The Bronze Rule

There’s one more thing you should ask yourself before you make an entirely new rule for something—can I represent this with the Bronze Rule?

In Fate, you can treat pretty much anything as if it were a character. Your gun? Sure. The storm outside? Absolutely. The scene itself? Why not? You can give anything aspects, skills, stunts, and stress boxes, and here’s the thing that makes this technique really cool—they don’t have to be the same ones the PCs get. It doesn’t make sense for the storm outside to have Fight and Physique, but what about Cold and Sleet? Your gun doesn’t need a physical or mental stress track, but what about an ammo stress track? And scenes already have aspects all over the place!

If you can represent a new thing as a character, it’s typically easier to do that than to create a new rule out of whole cloth. Not everything works this way, and there are some things you might not want to represent this way, but it’s a powerful tool that you can apply to a wide variety of situations.

There’s another extension of this technique—new rules for characters can be represented using the existing components of a character. You can represent magic through skills, super powers using aspects or stunts, and being corrupted by an ancient and seductive force with a stress track.