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  FATE:�Fantastic�Adventures�in�Tabletop�Entertainment
  Pyramid�Reloaded
  Pyramid Reloaded
  This is a Fate paper on visually explaining the skill 
  pyramid concept, in particular looking for a method 
  that makes it easier to place in front of players 
  who are new to the idea of the pyramid, or who are 
  having trouble wrapping their heads around it.
  This write-up also proposes a revision of the 
  phase-by-phase skill selection process that will 
  have at least a minor impact on the way that skill 
  pyramids look from phase to phase — don’t expect 
  this to completely jive with the online pyramid 
  generators at certain points, because it won’t.  The 
  proposition here is in the interests of speeding 
  up the entire skill process, making it easier to do 
  super-fast character creation as well as continue to 
  support the spirit of the traditional phase-by-phase 
  approach.
  I’m Impatient — What’s Changing?
  • Select likely skills phase by phase, if you’re doing 
  phase by phase character creation, but don’t 
  spend points on them.
  • Skill points all get spent at the end, on the skills 
  you put in your pool during the phase by phase 
  part.
  • Pyramid is still necessary, but the phase-
  boundary no longer exerts pressure on the later 
  pyramid, so higher rated skills start coming in 
  slightly earlier in some cases.
  • In order to accommodate this new method, when 
  gaining skill levels as part of advancement, you’re 
  no longer forced to spend them when you cross 
  another phase-boundary: you can now hoard 
  skill points and save up for some higher skills 
  to buy outright, rather than doing a bit-by-bit 
  promotion, so long as you continue to have a 
  pyramid that supports it.
  That’s all you get.  If you need more, you’ll have to 
  actually read the damn thing.
  Character Creation Overview
  Character creation progresses in phases.  Each phase 
  is tied to a background story for your character.  As 
  you and your GM consider what the story means 
  for your character’s sheet, you’ll determine the 
  following:
  • What aspect (or aspects, in an aspect-heavy 
  game) does the character gain from this 
  experience?
  • Which three to fi ve skills from the skill list might 
  have been aff ected by the experience in the 
  story?
  Write both of these things down for each phase, 
  but don’t worry about coming up with ratings for 
  those skills yet.  If you have a photocopy of your 
  entire skill list handy, you may fi nd it easiest to put 
  a check-mark next to each skill, since, once you’re 
  done stepping through the phases, you’ll want to put 
  together a unifi ed list of the skills touched by your 
  stories.
  Buying Skills
  Once you’re done with stepping through all the 
  phases, it’s time to move on to spending points on 
  skills for your character.  You get four skill points to 
  spend for every phase your character went through, 
  so a 5-phase character is going to have 20 skill points 
  to spend.
  Assuming you didn’t miss any key skills that might 
  have been touched by your background stories, you 
  should limit yourself to spending skill points only 
  on those skills.  It’s potentially likely that you’ll 
  only spend skill points on some of the skills you’ve 
  indicated — don’t feel like you must spend points on 
  must spend points on 
  must
  all the ones you check-marked.
  When you’re buying skills, skills cost one for 
  each level increase above Mediocre (the default).  
  Thus, the cost to buy a skill at Good, three up from 
  Mediocre, is 3 skill points.
  Skill Level 
  Cost
  Legendary 
  7 points
  Epic 
  6 points
  Superb 
  5 points
  Great 
  4 points
  Good 
  3 points
  Fair 
  2 points
  Average 
  1 point
  There is a limitation, however.  There must always 
  be one more skill the next step down than there is on 
  the step above it.  Therefore, if someone has two Fair 
  skills, there must be three Average skills to support 
  those.  
  In general, this is intended to represent the 
  idea that a lot of topics get explored as you learn 
  a specialty, but it does mean that occasionally the 
  “cause and eff ect” perspective on things will be 
  
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  that learning Basketweaving made you better at 
  that learning Basketweaving made you better at 
  Swordfi ghting.  Don’t put too much stock in looking 
  at this as a cause and eff ect thing.  That said, the 
  school of cinema teaches us that getting good at 
  Carwashing makes you better at Kung Fu, so maybe 
  we’re on to something here.
  At any rate, the resulting formation this lends 
  your skills is called the “skill pyramid”, and it can 
  be one of the harder parts of the game to wrap your 
  head around.  The good news is, once you get past 
  this, it’s all smooth sailing.  If it hasn’t clicked for you 
  yet, don’t worry.  We’ve got pictures.
  Building a Skill Pyramid
  Think of each skill as a brick that you’re using to 
  build your character.  The top of the pyramid, its 
  peak, is where your character’s focused specialties 
  stand out, with ratings that make those “peak skills” 
  the primary way your character makes its mark on 
  the world — from far away, the peak is what people 
  see about what you can do.
  At fi ve phases, you’ve got 20 skill points.  As it 
  happens, the highest single skill you can buy on that 
  budget and support with a pyramid is a Great.  It 
  breaks down like this:
  1 Great 
  1 x 4 points 
  4 points
  2 Good 
  2 x 3 points 
  6 points
  3 Fair  
  3 x 2 points 
  6 points
  4 Average 
  4 x 1 point  
  4 points
  Total: 10 skills for 20 points
  To understand why this would be called a pyramid, 
  look at it this way:
  Great(4)
  Good(3)
  Good(3)
  Fair(2)
  Fair(2)
  Fair(2)
  Avg(1)
  Avg(1)
  Avg(1)
  Avg(1)
  If you visualize the pyramid in this fashion, it’ll be 
  clear why you can’t take away one of the lower-rated 
  “bricks” — that would make the whole structure 
  above it unstable.
  At this point, you may have fi gured out that you 
  aren’t obligated to go for the Great — maybe you want 
  to spend points on more than ten skills.  This will 
  give you a thicker base to a pyramid that doesn’t yet 
  have a peak on it (we’ll show you this shortly).
  Still with a budget of 20 skill points, let’s decide 
  Still with a budget of 20 skill points, let’s decide 
  that the highest we really need to go is Good on a few 
  of our skills, one step down from the highest we can 
  go with 20 anyway.  To support a good, we’d have this 
  breakdown:
  1 Good 
  1 x 3 points 
  3 points
  2 Fair  
  2 x 2 points 
  4 points
  3 Average 
  3 x 1 point  
  3 points
  Total: 6 skills for 10 points
  That leaves us ten points over, after spending our 
  fi rst ten on our “core” (meaning, supported with the 
  minimum necessary lower skills) Good pyramid:
  Good(3)
  Fair(2)
  Fair(2)
  Avg(1)
  Avg(1)
  Avg(1)
  Since we already have one Good supported 
  after spending ten points, adding another Good 
  to the pyramid will only require adding one more 
  supporting brick at each level down, so we’d only 
  need to buy one more Fair and one more Average to 
  support the additional Good.  That’s 3 for the good, 
  2 for the Fair, and 1 for the Average, or 6 points, 
  leaving us four over.  Adding a chain of single skills 
  like this to a pyramid is called “thickening”.  Our 
  once-thickened pyramid, costing 16 points at this 
  point, looks like this:
  Good(3)
  Good(3)
  Fair(2)
  Fair(2)
  Fair(2)
  Avg(1)
  Avg(1)
  Avg(1)
  Avg(1)
  We couldn’t add a third Good at this point, since 
  we know that a Good “thickener” costs a total of 
  6 points.  A Fair “thickener” costs three (1 Fair + 1 
  Average for 3 points), leaving us one point for spare 
  Average, and a pyramid that looks like this:
  Good(3)
  Good(3)
  Fair(2)
  Fair(2)
  Fair(2)
  Avg(1)
  Avg(1)
  Fair(2)
  Avg(1)
  Avg(1)
  Avg(1)
  Avg(1)
  Or we could simply spend all four points on four 
  Averages:
  
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  Good(3)
  Good(3)
  Fair(2)
  Fair(2)
  Fair(2)
  Avg(1)
  Avg(1)
  Avg(1)
  Avg(1)
  Avg(1)
  Avg(1)
  Avg(1)
  Avg(1)
  As a piece of friendly advice, it’s usually a good 
  idea to build out your pyramid fi rst without worrying 
  about what skills go where, and then “slot in” the 
  skills after you’ve built the structure.
  Speed Pyramidding
  Now that you’ve got the idea what we mean when we 
  say “core pyramid” and “thickener”, you can start 
  building pyramids extra-fast with this handy-dandy 
  bit of mathematical shorthand.  First, the tables.
  Core Pyramid 
  Total Cost Gets You
  Legendary
  84 points
  1 Legendary, 2 Epic, 
  3 Superb, 4 Great, 
  5 Good, 6 Fair, 
  7 Average (28 skills)
  Epic
  56 points
  1 Epic, 2 Superb, 
  3 Great, 4 Good, 5 Fair, 
  6 Average (21 skills)
  Superb
  35 points
  1 Superb, 2 Great, 
  3 Good, 4 Fair, 
  5 Average (15 skills)
  Great
  20 points
  1 Great, 2 Good, 3 Fair, 
  4 Average (10 skills)
  Good
  10 points
  1 Good, 2 Fair, 
  3 Average (6 skills)
  Fair
  4 points
  1 Fair, 2 Average 
  (3 skills)
  Average
  Average
  1 point
  1 point
  1 Average (1 skill)
  1 Average (1 skill)
  Thickener 
  Adds Cost 
  Gets You
  Legendary
  28 points
  1 Legendary, 1 Epic, 
  1 Superb, 1 Great, 
  1 Good, 1 Fair, 1 Average 
  (7 skills)
  Epic
  21 points
  1 Epic, 1 Superb, 1 Great, 
  1 Good, 1 Fair, 1 Average 
  (6 skills)
  Superb
  15 points
  1 Superb, 1 Great, 
  1 Good, 1 Fair, 1 Average 
  (5 skills)
  Great
  10 points
  1 Great, 1 Good, 1 Fair, 
  1 Average (4 skills)
  Good
  6 points
  1 Good, 1 Fair, 1 Average 
  (3 skills)
  Fair
  3 points
  1 Fair, 1 Average (2 skills)
  Average
  1 point
  1 Average (1 skill)
  Using these tables, you can very quickly construct 
  Using these tables, you can very quickly construct 
  an optimized pyramid:
  • Determine the highest skill rating you want to 
  have, that is has a Core Pyramid cost less than the 
  number of skill points you have to spend.  Buy 
  that core pyramid, deduct the cost.
  • The biggest thickener you can buy from here on 
  can start no higher than the peak of your core 
  pyramid, and must have a cost less than or equal 
  to the points you have left.  Lather, rinse, repeat, 
  until you have no points left.
  Example. Lydia is creating a quick, eleven-phase 
  character.  She picks eleven aspects for him and quickly 
  determines a likely list of skills.  With eleven phases, she 
  has 44 points to spend.
  Looking at the Core Pyramid table, she sees that the 
  most 44 points can afford is a Superb core pyramid.  That 
  costs her 35 points, and leaves her with 9.  She writes 
  down that she has 1 Superb, 2 Great, 3 Good, 4 Fair, and 
  5 Average.
  Now she moves on to buying thickeners.  The biggest 
  thickener she can afford with 9 points is a Good, for 6, 
  leaving her with 3 points.  She adds 1 Good, 1 Fair, and 1 
  Average to her pool.
  With 3 points left, she can afford a Fair thickener 
  exactly, which she buys, adding 1 Fair and 1 Average to 
  her pool.
  Her totals are 1 Superb, 2 Great, 4 Good, 6 Fair, and 
  7 Average, an optimally constructed pyramid of 20 skills 
  for 44 points.  She places skills from her pool into the 
  pyramid, starting at the top with the one she considers 
  most important for the character, and moving on down 
  from there.
  Creating a less-than-optimized pyramid is just as 
  fast — all you have to do is pick thickeners that are 
  well under your remaining budget.
  Example. Lydia is creating a quick, 6-phase 
  character that she wants to give a broad skill-base.  She 
  decides to do this by buying one down from the most 
  expensive core pyramid she can buy.  With 6 phases, she 
  has 24 skill points to spend.
  For her core pyramid, she could buy a Great one for 20, 
  but she decides to step one down and buy a Good one for 
  10.  This leaves her 14 points and gives her 1 Good, 2 Fair, 
  and 3 Average. 
  Since she’s starting with a Good core, she can’t buy 
  more than a Good thickener.  2 Good thickeners at 6 
  points each costs 12 of her 14 points, adding 2 Good, 
  
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  2 Fair, and 2 Average.  With her remaining 2 points, she 
  can only buy 2 more Average skills.
  Her totals are 3 Good, 4 Fair, and 7 Average — 14 
  skills and a solid spread.  If she’d gone for optimized, she’d 
  have 1 Great, 2 Good, 4 Fair, and 6 Average — one less 
  skill.  If she’d bought lower on her thickeners, she could 
  have gotten 4 Fair thickeners instead of the 2 Good ones, 
  and would have had 1 Good, 6 Fair, and 9 Average, 16 
  skills — 2 more skills.
  Handling Advancement
  Advancement will occasionally involve the awarding 
  of skill levels.  With the older method of phase-by-
  phase pyramid construction carried forward into 
  advancement, this could get super-awkward with 
  skill point expenditures being forced every time you 
  got a “phase’s worth” of skill points.
  So, fi rst off , we throw out the idea that you 
  should be forced to spend skill points, ever.  Want 
  to hoard up 7 of them and spend them all at once? 
  Go right ahead.  But there’s more to adjust with the 
  advancement process than just allowing hoarding.
  The “Pyramid Reloaded” method encourages, 
  implicitly at least, a new perspective on the pyramid 
  — that it’s a bunch of slots which you can slide your 
  skills (bricks) into.  It’s good to make use of this new 
  perspective when it comes to advancement, if you 
  view it all as buying new slots.
  The old method, and perspective, introduced 
  quandaries such as, “if I spend a point to upgrade my 
  Good Swordplay skill to a Great, I’ve left a gap down 
  in the Goods that I now have to fi ll!  Oh, woe!”  But if 
  we’re just buying slots, and can save up our points, 
  we can buy new slots on the pyramid — the tables in 
  Speed Pyramidding, above, will help on this — and 
  slide some or all of our skills up, fi lling in any empty 
  slots left with as yet untaken skills.  
  This is really what we were doing before, but it had 
  the downside of feeling constrained, since we were 
  focusing on spending 1 point on skill X, another on 
  skill Y, and so on.  If we focus on the slots fi rst, and 
  then fi gure out where the skills fi t, we’ve made the 
  “problem” a lot easier.
  When buying new slots on our skill pyramid, there 
  are several approaches we can use.
  New Thickener.  This is very straightforward: 
  if you have the points to spend on a new thickener, 
  and it doesn’t exceed the height of your core 
  pyramid, you can just buy it, outright.  Use the table 
  pyramid, you can just buy it, outright.  Use the table 
  from “Speed Pyramidding”, above.
  Upgrade Thickener.  If you have a thickener 
  that’s shorter than the height of your core pyramid 
  (e.g., if you have a Good core pyramid with a Fair 
  thickener attached to it), you can spend points 
  equal to the cost of a single skill one higher than the 
  thickener’s height, upgrading the thickener to that 
  new height.  This is sounds more complicated than it 
  is: to upgrade a Good thickener to a Great thickener, 
  you spend the points it would cost to buy a single 
  Great skill (4).
  Upgrade Core Pyramid.  If you have a 
  thickener that’s the same height as your core 
  pyramid, you can combine the two into a larger core 
  pyramid by spending the points necessary to buy a 
  single skill one higher than either piece.  In other 
  words, to upgrade a Good core pyramid, you’ll need 
  a Good thickener to start.  To combine the pyramid 
  and the thickener into a larger core pyramid, spend 
  four points to buy a single Great skill: you now have a 
  Great core pyramid (and your thickener is no longer 
  considered a thickener, since it’s part of it).
  Once you’ve added a new slot or slots to your 
  pyramid, you can use the opportunity to shuffl  e 
  around where the skills are positioned on the 
  pyramid.  A good rule of thumb to use here is that 
  no skill may be moved more than one ranking 
  up or down on the pyramid at any given point of 
  development — but it’s a rule you should feel free 
  to break if there’s a decent reasoning behind the 
  change.
  This is best explored by making use of an extended 
  example.  
  Example.  Lydia has a character with a Good core 
  pyramid and a Good thickener, for a total of nine skills.  
  She has accumulated four skill points and wants to spend 
  them all at once, to buy a Great slot on her pyramid, 
  combining the Good core pyramid and Good thickener 
  into a single Great core pyramid.  With this decision made, 
  she doesn’t have to worry about skill points for the rest of 
  the process.  The result looks something like this:
  Brawl
  ?
  Sword
  Run
  Bow
  Bluff
  Listen
  Smith
  Search
  Spot
  
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  With a new slot added at the peak of her pyramid, she 
  could simply add in a new skill there, at the Great peak, 
  but that doesn’t appeal to her for several reasons.  For 
  one, it doesn’t seem organic to her (or her GM) that a 
  new skill appear from out of nowhere at Great.  As well, 
  she’d like to use the opportunity to improve one or more 
  of her already-existing skills.
  Considering what she has already, one option could be 
  to “cascade” several skills upward — she could take her 
  Good Sword to Great, then her Fair Bow to Good, and her 
  Average Listen to Fair, leaving Listen’s slot open on the 
  pyramid, to be fi lled by whatever new skill she decides to 
  take.
  Brawl
  ?
  New Skill
  Sword
  Run
  Bow
  Bluff
  Listen
  Smith
  Search
  Spot
  Looking at this, she’s not sure she really wants to 
  upgrade her Listen skill; she rarely uses it and she’s looking 
  at a third combat skill as her new skill.  So she could just 
  slot the new skill into the space vacated at Fair by her 
  Bow skill.  While it does involve a new skill appearing 
  at a position higher than Average in her pyramid, some 
  accelerated development for a new skill does make sense 
  for her combat-oriented character.
  Brawl
  ?
  New Skill
  Sword
  Run
  Bow
  Bluff
  Listen
  Smith
  Search
  Spot
  Since spending four skill points all at once represents 
  a fairly signifi cant developmental point for her character, 
  Lydia could contemplate a more extensive shuffl ing of 
  skills — the changes needn’t be limited to fi lling in spaces 
  vacated by skills as they ascend the pyramid.
  For starters, she contemplates a cascade like before — 
  Sword bumps to Great, Bluff bumps to Good, Splot bumps 
  to Fair, and a new skill hops into Spot’s Average space.
  But she realizes as well that her character rarely uses 
  his fi sts — he has come to see the sword as the civilized 
  way to settle disputes.  Further, he’s a stand-and-fi ght sort 
  of guy, so he doesn’t actually use his Run skill that much.  
  She decides to drop those two skills — Brawl from Good 
  to Fair, and Run from Fair to Average.  
  Now she needs to decide which of her lower skills can 
  ascend to take Brawl’s Good slot.  She settles on Smith, on 
  the idea that her character’s adoption of the Sword as his 
  primary manner of “relating” to his opponents also means 
  he’s taking a lot more time learning how to build the ideal 
  sword.
         
  Brawl
  ?
  New Skill
  Sword
  Run
  Bow
  Bluff
  Listen
  Smith
  Search
  Spot
  Shuffl  ing skills around the slots in your pyramid 
  is a powerful technique for making the pyramid a lot 
  easier to digest.  Characters evolve; some skills fall 
  out of favor for lack of practice, others improve with 
  their use.  When you can accept that your pyramid 
  is just a stack of skill slots, you have a much more 
  fl uid model for development, while still retaining 
  the advantages of a relatively math-light approach to 
  capping skill growth.
  How Offi cial Is This?
  Well, I’m an author of Fate, and I wrote this up all 
  solo. So it’s about as offi  cial as that.  
  The Legal Crap
  This document is © Fred Hicks, 2004, but otherwise 
  covered by whatever license currently covers Fate.  
  At the time of this writing, Fate is covered under the 
  Fudge license.  If Fate gets released under an OGL 
  license, this document is considered an extension 
  of that work, and thus covered under that as well.  
  Or someone can nudge me to update this document 
  with an offi  cial OGL declaration.  Bah.
  Fate: Fantastic Adventures in Tabletop 
  Entertainment™ is a trademark of Evil Hat 
  Productions, yadda yadda.
  
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  Where It’s Due
  Credit in the main for this idea goes to Leonard 
  “Landon Darkwood” Balsera, a good friend and one 
  of my favorite sounding-boards for Fate ideas.
  Beyond the inestimable Mr. Balsera, this document 
  sure as hell wouldn’t have happened without a lot 
  of lively discussion on the Yahoo! discussion group.  
  Thanks, guys.
  Here Are Some Websites
  http://www.faterpg.com/
  http://www.evilhat.com/
  http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FateRPG
  
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