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Regarding Monsterhearts, the Growing Up moves and the implied advancement scheme of pushing terrible teenagers towards healthy adulthood reads great on paper, but those moves are actually pretty terrible. I really want to remove the dice rolling from them because nothing undermines 'my vampire is slowly maturing into an emotionally available adult' like failing every single 'share pain' roll I attempt. That's something that happened in my actual ongoing monsterhearts game, I was the only one that took growing up moves and kind of regret my choice. There's a lot of weirdnesses to the game that I don't believe to be intentional. I wish all the best for Avery and their games, but I'm mechanically minded enough that I usually manage to trip over every unintended quirk in the rules. (Here's another one, at least half the moves can be triggered without any change in fictional positioning, so the MC will often have to make a move in response to none of the characters actively doing anything.)
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Aug 22, 2014 13:15
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Gazetteer posted:You mean like "Jill smoulders sexily to turn Martin on, rolls a 6, has not technically done anything other than sit there"? Just off the top of my head: Yeah, but like the only example there that naturally follows from the fiction is the first one (and only just barely. If I had described Jill's hair framing her face in an appealing way, catching the eye of Martin and rolling 6-). I feel like Monsterhearts has a real problem with integrating the principle of 'make moves but misdirect'. My regular MC and a lot of MCs I've played with (and when I've MCed myself) often had points in the game where nothing happened in the fiction and they have to make a hard move with nothing to misdirect. It's really blatant that a move in a situation like described tends to not arise from the fiction at all but come across as a nonsequitur. Don't get me wrong, I value the monsterhearts game I'm in and I think the game is excellently designed for its proposed theme and focus, I also just feel like there are gaps in the mechanics that underserve the otherwise incredibly focused and skillful design. Kai Tave posted:I don't really think this is the case though, at least not to the degree you're describing it. Bork the Barbarian doesn't need to be a rich deep character for the player to say "Bork wants to slay powerful monsters and get rich, bam, motivation." Likewise you don't need extensive buy-in with a Monsterhearts character. "Molly wants to be the most popular person in school no matter who she has to step on to do it." That's all you really need to get the ball rolling. Yeah, agreeing with this. If you're worried about player buy-in you can easily tell people to treat their characters as they would in a hypothetical teen paranormal romance Fiasco game. Getting them in trouble, making mistakes that you and everyone else at the table know are mistakes, making huge issues about nothing. They're all genre appropriate and require no player buy-in except into the idea that it's fun to see people gently caress up. Tulpa fucked around with this message at 20:47 on Aug 22, 2014 |
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Aug 22, 2014 20:38
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Mors Rattus posted:Well, the thing here is that sex isn't a mechanical device. It's a trigger - when you do this, this happens. And in a game about personal melodrama, especially in high school, sexual and physical intimacy are important to address. (In Apocalypse World it's less about physical intimacy and more about emotional intimacy, and would benefit from triggering off that.) I think both Monsterhearts and Apocalypse World could benefit from taking the rewording of sex moves in Urban Shadows, making them outright intimacy moves. Mainly because neither of those games do a good job addressing intimacy outside of sex.
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Aug 22, 2014 21:24
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Tulul, sure but I don't think what I suggested precludes that. You can make a game where Intimacy is as unhealthy and abusive as sex is in Monsterhearts, without even changing anything about the game. If anything, something like the vampire's sex move just being reworded to be about intimacy actually makes the skin more dysfunctional. They get added emotional leverage out of using people but not letting them get close. Ghouls drift towards stalker-ish behavior to anyone that's nice to them, infernals manage to be both drug addicts and dealers. Sure, the Chosen, the Mortal and the Fae work better if their sex moves are left alone but quite a few skins become even more focused on being metaphors for awful teenage creeps if the move is broadened to include all physical or emotional intimacy. Using intimacy in the description of a move doesn't make the characters healthy and mature, it just means there's a dozen more ways for them to be teenage monsters with relationship problems.
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Aug 22, 2014 22:42
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neonchameleon posted:In my experience, when taken on benevolent characters, the growing up move is one of the most amazing RP things I've had. I'm in particular thinking of my Queen who was trying to be a good person (most of the time anyway) and was loving up by the numbers, accidentally spamming "Turn someone on" rather than "Make someone feel beautiful". They are really, really good for well intentioned characters who just make things worse unless the dice gods hate you. (I'm not as happy with Call Someone On Their poo poo as I am the other three). But don't take them unless at least one of them is what your character is trying to do anyway. Yeah, my objection is mainly that having to roll for the grown up moves ends up with the awkwardness of what should make sense for my character, that she is finally acting in a more emotionally mature way, is sabotaged by my terrible dice rolling luck. It took 3 sessions of attempts before I could actually call someone on their poo poo and my cold is at +3! I was just sabotaged by my unbelievable bad luck, and having that happen over and over made it frustrating that I took those moves instead of something like rewriting my sex move or darkest self.
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Aug 24, 2014 01:09
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Every time I'd roll one of the growing up moves, I'd get 2 on the dice, so yeah. Improbably bad luck but it still occasionally led to good story opportunities. There was definitely an air of 'what happens now' when the rolls failed because it feels weird to say 'you acted like a mature adult, hard move.'
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Aug 24, 2014 04:39
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I've played in a frankly ludicrous amount of Monsterhearts games and I have actually never seen anyone play a Queen. There's something about it that's instinctually unappealing to the locals here.Cythereal posted:Just looking over this... as a non-antagonist, wouldn't the Queen make a lot of sense as the leader of a group of PCs? Not in the same way that the Chosen might be, but in the sense of the heart of the team, the real people person who can balance out the others and get them working together effectively? Now I kind of want to hack monsterhearts to be about Sailor Moon instead of teen angst and abusive relationships.
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Sep 6, 2014 05:25
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IIRC, SilCore actually showed their math and understood their probabilities pretty intimately. It's actually my go-to 'fix' for dice pool systems (except for Reign, which also actually showed its math and understood its poo poo), to just throw out whatever the normal thing was and use the bits and pieces of SilCore that make sense. That's not to say that certain line writers didn't understand the system at all, as demonstrated by Jovian Chronicles. Still, they did do the math in the core rules at least, and it's very non-swingy. It's not quite the same as Dune's roll and keep system, because you get a +1 to your result for every additional 6 you roll in SilCore. This keeps high skill values fairly relevant for more than just reducing swinginess.
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Sep 6, 2014 22:44
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Cythereal posted:I can also see it working really well for a kid from an immigrant family to whatever country you're playing in whose family is very close-knit and tied deeply to their old country while you're the kid assimilating into your new country - perhaps the only country you've ever known - and having problems with your family as a result. Yeah I get tons of bleed from my real life just reading about the Serpentine in this thread because what you wrote here is basically my IRL. It hits a bit too close to home for me so I don't know if I'll ever get a chance to play it. I kind of realize why no one in my local scene really likes the skin. It's way too far outside their experience, whereas the other skins aren't really. I have thoughts about how to play a Serpentine to really match up with this notion of someone trying to escape from their family, and they mostly center on keeping the family itself off screen as much as possible.
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Sep 21, 2014 23:31
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The Firestarter seems like a pretty cool skin. I haven't seen it in play yet but I'm in an ongoing game with the author of that particular skin, and another player has been planning on changing to that skin at the end of the season.
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Oct 17, 2014 18:42
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Golden Bee posted:Of the second skins, "The Sasquatch" always seemed cool in the angsty-90 kids way, and has the coolest move I've seen. The Sasquatch is mostly cool and one of the most conceptually developed of the Second Skins but some of the moves (in particular, Musk) tend to completely undercut the tone of the game and make it a farce.
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Oct 20, 2014 07:12
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Oh I know the underpinnings behind that move, I playtested an early version of that skin after all. I'm just in an ongoing game where another player is a werewolf that took Musk and it's really hard to take seriously whenever he interrupts a scene with "Ok I ran over here so I'm sweaty enough to musk"
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Oct 20, 2014 08:03
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Saguaro PI posted:the Proxy are cool, even if they have a couple of wonky elements. the Proxy is terrible in play. Completely broken, worthless rehash of the Infernal with half as much thought put into it.
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Oct 26, 2014 05:05
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The Proxy is seriously terrible, it's the only one from the "Skins for the Skinless" that I've actually seen in play, and it really is the case that there's no reason for anyone to interact with that character.
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Nov 9, 2014 10:31
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The Giant was designed pretty much for and from one-shot play using the alternate basic moves Ross also designed (which I believe are also available through the Second Skins kickstarter) So, the lack of understanding of the basic mechanics of Monsterhearts comes from those mechanics pretty much not being used. I've told him before that his alternate basic moves gut the string economy but the designs he likes are pretty much all about fictional positioning with no mechanical weight to that positioning. It's not Fiction-first, it's Fiction-only.
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Nov 26, 2014 06:39
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Plague of Hats posted:Oh, hey, I just picked up Beyond the Wall a bit ago and was really digging it. I doubt I'd run it as-is, but it's got some cool ideas and is nice and simple. Yeah honestly I would just use the playbook/town generation stuff and then run it in World of Dungeons or something.
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Mar 28, 2015 22:05
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