Skills may perform one or more of the four actions: attacking, defending, overcoming obstacles (a catch-all for solving problems) or creating an advantage (see below).

A relevant aspect can be invoked to grant a bonus to a die roll (either adding +2, or allowed a re-roll of the dice); this usually costs the player or GM a fate point.

To release the new version of Fate, Evil Hat Productions ran a Kickstarter campaign that initially asked for $3,000.

At the end of the campaign they raised $433,365 and expanded the product line significantly, adding two world books and a system toolkit.

[7] As a result of another crowd funding effort, Evil Hat released Fate Accelerated, a streamlined version of the rules based on the same core mechanic intended to get players into the game faster.

One notable difference is that skills are replaced with six "approaches" to solving problems - Careful, Clever, Flashy, Forceful, Quick, and Sneaky.

In his 2023 book Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground, RPG historian Stu Horvath noted compared Fate to GURPS, published twenty years earlier, saying, "Fate stands at a similar intersection, drawing from and synthesizing an array of contemporary design ideas, a kind of amalgamated avatar of the RPG industry, circa 2003, 2006, and 2013 — and growing still.