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PbtA is interesting. I think of it less as a rules engine and more as a language. PbtA is the Assembly of RPGs, except it's extremely easy to learn: Player move: a predefined narrative trigger brings about a set of predefined narrative consequences. GM agenda: general goals of the current gaming experience. GM moves: when the fiction needs an event to happen, pick one from this list. GM principles: shortcuts and guidelines to keep in mind while making GM moves. That's why the game is so hackable. It's because people look at this and realize this is a language they can use to translate whatever ideas they have in their minds into a roleplaying game. Playbooks, resolution systems, and all that are just secondary and could really be anything; it's a shame people don't play around with it much. Except for Vincent Baker himself, whose Freebooting Venus uses the language and runs away with it to do something completely different than AW, and John Harper, whose Blades in the Dark is very different from other PbtA works, but you can clearly see the language being used as a starting point of that game. e: though to be fair, I think people stick with 2d6+stat a lot because it's wonderful. It's got a bell curve with great probabilities and intuitively transformed with +stat, and it's very practical and easy at the table. Cyphoderus fucked around with this message at 23:10 on Jun 25, 2015 |
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Jun 25, 2015 23:07
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Evil Mastermind posted:Yeah, I'm a fan of the "I am a adjective noun" style of chargen. It doesn't work for every genre, but it can lead to some interesting character types through what seem at the time like random combinations. It doesn't even have to be adjective noun! Gamma World for 4th edition D&D used an adjective adjective system and it worked wonders. I'm really intrigued by Worlds in Peril. Has anyone here run it?
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Jun 26, 2015 16:00
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Error 404 posted:I am just waiting for someone to post a recruit so I can jump on that poo poo. Stop making me want to do it, I've already got 01 game and 01 master's thesis going right now
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Jun 26, 2015 16:59
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spectralent posted:"Yeah it's probably your Daring rating, roll it. That's an 8; you get ahold of the cliff face but you're not pulling yourself up unless you drop your staff" or whatever. I always feel like using the dice mechanic without also importing principles and GM moves is somehow breaking the spirit of it, though. Why would it be, though? Plenty of games have done partial successes and non-standard attributes before PbtA. It's also possible to do player moves, GM moves, principles and agendas without using 2d6+stat.
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Jun 27, 2015 01:59
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Golden Bee posted:I played four or five sessions. Oh, I only saw this now. Thanks for the reply! So it's not the moves triggering in those situations, it's you unlocking new moves by getting into situations? That sounds really cool, actually.
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Jul 3, 2015 02:49
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Evil Mastermind posted:Adam Keobel just announced that he's going to be writing the official Rat Queens RPG, using DW as a base. I really, really hope he goes for tone instead of setting. We could really go without rules for a fantasy setting that, let's face it, is just like all the other ones (on purpose, even). And writing for tone is going to be hard. The two things that make Rat Queens stand out in my mind are witty dialogue, that you really can't quantify into an RPG without going at least a little experimental, and a heavy focus on interpersonal relationships. If we get a fantasy RPG focused on relationships, romantic and otherwise, that'd be awesome.
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Jul 8, 2015 14:53
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Covok posted:My golden age superhero hack has reached its final In-Dev. I feel that, design-wise, it's pretty much at the end and no major edits will follow. I posted it before, but, due to my love of keeping older drafts as second documents, that one is outdated. It's a little different than most Pbta titles for a few reasons. The chief of which is its hyper focus on the genre. It's very much about Golden Age DC and really nothing else. It's not perfect, of course. Hell, it probably isn't even that good. I'm just curious if anyone would be interested in taking a look at the title. Giving their thoughts and all. Any feedback is appreciated. I haven't read any golden age personally, only some of the more modern homages to it (Starman, JSA, The Golden Age, and The New Frontier). But I really like this! I'd play it for sure, at least as a one-shot. I suspect the concept may be a little too gimmick-y to warrant anything more than that, except if maybe the players are super into the source material. I love the way the game's written in-character, but you might want to dial back on the exclamation marks. They make the text very tiring to read after a couple of pages. The enthusiasm is great, it's the exclamation marks specifically that I think are excessive. Big fan of how harm interacts directly with the fiction. I'm reading it as "when you take harm, the GM makes a hard move". Which is a great way to now have HP but still keep the illusion of it. Also a big fan of how there are two types of "Hx", heroic and civilian. I think in this day and age, it's sort of impossible to play a golden age story straight-faced. I love the way you got around that, by making the game very meta-textual. It's very clear that players are creating comic book fiction and not playing characters as if they were real; the only other PbtA game I can think of that does something similar is World Wide Wrestling.
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Jul 25, 2015 16:42
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On a related note, with so goddamn many AW hacks and variants out there, what do you guys consider the telltale signs of a poor hack? My own "screening process" consists of checking the Basic Moves and seeing if they agree with the game's atmosphere and are not too many, then looking at playbook concepts and checking whether they spark the imagination and make me want to play as them.
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Aug 8, 2015 13:10
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There's an AW principle that reads, "give everyone a name, make everyone human." Just add another one that says "give every object a name, make every object a product." You don't need endless lists of equipment to evoke the gear-obsessed feeling, the same way you don't need endless lists of NPCs to evoke a community feeling. Just give your stuff a name, place it in the context of market. Maybe provide players and GM with a Big List o' Generic Brand/Model names.
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Aug 13, 2015 16:42
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Captain Foo posted:I like this Ah, I meant endless lists of NPCs in sourcebooks. Endless lists of NPCs that you and your players came up with are the best
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Aug 13, 2015 17:40
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spectralent posted:Thanks for the read Tulpa; it's interesting, but I'm not sure I've played enough MH to have definitive counters/agreement. How about just straight-up reskinning WWW whole cloth? Stats: Look becomes Presence but remains the same conceptually - it's charm, screen/stage presence, commitment to Idol persona Power becomes Appearance - it's how good you look, period. The Power stat is used to "power through" wrestling in WWW; I suspect it would be genre-appropriate to have beautiful people being able to "power through" the Idol process. Work becomes Play - it's how skillful you are at actual singing, playing, dancing. Real remains Real - it's how good you are at bringing your real life into showbiz in a profitable manner. Moves: You can lift most of the basic moves without changing anything about them. The biggest change would be changing the Feat of Strength move to something like Appeal to your Beauty. You'll need to reskin Injuries to something appropriate as well, like maybe Scandals? Performances: Reskin Wrestling matches so they are collaborative, instead of competitive. Match control becomes the spotlight. Having the spotlight means all the eyes are on you and your singing/playing/dancing at that moment. The Wrestling Move still represents a big, impressive spot and display of skill. Botching it means going out of tune, stumbling, making a mistake: at that point, someone else who's also in the performance takes over the spotlight to save the song (transfer of match control). I don't know about this culture to give you playbook or Roles suggestions, but they're the main thing that'd change. Though I suspect reskinning the Roles wouldn't be too hard. Game structure is the same as WWW, "matches" (songs/performances) bracketed by promotional/personal/off-camera segments. The only real issue would be justifying who each performance's participants are. Maybe you can justify it by having everyone present on stage for all performances but only "allowing" the spotlight to switch between 2 or 3 players, as if the song were designed to highlight them. Or you can reskin one of the stipulation moves from WWW to allow everyone on stage at all times. Cyphoderus fucked around with this message at 12:00 on Aug 14, 2015 |
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Aug 14, 2015 11:54
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Meinberg posted:I finally got around to reading World Wide Wrestling and it is awesome. Have there been many PbPs of it? I'm curious how the timing works in the PbP format. I've been running the game that Evil Mastermind linked to and it's been great fun! With PbP you do indeed lose the table banter, and you also have this phenomenon where people will play very conservatively, taking few risks. But these are common to every PbP game, to be honest. On the other hand, WWW has a very structured flow of play (matches separated by segments), and by nature the game tends to shift the spotlight between characters, so not everyone is posting at 100% effort all the time. These things help reduce burnout in a PbP game. If you want to read the game, keep in mind that the entirety of my experience with wrestling is watching a match here and there during 2 months of "research" for the game, and most of those weren't modern WWE  So our game is definitely an example of how things can turn out when the GM is not a card-carrying Wrestling Fan.
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Sep 5, 2015 23:58
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Toph Bei Fong posted:To be honest, this is one of the ones that always kinda confused me about regular AW. When do I Go Aggro vs Seize by Force? Should Aggro just be for threats and intimidation, or is beating people up also? Does one seize information from someone through aggressive intimidation? Is there an intentional overlap between the two? Both are +hard so it works either way... That's not how it works. Always go fiction first. Describe the action, then figure out what move's best for it. In PbtA you never do this the other way around. This also has to be the specific action the character's performing, right now, in the fiction of the game. The entire point of the stats+moves backbone is to avoid reducing the roleplaying experience to a list of action verbs that you pick from. This means that any one action, say, intimidating someone, can be any one move – from acting under fire to looking for barter in the town market. The move that'll trigger depends on how and why that action is being done, not on what action is being done. That said: go aggro when you threaten violence, by any means whatsoever (up to and including violence itself). In a situation where the player rolls for going aggro, they're implying an immediate future where violence may or may not happen; the entire snowball of consequences from the move is based on that one fact. Seize by force when you want something someone has, they know you want it, you're willing to hurt for it, they're willing to hurt to hold on to it. In a situation where the player rolls for seizing by force, they're implying a future where violence is a fact, and everyone's bracing themselves to get hurt and hurt back, already. Error 404 posted:Apoc World does this. Act Under Fire has you only rolling Sharp. Actually, the fact that in AW you can only act under fire if you're cool – being tough, smart, hot or bizarre won't help you at all – is quite a subtle bit of world-building that helps set the tone of the game better than cars or guns or psychic storms can. It's also worth remembering that the first game to allow multiple stats for the generic 'avoid dangerous situation' move was Dungeon World, a game where the stats are D&D-derived and thus based on characteristics of the PCs like strength and intelligence. AW's stats are more abstract, being better described as the amount of success you can get with a kind of approach. Then a lot of the games that came later use AW-style stats and a DW-style defy danger move. I'm not sure it works very well, to be honest.
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Sep 9, 2015 19:42
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Hugoon Chavez posted:I'm running AW this weekend and I think I had a cool idea for the setting: You might want to include NPC-related questions to start building interesting relationships form the get-go. Things like, "Why is Spike's Girls important?" And, once somone's answered, "Okay, why does she hate you then?" "Exactly what were you doing with Dozer for the two hours you spent together last week under the bridge?" "Who was the last one of you to see Rolfball? He's been missing for two weeks now." Some of the questions you have right now are things that are going to be answered anyway through play; use questions to create new, interesting, weird situations. Cyphoderus fucked around with this message at 19:34 on Sep 17, 2015 |
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Sep 17, 2015 19:24
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potatocubed posted:That's the one. Latest version. This is really, really cool. I lost it at "Obdurate (impulse: to get everything wrong)".
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Apr 13, 2016 21:43
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