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Could you link to this post somewhere in the Dungeon World description? I was going to ask for a second post to copy it into/ask if someone wanted to maintain that post for me for the new thread but then you up and made this thread suddenly.
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Jun 26, 2015 16:57
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If anyone wants to get in on a playtest for my newest PBTA game, Fellowship, Covok is organizing one here on these forums: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3735106
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Aug 8, 2015 01:41
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Megazver posted:"I don't care about balance" when coming from the designer. (Looking at you, MotW.) Quick highlights: The basic moves don't really fit the feel of a cthulhu mythos setting, they're fairly generic for a *World system. The playbooks are fairly samey and none of them are particularly iconic or stand out in the fiction. The sanity, Lore, and Clue mechanics are all very mechanical and gritty for a *World game, gaining clues doesn't necessarily have anything to do with finding out anything new, and spending clues doesn't benefit you in ways that further the story. So all in all, it's passable and functional but not exceptional. And when we've got a lot of exceptional *World games out there, it just doesn't hold up. That said the Poke Around basic move is really good and I'd highly recommend any other Mythos-based *world attempt take a good look at adapting it. It is the only basic move that's actually unique to Tremulus and it is extremely good for the flavor of the setting. gnome7 fucked around with this message at 17:24 on Aug 8, 2015 |
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Aug 8, 2015 13:59
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Hello, PbtA friends. I've just launched a kickstarter for my pbta-like game, Fellowship, and I've also made an SA thread for it. I say pbta-like because Fellowship changes the core structure and assumptions of *World games in a lot of big ways. The GM-player has less narrative power but they also get a playbook to themselves, and the other players have significantly more narrative power than usual. To use the lingo from earlier in the thread, I feel like Fellowship is an honest attempt at a Third Circle hack, one that takes the *World framework and does something new with it. Have a look - backers have access to a downloadable rules preview that contains 90% of the final book. I don't want to derail any more threads so please post about it in the Fellowship thread, not in here. gnome7 fucked around with this message at 16:12 on Sep 5, 2015 |
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Sep 5, 2015 16:10
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Fellowship's combat rules are how they are because I want the players to generally succeed well and succeed quickly when they get the chance. So if they have the opportunity to roll Finish Them they might just end the whole encounter right there, and you move on to the next thing. A move like your house rule is not in the core rules because I think it would drag things out more and I wanted the journey to be more grand/overarching story stuff, where the individual battles and pieces aren't so important as the big picture is. But if you want to give individual encounters more fidelity/more tactics, then your house rule sounds like a solid way to do it. I have no complaints. If it works for you, then have fun! That's cool and I am glad it works out.
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Mar 18, 2016 06:54
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ShineDog posted:I'm kind of wobbling back and forward on it. I think the issue I have is this - dramatic escapes from crumbling temples are absolutely baked into the pulp adventure template, but at the same time they are entirely baked into the lead characters of those stories. It's something Nathan Drake or Indy does, it's not really Cutter or Sully or Marions thing to nearly the same extent. If the muscle or the conman characters have come along and gotten stuck in the temple, it's the two fisted adventurer who finds the way out. Give the two-fisted adventurer playbook a move like "When you need to make a dramatic escape, you always find a ladder, rope, open window, secret tunnel, or other exit out of here, right at the last moment." Maybe name it something like "That was a close one." If you need something to be automatic, well, buddy, you're writing in a system where you can just DO that. Its a-okay to make moves where nice things just happen for free under specific circumstances.
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Aug 12, 2016 01:46
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Grim World is absolutely a dungeon world supplement, yes.
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Sep 23, 2016 09:35
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To add to that, never be afraid to cut something that isn't working out. The thing that makes PbtA work is having a tightly focused game, that gives you rules to do exactly what's worth doing and little else. It is important to embellish and add on to what works and what ends up mattering, but it is far MORE important to remove anything that doesn't fit the theme you're going for. Otherwise you get those games like Tremulus, or that one survival games hack with 25 basic moves. One of the biggest red flags for a bad hack is if they copy Apocalypse World's Harm Clock exactly as it is, because the AW Harm Clock is meant to represent how flesh wounds just kinda happen, but once someone is seriously hurt, it takes a miracle to save them. That works great in the apocalypse. It does not fit or work in almost any other genre out there, but people keep it because hey, its easy and it works. But half the dang health bar is "you're going to die!" There are some exceptions, but for the most part, the Harm Clock rarely helps the theme of other PbtA games, because very few genres are as hyper-lethal as AW is supposed to be. gnome7 fucked around with this message at 11:57 on Sep 24, 2016 |
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Sep 24, 2016 11:55
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Alright, I've immediately bought that because that concept rules, and absolutely adds something that I didn't realize was missing from the original game until I read this post. I definitely want to play as robots or aliens, and I know a lot of people who would love to be uplifted animals.
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Oct 5, 2016 16:36
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paradoxGentleman posted:It sounds like I'm going to open a big ol' can of worms with this one, but still, it warrants asking: It doesn't, and Vincent Baker is weird. The source material he is drawing on basically never includes sex or sexuality and the moves would work significantly better as intimacy moves, triggered when you share sex, drugs, your sensitive side, or rock n roll with somebody. Between my response and Ilor's we've now covered this entire conversation and don't need to spend the next 8 pages on it.
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Oct 10, 2016 23:03
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Evil Mastermind posted:Sorry to double-post, but there's now an "official" list of PbtA games on the official Apocalypse World site. This is really cool of them to do, and also very useful to have. Thanks for sharing it!
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Feb 6, 2017 17:24
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I also find PbtA games work better when you start with a cold open. Just throw them in the middle of a situation where they already know each other and have a goal, and figure out how they're working towards that goal and why as the session progresses. For example, maybe start that Urban Shadows game with "Okay, you just got the money. Who has the money, and who is waiting in the car outside?" And after they answer, "Okay, [third player], what are you doing about the cops who are going to show up in 2 minutes?" If you've already done a bunch of world building, might as well start playing in the world right away.
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Jun 21, 2017 18:37
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That reads very much like someone went and wrote down some moves, then had an "oh oops this thing happened during play, let me expand this wording to allow for that situation/add a caveat to prevent that thing" and then kept doing that. Those moves are both way too wordy and way too vague at the same time, and also the stat distribution on those moves is all over the dang place. The whole thing needs a hard editing pass, and the editor needs to go at it with a pair of shears.
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Jun 27, 2017 08:07
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Meinberg posted:Speaking of tremulus, is there a good, horror-themed PbtA game out there? Urban Shadows is pretty good, but that's very much "horror themed" instead of horror. It's basically World of Darkness: Apocalypse Edition. I like it very much but its not really a horror game so much as supernatural mysteries where half the party is undead.
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Aug 30, 2017 20:33
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Ilor posted:On the topic of Defy Danger, I find that the cardinal rule of "to do it, do it" salvages some of the move's worst offenses. Let the fiction set which stat you're using. If you're trying to dodge a falling boulder, that's not WIS or CON, it is clearly and obviously DEX. So as the DM, when the player says, "gently caress, I jump out of the way!" it's your job to say, "Great, roll+DEX!" And if their DEX sucks, well, mebbe they'll get some XP out of the deal. It's also totally cool to respond to, "gently caress it, I'll just stand my ground and take the boulder! Defy Danger with CON?" with, "No, rear end in a top hat, a boulder has just dropped on you. Take damage" because that fits the fiction, and YOU (the GM) ultimately decide when a move triggers and when it doesn't. You are correct that having the GM stick to their guns on it mostly fixes Defy Danger, but then it falls into the other problem with Defy Danger: over half the time +Dex is the only correct stat to Defy with, because people use it to try and dodge things. You will almost never roll +STR, +CON, or +WIS to Defy Danger in normal play. Every physical roll seems to somehow end up DEX, and sometimes you use INT for a puzzle, and sometimes you use CHA to fast talk, and that's all the Defy Dangers you get! Which of course leads to: megane posted:I think the first step in making DW 2.0 is to redo the stats completely. There should be exactly four of them and they need to be carefully chosen instead of just copied from D&D (which had a terrible, boring-rear end stat array before it was blindly dumped into a system where stats work in a totally different way). And yeah, if you're going to have a basic move in the Act Under Fire / Defy Danger / Hold Steady / Adventure / Overcome family, it should sit on one particular stat, preferably the one that's least useful otherwise. Which also ended up being basically how Fellowship's stats and moves got to be what they are now. It started as a DW 2.0 attempt that rapidly evolved into its own (but still somewhat related) thing.
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Dec 26, 2017 06:37
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Access? Access seems good. Use Reputation to get info and influence, use Resources to get supplies, use Access to get into places, and use Openings to exploit weaknesses. And if I could suggest a fifth resource - use Force to remove problems in your way. Reputation can get you Resources and Access, Resources can get you Access and Force, Access can get you Resources and Openings, and Force and Openings can solve problems. gnome7 fucked around with this message at 13:18 on Mar 13, 2018 |
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Mar 13, 2018 13:15
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Is the PDF supposed to be $21.01? That is a strange number. Definitely buying this when I get home though, Legacy is a cool game that I never really got to the table, so 2E gives me a good excuse to try again.
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Mar 21, 2018 17:13
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Nah that's fine, I think that's more DTRPG's problem than yours. The price would make more sense if DTRPG mentioned it is supposed to be in another currency and they converted it.
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Mar 21, 2018 20:08
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It's also a game where you sometimes just need to recognize it is not for you. I appreciate Monsterhearts very much, its well designed and a cool addition to our hobby's landscape, and the author's real cool. But I will never play it, because it is very much not for me. And that's okay.
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May 10, 2018 15:01
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There is a reason that PbtA games limit each playbook to a single player, and its because yes, there is some overlap in utility/role between two different Battlebabes, or Hocus, or what have you. Two Hocus will probably be very different, since cult leaders and their cults and beliefs also vary significantly. But at the end of the day, every Hocus leads a community that mostly does whatever they say, but has some needs you need to keep on top of if you want to stay in charge, so two Hocus shouldn't be in the same game. I don't understand why this is supposedly a bad thing, though.
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Sep 14, 2018 00:40
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mixmastermind posted:What PbtA games have rules for collaboratively building a setting? Fellowship's core conceit involves this.
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Oct 13, 2018 05:46
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Demon_Corsair posted:I think fellowship will be perfect tonally for any of my fantasy game needs. I have blades in the dark for gritty criminal games. In my experience the best luck I've had doing this is showing people the book 2 (and book 3, and soon also book 4) playbooks. Like yeah book 1 has the elf and dwarf and orc and halfling, but then you get to book 2 and you've got the angel, the furry, the mecha pilot, the slime. It also lets you have a cool ship to travel around in as a communal playbook you all invest in together.
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Apr 5, 2021 21:14
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