Max's Fate - explaining and categorising

Last time you might have been confused by all the backgrounds and categories and what not, and now i'm going to explain more. if you did understand, excellent!

More on traits

Traits are what define our nobles and give them the all important Fate Cards. These are influenced by backgrounds and a certain degree of luck and dice rolling. For any chosen setting, each background has some traits, and they are rolled for randomly at the creation of the noble. I had thought that you could choose, but rolling is more realistic; when do commanders get to choose their subordinates personality?

So, let's take take a generic background from the last post, the Reeve's son. Reeves are the 'sheriffs' of Anglo-Saxon England, so we would expect them to be brave and fighters, at least in theory. His son will then roll a d6 and looks at his trait possibilities:

-1: Roll again, re-rolling a 1. He gains a negative secondary trait.

-2 or 3: Courageous

-4 or 5: Cunning

-6: Veteran

Basically, our fate is not totally within our choice, unless you don't like randomness and choose the traits.

As i began to explain last time, i have several traits already. Now i shall show you the cards they offer to us:

Courageous	Hero of the Age	Cunning	Bounding move
	Audacia		Hit and run
	Armour bright		I have a cunning plan
	Stubborn		I know the path
	Crouch lances		Assassins
Veteran	Bravery	Believer	Stubborn
	Aggressive charge		Audacia
	Sustained charge		I thought that went well
	Shieldwall braced		God is with us!
	Volley	Tribal leader	Hit and run
Berserker	Sustained charge		I know the way
	Bravery		Intimidate
	Goad		Goad
	Solid as the mountain		Mounted archers

Ok, you won't know some of the cards, because at the moment they only exist in my notebook, but you might get the idea by the names. All are primary traits.

I thought that each category has three traits that have to be taken, two for lower characters and one more for lords. The rest are optional and may be chosen for the character at his creation. I thought that:
Status I noble: 2 obligatory and 1 chosen.
Status II: 2 obligatory and 2 chosen.
Status III: 3 obligatory and 2 chosen.
Status IV: 3 obligatory and 3 chosen.
So this would give us (with two Status II nobles and a Status III lord) 9 cards. Add this to the about 15 generic cards and we have 21 cards, 33 if we add both decks together. But here lies the first big problem.

The first big problem

One or Two? One deck for each side, or one big deck for both players? Both have their advantages, and their disadvantages.

If each player had a deck, it would lean their cards would be only for their side, meaning no problems where a side can us the other player's cards even without having the right characters in their force (like a European knight using horse archers, for example). The decks are smaller, however, so powerful cards could be 'recycled' easier by canny players.

One deck means that the deck is bigger, but, as stated above, some mechanisms might be needed to stop certain characters use certain cards. This means more thinking though, but on the other hand it would be less encumbering on the table, with fewer chances of getting decks mixed up (you never know...).

I'm not sure, so any ideas are welcome.

It's all very good but...

...so far i've only been giving ideas, not hard categories and backgrounds and cards and all the rest! Do do not fear, they are being planned! The only thing is that they have to be flexible so that others can easily make characters AND decks. It's quite a slow progress, and in the next post i shall begin to set some proper walls on these foundations. I have the fate card ideas, categories and backgrounds. I guess fate cards should come first, as categories depend on they, so they might be coming this weekend.