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Do the brand names need to be important to the system, or to the fiction? I think a lot of the classic genre feel could be made up on the spot as color simply by putting the right queues in the playbooks. Just off the top of my head, you could have something like... Street Samurai Pick one piece of futuristic weaponry, then - Give it a brand name - Assign one tag to show its chromed goodness - Assign one tag to show its cheapness Decker You have a deck. - GIve it a brand name - Assign two tags to show how awesome it is Corporate Sellout Pick one piece of obvious cyber-augmentation, then - GIve it a brand name - Assign one tag to show its excellent - Assign one tag to show its enormous expense - Assign one tag to show that it's dated now Then you come up with the tag list and go from there. By the time the whole party gets done, you should have a brand taxonomy, and a few fruitful conflicts, like how Arisaka makes a fantastic deck but only the most ignorant guttersnipe would get Arisaka eyes.
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Aug 12, 2015 20:34
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I think maybe the commitment to gear-dork-ness should also be reflected in the Moves. I'm not sure how tightly to tie them but (for example) the Street Sam's special killy move should require them to mention the brand name or a tag from a weapon or cyber-enhancement to trigger the move. You want to just punch somebody? Basic move. You want to disembowel some dude with your razor-sharp finger blades by Hanzo Global Industries? Now you're triggering Sonny Went To Chiba.
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Aug 12, 2015 21:58
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Kai Tave posted:I think the problem here is that "dropping a brand name on a piece of gear to explain why it's badass" really only works one time for any given piece of gear, after which everyone at the table is probably going to be like "yeah yeah, we get it, your Arisaka gun is badass for the 50th loving time." So unless the street samurai is constantly acquiring new implants or new gear, which is a possibility but again "constant gear treadmill" is more a product of cyberpunk RPGs and not a lot of cyberpunk fiction, this seems like a move with limited usefulness. 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. QuantumNinja's not wrong that SR was all about a certain level of min-maxing, but I think there's room in the world for a game that duplicates the trappings without having to be the same game. I enjoyed obsessing about gear and 'ware lists and figuring out how to build the best possible character while still preserving a vaguely healable 3.0 Essence, but I also remember things that were cool in story terms. I think a game that helped us tell those stories without taking an entire session to get through a firefight would have some value.
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Aug 13, 2015 16:04
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I'm one of Ilor's players so it probably won't surprise people that I agree with what he's saying. AW's PVP is weak in some ways - the same mechanics that make PC vs NPC combat fast and fun can make PC vs PC very abrupt, with a distinct advantage to whoever gets off the mark first. In my experience, that sort of PVP happens rarely, and only with a fair amount of build-up. PCs end up having so much power in AW that outright killing one is a waste. Our larger gaming circle has argued a lot about PVP and while I'm a fan, I think it's only fun when the system lets it be fun. We used to play a lot of Shadowrun 3E and PVP there just sucked. - the social contract in SR3 implicitly puts all players on the same side. Having someone turn against another PC upsets the dynamic. Worse, it usually weakens the party. PVP at the wrong time can turn a simple mission into a TPK. Compare to AW where the PCs often inhabit different corners of the area. They may form teams to get things done, but for us, it's rare to see the entire party working together on the same thing at the same time. I think the social contract is the most important issue. I'm always a little baffled by people who hate PVP in RPGs on principle but who will cheerfully play other games ranging from Munchkin to Axis & Allies. - SR3 character creation can take a while, and beginning characters are considerably weaker than experience characters. Losing a character for any reason is a big setback for the player and can really piss people off. In AW your next character is less than ten minutes away and will be awesome. I'm a lot more willing to risk my character's survival if I know I'll be right back in the swing of it soon. - SR3 combat is granular and a knock-down, drag-out fight can take a while. At least once this worked for me - a long time ago I was GMing a low power level SR2 campaign and a festering disagreement between a street ganger and a hacker who had been forced into hiding together erupted into a slapfight in a safehouse bathroom, and the other players couldn't stop laughing. Usually it's just a drag, though, as people pull out their big guns and use all their tricks on every important roll. You can end up accomplishing nothing for an entire session because one PVP incident went on too long, and the other players wish they'd gone to the movies instead.
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Jan 21, 2016 16:30
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Bear Enthusiast posted:All of this sounds great but in practice it just means I have half the table on their phones while the other half gets to do interesting things, then vice versa. I've always felt like this was either me needing to push them towards the same overall goals, or just better time management to keep everyone engaged and not waiting too long between getting to do something. Is there some delicate balance I'm missing here, and if so any advice on said balance? I've only played in Ilor's games but generally speaking, any PC in AW can upset the whole apple cart in short order with a bold move. If you can't manage to at least politely fake interest in what the other PCs are doing, it's just rude. I generally have my laptop open all the time because I take session logs, and I still go a very long time without alt-tabbing to email or Facebook.
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Jan 22, 2016 02:31
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I often play without plotting hilarious fuckery, but when I do, I know I'm playing wrong.
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Jan 25, 2016 07:25
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Has anyone had a chance to check out The Sprawl yet? Is it worth $15 for the PDF?
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Mar 4, 2016 21:57
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It's funny to me how much playing a few modern games has changed our perceptions of bookkeeping. Games like Shadowrun required players to track every dime spent and every round of ammo expended in a firefight, and we never blinked. I say they've gotten soft. Also remember that the GM is explicitly allowed to skip the start of session move if there's "plenty going on already". You don't have to keep piling up new plot threads, NPCs, and Debts if they start interfering with addressing what's already going on.
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Oct 3, 2017 15:23
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Ilor posted:So think hard about what it is that your PCs will be doing, and tailor your game to that. This is vital, and it's something a lot of hacks miss out on. A really good genre game is a work of literary or film criticism. You don't have to show all that work to the reader, but if you dive deep into your source material, take some notes on why you're loving it, and feed that knowledge back into to your GM principles, attributes, moves, and playbooks, it will do wonders for your chances of making something good.
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Dec 28, 2017 16:46
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Halloween Jack posted:I like The Sprawl, on the whole, but it's a bit too fiddly and gear-minded for my liking. I've been pondering what would make a good cyberpunk/Shadowrun hack and gear has been a big concern for me. Bringing back elaborate gear tables would be wrong, but fetishizing the technology seems like part of the experience. Core texts like Neuromancer and Hardwired are so chock full of brand name gear and weapons that I can't see replacing them with generics. In my scratchpad, I've thought of making the brand name be part of the move, so you can't just say "I trigger my cybered-up nerves and steal the guard's gun," it has to be, "I trigger my Santoshi reflex booster and...".
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Jan 23, 2018 22:48
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Saguaro PI posted:So there's this thing I've seen in a few Powered by the Apocalypse systems, including Apocalypse World and Masks, picking an advancement where your character changes playbooks. Have any folks here ended up doing this or seen it happen in their games? It's something I'm a bit skeptical of and wanted to know how that ends up working out mechanically (in what circumstances do you justify a character having a 100% different skillset and abilities in this way?) and within play, so I wanted to have an idea of what that might look like. Remember that when you change playbooks, you keep your existing moves and stuff, as appropriate. It's not a 100% different skillset and abilities, it's just losing some of what you had, because you aren't really that guy anymore, and gaining some abilities, to reflect who you are now. I was playing Torch in the campaign that Ilor mentioned, and when he became a Hocus, he kept a lot of moves (I would have ended the world before giving up Oh Yeah!) but I gave up Bloodcrazed, Normal, Rasputin, The Unexpected, and Scent of Blood. Those changes reflected that the nature of Torch's crazy had changed, and so had his behavior. He had responsibilities to his flock, rather than just externalizing his crazy by painting the walls with his enemies' blood, and that settled him down in some ways, but made him so much weirder in others. I had an indecent amount of fun playing that character.
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May 7, 2018 19:52
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My thought is that the sex/intimacy moves are only interesting when the trigger itself is something new and different. The first time two characters sleep together, absolutely. If it's an on-again, off-again thing, maybe transactional, maybe not, then they could get a lot of move rolls out of it. Once it turns into a long-term every single night thing, no, not so much. It would just become stupid. As spectralent said, having the Driver try to prove that their significant other doesn't own them every single time for three months just becomes a waste of everyone's time. I might give them one last sex move roll for moving in together and then it's just part of the status quo. Of which there is none, right? So that's the next place I'd go looking for a new threat. Who loses because of this new stable partnership? Who wants what they have and thinks they can get it if they break up the happy couple?
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Jun 14, 2018 15:44
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CitizenKeen posted:So I like Powered by the Apocalypse mechanics, but don't like inter-party disharmony, and don't want to play Dungeon World, I should play... I'm not convinced that playing AW requires inter-party disharmony. I'm one of Ilor's players and I enjoy a little inter-party conflict as much as he does, but we've had plenty of sessions where everyone got along, and I never felt like the game broke as a result. It just doesn't expect or require everyone to form a close-knit party. That said, while I haven't played it, Fellowship does seem like a really interesting way of taking PbtA concepts and applying them to epic fantasy.
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Mar 12, 2019 20:32
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Poor guy was posting too early in his morning. BlackIronHeart's question comes from the Apocalypse World 2E game that Ilor is running.
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Apr 8, 2019 19:36
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Golden Bee posted:I’m thinking of running a noir set in 50s LA. Any system recommendations? Don’t know if monster of the week will do what I want it to. I know this is the PbtA thread, but if you don't mind going farther afield, Greg Stolze's _A Dirty World_ is built for noir and delivers.
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Apr 29, 2019 06:02
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Golden Bee posted:I just bought a dirty world but can you talk more about the dice pool changes? Any links on that? Ilor and I both played in a game that Blackironheart ran, and we all felt like we were rolling so few dice that the odds of getting matches at all were kind of slim. It fell like all rolls came down to luck. If everyone had a few more dice in their pool, it would settle the probability curve down some. Sorry this is vague but it's been a while and I don't have the rulebook handy right now.
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Apr 29, 2019 17:00
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Ilor posted:This largely depends on the hack in question. The 1.0 version of Legacy for instance very much left us all feeling like maybe we were doing it all wrong? There were a lot of gaps there that I think have since been smoothed out in 2.0. We did a little better with Cartel. But other games like Scum & Villainy were pretty straightforward. Our biggest gripe there was the same as it is in the original BitD in that the published setting is pretty thin on details for how poo poo actually works. Like, OK, from the description I know what electroplasm is sort of, but, like...is it dangerous to handle? Does it burn human skin? What would happen if you drank it? Does it have a shelf life? Does it make noise? And while the author's advice of "It's whatever, do what you want!" is liberating, it's not exactly helpful for someone trying to lend some verisimilitude to someone else's weird ideas I never minded that aspect of it. Maybe it's all that Star Trek RPG stuff I played in high school. How do you replace dilithium crystals? Do you need a shipyard? Can you move them from ship to ship? Hand wave it! My biggest problem in BitD was still the between-score moves. It seems too easy to just let people tick off options, as though there's nothing to reducing your heat score. On the other hand, you can't make too much out of it, because you it's still a between-score thing, not a score in and of itself. The rule book really needed more good actual play depictions to flesh that area out.
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Sep 27, 2019 20:17
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Gort posted:So, what PBTA game has the best combat moves? So far I've played Dungeon World and Monster of the Week. I feel like there's a subtle difference in scale in PbtA moves vs older games. If you think of rolling Seize by Force as equivalent to a D&D to-hit roll, then yeah, I totally get that it seems stupid that you automatically get hit back. If you think of it as abstracting a half-dozen old school turns into a scuffle, it makes a little more sense. I don't play much D&D, but if the opposition gets 4-6 turns to try to hit you, how often are they really going to miss every single one? It seems pretty unlikely that a PC would make it through enough turns to settle the object of the fight (take definite hold of it), punish the enemy until they fail a morale check (dismay, impress, or frighten your enemy), or just plain beat them down, without ever once taking a point of damage.
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Nov 21, 2019 16:05
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My worst thing as a GM, and that's not an easy title to win, is failing to notice when it's time to waive the fight and just say, "oh crap, yeah, you just killed that guy a lot." It's not fatal to a session but I think skipping over a whole fight scene against someone who has no chance of winning ends up being better for pacing and drama.
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Nov 21, 2019 16:57
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I think With Great Power also worked that way.
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Feb 22, 2020 02:24
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Covok posted:Worlds In Peril uses a Drive Playbook and Origin Playbook system to make your superhero. Crap, that's the one I meant. With Great Power isn't PbtA.
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Feb 22, 2020 07:01
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Are they specifically into the teenage superheroes aspect of Masks? If they're used to games that don't have the genre conventions embedded so deeply in them, and someone shows up wanting to play Batman or Wolverine, the game is going to go bad, fast.
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Apr 11, 2020 17:07
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Golden Bee posted:People can’t stand that you can have sex in a game. They couldn’t when AW came out and it’s either the same people arguing or new people joining the endless cycle of “don’t use it if you don’t like it”. I spent more than a couple minutes looking at that chat and wondering why I felt so hostile about it, until I realized that everyone who seemed scandalized by sex moves reminds me of my tedious sex-negative parents.
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May 2, 2020 03:00
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Lumbermouth posted:Absolutely do not listen to The Adventure Zone as an example of how to run a PBTA game. The most helpful podcasts that i listened to for GM stuff were the assorted Six Feats Under arcs for shorter games and Friends At The Table for longer campaign stuff. I agree. I've played a ton of AW and PbtA games, and I thought the Adventure Zone Monster of the Week podcast was fun, but it wasn't a great example of how to run the game. I can't tell how much was about the editing and how much they just played rules-lite, but either way, it doesn't give you a good feel for how to use the system.
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Mar 7, 2021 19:39
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Argh I hate the FitD dice mechanic.
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Mar 11, 2021 00:58
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Josef bugman posted:Why, if I can ask? At least as first, you're often rolling just one die, and that creates a flatter result curve than 2d6+0 would give you. Later on, once you're rolling more dice, it becomes less of a concern.
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Mar 11, 2021 02:37
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Siivola posted:AW characters get significant bonuses to their rolls, but that aside, he's not that wrong? AW characters kinda are massive fuckups. It's in many ways a game of unspeakably cool people absolutely bumbling through life in the wasteland. The bonuses count for a lot - almost every playbook will have a stat at +3, meaning that a 10+ is the most likely outcome of any given roll, and actual failure only happens one time in twelve. If it's important enough, you can also try to get help, set up the roll by reading the situation, or otherwise pick up an extra +1 here or there. 7-9 isn't always something bad happens, either. For lots of moves, the difference is just that you get fewer picks from a list. It's far from the end of the world. I am having a tough time making sense of this criticism because it's my criticism of systems like BitD or Ironsworn *in contrast to PbtA*, which I think does an amazing job of making the PCs feel like badasses.
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Dec 11, 2021 22:59
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hyphz posted:You don't have to flip your poo poo or sulk in order to not like losing. I don't see what's strange about wanting there to be interesting consequences from succeeding. Yeah but we were originally talking about this: quote:if you've got a player who wants to play the dice odds like a casino, who'll say "well he hits me x% of the time and I hit him y% of the time and my HP are z% greater than his" and so on then they might want to talk this whole thing out before they roll any dice, and then they have to ask about all the other moves, and before you know it it's become exhausting and opaque. It's not better or worse than the other style of play, but I can see why people who prefer it might not engage well with AW. So what are we currently arguing about?
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Jan 26, 2022 22:53
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hyphz posted:That's not the reason why I was banned. Well, to prove that someone was a worse gamer than someone else would require us all to have a common metric or n-dimensional matrix of metrics for determining what constitutes good and bad play, and I hope we never have that. I do however think that the playstyle of the post from the last page, in which players refuse to commit to an action without trying to mentally model the following seven generations of consequences and outcomes, is insufferable in a gaming group and should be relegated to PvE computer games.
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Jan 26, 2022 23:12
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Lurks With Wolves posted: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. This is truth. Be alive to how your players phrase things and what they seem to be paying attention to. If you lay out a situation where the bad guy is barricaded with hostages, and the player goes with, "I tell my gang to lay down suppression fire while I charge in and rescue the hostage," then that sounds like they're saying they want to wrap this up in a roll or two. If the player says, "I want to see if there's a way I could move from cover to cover as I flank them, that's reading a situation, right?" then that tells you they want to treat this as a protracted fight scene. It's fine to give them some pushback either way, if you want, but be alive to how they're taking it. I personally have no problem with the GM saying, "Your gang is small, their gang is large and heavily armed, if you just charge in there you're looking a base 5 harm, are you sure this is how you want to play it? or "Hey, just between us, you're the Gunlugger and this is six guys with 9mms, are you sure you don't want to just bum rush them?"
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Aug 8, 2022 20:23
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On the flip side, I've been in a couple PBtA games where the GM was running the game like it was D&D. Trying that crushes a lot of the fruitful voids in the game and leaves things tedious rather than fun.
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Aug 23, 2022 00:17
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Ilor posted:Starting a cult and running a dojo are often the same thing. If you'd been able to fulfill my spiritual needs, I might be training with you today!
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Sep 26, 2022 22:33
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The MCU seems to fairly explicitly embrace this. In the abstract, they sometimes try to categorize the levels of power various characters have. In practice, the question of who can beat up who is based entirely on the needs of the fiction at that moment.
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May 25, 2023 15:06
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