woman's Land]]: The setting.
* [[O-Ring Orifice]]: Averted by the various orifice
* [[Our Dwarves Are All the Same]]: Surprisingly, averted. White Dwarves are pretty much the same, but Black Dwarves have a strong influence of [[The Fair Folk]] in them and Brown Dwarves resemble the tamer, post-Fair Folk fairy tales.
* [[Poe's Law]]: It's an RPG all about rape, misogyny, and racism.
* [[Punny Name]]: "Have Her Cadaver".
* [[Random Number God]]
* [[Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil]]: Averted most gruesomely. It's barely a crime (less punishable than a wife keeping an untidy house) and mildly punished but usually ignored... and instead the woman is punished. To boot, ''half the males in the world'' are rapists in the game's universe.
* [[
* [[Sophisticated As Hell]]: This is what happens when dark, edgy, [[Serious Business]] meets fart jokes. "Experience an accumulation of gas in their rectum", indeed.
* [[STD Immunity]]: You'd think STDs would be pretty major in a game which places such heavy focus on sexual activity, but they're never so much as mentioned.
▲* [[
▲* [[Title Drop]]: The spell "FATAL". It destroys all life, everywhere.
* [[Title Drop]]: The spell "FATAL". It's like they are trying to hint at something...
* [[Toilet Humor]]: "Force Fart", which makes the target pass gas.
* [[Total Party Kill]]: One of the many, ''many'' magical fumbles results in killing off the entire ''planet''.
* [[Trolling Creator]]: They so are. Including many "arguments" why the game isn't as awful as it quite obviously is.
** The whole "game" is an overextended act of trolling to begin with. Not because it's an evil parody of other games, but because it's the only task FATAL actually could do well. It's about the situation you can often encounter on [[Image Boards|/tg/]]: players arrived for a game with the new group and found out that their "GM" is [[Furry Fandom|furry]] with [[Gunshow|the whole forest of yellow trees]] or [[Yaoi Fangirl]], and wants to run a fanfic-game instead, and of course have little to no experience as a GM to boot. A common reaction is for several players to go [[The Loonie|clowning]], trying to [[Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies|burn the fanfic world]] and dissuade the pretend-GM from having anything to do with Tabletop RPG ever again. It's the ''only'' thing FATAL can do well - first the "plot" may fall apart simply because character rolled negative anal circumference, then the toilet jokes are delivered and then it's "destroy the world" time - there's the special spell for that. Everything else is either bait (mostly porn elements) or unplayable by design - which is noticeable if you know RPG stuff ''and'' [[Read the Freaking Manual|actually have read the manual]] rather than scrolled through it looking for [[fanservice]] capabilities.
* [[Unexpected Gameplay Change]]: There is a section on warfare in an otherwise character-focused game. Yes, ''warfare'', as in army-on-army, not individual combat.
* [[The Unfair Sex]]: Inverted with the "Chastity Belt of Cursed Impregnation". Cursed or not, this item impregnates anyone who puts it on.<ref>(Given the awfulness of FATAL, it's safe to assume that the [[Mister Seahorse]] trope is in effect).</ref> If it's a cursed belt, then the unborn child will always be a girl.
* [[Unusual Dysphemism]]: "Fuckstick", "Cuntpipe", and "Mouth-cunt".
* [[Viewers are Morons]]: The book contains ''paragraphs'' describing to the reader what things like salt and cheese are.
* [[What Could Have Been]]: Even the extremely negative MacLennan/Sartin review acknowledged that there were some good ideas to be found in this morass and some of the math systems, while labyrinthine, do actually work well.
▲* [[You Fail Biology Forever]]: There's...quite a few issues here. For example, a slash to the abdomen that misses all "critical" organs has a 70% chance of causing your small intestine to spill out. [[Only a Flesh Wound|This isn't considered a particularly life-threatening wound.]]
▲* [[What Do You Mean It's Not Symbolic]]: While Christianity itself is absent from the game, there are many spells such as "[[Walking on Water]]", "waves be still", and "multiplication of loaves and fish".
▲** The cardiac notch is a small dent in the left lung wherein the heart rests. The author took this to mean that "the left lung is smaller than the right", and made it so a lung crit is twice as likely to hit the right lung as to hit the left.
▲* [[You Fail Statistics Forever]]: Some events in FATAL are "(1d100)% likely" to happen. This means you roll a d100 to get the odds, and another d100 to see if it makes the odds. That is, you roll two d10 dice <ref>(technically "a d100" is two dice already, unless you have one of those huge golfball-like novelty dice, but the principle is the same)</ref> and see which one is higher. You can see why the results are less complex than intended.<ref>(For the record, it's 50.5% to get a second d100 roll equal to or less than the first.)</ref>
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{{reflist}}
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[[Category:Tabletop Games]]
[[Category:FATAL]]
[[Category:Tabletop Games of the 2000s]]
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