Let's Make A FATAL Character: Part 3: Sociality, Occupation, and Skills 

"Happily Married (reroll if homosexual)" is one of the most insane things I've read in this hobby and it doesn't even rank in the top 10 worst FATAL things

IDK I always wanted to roleplay as a commoner peasant who doesn't ever leave their masters domain and dies at the age of 47 having never done anything other than farm and catch diseases

Ass-Eater the Hill Troll: What’re you all laughing at? Don’t make me use my high skill in Urinate!

This is like if Dwarf Fortress was developed by the Yandere Simulator guy

"To purchase slaves, see chapter 9: equipment."

I can't get over how "Ass-Pounder" is a valid in-universe nickname for your character

The irony, is that, 2 hours and a tonne of random detail later - I have fucking no idea what/who this kobold is. Personality, appearance - nothing. Just a list of completely arbitrary numbers.

It says "the most difficult, detailed, realistic, and historically/mythologically accurate"...but only actually succeeds are the "difficult, detailed" part...

22:30 "But as I said way back in the first video, the author does not seem to be _aware of the fact_ that he _can,_ instead of barring Ogres and Trolls from 96% of the occupations... just _remove_ them from the game." But could the game _really_ continue to claim to be "mythologically-accurate" once we could no longer actively _play_ as the _Borbytingarna,_ that most _quintessential and universal cornerstone_ of (strictly Caucasoid) European folklore, about which we have _all_ certainly heard so much _prior_ to tumbling head-first into the open but historically/mythologically-accurate cesspit that is F.A.T.A.L.?

Weirdly, the historical inaccuracy that annoys me the most here, just because just because it would've been so easy to correct and clearly was just a straight up mistake, having nothing to do with Byron's offensive views, is switching around the meaning of "peasant" and "serf". Serfs were specifically_ estate-bound peasants with virtually no rights, being close to slaves, whereas other peasants could be much freeer.

0:53 Oh Gods no, I don't want to finish making a F.A.T.A.L. character. I want _you_ to finish making a F.A.T.A.L. character. Big difference.

When in pseudomedieval fantasy society there is a 39% chance of being a single adult, a 40% chance of being unhappily married, and only a 16% chance of being happily married, then you know that the author had to deal with some personal trauma through his game. (it is also based on pretty much nothing historical - there is a huge difference in understanding of 'happy marriage' now and in the past - most cultures went for 'if both parts are at least content, then the society is stable' path, with different ways to assure that)

Absolutely love the breakdown at the end of the character creation. "Census of an edgey fantasy world". What a great way to put it. FATAL just doesn't seem interested in making ROLEPLAY characters. Honestly the tables would be more useful for a GM populating a town with NPCs. ...if it wasn't for the fact that each character involves rolling literally hundreds of dice and consulting dozens of tables and doing algebra.

I've been making a FATAL character alongside this video so..... Name: Wanderer-Forcer Race: Ogre, Base Gender: Male Age: 22 (Puberty) Birthday: 6/10/5,078 Sexuality: Heterosexual Height: 9'2 Weight: 664 lbs. BMI: 38 (NORMAL) MOST ATTRACTIVE: Waist MOST REPULSIVE: EYES Skin Color: Tan (The skin of a laborer) Hair: Brunette Hair Length: (7") or shoulder length Hair Thickness and Type: Medium Thickness, Curly, Oily Eye color: Brown Vision: Far-sightedness 1 foot Breadth: 49 Facial characteristics:Nose, big nostrils Presumed characteristics: Waster of money, generous Areola: 4" Areola Hue: Light Cup size: C Niple length: 1" Tongue: 6", Tip May touch tip of nose Anal circumference: 7", equivalent to three fingers of an Orc Length: 7.87 Cicumference: 9.03 Feet: 18" Fist Circumference: 18" Base Head circumference: 28.85" Base Current Armor: 6 Base Life Points: 51 Allergies: Bee stings Body Parts Left foot- 1 Right foot- 1 Left, lower leg- 6 Right, lower leg- 6 Left, upper leg- 12 Right, upper leg- 12 Groin- 1 Lower Torso - 32 Upper torso- 33 Left hand- 1 Right hand- 1 Left lower arm- 6 Right lower arm- 6 Left upper arm- 9 Left lower arm- 9 Face, and head- 12 Occupation: Bandit Advancement Points: Bandits gain AP by ambushing and robbing characters. For every silver piece or equivalent in treasure stolen in such a way, bandits gain 1 AP. For every successful attack in an ambush, bandits gain AP equal to half of the amount of damage dealt. Gold: 93 Sp Social Class: Peasant Birthplace: Hamlet Oldest Has 2 younger brothers Debauchery: gives fingerings PP= 47-100-17+6+14 (-50 or 1) Believes that Gods do not exist. (3 Unethical 50 Neutral Morality) Phlegmatic-Choleric Temparement Language: None Stats- PHYSIQUE - 143 (+20) Physical fitness: 72 (-17) sprint - 55ft Strength: 370 (+94) damage- +94% clean & jerk- 213 bench press- 427 dead lift- 640 Bodily Attractiveness: 45 (-34) Health: 86 (-6) life points: -1 intoxication/vomit: +6 Allergies- 1 illness immunity: 53% CHARISMA - 64 (-21) Facial: 52 (-29, "Unsightly") Vocal: 71 (-17, "Always says "uh" or "um" ") Kinetic: 57 (-25, "Unrefined") Rhetorical: 79 (-10) average speech rate: 135 or 220 50% DEXTERITY - 50 (-29) Hand-eye coordination: 59 (-25) finger-precistion: 1/8 inch Agility: 60 (-25) brawling attacks/round: 2 seconds to stand: 3 Reaction speed: 62 (-21) deep sleep recovery: 2 Enunciation: 19 (-56) maximum speech rate: 70 time to cast a spell: +130% INTELLIGENCE- 62 (-21, Normal intelligence range for orcs) Language: 38 (-34) possible # of languages learned: 1 vocabulary limit: violate Math: 51 (-29) highest possible math: multiplication Analytic: 30 (-50) Spatial: 130 (+14) unfamiliar object assembly: 1,000 WISDOM- 54 (-29) DRIVE: 70 (-17) hours relaxing: 19 Intuition: 34 (-44) Common Sense: 25 (-50) likely to: get caught for schemes: Make a pact with an unethical god Reflection :88 (-6) earliest memory at: age 3 Skills: Hide: 43 Silence 3 Tracking 5 Sight: 3 Brawling 5 Mangling 5 Wrestling 3 Smell 28 Sprint: 2 Sound 22 Touch 26 Taste 24 Aim 3 Bow, short 1 Dagger 1

Part of what makes the ogres so infuriating is that they would work great as monsters. Just make them unplayable and basically every issue with them is fixed. They're all awful horrible murderers that eat children? Sounds like something a group of adventurers should be dealing with. The author doesn't care enough to write proffessions for them? They're cartoonishly evil monsters that only exist for the players to kill, it doesnt really matter beyond how good at fighting they are. He could still write all his edgy lore about how scary and evil they are and it would actually make sense and work as part of a game that people might want to play, because hunting down an ogre that's stolen the local lord's child to eat sounds like it could be pretty fun. Either that or make them burly drow, where their society is awful but the ones likely to join an adventuring party have left and want live better lives. That could have some cool worldbuilding and story moments, like the part coming across a village of peaceful ogres that reject the child eating ways of their kin, and having to help them when a more feral tribe of ogres starts targetting them for being weak disgraces to ogre kind. Boom, now you've got cool evil monsters AND a race somebody might actually want to play as.

To the author's defense (hurk!): I think the "Happily Married (reroll if homosexual)" is trying to imply that marriages are inherently heterosexual, and homosexuals either cannot marry the same gender, or are forced to marry the opposite gender. In that case, a homosexual character in a straight marriage cannot have a happy marriage.

A Dancer gets AP for every "NEW" dance move mastered. This either means: 1-They will stop leveling up when levels start requiring AP in the hundreds, or 2-A "new dance move" can be something like "this exact move but I turn the foot 10 degrees to the left more"

2:48 reading that description gave my a migraine. "surnames are a foreign concept to trolls. Instead, when 2 trolls with the same name interact, [describes the exact same ideas real world humans used to create surnames]." Like, does he just not KNOW that's where the concept of last names came from? Did he think that people having last names like "Johnson," "Baker," "West," or "Strong" just happened by complete coincidence?

It's funny, because games like Warhammer Fantasy or Dungeon Crawl Classics also suggest the vast majority of the population are peasants and serfs, and during character creation the rules presume that your character likely belongs to that social class as well, but the games are about adventuring in a fantasy world and so therefore tell you how your character overcomes those statistical probabilities in order to become a great hero. This game, on the other hand, seems to be designed specifically so the Game Master can laugh at you while you roll up your third chambermaid and say "oh well, that's the rules! Sucks to suck!"

9:57 Of course, the *actually historically accurate* way of handling literacy would be something like "scholarly and bureaucratic professions get it automatically, everyone else has a percent chance based on social class". But at least it isn't "can read own name" and then varying WPM speeds.

What strikes me as a bit weird is making players roll occupations with race And ability restrictions instead of just letting them choose one they qualify for.

My three girlfriends. And yes, they play TTRPGs. 😎

So far this just feels like an overly elaborate NPC generator.

I must take off my hat to you, for not only the endurance it must've taken to finish creating a character in F.A.T.A.L. but for also doing such a thorough analysis regarding the nonsense in each single chapter of this mess. I also felt that it's worth mentioning, F.A.T.A.L. had an official "theme song" which is a poorly produced death metal song, apparently performed by the author. As if Kinder-Fressers weren't enough, you had to keep it metal.

Even though I got an adolescente Bugbear when I tried to make a character, the thought of having to roll 100+ years worth of dwarf or elf skills made me give up right then and there.

At the end you mention a random possible FATAL party, and how it could not possibly work, and how any normal game would not give the players the chance to play boring useless commoner jobs, but I know of at least 1 game where that kind of party comp is ideal, where playing as a blind beggar, or a serving wench, or a jester is completely allowed and encouraged by the rules. It's Burning Wheel. The story is driven by the goals of the player characters, so as long as the players have reasons for their characters to interact, any party composition is feasible. Burning Wheel honestly achieves the "medieval fantasy but releastic" goal of FATAL, much more easily because it starts with considering the roleplaying, rather than completely ignoring it.

FATAL: "Roll a d1000.000 to determine if you have a random defect." Also FATAL: "roll a d20 to determine the month, reroll if you're above 13"

32:30 AD&D 1e at least actually addressed this, saying people with classes were not common, and that it's assumed that the players are exceptional, and have made the steps previously to move beyond that average life. In fact everyone had secondary skills representing what they used to do. Like blacksmithing or animal husbandry. But that wasn't their adventuring class, it was a skill they had from their past that they could use on their adventure as it became relevant. Point is, it's that assumption. It is assumed that if you are going on adventures and slaying monsters, you are not an average person, you have the skill that necessitates feeling like you are even capable of doing that and walking away with your life. And this doesn't have to be unrealistic then, it's still true that the players are not representative of the average.

I assume the reason why homosexual characters can't be happily married is because it explicitly says marriage is between a man and a woman, and a gay character in a heterosexual marriage would be pretty unhappy about it.

We appreciate you suffering through this to show us the madness that is this system.

i believe a quote from Parkzer is appropriate "the very fact that you allowed it to get 8% this bad presents an overwhelming critical problem in your management" or something like that

It all makes so much sense now - he's an unhinged "ideas" guy. He can only come up with ideas, not how to actually implement them into a gaming environment. It doesn't help that he's so unhinged that nearly all of his ideas are edgy for the sake of it or intentionally insensitive because he thinks a scholar might have said it once.

I strongly suspect that the authors of this game never played it. They might have had their own game which they played, which formed the basis for the published version, but they certainly never rolled skills for each year of an elf's life, tried to form a party of different races, or tried to gain XP for learning a new dance move.

okay so. male anakim have 1000 options (some double/tripled up, but theres like at least 300 names there). female anakim have 100 name options. he got bored of writing down names at the SECOND OPTION Edit: theres a lot of very similar names in the female anakim list (leta/letea for example) but somehow the worst is. 86: Nichola. 87: Nicholaa.

The absolute shock I felt when I realized that the author meant "bortbytingarna" (scandinavian folklore changelings), but misspelled it! Not the worst thing by far, but it's always fun to point out buchered swedish :3

I love how the author comment basically says that you can call him a racist and sexist pervert, but not an incel!

I could imagine a version of this game where there flat-out are *no* combat classes. Every character is coming from a mundane background and has, in some way, found themselves suddenly in an adventuring life with no obviously-applicable skills for the challenges ahead. It could be an interesting roll-playing experience to have a party trying to scrape together combat skills without being killed or maimed, having to find ways to leverage what they actually *are* good at in unfamiliar or perilous situations. Could even be worked in with base stats having modifiers based on things out of your control. A real work-with-what-you've-got type game. Probably not a fun time for most, but niche groups would probably get a kick out of it and it could make for some good stories if carefully balanced. Unfortunately, the fact that FATAL only gives you AP for performing *within* your given job is a clear indication that such a concept was not considered. Because, as mentioned in the video, no aspects of actually playing this game seem to have been considered when the character-creation rules were penned.

Honestly, a role playing game without any typical classes like warriors and wizards instead opting for professions of normal people inhabiting the world improvising their talents to become a ragtag team of heroes is a stellar idea for a ttrpg.

Trolls, Elves and Dwarfs are from Nordic mythology so should have Nordic names. Kobolds are from Germanic folklore so should have German names (and those Kobolds are mischievous pranksters more than anything). "Anakim" clearly take inspiration from biblical sources and so should have Hebrew names...especially when their whole species already has a Hebrew-inspired name. Ogres are the only freebie because Ogre-like monsters appear in the mythologies of many cultures (although since he already went with the "Kinderfresser" stuff they might be the Germanic variety too). Indonesia has its own folklore but that features no silver-skinned slavers. It's amazing how the deveolper of this "game" lays his own twisted worldview out for all to see. I'd almost call it pornographic exhibitionism in text form.

And I thought that Call of Cthulhu was silly about age and having way too many skills. this is pain, sexist racist, homophobic sanist ableist pain.

Remember in the first video where the author stated that nerds had good intelligence but little common sense? I’d like to point out that while the author does seem to have a good grasp on mathematics, assuming all these calculations of statistics would be fun for the average person, he also very clearly lacks the common sense necessary to put it all together in a way that players will enjoy. The author is a nerd

The 1d4chan wiki page for FATAL states that Byron Hall is currently serving prison time for “playtesting the Anal Circumference tables,” i.e. raping a teen mother in front of her child. And I don’t know whether I’d rather believe he’s in prison, or that that was just coincidentally another guy named Byron Hall with a love for sex of various degrees of nonconsent, while our heroic “game” “””designer””” is still putting around writing cheap owns about his weed-smoking girlfriends in RU-vid comments sections.

something i find funny about all the mundane occupations ill-fit for player characters is that it's not even like it'd be that hard to set them up so that they're valid options for commoners pulled into the world of adventuring by circumstance. something that comes to mind are the elder scrolls games, where from morrowind onward ( and yes, this includes skyrim, the game where there's no class system for the pc ) there's a bunch of npc-exclusive classes such as the illustrious _bookseller_ or the mighty _pauper_ and you might expect they're npc only because they'd be useless in the player's hands ... but no, they're actual real classes ( which can be replicated with the custom class system ) because every class needs its preferred skills and attributes. and even when applying that sorta thing to a system where classes _can_ have unique mechanics, you'd still have chefs that have proficiency in daggers, dexterity, and alchemy, and sailors proficient in brawling, grappling, and perception, and so on and so on it's one of those things where a game that actually knows what it's doing could use its absurdly detailed selection of jobs to facilitate eclectic characters and memorable experiences, because little can compare to taking the absurd and seriously going "okay, now let's make this _work"_

The author commenting on your video is the icing on the can't-make-this-shit-up cake.

It's funny that you say that a bunch of untrained peasants would not make for a good adventuring party when that became the entire draw of the start of a game of DCC

Wait, so each day you dont get beat as a slave I'd get an AP. Could I run away, not get beaten, and then just get an AP per day? I'm not reading the actual book to see if i missed something. Im just curious that is an option.

I'm reminded of the segment in the 1e AD&D rule book where Gary takes the time to say, essentially, "10 is the average stat for non-adventurers, and 3d6 is a good way of generating that average. As a result, you should never generate characters by rolling 3d6 6 times"

My GM always complains how 5E DND is somehow too "vague". I'll show him these videos.

Did anyone beside the author and friends acturally enjoy this game?

In most games it is stated or at least understood that you are playing as the rare exception, the hero, choosen, the elite, ect and the majority of the npcs are the common folk.

I love this series with a passion. I was so worried when I came across the first episode and realized that it had just come out (and so I couldn't binge), but you come out with these so often, I can't complain. Keep up the good work!

The fact that we need 3 videos, each one no less than a half hour each (don’t get me wrong, I’m loving the content), REALLY says something about how needlessly padded and excessively pedantic and complicated the rules are. There’s literally NO REASON for a character creation session to take at least 2 weeks.

"FATAL seems more concerned with being a census for an edgy fantasy world than in being any kind of actual game" is the most brutally accurate description of this mess!

6:00 - Rolling for names is particularly weird, because it isn't justified by the logic the writer uses elsewhere. For all that body and stat stuff, they basically say that you roll because, in real life, you don't get to choose that, so you don't in the game either. There's some obvious and weird biological essentialism going on there... What, so I my character will have a particular strength level whether I decide they spend all their time physically training for strength, or tinkering with small gadgets? My mental "limits" are entirely set at birth, they can't improve through education, training, or practice? etc...But it is at least internally consistent with the writer's bizarre view of the world where you emerge from the womb as just a baby version of the adult you are always fated to be. But... names? No, mate, people can and do change names, all the time. There's absolutely nothing stopping someone from going by something else, especially in this kind of fantasy environment, it's not like you need to fill in a form with a photocopy of your new passport, y'know? And, even then, _nicknames?!?_ What, your mum decided your nickname was "Child-Devourer", and that's just it forever, is it? You're always going to have exactly one nickname that everyone knows you by? When you make a new friend, you have to be all "Hi, I'm Sifridus, but everyone calls me Bed-Wetter"? That's... no, my dude, no. If there's one thing in the game that players should be able to pick for themself, it's their character's name, and if there's one other thing that shouldn't be set at all and should emerge through gameplay, it's their nickname. Keep the dice well away from these.

rolling skill points for each year of life when dwarfs can start out at age 1000 is WILD

See this level of intercacy is better suited for a video game where all this is generated under the hood.

You talked me into it. I look forward to rolling up a FATAL character soon!

28:00: I'm reasonably certain the power dynamic really is fetishistic. Pretty much the entire game seems to be, which the original name kind of suggests.

Having so many aspects of your character's personality, ethos, personal history, etc by randomly determined *might* be a fun roleplaying challenge. Once or twice. For a very experienced player specifically looking for something to shake them out of all their normal patters. But otherwise, eugh, miserable.

There's a passage early in FATAL (I forget which version I read back in the day) but it always stood out to me. It's this fart-huffing smug little ramble from the designer where he opines that no game is truly ready for real roleplay because they never consider the totality of player options. Specifically they give an example of a party finding a maiden chained in a dungeon and mock how 'most games' would expect the players to rescue her, but fail to give the option for the players to violently murder her or sexually assault her. To me this always stood out as the core failure of understanding on FATAL's part because... literally nothing stops you from doing those things in DnD. There aren't hard rules for the second one but nowhere in the rulebooks does it say you can't. What keeps players from doing those sort of things is basic human decency, not because there isn't a chart.

About the months: it is especially funny as there ARE specific names for the different moons in different cultures. Guess it wasnt "scholarly" enough lol

10:21 iirc that is accurate actually, that just seems incorrect because medieval european slavery was a lot less repressive than the later system of chattel slavery, and so 'being a slave' basically just meant being poor, rather than being property. Now for the autbor fatal particularly, i do feel that he probably means chattel slavery, for totally not racist and power tripping reasons Edit: Commented too soon lmao, oh my god what the fuck is the occupation system hahaha

This video's commentary at the end was excellent. I am myself slowly piecing together a TTRPG, and learning how other games work has been invaluable. I will be extremely careful to not put effort only into the things I like, thank you for the heads up. If you'd like, I would be happy to subject myself to one (1) session of gameplay with you, because I am desperately curios as to how combat works.

4:49 ok but "Ass-slasher" is really funny edit: god dammit you said the same thing literally 5 seconds later

This is probably a silly thing to notice given the sheer idiocy of this system, but it seems like the 'creator' of this system thinks that peasants are of a lower social class than serfs... when in reality, serfs were essentially slaves that were considered part of the land as opposed to being owned directly by another person. Peasants could actually own property and were allowed to move if they wanted.

34:25 IDK I'd kinda welcome a spy game that has you character create characters of the ordinary persuasion, in facility of either the experience of playing an underground resistance of regular citizens making do with what they have, or an "our man in havanna" style farcical adventure. Hell, a game which gave you the ability to generate average random fantasy joes with appropriate (and improvisationally useful) occupational skills, in a less insane and time consuming way, might be a good basis for a comedy game, if it had been set up that way.

11:38 not to be defending the FATAL on main (because I'm not, it sucks lol). But the 'marital status' section says marriage is between a male and female, implying gay marriage is illegal in the FATALverse, and therefore gay characters can only be in an unhappy lavender marriage/beard type situation. Which is actually weirdly progressive for FATAL, I'd expected there to be a roll for whether straight marriage converted a gay character into be straight or something.

The thin is, even if it is technically more realistic that each individual person to roll for things like age, race and occupation as most people don't choose any of these, it's extremely unrealistic that a group of adventurers would have more than one race in a world like that, or that they would have chambermaids and gladiators accompaning then. It's realistic that most characters would not be nobility but it is not realistic that a troll, an elf and a kobold would form a party, but the own author rules

uhh... monstrous (troll/ogres/etc...) can't be... mercenaries?! excuse me? do they not understand money or something? "GIVE MONEY GO FIGHT" seems like a pretty understandable career path even for the dumbest of sentients. why.... EDIT: THEY CAN'T BE RUFFIANS EITHER?!

The guy who made this game was a disturbed individual

Part of what saddens me about the existence of FATAL is that there's *so much* that could have been used from the cultural research that was allegedly done, and most of it was just *ignored.* As for the occupations... most of them could have been rolled into appropriate "group" occupations (stuff like "craftsman" rather than going into the details of "is this person a cooper, a blacksmith or a weaver"), but that might have required some effort put into it. WFRP did occupations *far* better, without sacrificing the ability to have a playable character with some prospect of advancement.

There are time periods and specific places in post Classical Era Europe where up to 30% or more of the European population were slaves. But for the whole area and for the full period is quite a stretch.

The more I hear about this, the more I feel like this was just a giant troll against TTRPG players.

"This is where everything really starts to fall apart" What do you mean "fall apart" it was never in one piece to begin with

I have no idea how anyone would go on an adventure with this system so far, but I suppose if you wanted to play a story about a chambermaid being a chambermaid it couldn't be more existant. Edgy slice of life simulation could be a system that could get off the ground, if not made so absurdly nonsensical.

For the skill points... why didn't he just have players roll per age category? AD&D has ability modifiers based on your age, and those are similarly done per each category you lived through, not year by year. And it works fine regardless of how old you are.

The big (deliberate) misunderstanding the author has made is that its not "unrealistic" to choose to tell stories about people who lead interesting lives, or are above average. Those people DO exist in real life, and you're making a narrative choice to focus on them

Will a future video feature the metamorphasis alpha character creation?

Byron responding to your video is the funniest thing this week, many thanks for this

I found myself at 55 seconds in furiously voting for the Classic Metamorphosis Alpha chargen...

It took me until this video to realize that the Borbys are a bastardization of Bortbyting , which is the swedish form of a changeling , as in a child that has been swapped for a troll child by some nondescript mythological being. The name has been so bastardized I didn't even recognize it. I'm scandinavian. The guy has probably read the plural definite form, bortbytingarna, and assumed it was a proper singular. That's about the due dilligence I expect out of this guy.

Okay, so the aauthor of this "historically accurate" game has no idea wtf serfs are. They were DEFINITELY and in some countries during some periods were bonded to their land by a feudal and to either pay tribute to him or work for free.

So I found and read some of the rule book for this game many years ago. It had a class system then… but a bad one. So it must be the older version of this game. The impression I got from skimming it back then was that the game portion wasn’t storytelling, it was the character creation itself. This seems like a game where the whole point is to make a silly or ridiculous character with your friends and then see how long it can last without dying or becoming unplayable. In most cases characters would not even make it beyond character creation without being unplayable, and that seems to be the point. It can be kinda fun to see how badly the dice can screw you by following all those tables.

You know this would be really impressive… as a computer program

Do Exalted characters some day! I'd love to see you tackle that.

Oh man, like, *the* FATAL? This game has been notorious for 20 years!

If we are under the delusion that someone actually will be running this game, the year thing doesn’t make sense. Because you will have the possibility of 3-4 characters being different ages with different birth years but the birth years don’t match up. Ie. 30 y/o born in 5110 and a 20 y/o born in 5115. So is the current year 5140 or 5135?

I can’t stop watching. The music is perfect to bring out that „cool, edgy 2000s vibe“ Also someone with too much time and not enough morals should absolutely make a character creator with it. Maybe even a simulation for the game so you don’t waste time calculating it.

Depending on the period of the middle ages, slavery didn’t exist

It's like the dev forgot, that not everyone is equally likely to go on an adventure. Dnd might not have a chambemaid class, but that doesn't mean that there are no chambermaids in dnd, just that they don't usually have the skills to be adventures. Most NPCs are going to be level 1 at most!

You know, this book makes me feel a _lot_ better about my world building abilities

A small addendum to the ending, I wouldn't personally say that having player characters all be competent fighters is a "lack of realism" in any sense. When playing a tabletop game, or reading a book/watching a movie/consuming any kind of media, you are not plucking a random person out of the setting and watching them. You are instead, watching a number of people to whom the events of the story happen. Thus, if the story requires combat experience, all the player characters will have combat experience because if a character didn't have combat experience then _they would not be a part of this story._ Frodo is not the main character because Tolkein rolled a d1000000 for a random person on middle earth, he is the main character because he has the one ring and thus the story happens to him. This is also why random tables for race/class/name/gender/etc are nonsensical outside of the context of quick play character generators. You aren't playing some random mook, you're playing someone to whom the story happens. Thus you are allowed to be a bit exceptional, and to choose some details. You aren't literally being born into a fantasy world and living out your life, you're puppeting one specific individual later in their life for a limited time.

Your suffering does not go unappreciated.

10:20 I have a suspicion that the Kobold Sociality table missed an editing pass as it's the only table with repeating rows (41-60 is the same as 1-20). The starting funds match Bugbear but Bugbear 41-60 are literate.

Not a lot of games discuss whether the player is the character, or just a guide to them. I like to use the old old Greek myth Ray Harryhausen movies or the deities in DiskWorld playing their game - as an example of the second approach. Old editions of D&D see to fall into this later category, even if newer versions (and most other games) have dropped this interpretation The 3d6 first rolls before choosing a classis like grabbing a random person and then checking if they fit an adventure role. Just the opposite of chose an occupation and then make a fitting person. Rules for alignment make a bit more sense in this aspect as well. A player with a lawful good character should be saying things like "It would be so much easier to kill the ork in his sleep, alas this stupid mortal has morals and will insist on an honorable challenge!" FATAL seems very much focused on this idea that players are not the same as their pawn in the game. A focus on physical details clearly established a different person. The mundane occupations are because you're choosing a random mortal to be a hero, not taking up an established adventurer. All of this is done in the worst way possible - but its an interesting difference from how other games are played, especially by the time it was written. Thank you for your time and analysis. I hope you didn't hurt yourself too much during this ordeal.

To play devils advocate here having the players start off of random labourers and then turn into adventures due to circumstance isn't such a bad idea

Why is serf higher class than peasant on the table? A serf was essentially a type of slave, whereas peasants were free.

I tried making a character once and gave up after 30 minutes. I salute to your strength good sir, and may God have mercy on your soul.

I love you, flumpf guy. Your teacher-liked disposition is perfect for your avatar and super comfy to listen to while I'm working on commissions. (for those who don't know flumpfs were good-aligned in the older editions of DnD and known to be very gentle, nice creatures who helped adventurers! But the look alien so lots of people just thought they were monsters.)

FATAL is the fabled unlimited games, but no games.