TEXT: This section will introduce you to 
  how the rules of this game work and 
  what all the number-bits in this book 
  represent. You can read the rules in 
  detail in Chapter 5: Playing the Game 
  and in Chapter 7: Running the Game.
  The Basics
  First and foremost, if you’re asking 
  yourself, “What is a roleplaying game, 
  anyway?” go to www.arcdream.com 
  for an introduction. Back? Good!
  In the FATE RPG, characters, 
  vehicles, equipment, and even scenes 
  and locations that are important to 
  the story are defined by three key 
  terms: aspects, skills, and Gifts. 
  Rolling Dice
  Many events in FATE—particularly 
  the challenges that face the Strangers 
  of the Kerberos Club—are resolved 
  by rolling a few (usually four) special 
  dice called Fudge dice. Each Fudge 
  die gives you a +, -, or 0 result. Add 
  one for each + and subtract one for 
  each -. (The 0 are worth zero.) Get 
  a high enough result and you rise to 
  the challenge. Important characters 
  and objects use skills to boost their 
  rolls—and just about everything in 
  the game can use aspects.
  Since Fudge dice can roll negative 
  or positive, it’s possible to get a result 
  below zero. Therefore we always put 
  either a plus sign or a minus sign in 
  front of a roll’s result to make clear 
  whether it’s above zero or below zero. 
  A roll that’s 6 above zero would be 
  written as +6, not just as 6.
  Aspects
  Aspects are one of the most important 
  parts of FATE. They are short, 
  descriptive phrases that describe 
  characters, scenes, objects, places, 
  or even the game world as a whole. 
  The ones you’ll probably use most 
  often, though, are your character’s 
  personal aspects: they express your 
  character’s personality, background, 
  appearance, 
  beliefs, 
  possessions, 
  connections, and other parts of what 
  makes him or her unique.
  Aspects can be simple statements, 
  nicknames, catchphrases, the names 
  of associates or enemies, and so forth. 
  When you see a character write-up in 
  this book, the listed aspects give you 
  a sense of who the character is. When 
  you make your character, you decide 
  what his or her aspects are.
  If there’s an aspect at hand—
  on your character, the scene, your 
  opponent, whatever—and it’s relevant 
  to the task at hand in a positive way, 
  you can use it to improve your result. 
  This usually means spending a Fate 
  Point (see the next page) for each 
  aspect you use and adding a +2 bonus 
  to your roll for each one—although 
  no aspect can be used more than once 
  on a single roll. Your opponent can do 
  the same.
  Of course, this aspect business 
  isn’t limited to turning failure into 
  success. If you’ve already succeeded 
  without calling on an aspect, but you 
  want to succeed by even more, you can 
  use aspects to do that. 
  Unimportant characters, locations, 
  events and objects can be handled just 
  with aspects—leaving out skills and 
  Gifts entirely—to speed things up.
  You can find more information 
  about aspects on page 184.
  Skills
  Most things that player characters do 
  in the game are done with skills (and 
  of course if the skill isn’t enough, you 
  can augment it with an aspect). Skills 
  are areas of training, experience, or 
  sheer talent. When you want your 
  character to do something risky or 
  that has the potential to add to the 
  story—something with an interesting 
  consequence for failure—you’ll use 
  one of your character’s skills. 
  Unlike aspects, skills are concrete 
  and quantifiable—each skill has a 
  numeric skill rating that measures 
  how effective the character will be 
  with it in play and how likely you 
  are to succeed. Skills tell you what a 
  character can do.
  Every skill also has a Power 
  Tier that indicates how effective it 
  is in comparison with the efforts 
  of an ordinary human being. Most 
  skills are in the Mundane Tier, but 
  supernatural powers, such as super-
  strength or telepathy, will frequently 
  be in higher Power Tiers.
  To see if you do well, roll Fudge 
  dice and add your skill rating. That’s 
  your skill roll.
  Compare the skill roll to a diffi-
  culty number set by the GM. If you 
  beat the difficulty number, you 
  succeed.
  For more on skills see page 198.
  How to Play FATE
  
  How Well Did I Do?
  How well you succeed at a challenge is 
  determined by three results of a skill 
  or aspect roll: effort, shifts, and effect. 
  Add together your skill roll plus 
  any aspect bonuses to get your effort.
  (Other modifiers caused by the 
  circumstances at hand may affect your 
  effort, such as when trying to climb 
  a particularly slippery wall or find 
  a dropped earring in an especially 
  cluttered room. That’s up to the GM to 
  determine, though. If she doesn’t bring 
  it up, don’t worry about it.)
  How well you succeed is measured 
  in shifts. If your effort beats the diffi-
  culty number, you get a number of 
  shifts equal to the margin of success. 
  If the difficulty rating is +3 and your 
  effort is +6, the margin is 3 so you get 
  three shifts. 
  The number of shifts you get is 
  called your effect. The higher your 
  effect, the better you did. 
  Sometimes you’ll want to spend 
  some of these shifts to accomplish 
  something special. In that case, reduce 
  your effect by the number of shifts 
  that you’re spending. See page 320 for 
  details. But usually you just use them 
  to say how well you succeeded at the 
  thing you were trying to do. 
  And if you’re competing against 
  an opponent, it’s easy. Best effect wins.
  Stress
  When 
  bad 
  things 
  happen 
  to 
  characters—such as injury, embar-
  rassment, or fright—they take stress. If 
  your objective is harming someone else 
  (physically or otherwise), stress is how 
  we represent it in the game. 
  Stress comes in three varieties: 
  Health, Composure, and Reputation. 
  The more points of stress you take, the 
  worse off you are.
  For example, let’s say you’re in a 
  fistfight with a couple of goons. Your 
  effort (the total of your roll, your skill 
  rating, and any modifiers) is +6, while 
  theirs is only +3. The GM tells you that 
  you can spend a shift to knock one of 
  them down a short flight of stairs and 
  out of the immediate area. You decide 
  to do that, and put the other two shifts 
  toward dealing damage. The goon 
  takes 2 points of Health stress and is 
  knocked down the stairs.
  If something has a Weapon rating 
  (like “Weapon 1”), it does additional 
  stress. If something has an Armor 
  rating (like “Armor 1”), it absorbs stress. 
  Taking stress is bad. If you take 
  enough of it, you’re Taken Out, or 
  removed from the story for at least 
  a while. You could be dead, uncon-
  scious, disgraced, fleeing in panic, or 
  whatever’s appropriate for the attack 
  that took you out. Within that context, 
  the attacker gets to choose your fate. 
  Given a few minutes of respite, 
  stress goes away on its own. When you 
  don’t have that luxury, there is another 
  way to reduce stress: by taking conse-
  quences.
  Consequences
  Consequences 
  are 
  longer-lasting 
  effects that can be as insignificant as 
  being winded or off-balance or as life-
  changing as losing a limb or being 
  ostracized from polite society. 
  You can reduce incoming stress 
  by taking a consequence. A Trifling 
  consequence reduces stress by 2, a 
  Middling consequence reduces stress 
  by 4, and a Grievous consequence 
  reduces stress by 6. 
  Consequences are like aspects that 
  are negative (see the Aspects section 
  for more on aspects). You don’t want 
  consequences, but sometimes they’re 
  your only chance to stay on your feet. 
  But you can take only so many conse-
  quences.
  You can also choose to make a 
  concession instead of taking a conse-
  quence. This is essentially you taking 
  yourself out, but according to your 
  terms instead of your enemy’s.
  When you see a write-up for a 
  person, animal, or vehicle in this 
  book, the more stress boxes and conse-
  quences are listed, the more resilient 
  that person, animal, or vehicle is.
  Gifts and Fate Points
  Gifts bend the rules a little where your 
  character is concerned. You might have 
  a Gift that gives you a special piece of 
  equipment or that makes one of your 
  aspects more powerful or that provides 
  a little boost to some of your skills in 
  the right circumstances. They’re sort 
  of a halfway point between aspects 
  and skills, in that they have concrete 
  mechanical effects, but it’s up to you to 
  define the specifics within the guide-
  lines provided. Every character has at 
  least one Gift. We’ll discuss them in 
  the Gifts section on page 244.
  Every player also has a store of Fate 
  Points—sometimes a lot, sometimes 
  a few, sometimes none! Spend Fate 
  Points to affect the events of the story 
  in your favor; earn Fate Points by 
  acting in accordance with one of your 
  character’s aspects in a way that puts 
  you at a disadvantage. This back and 
  forth of Fate Points—the “Fate Point 
  economy”—is, like aspects, central to 
  FATE. More information on how this 
  works is in the Aspects section, page 
  184.
  And that’s how you play the game.
  
SOURCE: textdata/thevault/FATE (fudge) [multi]/Kerberos Club/Kerberos Club - How To Play FATE.pdf