Retroactive Compels

One of the things that I really like about Cortex+ is that there exists a mechanism for players to easily gain plot points (story points or fate points or whatever you wish to call them) by adjusting their dice pools prior to rolling if some trait (aspect) applies in a way that makes life difficult.

In my experience both playing and running in Fate games, GMs almost universally have trouble keeping the Fate point economy moving enough on their own, and players usually don't overcome the table inertia to subtly maneuver for compels.  Certainly, familiarity with the characters helps, as does practice on the part of the GM, but I still find myself not doing it well when I run traditional Fate games even though I'm consciously looking for opportunities to do so.

In Wrath of the Autarch, I remedied this by allowing players to get a Fate point when they failed a roll during the narrative phase, and then used an aspect to color the nature of the narration.  If the aspect involved a relationship with another player, both players could get a Fate point.

This worked really well to bring the downside of aspects into play quite a bit more, because failing a roll is a such an easily remembered concrete trigger.  It also worked really well to springboard into the next dilemma, failing forward to the next problem.

In WotA, during the narrative phase, players have quite a bit of narrative control over the developing story, more than in Fate Core, but I don't see any reason this couldn't be used in a similar fashion for standard Fate, although I've yet to do so.

There is an economy of rolls in the narrative phase of WotA that doesn't exist in Fate Core, so it might have to be constrained a little (particularly for subsystems like the Conflict rules which have lots of rolling), but I still think it could work in general.

The benefits of something like this are twofold: a way for players to easily get Fate points without GM oversight as well as a method to make failure a little more rich by bringing in new problems related to a character's aspects (failing forward).