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Zorak of Michigan posted:I don't know if I agree. I haven't played SR in years but I seem to recall that it was just about impossible to get through a full action without a higher level of description than we usually get in AW. I don't want to make people orate about the virtues of the neoKrinkov compared to filthy capitalist civilianized war profiteering M-7 carbines, I just want to steer them away from the vaguer AW terminology ("I shoot her in the face with my magnum") and toward SR obsessiveness about gear ("I shoot her in the face with my Ruger Chromehawk"). I think it would be an important color aspect. I get what you're going for, but there's only so many times you can say "I stab him with my Mitsuhama Airsplitter" instead of "I stab him with my vibroblade" before calling something a Mitsuhama Airsplitter loses whatever impact it has. I mean, people don't actually go around calling things by their brand name every time they use them. Giving people a better combat move that only unlocks when they use their gear's full product name just means people are going to talk like they're in a bad commercial. (Admittedly, that could be a really cool move for a corporate goon playbook, but not for everyone.) I guess my point is that talking about your sweet tech is something that needs to be rewarded, but you need to be rewarding the kind of tech talk that will actually sound natural when you have people doing it constantly over the course of a run.
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Aug 13, 2015 16:45
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Pththya-lyi posted:My Monsterhearts game involves an insane asylum where they're doing it old school. I hope for my players to end up in the tranquilizer chair at some point: Could you go into the intended fiction behind what this move does? Because something about this move isn't quite clicking for me, and I think it's the rewards. I do get what you're going for when you have this be a Volatile roll, though. Also, just want to say that, even though I don't quite like it, it should be good enough for a little one-off move in your personal game.
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Sep 17, 2015 18:32
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Pththya-lyi posted:My Monsterhearts players want their characters to be in more situations that require teamwork. They do like the system and are invested in the setting we made together, but they'd like some more conventional player-versus-environment type situations. How can I encourage that? I realize it's partly on them to find reasons to cooperate, but I'd like to help make things easier. Just bring some rear end in a top hat NPCs in. Or the feds. Or the crew of a Ghost Hunters type show that's also interested in vampires and werewolves and junk. Really just any general antagonistic force that would impact multiple PCs. Also, remember that one of the things about Monsterhearts' moveset is that players don't really have the tools to interact in a healthy way with each other until they take some of the growing up moves, so be ready to handwave things in the interest of cooperation.
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Sep 30, 2015 03:23
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ShineDog posted:Can someone give me a brief rundown in a typical pbta game of how you would handle the big bad as a gm? The big superguy? The Darth Vader style scary and dangerous Endboss fight? I've only played dw and it's a bit more classically "has a bucket of HP and hits harder" for those type of encounters. Funny you should mention Dungeon World, because Sage LaTorra (Well, and you could make custom moves to help reinforce the fiction surrounding those kinds of characters, but I feel like it's more important to emphasize the fictional approach when we're talking about making things impressive without hitting people with giant mechanical sticks.) Lurks With Wolves fucked around with this message at 00:44 on Jul 24, 2016 |
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Jul 24, 2016 00:37
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Also, the Infernal's a metaphor. Sure, it works as a drugs equivalent, but you could also use it as a metaphor for anxiety and how the pressure to succeed keeps you going until it makes you crash completely, or you could just ignore metaphors entirely and focus on dealing with the devil and it'll work fine. Succubus/incubus skins can't really do that. You can't have the uncomfortable stuff be metaphorical subtext when the text is "sex demon".
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Aug 15, 2016 03:14
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Siivola posted:...Hey. How well would WWW reskin from rasslin' to fightan games? Something like Tekken, say. The thing is, World Wide Wrestling very explicitly models professional wrestling. That is to say, it's about wrestlers in a ring trying to make the audience interested in themselves and their rivalries and the winner is determined by the people setting up matches and not the people wrestling. There's some alternate rules in International Incident that let things work in a less predetermined way, but WWW by default doesn't really work for things that aren't booked the way wrestling is.
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Sep 21, 2016 23:25
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Evil Mastermind posted:Wow, missing the point on the mechanics and the tone of the game. That's pretty impressive. Eh. Making playbooks that don't fit with the core game at all is less of a problem when you're also making fundamental changes to the core mechanics. I don't like the Giant or the move changes either, but let's not judge it by standards it's not trying to meet. Heliotrope posted:Yeah, a guy by the name of Ross Cowman changed almost every basic move and it's pretty bad. I have to admit, seeing Avery talk about basing the new edition's rules off them isn't something I'm a fan of. But maybe it'll be better then what Ross came up with? Honestly, I'm not that worried about Avery taking some inspiration from that? Those moves are way worse than the quite frankly amazing core moves from Monsterhearts 1e, but Turn Someone On is the lynchpin of the entire string cycle. If Turn Someone On needs to be changed to make it not be insulting to asexuals and people who have a set orientation they want for this character*, and it does, then the entire moveset needs to be changed or it's going to be worse from getting haphazardly changed. As it stands, this is one of the only real attempts at totally reworking Monsterhearts' core moves, so Avery might as well take what inspiration she can. *Yeah, I know. I'm laughing at people who are afraid of their characters becoming gay as hard as the rest of you. But if one of the players is deeply uncomfortable with men flirting with her, there needs to be a better way to deal with that than everyone playing a man agreeing to not use one of the key game mechanics on her character.
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Oct 27, 2016 20:08
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KirbyJ posted:I'm sure this has been asked before, but does anybody have any opinions on The Sprawl vs The Veil vs Headspace, in terms of PbtA cyberpunk? I'm running a PbtA oneshot in a few weeks and I want to present a cyberpunk option but I'm currently torn (right now between Sprawl and Veil, but open to Headspace). Thanks! It's a few days late, but I've run a few sessions of The Sprawl and read through a reasonable chunk of The Veil so I might as well give my opinion. The Sprawl is one of the first PBTA games to start development after Apocalypse World came out, and it shows. The layout's not great and some of the moves feel like Apocalypse World 1e era moves if you get what I mean, but you can feel the amount of work that went into it. The Sprawl knows what it wants to be, and that is a game about a team of professionals that do jobs both for and against megacorporations and how they struggle to get out before they get the attention of any one megacorp and get eliminated with extreme prejudice. If you want to do that, it'll work great. If you don't, it won't. Simple as that. The Veil... The quickstart for The Veil suggests that it's about Ghost In The Shell-style cyberpunk that's focused more on philosophy than being crushed in capitalism's gears. The Veil's aesthetic suggests that it's about GITS-style cyberpunk. The actual mechanics just don't feel like they gel into something that actually does that. It's not that the mechanics seem bad from my reading, it's that everything in the version I read just feels like it needs a few more editing passes. That doesn't sound like much, but it gets under your skin. Some of the rules aren't as explained as well as you'd want them to be, and it bugs you. You realize that the game talks about how being diverse and egalitarian and etc in cyberpunk is important, but then there's a few spots where some of the playbook options feel weirdly japanophilic and the playbooks would be better if they weren't. You come into the game expecting high-concept cyberpunk and one of the core playbooks is a member of a dying secret society with a cybertome and abilities based on finding true names and they're chased by iconoclasts whose true forms' description choices are lifted wholesale from the wolves that hunted the Solace in Apocalypse and it's all just tonally dissonant. If I sound really down on The Veil, it's because I still want to like it despite itself. Hell, I still actually like it despite itself. Friends At The Table is currently running a game of The Veil, and I'd recommend checking it out if you want to hear someone actually play it. The only thing is, I'd trust that group to make a high-level philosophical cyberpunk anime out of thin air if they wanted to. I just don't feel like The Veil is going to give you that much moment-to-moment guidance on doing that if your group can't.
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Oct 2, 2017 04:13
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Halloween Jack posted:I forgot to add: I presume the Operator was dropped because its core conceit is something everyone should be doing anyway? Also their main mechanical thing got given to literally everyone so they lost a good chunk of their identity and what they had left got given to the Driver. I miss having a playbook that's specifically about having a dozen plates spinning at all times, but I honestly can't say the changes didn't help.
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Dec 7, 2017 03:42
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homullus posted:All of those things are better in their AW form. Static damage makes combat less swingy and makes threat selection easier; there's also some niche protection, such that the fighting-mans can consistently do the best in combat. Similarly, "Defy Danger" allowing you to use whatever attribute is dumb: only characters who have training for that sort of thing should be good at it. If you want to be a wizard who's got a little more real-world experience (and thus is better at acting under fire), it's at the expense of something else. I'm going to elaborate on this a bit more, because multi-stat moves in PBTA games are my white whale and I don't want anyone to think they should never touch them under any circumstances. So, multi-stat moves are fundamentally things you want a lot of character types to be good at in their own way. Take Finish Them from Fellowship. It can be used with any stat, because it's about the myriad ways you can defeat an enemy (combat or otherwise) and everyone being able to contribute is a key thing thematically, with each stat having a very clear set of situations where it would apply. For a more restricted example, take Talk Sense from Fellowship. (I have Fellowship handy right now and it has good examples, so sue me.) You can Talk Sense with Sense, Wisdom or Grace. Sense if you're talking about your plan because Sense is about being observant and planning things out, Wisdom if you're appealing to their emotions because Wisdom is about being attuned to people, Grace if you're getting by on flash or lying to people's faces because Grace is about being a tricky, flashy fucker. (I'm playing an rear end in a top hat elf in a Fellowship game, so I'm biased.) And this works, because those are all valid ways to convince people to do something for you and there isn't a good reason to split those off into separate moves. Now, why does Defy Danger suck? Three reasons. 1) D&D stats just suck in general. The stats have vague, badly-balanced areas they cover, so a move that uses multiple stats are going to be vague and badly-balanced no matter what. 2) Dungeon World's moveset just kind of sucks. The moves are weird and don't cover much, so 75% of what you'll want to do is just going to default to "eh, try Defy Danger". 3) Defying Danger is just too broad for one single move. "When you defy danger, do X" could trigger at literally any time. I know I just mentioned a broad multi-stat move in the form of Finish Them, but "when you attempt to defeat an enemy you hold an advantage over" is so much more specific than just defying danger and the Fellowship stats and how they'd interact with a multi-stat move are so much more clearly defined than the six D&D stats. Anyway, a pulpy adventure game like Dungeon World has a place for a multi-stat move that covers doing a bunch of pulpy nonsense like Defy Danger, but you're going to need to think about it more than they did with Defy Danger.
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Dec 25, 2017 21:50
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BinaryDoubts posted:Anyone have thoughts on The Veil? The emotions-as-stats approach seems interesting, but I wonder how it goes in play? I'm just going to quote myself from October. Lurks With Wolves posted:It's a few days late, but I've run a few sessions of The Sprawl and read through a reasonable chunk of The Veil so I might as well give my opinion. Lurks With Wolves fucked around with this message at 22:15 on Jan 11, 2018 |
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Jan 11, 2018 22:13
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ProfessorCirno posted:I'm about to enter a Sprawl game as a Killer, and I feel like I have to be missing something. Technically you only need one pick to make the blade option equivalent to a sword/machete and you get two to three, so your custom weapon isn't going to be worse than a machete. Still, Custom Weapon is still weird and not great for melee weapons unless you want to make something weird like a stun knife or a sword with autofire or you're really attached to the mental image of a streetsam with a custom blade. As a side note, this conversation is reminding me of how much I dislike the way harm ramps for combat-focused characters in The Sprawl. It's really easy for characters with combat-focused cybernetics to do 5+ harm at a base level, and it might be appropriate for the capital-K Killer to be doing "they are dead" levels of damage every time when they're at their peak but it ruins my entire sense of scale for harm.
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Jan 19, 2018 19:46
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lessavini posted:On a superficial read I thought the factions exerted some kind of pression on the players, pitting them against each other in the process. Factions are a big deal, but it doesn't really gamify how factions gain and lose power. I'd still recommend looking at it for things like what kind of moves a character would have just because they're in a major faction or GM advice on how to run games with factional conflict that are kind of out of players' control, but don't expect a bunch of rules for how to model the undead being pushed out of this borough because that's basically all just GM moves affecting the fiction.
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Apr 22, 2018 22:27
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Pollyanna posted:Yeah XP isn’t that great and HP i haven’t run face-first into yet so I don’t recall what the problem with it is. Is it just the 1hp fine, 0hp dead thing? This response is a bit late, but personally the main problem with HP is the randomness of damage. If nothing else, damage clocks just tell you that you can take five or six actual solid hits until something goes down. You can't do that with HP in Dungeon World given the extreme variance of damage dice, and rolling to see if you got brought down to 11/12 HP or 4/12 HP just isn't as connected to the fiction as rolling to see if that hit jarred your gun out of your hand in other PBTA games. EDIT: Demon_Corsair posted:With fellowship, is there a way to do more of a sandbox style game, or is it always played in opposition to some big bad? There needs to be some kind of big bad encroaching threat you're acting against. You can get abstract with it and you don't need to be 100% fighting against said encroaching threat at all times, but the entire structure of the game as it currently stands is built around having some kind of overlord and their evil minions. Lurks With Wolves fucked around with this message at 17:30 on Aug 19, 2018 |
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Aug 19, 2018 17:27
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Quote posted:I had a player manage to take down an apprentice Jedi* and steal his lightsaber in my gonzo space game. I made it clear that it's not a weapon meant to be used by those without training. What are some consequences for using it poorly that I could pop into a custom move? Losing a limb or a few fingers was the first obvious thing that came to me, but I know there should be more. Off-hand, it shouldn't be too hard to make something like quote:When you wield a lightbringer under pressure, roll 2d6+stat. On a 7+, pick one option from the following list: Then you can just save accidentally cutting off your own limbs for any 6-s rolled when that would fit what's going on.
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Jul 27, 2020 17:08
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Don't get me wrong, Urban Shadows 1e was bad about giving each PC their own personal organizational drama whose internal politics probably won't overlap with other PCs. But the genre is urban fantasy crime drama, and part of those genre conventions is everyone getting pushed together until all those schemes get tangled together. Players keep wanting to be moody loners who don't interact with other players, but that's a problem whenever a game in this genre doesn't go really hard at giving people a group goal. It isn't really something uniquely bad about it. (And I haven't looked at 2e, but establishing set locations where everything crosses over when you make your city is a good change.)
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Jan 28, 2022 20:36
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Vadun posted:My group played our first PbtA game yesterday with World Wide Wrestling 2e and everyone had a lot of fun. Also try adding more faction stuff so you justify having more characters around during singles matches, even if they aren't running in. Still, it's always going to be a problem with the genre. It's why WWW encourages players not involved in a match to act as announcers.
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Feb 13, 2022 18:17
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I always appreciate harm systems that come with some amount of inherent prompting. Like Masks going "you are now feeling really insecure about this, this is is the kind of stupid thing you need to do to heal", or just the basic Harm roll in Apocalypse World usually giving you more to work with than "you got shot, and that... really sucks for you?". Hit point systems generally have a lot of flaws, but having no consequences to work with besides a number being lower is one of the worse ones.
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Feb 23, 2022 17:21
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AW combat really depends on how thinly you slice it. Seize By Force could be your gang taking control of an entire outpost. It could also be you struggling to grab a knife as one moment in the brawl, or anything in between. If you slice it too thin everything stops making sense, but making fights that are long enough and tough enough for any given situation is much more of an art than a science.
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Aug 8, 2022 17:35
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Also, remember that you don't need to completely reinvent the wheel mechanically. What does Blades have already? A lot of skills and gear, crafting/ritual rules and the ability to make custom moves. For skills, if you're shooting fireballs in a magic duel it might be Attune, but in an actual bar-room brawl it's probably still Skirmish or Wreck. If you're flying onto a rooftop it's a Prowl roll, just like the guy who's parkouring onto the rooftop. Gear is most useful for the basic fight stuff, but you're designing the magic system here. You can just have the stuff necessary for combat wands and mage armor take an equivalent amount of Load to regular guns and armor, and the fiction changes but the mechanics stay roughly the same. And don't forget the existing rules for making your own weird stuff, rituals/inventions and custom moves. For rituals and inventions, maybe just give them a free +1 Magnitude to encourage them to make wild stuff with it. And Custom Moves... Well, it depends on how much custom content you're willing to make, but you can always just give each PC one free one at the start of the game for whatever weird magic stuff they already know how to do. Making a move like "Fire Mage: You can always shoot fire from your hands, whether you have a combat wand or not, and you have a few other benefits" is close enough to the existing custom moves like this one. quote:[Adept] Sash Fighting: You may You may need to reexamine what exactly Attune is capable of, but if you follow my advice here and you keep Attune's actual scope to somewhere around the kind of minor divination and basic magic poking it handles now you probably won't need to make entirely new subsystems.
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Jan 29, 2023 16:46
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Ash Rose posted:Speaking of Monster Hearts, I am running Thirsty Sword Lesbians, which uses a lot of the same mechanics, and I could use some advice on how to handle something. Next session the players are about to head out from the safety of a town to find a stronghold where some folks from a Toxic Power are hiding. The issue is, I have established that the planet they are on is fairly hostile, with their settlement being the lone place of relative safety, how can I impart the danger present in the journey without necessarily zooming in and slowing the game down, there isn't really a move that tracks super well, Defy Disaster is for imminent danger and I don't think a perilous journey quite counts as that. You can always just steal A Long Journey from Fellowship et al. Establish some problems with input from one person, have them decide what other PC handles the problem, and generally just keep the scenes at a montage level of investment. You don't have to do anything too complicated mechanically. Also, as someone who played in a lot of Monsterhearts PBPs back in the day, two pieces of advice. 1) Moreso than real time games, you need to get to the point and give people interesting prompts fast. Just given the slower pace of pbp, if you don't know what to do and wait for a scene change to do something you're going to be waiting a long time. 2) Make sure you all have some way to chat in real time as a group. Monsterhearts can go some rough places, but you can talk through them reasonably well if you can talk like regular people. But if someone makes a bad post and discussion of it has to go at typical posting speeds, that post where the Vampire went too far and weirded everyone out IRL will sit there for ages and it's going to be agonizing.
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Feb 11, 2023 21:10
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Golden Bee posted:If you get rid of faction advancement, your players have an even lower chance of running into each other, which creates more downtime and makes your job as a GM harder. To elaborate on this a bit, Urban Shadows has a problem where it's really easy for everyone to just stay silo'd off in their own faction's problems and never meaningfully cross those threads over. A good GM can make it work anyway, but if your players aren't helping it's like dragging dead weight. 2e's making some changes to make it easier, but 1e's still fine if you recognize it's a problem and don't undermine what tools it does have to bring people together.
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Feb 14, 2023 15:39
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On top of what everyone else said, remember the bit about formidable NPCs triggering a move when they get a condition and how that's mostly a way to make fights more dynamic. A weird monster isn't necessarily going to express emotions like a human, but unless it's actively otherworldly you can still go "after that stab, it's Angry and lashing out" or "it's running scared" or "you've backed the bio-wyrm into a corner and it's getting desperate". Conditions are really basic emotions, and you don't need to give every opponent all five. They still fit fine for weird un-flirtable enemies.
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Mar 20, 2023 14:49
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