Fate Core vs Open Legend

Compare Fate Core and Open Legend side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, cost, and more.

	Fate Core	Open Legend
Genre	Universal	Universal
Play Style	Narrative, Rules-Light, Collaborative, Cinematic, Improvisation, Theater of the Mind, Low-Prep, Roleplay-Heavy, Drama, Freeform Magic, Open Source, Tag-Based	Toolkit, Classless, Hackable, Heroic, Modular, Character Building, Tactical, Crunchy
Core Mechanic	Roll 4 Fudge dice + skill vs. difficulty. Spend/earn Fate points to invoke aspects.	Roll a d20 plus one or more attribute dice (d4 through d12 based on attribute score, scaling to multiple dice at higher scores) against a Challenge Rating. All dice explode on their maximum face and can keep exploding without limit. Characters have eighteen attributes split across Physical, Mental, Social, and Extraordinary categories; extraordinary attributes channel banes (negative effects) and boons (positive effects) instead of tracking a spell list. Advantage or disadvantage adds extra dice and drops the lowest or highest before summing.
Dice	4dF (Fudge dice)	d20 + d4–d12
Complexity	Low	Medium
Accessibility	Very High	Very High
Runnability	High	Medium
License	CC BY 3.0	Open Legend Community License (SRD)
Cost	Free (SRD)	Free / $$
Publisher	Evil Hat Productions	Seventh Sphere Publishing
Year	2013	2018
Best For	Narrative-focused groups who want to tell collaborative stories in any genre with minimal rules.	Groups who want a single classless engine to handle fantasy, science fiction, modern, or horror campaigns through eighteen attributes spanning physical, mental, social, and extraordinary domains, with magic and special effects folded into the same dice mechanic as combat.
Highlights	Genre-agnostic, encourages narrative play, free rules	All dice explode on maximum rolls with no cap, producing occasional dramatic result spikes through the same mechanic that handles ordinary rolls. Magic is folded into the attribute system through banes and boons, so extraordinary attributes like Energy or Entropy roll for fixed effects rather than tracking a spell list. Hits that exceed a defense by ten or more automatically apply a free bane on top of damage, so big roll-overs translate into status effects like knockdown or stunned rather than wasted overflow.
Considerations	Aspect economy demands constant creative input which can exhaust players, character differentiation can blur with freeform aspects, requires system mastery from the GM to run smoothly	First-level character creation spends 40 attribute points across 18 attributes plus 6 feat points across a tiered feat list, producing heavy upfront decision load before play begins. Weapons have no damage dice — damage equals your action roll minus the target's defense — so weapon variety within a category is largely cosmetic, and the book itself notes that a longsword mechanically dominates a shortsword. Hit points come from Fortitude, Presence, and Will (HP = 2·(F+P+W) + 10) rather than from level, so a character who dumps all three stays near 10 HP regardless of how much XP they earn.