So I don't know how many people are up on Fate, as this is going to be a little heavy on jargon, but I wanted to get this initial decantation from the mental alchemiter out there.

It's intentionally vague on a lot of the crunchy aspects. Like, all of them.

---

My Little Pony: Fated for Friendship is a Fate-engine game which can be played in either the conventional story-
resolution "pickup" manner, with players and a GM, or in a collaborative "progressive" manner with only players.

In the progressive mode, each player character has a current Goal: to advance a Skill, discover or explore an
Aspect, or master or refine a Stunt. This Goal will be accomplished when the player overcomes an Obstacle --
either Takes Out an Adversary of a certain power, or withstands the Stress and/or Consequences of
accomplishing a difficult task in a limited time frame. Characters have three Stress tracks, representing their
capacities for physical, mental, and social stress: Health, Focus, and Composure.

Players take on the task of creating and adjudicating these Obstacles for each other, and can pursue shared
Goals by increasing the strength of the Obstacle accordingly. (e.g. "Griffon the Brush-Off" is Pinkie Pie and
Rainbow Dash discovering a shared Aspect, "The Merry Pranksters". They do this by Taking Out an Adversary,
Gilda the Griffon, through Composure Stress.)

In the process, characters Invoke Virtues: ways to spend multiple Fate Points at once to accomplish unusual
things or set up pools of "narrative potential" which can be used for rerolls or bonuses unconditionally. Here are
the seven Virtues, six of which are possessed by individual characters and the last which is possessed by the
player group simultaneously.

Honesty - Invoke the Virtue of Honesty to project a personal Aspect temporarily onto another character, a scene,
or even an adversary, and establish a pool to let other players tag it. For example, if another character’s “All
Planned Out” Aspect is being Compelled to worsen their rolls in a crisis situation, you could project your “I’ll Live
Through This” Aspect to them, giving them a tag and some points to resist the Compulsion.

Generosity - when taking Consequences to mitigate Stress for any reason, you can Invoke the Virtue of
Generosity to transfer Consequences from another player, or “steal” Intense Hazards from a Scene or Aspects
from an Adversary (which can cause them Stress). For example, in social conflict with an adversary, you could
steal the “Cruelly Defaced” Aspect they had been invoking to resist your social rolls, gaining a bonus to your roll
and causing them additional Composure Stress, in exchange for taking the Consequence of “Cruelly Defaced”
yourself.

Loyalty - Invoke the Virtue of Loyalty to activate one of your Aspects as, effectively, a source of Grit, letting you
lose opposed rolls or even be Compelled without deviating from your current course of action. For example, you
can keep helping your friends in spite of an Adversary’s attempts to deceive you, appealing to your desires to
“Steal the Spotlight” and realize your “Big Dreams”; your friends are counting on you, and you’d “Never Leave
Them Hanging”.

Kindness - when trying to find Aspects to tag, Invoke the Virtue of Kindness to “convert” adversarial Aspects,
turning them into positive ones for you. For example, you can calm a raging beast, even though it’s been using
“Ferocious” and “Bigger Than You” as positive Aspects to prevail so far -- clearly it’s being driven to be so
ferocious by something it can’t effectively address because it’s bigger than you.

Laughter - when trying to discover, evoke, engineer, or transform Aspects, Invoke the Virtue of Laughter to
spend a large number of Fate Points all at once to shift the roll in your favor, letting you pull off transformations
that might seem impossible. For example, you can use your Art to transform a Scene’s Intense Hazard,
“Terrifying”, into a positive Aspect like “Ridiculous”, turning what might have been a persistent source of Stress
into a way to allow you and your friends to recover.

Magic - Normally when you discover, evoke, engineer, or transform an Aspect you get a single free tag against it
and have to spend Fate Points to keep activating it. Invoke the Virtue of Magic to establish a pool that lets you
or others keep tagging novel Aspects. For example, when you’ve used your Academics to discover that an
Adversary has the Aspect “My One Weakness”, and that the current Scene has the Aspect “Ancient Treasure”,
you can establish a pool to help you connect the dots, as it were.

Friendship - You can’t just Invoke the other six Virtues left and right. Generally they can only be invoked once in
a given scope -- Scene, Stage, or Session. Invoking the Virtue of Friendship establishes a pool of Fate Points that
other characters can use to Invoke their Virtues, even if they’ve been Invoked already in the appropriate scope.
There is no such second chance for Friendship -- it is the Virtue all the players hold collectively, and they must all
agree to let you Invoke it.

Virtues have four levels - Novice, Practiced, Devoted, and Extraordinary. At higher levels of a Virtue, you can
activate it more often and its effects can become more potent or last longer. Progressive games generally begin
with the six individual Virtues spread at Novice level between the characters, with Friendship potentially
available at Novice level as well, especially if there are enough players that each generally has just one Virtue. In
general, characters can possess Virtues either equal to their collective level of Friendship or at one level higher.

It might seem as though certain Virtues are naturally suited for affecting certain Skills, or influencing certain
Stress tracks. Certainly this is true, but that doesn’t limit them. The only limit is how many Fate Points a player
is willing to spend. Keep in mind that when you Take Out, or win Concessions from, an Adversary you’re gaining
the right to narrate the results how you see fit. You can do something as seemingly inappropriate as Invoking
Kindness on a Might roll to Take Out an Adversary with Health Stress -- not by narrating how you damage or
cripple them, but by giving a “practical demonstration” of how their various defensive Aspects wouldn’t be able
to save them.

In a progressive game, characters can’t set their Goal to be to advance a Virtue. Virtues are advanced through
being Sparked. If, in the process of attempting to overcome an Obstacle, a character acquires sufficient Stress
and Consequences that they would be Taken Out, they can instead attempt to Spark a Virtue, spending Fate
Points -- and gaining bonus points based on the size of the relevant Stress track and severity of the
Consequences -- to Invoke a Virtue one level higher. They are not Taken Out until the Virtue wears off, and if the
Obstacle is overcome in that time, they advance the Virtue instead of whatever character trait they were trying
to progress with their Goal.

Characters can only Spark a Virtue if they could legitimately possess its advanced form, based on the collective
level of Friendship -- or the collective level of the other Virtues, if a character is attempting to Spark Friendship.
This suggests that progressive play will follow the general pattern of Sparking the various Virtues and then
Sparking Friendship, and, in fact, this is true.

The ultimate goal of progressive play is to discover the circumstances under which your characters Spark an
Extraordinary Friendship.